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<p /> <p>A super-PAC called TruthPAC, founded last week by a former Microsoft executive, has unleashed a series of provocative ads in Florida and Utah targeting Jewish and Mormon voters. The ads&#8217; message: If Donald Trump would ban Muslims from entering the United States, what religious group would be next?</p> <p>In a 15-second ad running in South Florida, the super-PAC features a cut of Trump&#8217;s speech announcing a proposed ban on Muslim immigration, but replaces &#8220;Muslims&#8221; with &#8220;the Jews.&#8221;</p> <p /> <p /> <p>A <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NBjTQr1pDc" type="external">nearly identical ad</a>, apparently designed for the Utah market, subs in &#8220;Mormons.&#8221; A third <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pufg8zCIgI0" type="external">version</a> of the ad features a rolling list of religious and ethnic groups.</p> <p>Mother Jones couldn&#8217;t find invoices filed with local television stations reporting the ad time being purchased for these spots. (This information would show up in the available database only if the ads are airing on network news stations, not on cable channels.) But TruthPAC reported on Saturday that it had <a href="https://projects.propublica.org/itemizer/filing/1124534/schedule/se" type="external">spent</a> $92,500 on ad production and buys. There is virtually no public information about the group, which was created on November 2. Information about its funding or total war chest won&#8217;t be available until after the election. Super-PACs can be quickly created and are allowed to spend unlimited sums instantly.</p> <p>The treasurer of the group is a man named Dick Brass. He&#8217;s a former journalist who became a tech executive. He is perhaps best known for his work at Microsoft. In 2010, Brass published a New York Times op-ed <a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/microsofts-innovation-versus-dick-brass/?_r=0" type="external">blasting</a> Microsoft for failing to innovate, citing work he did in the 1990s on an early version of tablet computers. His Wikipedia entry states that Brass <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Brass" type="external">helped</a> pioneer spell-checking software.</p> <p>Brass did not return a request for comment. It remains unclear how much the group will spend on these last-minute ads and who is putting up the money for this campaign.</p> <p />

Who’s Behind the Jarring New Anti-Trump Ads That Depict Him Banning Jews and Mormons?

https://motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/whos-behind-these-jarring-new-anti-trump-ads-jews-mormons/

2016-11-07

<p>&amp;lt;a href="http://www.shutterstock.com"&amp;gt;Samot&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;/Shutterstock</p> <p /> <p>The green crowd used to feel pretty rosy about Greece. After former Prime Minister George Papandreou was elected in 2009, he set up <a href="http://www.ypeka.gr/Default.aspx?tabid=37&amp;amp;locale=en-US&amp;amp;language=el-GR" type="external">a government ministry</a> to study the environment, energy, and climate change, and he <a href="http://www.papandreou.gr/papandreou/content/Document.aspx?d=6&amp;amp;rd=7739474&amp;amp;f=1733&amp;amp;rf=131847588&amp;amp;m=4565&amp;amp;rm=9378861&amp;amp;l=1" type="external">talked up initiatives</a> on eco-tourism and renewable energy. But now, after six years of recession, the country has begun buying into several new environmentally damaging development schemes to generate liquidity,&amp;#160;the&amp;#160; <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/14/world/europe/seeking-revenue-greece-approves-new-mines-but-environmentalists-balk.html?pagewanted=1&amp;amp;_r=0&amp;amp;nl=todaysheadlines&amp;amp;emc=edit_th_20130114" type="external">New York Times&amp;#160;reports</a>.</p> <p>Partly as an effort to appease lenders like the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission, Greece has new plans to &#8220;sell off thousands of acres for solar fields and allow oil exploration near delicate ecosystems,&#8221; as well as international mining operations for copper, zinc, and lead, according to the Times. But the most controversial project by far is a new open-pit gold mine and a processing plant in the north of the country, run by Canada&#8217;s <a href="http://www.eldoradogold.com" type="external">Eldorado Gold Corporation</a>.</p> <p>Proponents say the project could bring in 1,500 jobs, but a growing protest movement charges that the operation is &#8220;nothing more than a symbol of Greece&#8217;s willingness these days to accept any development, no matter the environmental cost,&#8221; according to the Times. &#8220;Only 10 years ago, they like to point out, Greece&#8217;s highest court ruled that the amount of environmental damage that mining would do here was not worth the economic gain.&#8221;</p> <p>&#8220;The dust this will create will be killing off the leaves. There will be no goats or olives or bees here,&#8221; Christos Adamidis, a hotel owner in the area, told the Times. &#8220;This will be a business for 10, maybe 15 years, and then this company will just disappear, leaving all the pollution behind like all the others did.&#8221;</p> <p>The World Wide Fund for Nature said that environmental standards accross the country are are largely being ignored, &#8220;from the reduction of mandatory environmental impact reviews to plans for increasing coal use,&#8221; as the country&#8217;s natural resources are parcelled out, according to the Times. And it&#8217;s not clear whether the environmental fire sale will help generate the revenue Greece&#8217;s leaders seek: The government reportedly didn&#8217;t even secure a percentage of gold earnings for itself in the Eldorado deal.</p> <p>Conservative Republicans in the United States have long used the spectre of Athens to trash government spending. &#8220;What is calamitous is the path we&#8217;re on as a nation,&#8221; Sen. Lindsey Graham <a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/politicolive/0711/Graham_Were_becoming_Greece.html" type="external">said in 2011</a>&amp;#160;during the first debt-ceiling debate.&amp;#160;&#8220;We&#8217;re becoming Greece.&#8221; For once, US conservatives&#8217; warnings could be right: The&amp;#160;Hellenic nation&#8217;s&amp;#160;corporate-friendly environmental selloff appears to deepen ecological woes while failing to solve the nation&#8217;s fiscal crisis. It remains to be seen whether the right in America will take that lesson to heart.</p> <p />

Greece’s Latest Fiscal Solution: Create an Ecological Crisis!

https://motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/greece-development-environment-eldorado-gold/

2013-01-14

<p>It was a good summer for fund investors, as calm and strong markets around the world lifted most categories to gains from July into September.</p> <p>The third quarter's smooth ascent was a turnaround from the topsy-turvy returns of the spring, when worries about the British vote to leave the European Union had global markets convulsing. It also keeps most funds on track for an up year. Through Wednesday, 94 percent of the 7,510 funds tracked by Morningstar have made money in 2016. That's a much higher rate of success than 2015, when only 37 percent of funds gained.</p> <p>Continue Reading Below</p> <p>Last quarter's returns came despite a long list of worries that could have spooked investors. Economic growth around the world is still only modest, and U.S. corporate earnings are in the midst of their longest string of declines since the Great Recession. Even still, the largest mutual fund by assets, Vanguard's Total Stock Market Index fund, managed to return 4.5 percent in the quarter through Wednesday.</p> <p>Interest rates remain low, which is pushing investors to pay higher prices for stocks even though earnings are falling. Bond funds, meanwhile, eked out modest gains. Here's a look at some of the trends that shaped the quarter for fund investors:</p> <p>&#8212; The Apple effect</p> <p>A big factor for many funds' good quarter was the resurgence of Apple's stock. The technology company is the largest by market value, and its immense size means its movements have a bigger effect on how indexes &#8212; and the funds that track them &#8212; perform than any other stock.</p> <p>Apple returned 19.8 percent in the quarter through Wednesday, including dividends. It soared on excitement about orders for its new iPhone model.</p> <p>Advertisement</p> <p>Funds heavily invested in Apple benefited. The Fidelity Select Computers fund, for example, has roughly a fifth of its portfolio in Apple, and its 16.9 percent third-quarter return through Wednesday was more than quadruple an S&amp;amp;P 500 index fund's return.</p> <p>Many funds run by stock pickers, though, didn't get as big a lift from Apple's rise. That's because many keep a smaller percentage of their portfolios in Apple than index funds do. In fund jargon, managers say they are "underweight" Apple, whose stock had been mostly falling since peaking in early 2015.</p> <p>After looking at the holdings of 435 mutual funds with $1.5 trillion in assets, strategists at Goldman Sachs found that the average fund had 2 percent of its assets invested in Apple stock, lower than their benchmark indexes' 2.7 percent. That makes Apple one of the most "underweighted" stocks for mutual fund managers, along with Exxon Mobil and AT&amp;amp;T.</p> <p>&#8212; A quiet quarter for bond funds</p> <p>Bond funds rose last quarter, but not by much. It's a result of the low yields found across the bond market.</p> <p>The yield on the 10-year Treasury note dropped to a record low during the summer, and that means bonds are producing less interest income than before. It also means interest rates have less room to fall, and falling rates are what mean price increases for bonds.</p> <p>A sizable group of investors has been saying bonds have become too expensive and are due for a pullback.</p> <p>Despite those predictions, demand for bonds has remained strong, keeping rates low and steady through the third quarter. The largest bond mutual fund, Vanguard's Total Bond Market Index fund, returned 0.4 percent through Wednesday. The fund tracks an index of investment-grade bonds, including Treasurys and high-quality corporate bonds.</p> <p>Actively managed funds have more freedom to focus on areas of the bond market that have higher yields, along with higher risks. The largest actively managed bond funds, the PIMCO Total Return fund and the Metropolitan West Total Return Bond fund, returned between 0.8 percent and 1 percent through Wednesday, depending on which share class you owned.</p> <p>&#8212; Emerging strength</p> <p>Some of the best returns this past quarter came from a group of funds that only a year ago were among the world's worst.</p> <p>Emerging-market stock funds have roared higher as investors scour the world for companies able to deliver strong earnings growth in a slow global economy. Bond funds that specialize in developing economies were also strong because they offer higher yields than bonds from the U.S., Europe or Japan.</p> <p>The Oppenheimer Developing Markets fund is the largest actively managed emerging-market stock fund, and it returned 10.1 percent for the quarter through Wednesday, more than double an S&amp;amp;P 500 index fund. That big jump, though, only means that it recovered some of its losses from earlier, when worries about slowing economic growth in emerging markets weighed down returns. The Oppenheimer fund is still down from two years ago.</p>

3Q Fund Review: A welcome return to strong, steady returns

http://foxbusiness.com/features/2016/09/29/3q-fund-review-welcome-return-to-strong-steady-returns.html

2016-09-29

<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p> <p>DENVER &#8212; A Colorado bill to allow some public school employees, including teachers, to carry handguns at work after getting safety training passed a Republican-led Senate committee on a party-line vote but faces tough prospects in the Democrat-led House.</p> <p>Dozens of teachers and gun control advocates squared off against gun rights activists in testimony before the State, Veterans, and Military Affairs Committee, which sent the bill to the full Senate for consideration.</p> <p>The bill is co-sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Chris Holbert of Parker and Republican House Minority Leader Patrick Neville of Castle Rock. It would allow individual school districts to decide whether district employees who are concealed-carry permit holders could undergo training to carry on campus. Colorado&#8217;s elected sheriffs would coordinate that training.</p> <p>Currently, only school resource officers, many of them active-duty police officers or hired private security guards, can carry a weapon at Colorado public schools. Holbert said his bill seeks to add training requirements for anyone, including existing private security. Concealed carry is legal at college campuses in Colorado.</p> <p>Colorado&#8217;s 178 school districts could decide if and how many employees could get training. Holbert and others said it was a common-sense measure to increase school security, especially for rural districts whose schools sometimes are lengthy distances from first responders. The names of those allowed to carry at school would be protected from open-records laws.</p> <p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> <p>The County Sheriffs of Colorado, Rocky Mountain Gun Owners and other groups support the bill.</p> <p>&#8220;Turn criminal safe zones, which is what (public schools) are now, into dangerous zones for criminals,&#8221; urged Dudley Brown of the gun owners&#8217; group.</p> <p>Opponents included several teachers, the Colorado PTA and two relatives of Mary Sherlock, a school psychologist slain in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. They argued the bill was a way to introduce more guns into schools &#8212; and that having them there won&#8217;t prevent school shootings.</p> <p>In December, the rural Hanover School District 28 board voted to allow trained school employees to volunteer to be armed on the job. The district currently shares an armed school resource officer with four other school districts.</p>

Colorado panel OK’s gun safety training for school workers

https://abqjournal.com/934778/colorado-panel-oks-gun-safety-training-for-school-workers.html

2017-01-24

<p>Gov. Buddy Roemer&amp;lt;a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/"&amp;gt;Gage Skidmore&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;/Flikr</p> <p /> <p>&#8220;We&#8217;ve got to redefine America!&#8221; Buddy Roemer roars, sounding exactly like the former Congressman, ex-governor, and current <a href="http://buddyroemer.com/" type="external">presidential hopeful</a>&amp;#160;that he is. But what he says next is a bit of a departure from campaign-trail boilerplate. &#8220;Look at Southwest Airlines!&#8221;&amp;#160;he shouts. &#8220;Who here likes Southwest?! I love Southwest! No numbers, no lines, you sit wherever you want! They&#8217;ve redefined the airline!&#8221;</p> <p>&#8220;And look at Cirque du Soleil!&#8221;&amp;#160;he goes on. &#8220;Look at what they&#8217;ve done! No popcorn, no sodas! No animals!&#8221; Roemer looks incredulous. &#8220;No animals!&#8220;</p> <p>Buddy Roemer, you might say, is seeking to redefine the circus. Having had it with both the Democrats, who first made him a Congressman in the 1980s, and the GOP, his party for the past quarter-century, he is running for the nomination of the Reform Party. It&#8217;s slow going&#8212;the campaign event I&amp;#160;attended was held in a small classroom on the University of California-Berkeley campus, with maybe 30 students and aging hippies in attendance.</p> <p>But Roemer didn&#8217;t let that slow him down. A banker by trade, he laid into Obama and his <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-20/jpmorgan-employees-join-goldman-sachs-among-top-obama-donors.html" type="external">banker buddies</a>: &#8220;After he signed financial reform into law, he attended a <a href="http://www.observer.com/2010/07/president-obama-comes-to-new-york-will-see-anna-wintour-joy-behar/" type="external">fundraiser</a> that was $30,000 a head!&#8221; he said in a measured, yet disgusted tone before shouting, &#8220;Hypocrite!&#8221; Don&#8217;t let the elfin charm fool you&#8212;Roemer&#8217;s got a fire in the belly. His financial reform blueprint includes reinstating the <a href="" type="internal">Glass-Steagall Act</a>, raising banks&#8217; capital ratios, and outlawing big bank bailouts. He&#8217;s also calling for a ban on Super PACs, and large campaign contributions, instant disclosure of all political donations, and criminal penalties for violators. His own self-imposed donation limit? A hundred bucks. No wonder he&#8217;s won the love of the left, from <a href="http://138.%09http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2011/10/05/buddy_roemer_to_occupy_wall_street_i_stand_by_you_.html" type="external">Occupy</a> to <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLHvSG0hcFM" type="external">Maddow</a> to <a href="http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/393424/july-28-2011/buddy-roemer-pt--1" type="external">Colbert</a>.</p> <p>But Roemer is quick to point out that he remains a conservative at heart:&amp;#160;He&#8217;d cut entitlement spending and public employees, get that Keystone pipeline going and frack the country dry. &#8220;We oughta tap those wells out,&#8221; he says. The Pentagon budget deserves a&amp;#160;&#8220;scrubbing,&#8221;&amp;#160;he says, but the world is &#8220;a dangerous place&#8221; and we need &#8220;healthy&#8221;&amp;#160;defense spending.&amp;#160;</p> <p>He might be a mind-bender for Americans used to something a bit more traditional. But then, so is Cirque du Soleil.</p> <p />

Buddy Roemer Redefines the Political Circus

https://motherjones.com/politics/2012/04/buddy-roemer-president-campaign/

2012-04-21

<p /> <p>President Donald Trump&#8217;s administration has continued to indicate they prefer to work out a bipartisan deal on tax reform and one of the groups they&#8217;ve turned to is the moderates within the Democratic Party, the Blue Dog Coalition.</p> <p>Continue Reading Below</p> <p>The 18-member Blue Dog Coalition, known for being the moderate Democrats within the House of Representatives, have been preparing behind the scenes for the possibility that they may be called upon to work with the administration and possibly be critical yes votes in case the Republican majority can&#8217;t get the job done on their own, FOX Business has learned.</p> <p>On June 15, Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.), policy co-chair of the Blue Dogs, sent a letter to lobbyists, think tanks and advocacy groups, inviting them to listening sessions to give them a chance to express what they would like to see in a bipartisan tax plan. More than 15 groups accepted the request and met with Lipinski in late July, including the AFL-CIO, the Tax Policy Center and the National Federation of Independent Business, according to people familiar with the matter.</p> <p>The group has also met with representatives from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Maya MacGuineas, President of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, according to Democratic aides.</p> <p>A spokeswoman for the Chamber of Commerce confirmed the meeting to FOX Business.</p> <p>&#8220;I can confirm that we met with them on tax reform, and we will continue to engage all sides of the political spectrum on the number one issue for the business community &#8211; pro-growth tax reform,&#8221; the spokeswoman said.</p> <p>Advertisement</p> <p>MacGuineas would not confirm or deny meeting with the Blue Dogs.</p> <p>Five days after Lipinski sent his letter to members of K-Street, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn and Legislative Affairs Director Marc Short, had a casual dinner with members of the Blue Dog Coalition on Capitol Hill to hear their ideas on what they hoped to see in a new tax reform bill.</p> <p>Lipinski spoke to FOX Business in an exclusive interview, confirming the meeting with the White House officials but also noted they haven&#8217;t heard from them since then and are continuing to hope to be part of their future plans.</p> <p>&#8220;They said to keep the lines of communication open. Nothing has gone beyond that and we haven&#8217;t seen anything specific in and out of the plan. When we met with them, we talked about what the issues are and what the difficulties were going to be,&#8221; Lipinski said.</p> <p>A White House spokeswoman did not return calls for comment.</p> <p>While dinner attendees considered the get together friendly and informative, some members of the Blue Dog Coalition left with more questions than answers, wondering if the administration&#8217;s plan was based on wishful thinking &amp;#160;and if there was enough evidence to back up their hope that broad tax cuts will be paid for, in part, by an increase in economic growth.</p> <p>In an exclusive interview with Fox Business, Congressman Mike Thompson (D-Calif.), a member of the Blue Dog Coalition and of the House Ways and Means Committee, said that the administration&#8217;s plan to pay for tax cuts through economic growth is an unrealistic goal.</p> <p>&#8220;I believe it needs to be paid for and not with smoke and mirrors. It has to reasonably score and needs to be revenue neutral. It can&#8217;t just be paid for on a hope and a wish,&#8221; Thompson said.</p> <p>Cohn, in an interview with Stuart Varney on Friday, reaffirmed that tax cuts will be paid for by growing the economy. &#8220;When you lower the corporate rate from 35% down to 15%, that 20% has an enormous multiplier effect in the U.S. economy. Of course we are going to get growth by lowering the business rate,&#8221; he said at the time.</p> <p>It wasn&#8217;t clear at the meeting in June if the White House would be able to conjure together a bill that would be revenue neutral, which is the bare minimum of what the Blue Dogs would want to see in a bipartisan tax plan.</p> <p>According to Thompson and Lipinski, the group has expressed some of their broader expectations on crafting a tax reform package with White House officials and House leadership, including Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Kevin Brady (R-Texas).</p> <p>They say the Blue Dogs hope to see a plan that increases economic growth, the reduction of rates for middle income workers, broadening the revenue base, lowering the corporate tax rates and it being revenue neutral.</p> <p>The caucus is expected to release more detailed tax reform principles in September.</p> <p>One of the unknowns for the moderate Democrats is where House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) stands on working with their group.</p> <p>So far, there&#8217;s been no outreach from the speaker&#8217;s office and if he&#8217;s relying on getting a bill passed through the House with only conservative Republicans, experts say there&#8217;s no guarantees that tactic will work out in their favor.</p> <p>Mark Mazur, director of the Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center and former assistant secretary for tax policy in the Treasury, said in an interview with FOX Business, Ryan might need the Democrats after all. &#8220;It&#8217;s a hard one because I think if Republicans are going to use reconciliation and plan to do it as Republicans alone, there&#8217;s still no guarantee it will pass,&#8221; Mazur said. &#8220;They have a narrow majority in both chambers and it&#8217;s hard to do.&#8221;</p> <p>Lipinski also said he was disappointed with the lack of outreach from Ryan&#8217;s office to the Blue Dogs but also insisted that the House Speaker did meet with the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus.</p> <p>&#8220;It&#8217;s disappointing that Speaker Ryan hasn&#8217;t reached out to the Blue Dogs, but I have to say with the problem solvers caucus back in June. I can&#8217;t get into details. The issue of tax reform did come up. The Speaker did seem interested what Democrats were thinking about tax reform at that time. I&#8217;m hoping this is not going to be a situation that republicans cook up a plan and come looking for democrats come on board,&#8221; Lipinski said.</p> <p>A spokeswoman for Ryan did not return calls for comment.</p>

Trump White House turning to Democrats for tax reform

http://foxbusiness.com/politics/2017/08/10/trump-white-house-turning-to-democrats-for-tax-reform.html

2017-08-10

<p>You may not know it, but even after George Washington and the Continental Congress had raised an army to fight against the English Crown, the American Colonists weren&#8217;t exactly sure what they were fighting for. It was for this reason that Thomas Paine published his famous pamphlet, Common Sense, which was at that time, the top selling work in American history.</p> <p>In it, he argued that the Americans were fighting for their independence from England, that they should be self-ruled, not taxed, ruled, and regulated by one little king on one little island thousands of miles away. General Washington himself was so pleased by the tract- because it gave focus to the character and ultimate goals of the little movement that had been brewing on this side of the pond ever since the Tea Party in Boston- that he purchased hundreds of them for his soldiers.</p> <p>The second &#8220;Tea Party Movement&#8221; in American history seems to be faced with a similar dilemma. What are its goals? What are its principles? Who are its leaders? Why does it exist? Is it primarily a <a href="http://caivn.org/article/2009/11/30/tea-party-co-founder-blasts-mainstream-gop-imitators" type="external">Republican</a> movement, or a <a href="http://caivn.org/article/2009/12/08/tea-party-destiny" type="external">non-partisan one</a>" Is it a grassroots movement, or does it take its cue from major news organizations and powerful talking heads in the media" The Tea Party protesters that turned out in droves last year to rankle with the Democrats&#8217; proposed reforms, now seem to be at war with each other.</p> <p>The controversies and conflicts surrounding the first National Tea Party Convention less than a week away, only serve to highlight the internal struggle to define the Tea Party movement. Grassroots activists, wary of what they perceive as an establishment-run event are demanding refunds of their (over $500) tickets to the convention. Two key speakers, Congresswomen Michelle Bachmann and Marsha Blackburn have <a href="http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/michelle-bachmann-and-marsha-blackburn-withdraw-from-tea-party-national-conference-82952367.html" type="external">both canceled</a> their speeches at the convention. Sponsors are pulling their support, there <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/27/palins-tea-party-conventi_n_438410.html" type="external">are growing concerns</a> that keynote speaker, Sarah Palin will end up speaking to a half empty room, and convention organizers <a href="http://politics.nashvillepost.com/2010/01/27/ex-webmaster-charges-tea-party-nation-with-labor-law-violation/" type="external">are facing charges</a> of labor law violations.</p> <p>Without a unifying cause and underlying set of principles to guide it, the Tea Party or any organization will necessarily devolve into petty disputes, general disarray, and emphasis on profits over principles. Tea Partiers thought that unifying cause was dissatisfaction with the status quo&#8211; a Washington D.C. that seemed out of touch and overbearing. The infighting and controversy over next week&#8217;s Tea Party convention could very well be a sign that these same people have the same beef with the Tea Party Convention&#8217;s organizers and speakers- that they too are out of touch.</p> <p>For someone who has made a successful political career out of her down-to-earth, average American appeal, Sarah Palin and her advisers have made a terrible miscalculation in allowing her to charge $100,000 for her speech at the nation&#8217;s first Tea Party Convention, while simultaneously stumping for Senator John McCain&#8217;s reelection in Arizona, after he voted for bailouts in his previous term. In addition, Palin recently called for an overt <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/29/palin-urges-gop-tea-party_n_441847.html" type="external">merger</a> between the GOP and Tea Party movement, fueling critics who have long claimed that the grassroots effort is simply an extension of the Republican party.&amp;#160; And for a movement fed up with corporate elitism and profits over principle, allowing Tea Party Nation, a for-profit business to organize the first Tea Party Convention was a miscalculation equally as grave.</p> <p>Only time will tell if Tea Partiers find the principles and common identity they are seeking, but if Tom Paine were here, he would tell them that common sense dictates that their budgets, their insurance, their doctors, and their lives are their own private business, and should be independent from the caprice of a few legislators in one tiny city that may be hundreds of miles away.</p>

The Tea Party movement in crisis

https://ivn.us/2010/01/30/tea-party-movement-crisis/

2010-01-30

<p>INDIANAPOLIS (AP) &#8212; The Indianapolis police chief says a witness protection program is needed to help prosecute violent crime.</p> <p>Chief Bryan Roach told members of an Indianapolis City-County Council committee Wednesday that witnesses and victims feel unsafe. He says: "More and more the public who are engaged in violence have a feeling that they can get away with it."</p> <p>Roach is among supporters of a proposal to use $300,000 to create a witness protection program. The committee sent the proposal to the full council for consideration as early as Jan. 29.</p> <p><a href="https://www.indystar.com/story/news/crime/2018/01/18/why-indianapolis-police-chief-says-city-needs-witness-protection-program/1042323001/" type="external">The Indianapolis Star</a> reports discussion of the program comes as the number of people killed in Indianapolis has grown every year since 2012. The newspaper says the percentage of cases that lead to arrests, meanwhile, has declined to below 50 percent.</p> <p>___</p> <p>Information from: The Indianapolis Star, <a href="http://www.indystar.com" type="external">http://www.indystar.com</a></p> <p>INDIANAPOLIS (AP) &#8212; The Indianapolis police chief says a witness protection program is needed to help prosecute violent crime.</p> <p>Chief Bryan Roach told members of an Indianapolis City-County Council committee Wednesday that witnesses and victims feel unsafe. He says: "More and more the public who are engaged in violence have a feeling that they can get away with it."</p> <p>Roach is among supporters of a proposal to use $300,000 to create a witness protection program. The committee sent the proposal to the full council for consideration as early as Jan. 29.</p> <p><a href="https://www.indystar.com/story/news/crime/2018/01/18/why-indianapolis-police-chief-says-city-needs-witness-protection-program/1042323001/" type="external">The Indianapolis Star</a> reports discussion of the program comes as the number of people killed in Indianapolis has grown every year since 2012. The newspaper says the percentage of cases that lead to arrests, meanwhile, has declined to below 50 percent.</p> <p>___</p> <p>Information from: The Indianapolis Star, <a href="http://www.indystar.com" type="external">http://www.indystar.com</a></p>

Indianapolis chief makes case for witness protection program

https://apnews.com/amp/ef85429bc15244b3b77dfbb030e0b2f3

2018-01-18

<p>On Wednesday,&amp;#160;Ahmed Said Khalil al-Jabari, head of the Hamas military branch, was killed by an Israeli air strike in Gaza City.</p> <p>This <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-20328579" type="external">attack</a> is the result of increasing tensions between the Gaza Strip and the Israeli army, following a series of&amp;#160;rocket attacks from Gaza in the last week. Since Saturday, over 115 rockets have been fired by militants in Gaza, wounding four Israeli soldiers. Israel reacted with a series of air strikes, 20 according to a member of the&amp;#160;Israeli&amp;#160;army, with the objective of&amp;#160;destroying&amp;#160;rocket launch capacities.</p> <p>The latest air strike on Wednesday morning killed Mr. Al-Jabari, as well in his assistant who was with Al-Jabari in the targeted vehicle. As the head of the military wing of Hamas, called the&amp;#160;Ezzeddine Al-Kassam Brigades, Mr. Al-Jabari is the highest Hamas leader killed by Israel since Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009. Mr. Al-Jabari, 52, became the <a href="http://www.lemonde.fr/proche-orient/article/2012/11/14/traque-par-l-armee-israelienne-ahmad-jabari-vivait-dans-la-clandestinite_1790501_3218.html" type="external">de-facto leader of the Hamas</a> military branch when Mohamed Raif, head of&amp;#160;Ezzeddine Al-Kassam, suffered multiple injuries from an&amp;#160;Israeli&amp;#160;attack in 2002.</p> <p>Knowing to be on the Israeli wanted list, Mr. Al-Jabari has been living in hiding for several years. He was one of the&amp;#160;architects&amp;#160;of the release of Israeli soldier&amp;#160;Gilad Shalit, who was a prisoner in Gaza for 5 years. Shalit was exchanged for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. Al-Jabari broke his usual clandestine lifestyle to&amp;#160;accompany Mr. Shalit to the airport in front of news stations from all over the world.</p> <p>The Israeli Defense Forces stated that Mr. Al-Jabari has been specifically <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-20328579" type="external">targeted because he</a> &#8220;was directly responsible for executing terror attacks against the state of Israel in the past number of years.&#8221;&amp;#160;Yisrael Katz, a minister from the governing party in Israel said the government is sending a message to Hamas that &#8220;Israel will continue to kill and target anyone who is involved in the rocket attacks.&#8221; Tension is continuing to escalate and the IDF is saying it will not hesitate to evolve the situation into a complete military operation if necessary.</p> <p /> <p>The reactions on both sides raise fear of a sharp increase in violence. The ferocity of the air strikes, which killed at least eight people and injured more, has led to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/15/world/middleeast/israeli-strike-in-gaza-kills-the-military-leader-of-hamas.html?pagewanted=1&amp;amp;_r=0" type="external">waves of rage in Gaza</a>. Abu Zuhri, Hamas&amp;#160;spokesmen&amp;#160;said, &#8220;Israel will regret the moment they even thought of doing this.&#8221; The&amp;#160;Ezzeddine Al-Kassam brigades said Israel&amp;#160;&#8220; <a href="http://www.lemonde.fr/proche-orient/article/2012/11/14/israel-tue-le-chef-militaire-du-hamas_1790453_3218.html" type="external">opened the gates of hell</a>&#8221;&amp;#160;with their offensive.</p> <p>International reactions have&amp;#160;highlighted&amp;#160;the danger of situation. The United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has <a href="http://www.kuna.net.kw/ArticleDetails.aspx?id=2274310&amp;amp;language=en" type="external">called for</a> &#8220;immediate de-escalation of tensions.&#8221; Egypt, who has been trying to&amp;#160;negotiate&amp;#160;a ceasefire for the past five days, has condemned the Israeli air&amp;#160;strikes. Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohamed Kamel Amr called &#8220;Israel to stop its strikes on Gaza Strip immediately.&#8221; The Palestinian President <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/14/israel-gaza-strike_n_2130668.html" type="external">Mahmoud Abbas has urged</a> the Arab League to hold an urgent meeting to find a resolution.</p> <p>The evolution of the conflicts will need to be followed closely as events continue to unwind. According to the latest CNN report, the IDF has scheduled three more air strikes this evening. Additionally, reports of more rockets from Gaza have been rolling in, most <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/162099#.UKQEc-Oe-YY" type="external">recently near</a> a Dimona nuclear power plant. No injuries or damage were reported from that attack. The Iron Dome missile defense system has intercepted rockets fired at Be&#8217;er Sheva.</p> <p />

Head of Hamas Military Branch Killed By Israeli Air Strike

https://ivn.us/2012/11/14/head-of-hamas-military-branch-was-killed-by-a-israeli-air-strike/

2012-11-14

<p>Germany&#8217;s top soldier, army chief Wolfgang Schneiderhan, has resigned over accusations of a cover-up after officials withheld information about a NATO airstrike that killed dozens of civilians in Afghanistan.</p> <p>The BBC:</p> <p>Germany&#8217;s top soldier has resigned over allegations of a cover-up related to a deadly Nato air strike in Afghanistan.</p> <p>Wolfgang Schneiderhan&#8217;s move followed reports that key information about the 4 September action was withheld, the defence minister said.</p> <p /> <p>The strike, which was ordered by a German commander, targeted two fuel tankers hijacked by Taliban militants.</p> <p>But dozens of civilians were also killed in the attack, which happened in the northern province of Kunduz.</p> <p><a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8380226.stm" type="external">Read more</a></p>

Top German Soldier Quits Over Cover-Up

https://truthdig.com/articles/top-german-soldier-quits-over-cover-up/

2009-11-27

<p>Anita Sarkeesian of <a href="http://www.feministfrequency.com/" type="external">Feminist Frequency</a> has debuted the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toa_vH6xGqs" type="external">second part</a> of her &#8220;Tropes vs Women in Video Games&#8221; episode on damsels in distress.</p> <p>The script&#8217;s use of repetitive language is particularly powerful, exposing the unoriginality of misogynistic plots. Sarkeesian also does a good job of explaining how this violence affects our analog world for those disinclined to believe any connection. It&#8217;s disappointingly easy to recognize what points she makes in response to sexist critics, promising them they can still enjoy their games and professing confidence in designers&#8217; motives, and I hate that Sarkeesian has to soothe them to get her point across: even if game creators just haven&#8217;t put a lot of thought into gender, as she suggests, I still think they&#8217;re culpable. At the same time, though, she makes the video emotionally accessible for skeptics, allowing them to abandon their defensiveness, without substantively compromising her position. That&#8217;s a remarkable feat.</p> <p>Unsurprisingly, the video was <a href="http://business.financialpost.com/2013/05/29/tropes-vs-women-in-video-games-briefly-taken-down-after-it-was-community-flagged-on-youtube/" type="external">briefly removed by YouTube</a> due to user complaints&#8211;Sarkeesian has faced harassment for challenging sexism within gaming culture since she started fundraising&#8211;but it&#8217;s back online now. You can watch the video below and <a href="http://www.feministfrequency.com/2013/05/damsel-in-distress-part-2-tropes-vs-women/" type="external">read the transcript on Feminist Frequency</a>. For background, make sure to catch up on our <a href="" type="internal">coverage</a> of the first episode and our <a href="http://www.feministfrequency.com/2013/05/damsel-in-distress-part-2-tropes-vs-women/" type="external">Feministing Five with Sarkeesian</a>.</p> <p>Trigger warning for violence against women.</p> <p />

Watch: Feminist Frequency’s Damsel in Distress episode, Part 2

http://feministing.com/2013/05/29/watch-feminist-frequencys-damsel-in-distress-episode-part-2/

<p>The headlines were everywhere.</p> <p>"Ivanka Trump gets booed, hissed at during Berlin event," said the liberal Politico website.</p> <p>"German crowd boos Ivanka Trump for calling her father a &#8216;champion&#8217; for families," wrote the Washington Post.</p> <p>"German crowd hisses, boos at Ivanka when she defends her dad," CNN said.</p> <p>Trump was in Berlin to attend a women's panel late last month. At one point, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/25/politics/ivanka-trump-germany-hisses/" type="external">CNN</a> said, "The audience interrupted Trump with hissing and boos during a discussion on paid leave when she began describing her father as an advocate for women."</p> <p>But you'll be shocked (shocked! we say) to hear that it just didn't happen.</p> <p>"Contrary to the stereotype, the daughter of the US President made a sophisticated and level-headed impression at the panel discussion with Chancellor Angela Merkel, Queen M&#225;xima of the Netherlands, and head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde. The glamorous White House ambassador also cleverly handled a controversial issue," the German newspaper <a href="http://www.bild.de/politik/ausland/ivanka-trump/berlin-visit-there-was-no-booing-for-ivanka-trump-51469066.bild.html" type="external">Bild</a> wrote.</p> <p>When Trump said she was "proud" of her father, "there was some unrest in the audience. There was no booing or heckling at all, however."</p> <p>There was, at best, some "murmuring."</p> <p>This makes it even more surprising that US media are painting an entirely different picture of Ivanka&#8217;s appearance in Berlin. The murmuring that could be heard as Ivanka defended her father against criticism was interpreted as massive booing of the President&#8217;s daughter.</p> <p>The alleged hostility toward Ivanka during her visit to Berlin was a lead headline at US outlets such as ABC, CNN, and Fox, along with several major newspapers.</p> <p>In a discussion broadcast by the Trump-friendly TV station Fox on Tuesday night (local time), the audience of the Berlin event was heavily criticized. A report on the Fox website featured the headline: &#8220;Germans jeer Ivanka Trump for defending her father&#8221;.</p> <p><a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2017/04/25/ivanka-trump-booed-berlin-237569" type="external">Watch</a> the "booing" for yourself. You'll see.</p>

The MSM Said Germans Booed Ivanka. They Didn't.

https://dailywire.com/news/15914/msm-said-germans-booed-ivanka-they-didnt-joseph-curl

2017-05-01

<p>The president-elect has not taken fondly to the idea that he would have lost to President Obama had the two faced each other in the just concluded presidential race.</p> <p>Obama made the <a href="" type="internal">suggestion</a> in an interview published last week, but Trump is still tweeting about it.</p> <p>On Tuesday afternoon, he wrote on Twitter, &#8220;President Obama campaigned hard (and personally) in the very important swing states, and lost. The voters wanted to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!&#8221;</p> <p /> <p>With every tweet, this one included, Trump puts his dangerous childishness on full display.</p> <p>The election is over, Trump won, and the next item on the agenda for the United States is the peaceful and orderly transition of power from President Obama to President-elect Trump.</p> <p>And yet, Trump is rambling on about Obama&#8217;s supposedly failed role in campaigning on behalf of Hillary Clinton while the presidential race was still underway &#8212; a literally irrelevant issue.</p> <p>As Jimmy Kimmel Live&#8217;s Bess Kalb put it in a reply to Trump, &#8220;Honey honey shhhh. It&#8217;s over. You did it, baby. You have to be president now. Stop catastrophizing into imaginary spirals.&#8221;</p> <p /> <p>Something else to note as well &#8212; Trump&#8217;s win is hardly resounding enough to put him in a position to endlessly belittle the campaign strategy of his opponent. Trump lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes &#8212; something that, evidently, offends him at least as deeply as Obama&#8217;s comments that he could have beaten Trump in an Obama/ Trump match-up.</p> <p>Featured Image via&amp;#160; <a href="http://www.gettyimages.com/license/622149474" type="external">JIM WATSON/ AFP/ Getty Images</a>.</p>

Donald Trump FREAKS Out On President Obama During Tuesday Afternoon Twitter Meltdown (DETAILS)

http://bipartisanreport.com/2016/12/27/donald-trump-freaks-out-on-president-obama-during-tuesday-afternoon-twitter-meltdown-details/

2016-12-27

<p /> <p>Hedge fund manager Philip Falcone agreed to a five-year ban from the financial industry and will admit wrongdoing to settle charges by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that he improperly used money from his hedge fund and unfairly favored some of his investors, the SEC announced on Monday.</p> <p>Continue Reading Below</p> <p>The ban would put at least a temporary end to Falcone's controversial career of managing investor money, which was notable for a dramatic rise and fall during and soon after the financial crisis. But it would not prevent him from serving as a director or officer of a public company.</p> <p>The new settlement agreement, which involves Falcone and his hedge fund Harbinger Capital, comes after the Commission rejected an earlier proposal because it was too lenient, lacking any admission of wrongdoing or a full industry ban. The new agreement also appeared to be the first to require a defendant to admit wrongdoing since new SEC Chairman Mary Jo White announced a much tougher policy that would require such admissions more often.</p> <p>The agreement must still be approved by a federal judge.</p> <p>"Falcone and Harbinger engaged in serious misconduct that harmed investors, and their admissions leave no doubt that they violated the federal securities laws," said Andrew Ceresney, Co-Director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement. "Falcone must now pay a heavy price for his misconduct by surrendering millions of dollars and being barred from the hedge fund industry."</p> <p>Falcone, 51, who made a hugely successful bet against the subprime mortgage market before getting hit by steep losses from a failed wireless startup, LightSquared Inc, said in a statement he was "pleased" to reach a settlement.</p> <p>Advertisement</p> <p>"I believe putting these issues behind me now is the best course of action for me and our investors," he said.</p> <p>His fund Harbinger Capital, which once boasted assets under management of $26 billion, fell to around $3 billion earlier this year. The fund's current size could not immediately be ascertained.</p> <p>Falcone, whose rags-to-riches story took him from a poor upbringing in Minnesota to the trappings of wealth, including the purchase of a New York mansion once owned by former Penthouse Magazine publisher Bob Guccione, might have a tough time getting back into the industry.</p> <p>"This is a more traditional SEC settlement. It's far more comprehensive than what they had before," said C. Evan Stewart, a partner at Zuckerman Spaeder in New York.</p> <p>To reenter the business, Falcone would have to apply to the SEC for permission once the five years have passed.</p> <p>"That's an agency that has found him not a good person to be in charge of other people's money," Stewart said. "The likelihood that that's going to a change in five years, that's not automatic. There's a pretty high barrier to getting back in."</p> <p>The government asserted that, at the height of the financial crisis, when many of the fund's assets were tied up in the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Falcone let select investors get out while denying that opportunity to others.</p> <p>The SEC also claimed Falcone illegally loaned himself $113 million from the fund to pay his taxes, leaving investors unable to access their money. Falcone eventually repaid the loan.</p> <p>To settle the charges, Falcone will have to admit to having done what the SEC alleges he did. He will have to personally pay around $11.5 million in disgorgement and fines, while his hedge fund, Harbinger Capital, will pay $6.5 million, according to the SEC's announcement.</p> <p>BAN AND ADMISSION</p> <p>David Marder, a former assistant district administrator for the SEC in Boston, called Harbinger a "big deal" for lawyers seeking an indication of what cases will require admissions in the future.</p> <p>The policy of allowing defendants to neither admit nor deny wrongdoing came under scrutiny after U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff rejected a $285 million settlement with Citigroup Inc based in part on the lack of admissions.</p> <p>During Falcone's five-year ban, he will be allowed to help meet redemption requests from Harbinger's investors under the supervision of an independent monitor. He will also be able to continue as chairman and chief executive of his publicly traded company, Harbinger Group Inc.</p> <p>However, his securities industry ban and admission of wrongdoing will likely prevent other public companies from choosing him for their boards.</p> <p>"He could still technically serve on the board of other public companies," said Mark Kornfeld, a partner at BakerHostetler. "In the short-term, most would expect companies to shy away from bringing him aboard."</p> <p>BOOM AND BUST</p> <p>At the height of his success, Falcone earned a 116 percent gain for Harbinger in 2007 betting against subprime mortgages.</p> <p>But Falcone struggled during the financial crisis, losing 22 percent in 2008 and telling investors on Christmas Eve that they would not be able to get their money out of the fund in order to stave off a rush of redemptions.</p> <p>A little more than a year ago, his hedge fund owned 96 percent of LightSquared, a venture that depended on government approval to build a high-speed, wireless network that tests eventually showed would risk interfering with the Global Positioning Systems.</p> <p>When the Federal Communications Commission failed to give final approval to the venture, LightSquared was forced to file for bankruptcy, which led to heavy losses at Harbinger in 2012.</p> <p>Falcone said of the settlement: "It will allow me to continue to focus on my permanent capital vehicles and maximizing the value of LightSquared for all stakeholders. I remain committed to managing Harbinger Capital's portfolio of investments for the benefit of our investors."</p> <p>(Reporting By Emily Flitter. Editing by Andre Grenon)</p>

Falcone Reaches Deal With SEC, Admits Wrongdoing

http://foxbusiness.com/features/2013/08/19/falcone-reaches-deal-with-sec-admits-wrongdoing.html

2016-01-25

<p>US President Donald Trump said Thursday that the opioid crisis in the United States constitutes a &#8220;national emergency&#8221; and pledged to step up efforts to fight the epidemic.</p> <p>&#8220;The opioid crisis is an emergency,&#8221; Trump told reporters at his New Jersey country club, where he is on a two-week working vacation. &#8220;It&#8217;s a national emergency.</p> <p>&#8220;We&#8217;re going to spend a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of money on the opioid crisis,&#8221; the president said. &#8220;It is a serious problem, the likes of which we have never had.&#8221;</p> <p>Trump&#8217;s declaration of a &#8220;national emergency&#8221; came two days after he held a meeting with top advisers to discuss tackling the drug problem.</p> <p>Trump &#8220;has instructed his Administration to use all appropriate emergency and other authorities to respond to the crisis caused by the opioid epidemic,&#8221; a statement issued by his office said.</p> <p>Prescription painkillers and heroin contributed to some 60,000 overdose deaths in the United States in 2016, a 19 percent surge over the previous year, according to an estimate compiled by the New York Times.</p> <p>Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whose Department of Justice last week announced a new &#8216;Opioid Fraud and Abuse Detection Unit&#8217;, added: &#8220;This nation has never seen overdose deaths anywhere close to these numbers, and for each death, many more suffer debilitating addictions.&#8221;</p> <p>An estimated two to three million people are hooked on prescription painkillers or heroin, according to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, and 90 people die every day in the United States from opioid overdoses.</p>

Trump Declares Opioid Crisis a National Emergency

https://newsline.com/trump-declares-opioid-crisis-a-national-emergency-2/

2017-08-11

<p /> <p>Welcome to OnSale at FOXBusiness, where we look at cool stuff and insane bargains.</p> <p>Continue Reading Below</p> <p>Design your own case to house your e-reader and indecisive do-gooders need to check out this new way to give. And dog owners may want to create one of these profiles for their pup.</p> <p>E-Reader Wrap</p> <p>If you&#8217;re heading to the beach for spring break, or looking for a place to house your new <a href="" type="internal">iPad</a> 2, check out a new way to protect your tech toys.</p> <p>Gadget accessories maker M-Edge <a href="http://app.medgestore.com/customize" type="external">has a new feature Opens a New Window.</a> that lets users create their own design for an iPad, Kindle, or Nook case. You can download a high-res photo to the site or upload your favorite artwork and the image will be printed on a 100% cotton canvas case.</p> <p>The program lets you add multiple images, crop or scale an image, and add text. And if you don't feel like customizing your own design, &amp;#160;the site has plenty of awesome pre-existing designs.</p> <p>Advertisement</p> <p>You can make your own jacket for a Kindle or Nook for $40, or pay $50 for an iPad case, first or second generation. You can choose between a chestnut and black leather spine and your device will rest comfortably on a soft, light brown interior. Expected date of arrival is two to three weeks. <a href="http://www.medgestore.com/" type="external">Check it out at MEdgeStore.com Opens a New Window.</a>.</p> <p>Charity Card</p> <p><a href="" type="internal">OnSale told you about</a> &amp;#160;a program called <a href="http://www.SwipeGood.com" type="external">SwipeGood Opens a New Window.</a> that contributes the change from your credit card purchases to the charity of your choice. Well, if you didn&#8217;t sign up as part of your New Year&#8217;s resolution, it&#8217;s not too late.</p> <p>The company is launching a new initiative called <a href="http://www.smart-giving.com/" type="external">SmartGiving Opens a New Window.</a>, that streamlines the donations you make to charities according to your actual day-to-day spending habits. All you have to do is register a credit card with the site, and the company provides more than 300 worthy causes to donate to--and you don&#8217;t have to choose just one.</p> <p>Say, for example, you put $35.25 in groceries on your credit card. SmartGiving would round up to the next dollar, dedicating the remaining 75 cents to a charity that feeds the hungry. If you buy books for school on your card for $149.50 SmartGiving will set aside 50 cents for a community education program.</p> <p>If a user finds a charity they want to dedicate solely to, he or she has the option to turn off the &#8220;Smart&#8221; feature and direct donations to a specific non-profit organization.</p> <p>App-y Tails</p> <p>A new application for the <a href="" type="internal">iPhone</a> and iPad will make canine ownership more convenient for dog lovers everywhere.</p> <p>Appropriately called <a href="http://www.doginfousa.com" type="external">&#8220;My Dog, Opens a New Window.</a>&#8221; &amp;#160;the app will find you a nearby groomer, a local trainer and dog park, as well as store your pup&#8217;s medical info all on your handheld device. The man behind the app, California-based Holger Laufenberg, says he came up with the idea after his dog disappeared. When he started calling local shelters, he says he was asked questions about the dog&#8217;s appearance, breed, medications and allergies. Through &#8220;My Dog,&#8221; owners create a picture, detailed description, emergency contact information, and medical history.</p> <p>The app also includes a national pet service directory and a dog-friendly travel guide. You can either search the App Store for &#8220;My Dog&#8221; or download it at <a href="http://www.doginfousa.com/doginfousa/iPhone_Dog_App.html" type="external">DogInfoUSA.com. Opens a New Window.</a></p> <p>Know of a killer deal or insane bargain? E-mail the goods to <a href="http://mailto:OnSale@FOXBusiness.com" type="external">OnSale@FOXBusiness.com</a> and share the wealth.</p>

A Dog Owner’s Dream App and Swiping for Charity

http://foxbusiness.com/features/2011/03/23/dog-owners-dream-app-swiping-charity.html

2016-03-04

<p /> <p>Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen was thrust into the election-year boxing ring during a congressional committee hearing on Wednesday, defending the central bank's regulatory role, taking and landing punches on Wells Fargo and other banks considered too big to fail, and addressing accusations of political conflicts of interest.</p> <p>Continue Reading Below</p> <p>At a House of Representatives Financial Services Committee hearing, Yellen also provided details on the changes the central bank is considering making to the annual stress tests it gives U.S. banks. It would move to a more risk-sensitive, firm-specific approach that "would result in a significant aggregate increase in capital requirements" for the eight largest U.S. banks, she said.</p> <p>She told the committee that the Fed was reviewing whether the largest U.S. lenders are complying with banking rules in the wake of the Wells Fargo scandal in which the bank settled charges that it opened as many as 2 million unauthorized customer accounts.</p> <p>"I think it is very important that senior management be held accountable," Yellen told the House panel.</p> <p>The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform law enacted in 2010 expanded the Fed's authority over banks, giving it the ability to break up those considered "too big to fail" and requiring it to monitor for institutions' weaknesses that could wreak havoc across the country's financial system.</p> <p>Republicans have said those powers go too far, and the central bank's resulting regulations have dried up liquidity, imposed excessive costs on small banks, and crippled banks' ability to lend. Recently, the committee approved legislation crafted by its Republican chairman, Jeb Hensarling of Texas, to curb the Fed's regulatory role as part of a revamp of Dodd-Frank.</p> <p>Advertisement</p> <p>Democrats, meanwhile, are pushing the Fed to take full advantage of its authority, with some on Wednesday pressing Yellen to break up Wells Fargo &amp;amp; Co, recently ensnared in a scandal over creating phony accounts in real customers' names.</p> <p>Yellen demurred on intervening in Wells Fargo, but said the Fed has initiated a review of all the large banks and is concerned about compliance across the board.</p> <p>CHARGES OF BEING TOO 'COZY'</p> <p>Republican Representative Scott Garrett also pressed Yellen over media reports that Fed Governor Lael Brainard might take a top job in the next administration if Democrat Hillary Clinton wins the Nov. 8 election.</p> <p>"The Fed has an unacceptably cozy relationship both with the Obama administration and with higher ups in the Democratic Party," Garrett said.</p> <p>Yellen said she was unaware of any contact between Brainard and Clinton.</p> <p>Puerto Rico, currently mired in a financial meltdown, also came up frequently in the hearing, but Yellen said a solution to its fiscal crisis should come from the White House or Congress.</p> <p>Alongside the stress tests, the largest banks must also provide "living wills" to show how they would wind down operations should they fail, without needing help from the federal government. This spring the Fed said five out of eight of those banks, including Wells Fargo &amp;amp; Co. and Bank of America Corp., did not have credible plans, and gave them until October to make revisions.</p> <p>On Wednesday Yellen said the Fed stands ready to use its authority to impose higher capital requirements on those banks if problems are not corrected in their wills. J.P. Morgan Chase &amp;amp; Co., Bank of New York Mellon Corp., and State Street Corp. also must resubmit their wills.</p> <p>Yellen also said Congress may want to consider making small community banks exempt from the Volcker Rule restricting their investments and the compensation limits in Dodd-Frank.</p> <p>"The risks addressed by these statutory provisions are far more significant at larger institutions than they are at community banks," she said. "In the event that a community bank engages in practices in either of these areas that raise heightened concerns, we would be able to address these concerns as part of the normal safety-and-soundness supervisory process." (Reporting by Lisa Lambert and Patrick Rucker, Additional reporting by Jason Lange; Writing by Lisa Lambert; Editing by Andrea Ricci and Linda Stern)</p>

Fed's Yellen Defends Regulatory Role, Raises Stress Test Changes

http://foxbusiness.com/politics/2016/09/28/feds-yellen-defends-regulatory-role-raises-stress-test-changes.html

2016-09-28

<p>Jan 24 (Reuters) - Anika Therapeutics Inc:</p> <p>* ANIKA THERAPEUTICS EXPANDS STRATEGIC COLLABORATION WITH THE INSTITUTE FOR APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES (IALS) AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST TO DEVELOP INNOVATIVE THERAPY FOR RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS Source text for Eikon: Further company coverage:</p> Our Standards: <a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a> <p>NEW YORK (Reuters) - A former Playboy model who said she had an affair with President Donald Trump filed suit in California on Tuesday to release her from a legal agreement requiring her to stay silent, becoming the second woman this month to contest an arrangement to keep quiet about an alleged extramarital relationship with Trump.</p> Playboy Playmate of the Year Karen McDougal poses at the Playboy Mansion in Beverly Hills in 1998. REUTERS/Files <p>Karen McDougal filed the lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court against American Media Inc, publisher of the National Enquirer, which paid her $150,000 in 2016 to keep quiet on the matter, according to a copy of the lawsuit provided by her lawyer, Peter Stris.</p> <p>The lawsuit comes a month after the New Yorker reported on the alleged affair and a move by American Media Inc to pay McDougal for exclusive rights to her story, which it never published. The New Yorker article noted that American Media head David Pecker has described Trump as a &#8220;personal friend.&#8221;</p> FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks with the news media before boarding Marine One helicopter to depart for travel to California via Joint Base Andrews from the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, U.S., March 13, 2018. REUTERS/Leah Millis/File Photo <p>American Media Inc did not immediately respond to a request for comment.</p> <p>&#8220;AMI lied to me, made empty promises, and repeatedly intimidated and manipulated me. I just want the opportunity to set the record straight and move on with my life, free from this company, its executives, and its lawyers,&#8221; McDougal, who was Playboy magazine&#8217;s 1998 Playmate of the Year, said in a statement.</p> <p>Adult film actress Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, sued the president on March 6, stating that Trump never signed an agreement for her to keep her quiet about an &#8220;intimate&#8221; extramarital relationship between them. Daniels received $130,000 under that agreement.</p> <p>Earlier this week, a law firm representing Trump and the corporation that paid Daniels said in a court filing it was seeking at least $20 million in damages for multiple violations of the nondisclosure agreement.</p> <p>Reporting by Nathan Layne in New York; Editing by Will Dunham</p> Our Standards: <a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a> <p>NEW YORK, 2018 - A rise in oil prices to three-week highs helped lift equity markets worldwide on Tuesday, while the U.S. dollar jumped ahead of a meeting of Federal Reserve policymakers, who are expected to go ahead with the first of at least three U.S. rate hikes this year.</p> <p>U.S. technology stocks lagged broader markets, continuing a sell-off sparked by reports of large-scale misuse of Facebook user data. Facebook Inc ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=FB.O" type="external">FB.O</a>) shares lost 2.5 percent, continuing a slide that took nearly 7 percent off their price on Monday. While stocks on Wall Street climbed, Facebook&#8217;s drop kept the gains in check.</p> <p>The Dow Jones Industrial Average <a href="/finance/markets/index?symbol=.DJI" type="external">.DJI</a> rose 116.36 points, or 0.47 percent, to 24,727.27, the S&amp;amp;P 500 <a href="/finance/markets/index?symbol=.SPX" type="external">.SPX</a> gained 4.02 points, or 0.15 percent, to 2,716.94 and the Nasdaq Composite <a href="/finance/markets/index?symbol=.IXIC" type="external">.IXIC</a> rose 20.06 points, or 0.27 percnet, to 7,364.30.</p> <p>There were other tech-related problems, as well. An accident with an Uber test car UBER.UL on Monday that resulted in the first fatality involving a fully autonomous vehicle also weighed on Silicon Valley sentiment.</p> <p>Shares in European chipmakers faced pressure, while Germany&#8217;s SAP ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=SAPG.DE" type="external">SAPG.DE</a>) declined 0.5 percent, hit by a knock-on effect from U.S. business software peer Oracle, whose quarterly revenue missed analysts&#8217; estimates.</p> <p>&#8220;There certainly are some stocks where valuations look somewhat stretched... so we&#8217;re focusing our exposure within the technology sector on the cheaper end of the market,&#8221; said Mike Bell, global market strategist at JPMorgan Asset Management.</p> <p>&#8220;We&#8217;re a bit more cautious on the more expensive and some of the more popular names in the sector,&#8221; he added.</p> FOCUS ON THE DOLLAR <p>The U.S. dollar climbed to a one-week high against the Japanese yen as traders limbered up for the start of a two-day Fed Reserve meeting.</p> <p>With a quarter-point hike - its sixth since the Fed began raising interest rates in late 2015 - baked into market prices, major currencies were largely moving in ranges.</p> Slideshow (3 Images) <p>&#8220;Euro/dollar is being buffeted by cross currents, especially as both central banks (Fed and the ECB) are normalizing policy, but it needs an unexpected policy action to jolt markets,&#8221; said Neil Jones, Mizuho&#8217;s London head of currency hedge fund sales.</p> <p>Markets expect at least two more U.S. rate hikes after Wednesday this year, although analysts acknowledged that the central bank&#8217;s &#8216;dot plot&#8217; could potentially point to as many as four.</p> <p>The Fed bets kept long-term U.S. bond yields edging higher, with short-dated yields up too.</p> <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=FB.O" type="external">Facebook Inc</a> 168.15 FB.O Nasdaq -4.41 (-2.56%) FB.O .DJI .SPX .IXIC SAPG.DE <p>The yield on 10-year Treasuries was up at almost 2.89 percent US10YT=RR, 6 basis points below the four-year high of 2.957 percent touched a month ago. Two-year notes US2YT=RR hit a 9-1/2-year high of 2.33 percent.</p> <p>Among major commodities, oil prices jumped in line with the dollar as investors remained wary of growing crude supply, although tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran provided some support. [O/R]</p> <p>U.S. crude CLcv1 rose 2.24 percent to $63.52 per barrel and Brent LCOcv1 was last at $67.37, up 2 percent.</p> <p>The potential for a trade war cast a shadow over export currencies after U.S. President Donald Trump imposed steep tariffs on steel and aluminum. The government is expected to unveil up to $60 billion in new tariffs on Chinese imports by Friday.</p> <p>U.S. businesses were alarmed, with several large U.S. retail companies, including Wal-Mart Inc ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=WMT.N" type="external">WMT.N</a>) and Target Corp ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=TGT.N" type="external">TGT.N</a>), on Monday urging Trump not to impose massive tariffs on goods imported from China.</p> <p>The dollar index .DXY, tracking the greenback against a basket of major currencies, rose 0.74 percent, with the euro <a href="/finance/currencies/quote?srcCurr=EUR&amp;amp;destCurr=USD" type="external">EUR=</a> down 0.75 percent to $1.2241.</p> <p>The Japanese yen weakened 0.42 percent versus the greenback to 106.54 per dollar, while sterling <a href="/finance/currencies/quote?srcCurr=GBP&amp;amp;destCurr=USD" type="external">GBP=</a> was at $1.3996, down 0.19 percent on the day.</p> <p>Editing by Bernadette Baum and Dan Grebler</p> Our Standards: <a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a> <p>WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump feted Saudi Arabia&#8217;s powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Tuesday and lauded U.S. defense sales as a boost to American jobs, even as Riyadh&#8217;s involvement in Yemen&#8217;s civil war faced criticism.</p> <p>In the Oval Office, Trump and the crown prince lauded the strength of U.S.-Saudi ties, which had grown strained under the Obama administration in part over differing views towards Riyadh&#8217;s regional rival Iran.</p> <p>Not so with Trump, who has taken a hardline view against Iran similar to that of the Saudi crown prince who has compared Iran&#8217;s supreme leader to Adolf Hitler.</p> <p>The talks were part of the first visit by the prince to the United States since he became the heir apparent last year to succeed King Salman.</p> <p>Trump&#8217;s red-carpet treatment highlighted his administration&#8217;s strong backing of the crown prince, who carried out an anti-corruption purge that consolidated his power and whose aggressive foreign policy has caused unease among some Western allies.</p> <p>At the same time, the kingdom has witnessed a cautious new climate of social freedoms with the rise of the 32-year-old crown prince to power after decades of elderly rulers.</p> <p>Trump and Prince Mohammed discussed an agreement last year for $200 billion worth of Saudi investments with the United States, including large purchases of U.S. military equipment. Trump said the military sales contributed to the creation of 40,000 American jobs.</p> <p>Trump held up charts to show the depth of Saudi purchases of U.S. military hardware, ranging from ships to missile defense to planes and fighting vehicles.</p> <p>&#8220;Saudi Arabia is a very wealthy nation, and they&#8217;re going to give the United States some of that wealth, hopefully, in the form of jobs, in the form of the purchase of the finest military equipment anywhere in the world,&#8221; he told reporters.</p> <p>The crown prince, who is also the defense minister, is on a public relations blitz while traveling in the United States, with stops in New York, Boston, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Houston to cultivate investments.</p> <p>As they talked, U.S. senators debated a resolution seeking an end to U.S. support for Saudi Arabia&#8217;s campaign in Yemen&#8217;s civil war, in which about 10,000 people have been killed. Some members of Congress have been critical of the Saudi involvement, particularly over the humanitarian situation and civilian casualties.</p> <p>A Saudi-led coalition, with logistical and intelligence support from Washington is fighting to counter the influence of Iran, an ally of the Houthi militia, which denies any help from Tehran and say it is fighting a revolution against corrupt politicians and Gulf powers in thrall to the West.</p> <p>Senator Bob Corker, chairman of the chamber&#8217;s foreign relations committee, said senators had questioned the crown prince closely about Yemen during a meeting with him on Tuesday.</p> <p>The Saudi embassy said the prince discussed with members &#8220;countering the threat posed by Iran and the Iran-backed Houthi militias&#8221; as well as Saudi &#8220;efforts to address and alleviate the humanitarian situation in Yemen.&#8221;</p> U.S. President Donald Trump welcomes Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, U.S. March 20, 2018. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst PRINCE&#8217;S RAPID RISE <p>Prince Mohammed capped his rapid rise to power last June by replacing his elder cousin Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, who had close relationships with U.S. intelligence and defense circles, as crown prince. He is likely to rule for many decades if he succeeds his father.</p> <p>Trump praised the king&#8217;s move to elevate Mohammed and called U.S.-Saudi ties strong as ever.</p> <p>&#8220;I thought your father made a very wise decision. And I miss your father - a special man,&#8221; he said. King Salman is to visit the United States later this year.</p> Slideshow (9 Images) <p>Though the prince has won Western plaudits for seeking to ease Saudi Arabia&#8217;s reliance on oil, tackle chronic corruption and reform the conservative Sunni Muslim kingdom, the severity and secrecy of his anti-corruption crackdown last November unnerved some in the West.</p> <p>The crown prince, in a rare foray into speaking English, said on Tuesday the Saudi pledge for $200 billion in investments will end up at $400 billion when fully implemented. He said a 10-year window for implementing the deal was already under way.</p> <p>&#8220;This is a signal that there (are) a lot of things (that) could be tackled in the close future and more opportunities. And that&#8217;s why we are here today, to be sure that we&#8217;ve tackled all the opportunities and achieve it and also get rid of all the threats facing our both countries,&#8221; he said.</p> <p>Any visit to the New York Stock Exchange will be watched closely by investors because of the potentially lucrative listing of up to 5 percent of Saudi oil firm Aramco expected this year.</p> <p>Also high on the agenda in the White House talks was confronting Iran, a country Trump has repeatedly criticized for its expansionist policies in the Middle East,</p> Related Coverage <a href="/article/us-usa-saudi-senate/senators-criticize-u-s-support-for-saudi-campaign-in-yemen-as-crown-prince-visits-idUSKBN1GW2BA" type="external">Senators criticize U.S. support for Saudi campaign in Yemen as crown prince visits</a> <p>Saudi Arabia on Monday called the Iran nuclear deal a &#8220;flawed agreement,&#8221; and Trump has made clear he plans to exit the agreement unless changes are made to it.</p> <p>&#8220;We&#8217;re going to see what happens,&#8221; Trump said.</p> <p>&#8220;But Iran has not been treating that part of the world or the world itself appropriately. A lot of bad things are happening in Iran. The deal is coming up in one month and we&#8217;ll see what happens.&#8221;</p> <p>The prince was also due to have dinner with Jared Kushner, Trump&#8217;s senior adviser and son-in-law, along with Jason Greenblatt, the two point men in the Trump administration overseeing Middle East peace efforts.</p> <p>Crown Prince Mohammed and Kushner have forged a close relationship, which has at times come under criticism in Washington for circumventing normal diplomatic channels.</p> <p>Additional reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Yara Bayoumy and Alistair Bell</p> Our Standards: <a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a> <p>BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - Unfair trade and an overproduction of steel are at the root of international tensions over commerce, France&#8217;s finance minister Bruno Le Maire said on Tuesday after a G20 gathering in Buenos Aires.</p> France's Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire speaks during a news conference at the G20 Meeting of Finance Ministers in Buenos Aires, Argentina, March 20, 2018. REUTERS/Marcos Brindicci Slideshow (2 Images) <p>&#8220;This G20 meeting has been really useful because it has helped us to understand the difficulties of every nation and it has helped us make a path, a step in the right direction,&#8221; said Le Maire, adding that G20 members had acknowledged the issue of steel over-capacity.</p> <p>&#8220;Unfair trade conditions are also at the root of our difficulties,&#8221; he said.</p> <p>Reporting by Francesco Canepa; Editing by Paul Simao</p> Our Standards: <a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>

BRIEF-Anika Therapeutics Expands Strategic Collaboration With Institute For Applied Life Sciences Former Playboy model sues to break silence on alleged Trump affair Global stocks get lift from oil prices; Fed bets boost dollar Trump praises U.S. military sales to Saudi, fetes crown prince France's Le Maire blames 'unfair trade' for global commerce woes

https://reuters.com/article/brief-anika-therapeutics-expands-strateg/brief-anika-therapeutics-expands-strategic-collaboration-with-institute-for-applied-life-sciences-idUSFWN1PJ19U

2018-01-24

<p>The Washington Post is reporting that Prometheans, Inc., a World War II black veterans group, is disbanding because membership in the organization has declined. Sarah Kahn reports that the veterans - most of them nearing 90 - friends and family members made toasts and speeches at the group's banquet in Silver Spring, Md. D.C. chapter President Friason Travis, 90, called the organization a "guiding light and power."</p> <p>The Prometheans, as they call themselves, were among the African Americans who fought for their country in World War II. They were originally a group of about 350 young black students, chosen by the military because of their IQ levels of 120 or higher. They were sent to Howard University in 1943 to complete a four-year engineering degree in 18 months through the Army Specialized Training Program, which at that time offered training at colleges throughout the United States.</p> <p>But the program was dissolved only a year later, and many of the untrained college kids were thrown onto the Italian war front as infantrymen, cavalrymen, medics and other "ground pounders," said Bryant Tate of Silver Spring, a member of the organization and son of one of the veterans.</p> <p>But the young black soldiers bonded. And after the war, the survivors pledged to keep in touch as long as they could. They named themselves after the Greek god Prometheus, meaning "fore-thinker."</p> <p>The nonprofit Prometheans Inc. officially started around 1960. It has a scholarship fund for Howard University graduating seniors. In decades past, the group held community-service events to help young black children in the Washington, D.C., area receive an education and find jobs.</p> <p>Advertisement</p> <p /> <p>This organization has made a major contribution to society. To have done so as a national organization for 51 years is exemplary. These men are trailblazers and are leaving a legacy of which this nation can be proud.</p> <p>Read more at <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/world-war-ii-black-veterans-group-disbands-but-friendships-remain/2011/08/13/gIQAAac2DJ_story.html?hpid=z5" type="external">the Washington Post</a>.</p> <p>In other news: <a href="" type="internal">'The Game' Accused of Inciting Phone Flash Mob.</a></p>

World War II Black Veterans Group Disbands

https://theroot.com/world-war-ii-black-veterans-group-disbands-1790865304

2011-08-15

<p><a href="http://wp.me/p3bwni-845" type="external">21st Century Wire</a> says&#8230;</p> <p>As the&amp;#160;heavily manufactured border surge remains ongoing, we&#8217;ve received an inside glimpse of what&#8217;s been happening at the US-Mexico border from a former federal agent&#8230;</p> <p>Former border patrol agent Zach Taylor, who is also the&amp;#160;founder of the National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers (NAFBPO), was recently interviewed discussing the dark details of border security.</p> <p><a href="http://www.noisyroom.net/blog/zachtaylor.jpg" type="external" /> IMAGE: Former border patrol agent Zach Taylor during his interview with Little Bonanza Productions for the film &#8216;Back to the Border&#8217;. (Photo&amp;#160; <a href="http://noisyroom.net/blog/2014/07/20/former-border-patrol-agent-warns-whats-coming/" type="external">noiseyroom</a>.net)</p> <p>Taylor revealed&amp;#160;the many dangers the United States currently faces under the accelerated border surge that has been carried out by the Department of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services through federally funded grant programs. The interview examines Taylor&#8217;s personal&amp;#160;experience working as a border agent and among many of topics discussed, is FEMA&#8217;s preparedness for mass casualty in United States, that according to Taylor, corresponds with the Center for Disease Control&#8217;s lack of coordination with border area processing facilities.</p> <p>Here&#8217;s a short YouTube&amp;#160;video depicting a portion of an interview conducted by Little Bonanza Productions talking with former border agent Zach Taylor who describes the border crisis as a form of &#8216;asymmetrical warfare&#8217; that threatens United States sovereignty&#8230;</p> <p /> <p /> <p>The type of warfare Taylor seems to be talking about is akin to the&amp;#160;1966 plan that was crafted by two&amp;#160;American&amp;#160;sociologists and political activists&amp;#160;Richard Cloward&amp;#160;and&amp;#160;Frances Fox Piven, which called&amp;#160;for a short circuiting of the country&#8217;s&amp;#160;welfare system&amp;#160;through a crisis &#8211; the flood of illegals pouring into America could very well cripple the country&#8217;s infrastructure from the inside out.</p> <p>Many have pointed to the&amp;#160;Reagan era as the precursor to the border crisis we face today, as an influx of undocumented illegals entered the&amp;#160;United States through the passing of the&amp;#160;Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986, granting amnesty to nearly 3 million immigrants, it was a bill that was supposed to strengthen border security but enforcement was crippled once amnesty was allowed. Reagan&#8217;s amnesty, opened the door for future abuses against the sovereignty of America and immigration law already in place.</p> <p>In a national press release by NAFBPO, <a href="http://www.tucsonnewsnow.com/story/25756053/former-federal-agents-blast-obama-for-children-crossing-border-illegally" type="external">Taylor discussed the failure of government through its various angencies and corrupt politicians</a>:</p> <p>&#8220;The non enforcement of America&#8217;s Immigration Laws has lead America to the next step in becoming a failed state in that we are arguably a lawless nation by not enforcing the Immigration Laws or upholding the Constitution. Yes, our leaders are guilty. However, we are responsible because it is the American voter that has placed untrustworthy people in positions of power and kept them there when they have clearly demonstrated that they have violated that public trust. These successful con artists are well dressed, attractive and charming.&#8221;</p> <p>&#8220;Putting untrustworthy officials in charge of America is how Americans are robbed in the 21st century, with the aid of the IRS, DOJ, BLM, DHS, EPA, HHS, etc., of their money and their God given rights.&#8221;</p> <p>Back in&amp;#160; <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/02/07/insurgency-in-america-former-border-agent-details-national-security-threats-spilling-into-the-u-s/" type="external">February of 2012</a>, Taylor had been seen warning the public about the Obama administrations polices regarding illegal border crossings, stating, &#8220;This administration is trying to facilitate the entry of illegal aliens into the United States.&#8221;</p> <p>In a recent report here at <a href="" type="internal">21WIRE</a>we disclosed some of the current information that has come to our attention in regards to the DHS dumping scheme, as many of those being shipped into US custody have been found to be carrying many communicable diseases in addition to the child abuse and human trafficking concerns:</p> <p>&#8220;Important new details have emerged regarding the cascading &#8216;border crisis&#8217; of illegal aliens, immigrants and alleged refugees that have been trafficked into processing facilities, detention centers as well as bus stations around the country. In a Judicial Watch report, it has come to light that many of those being transferred have been carrying infectious diseases and viruses such as the&amp;#160; <a href="http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2014/07/illegal-alien-minors-spreading-tb-ebola-dengue-swine-flu/" type="external">Ebloa virus, dengue fever, tuberculosis and the H1N1 strain of Swine flu</a>,&amp;#160;there are also accounts stating that 1 in 5 of illegals arriving at Rio Grande Valley in Texas, has&amp;#160;scabies. Additionally, since October of 2013, there were reports of a what appeared to be the first admission of a covert surge of illegals into the country, all sanctioned by the federal government to enter US territory, according to the&amp;#160; <a href="http://www.texastribune.org/2014/06/24/health-officials-docs-raise-concerns-about-immigra/" type="external">Texas Tribune</a>:</p> <p>&#8220;Since October, authorities in the&amp;#160;Border Patrol&#8217;s Rio Grande Valley sector have detained an unprecedented 160,000 undocumented immigrants, including more than 33,500 unaccompanied minors. These immigrants were&amp;#160;transferred to federal detention centers, where they have been held temporarily.&#8221;</p> <p>These were numbers from 9 months ago and there are more recent reports of nearly 300,000 undocumented illegals entering the country, with over 50,000 minors and counting.&#8221;</p> <p>There were other revelations in addition to the health and safety concerns of illegals and citizens alike, such as the governments role in the DHS operation, particularly the White House&#8230; As a&amp;#160;FedBizOpps ad&amp;#160;for the DHS program, requested &#8216; <a href="https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&amp;amp;mode=form&amp;amp;id=c6d7c0050b912fbc917a46d6709d38bd&amp;amp;tab=core&amp;amp;tabmode=list&amp;amp;=s=opportunity&amp;amp;mode=form&amp;amp;id=c6d7c0050b912fbc917a46d6709d38bd&amp;amp;tab=core&amp;amp;tabmode=list&amp;amp;" type="external">Escort Services For Unaccompanied Alien Children</a>&#8216;&amp;#160;on January 29th, 2014.</p> <p>Here is a recent excerpt from a&amp;#160;Washington Times&amp;#160;article on the matter, entitled,&amp;#160; <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jun/23/white-houses-claim-shock-illegal-kids-falls-flat-f/" type="external">DHS ad contradicts White House claim of shock by illegal immigrant children</a>:</p> <p>&#8220;The Obama administration say they were caught off-guard by the sheer number of illegal children who&#8217;ve crossed into America in recent days, but an employment ad from the&amp;#160; <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/department-of-homeland-security/" type="external">Department of Homeland Security</a>&amp;#160;may prove otherwise.</p> <p>The ad,&amp;#160; <a href="https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&amp;amp;mode=form&amp;amp;id=c6d7c0050b912fbc917a46d6709d38bd&amp;amp;tab=core&amp;amp;tabmode=list&amp;amp;=s=opportunity&amp;amp;mode=form&amp;amp;id=c6d7c0050b912fbc917a46d6709d38bd&amp;amp;tab=core&amp;amp;tabmode=list&amp;amp;" type="external">dated Jan. 29 and posted on FedBizOpps.Gov</a>, seeks contractors to &#8220;provide unarmed escort staff, including management, supervision, manpower, training, certifications, licenses, drug testing, equipment and supplies necessary to provide on-demand escort services for non-criminal/non-delinquent unaccompanied alien children ages infant to 17 years of age, seven days a week, 365 days a year. &#8230; There will be approximately 65,000 [unaccompanied alien children] in total.&#8221;</p> <p>It was also recently disclosed by the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/24/world/americas/swindles-target-kin-of-migrants.html?hp&amp;amp;action=click&amp;amp;pgtype=Homepage&amp;amp;version=HpSum&amp;amp;module=first-column-region&amp;amp;region=top-news&amp;amp;WT.nav=top-news&amp;amp;_r=1" type="external">New York Times</a> that many &#8216;unaccompanied&#8217; minors that have been held at American military bases have apparently would up in the hands of criminals looking to extort profit before reuniting them with alleged family members:</p> <p>&#8220;The F.B.I. says, swindlers have gotten hold of precise details about the children to reach out to their relatives across the country, claiming that payments are required to cover the processing costs and travel expenses of reuniting families. Cases of the fraud have been reported in 12 states so far, from New York to California, with the con artists seeking $350 to $6,000 in so-called fees, the F.B.I. says.&#8221;</p> <p>This begs the question: how would a criminal element have access to information on minors being held at processing centers at American military bases?</p> <p>The NY Times piece goes on, stating that, &#8220;Investigators are trying to determine whether a federal database on the children was hacked, or if a contractor or government employee with access to information on the minors sold it to con artists, a government official familiar with the case said.&#8221;</p> <p>Here&#8217;s another YouTube video below with former border agent Zach Taylor addressing a&amp;#160;Pima County Republican Club about the numerous border security issues that America is currently facing today&#8230;</p> <p>READ MORE DHS&amp;#160;NEWS AT:&amp;#160; <a href="" type="internal">21st Century DHS&amp;#160;Files</a>READ MORE NAFTA&amp;#160;NEWS AT:&amp;#160; <a href="" type="internal">21st Century Wire NAFTA&amp;#160;Files</a></p> <p>&#8211;</p>

Assault on America: Ex-Border Agent Says US Government ‘Facilitating’ Illegal Surge Scheme

http://21stcenturywire.com/2014/07/24/assault-on-america-ex-border-agent-says-us-government-facilitating-illegal-surge-scheme/

2014-07-24

<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p> <p /> <p>Just a couple of weeks after the Bears&#8217; mauling of Cleveland, we turn our focus to Saturday afternoon, when the third-ranked Monarchs will play host to No. 1 Rio Rancho. These two elite 6A programs are meeting up for the third time in 12 months. <a href="https://d3el53au0d7w62.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/19/YODICE-James_web.jpg" type="external" /></p> <p>I will say here what I&#8217;ve said all summer: I&#8217;m not convinced the Monarchs need to beat the Rams, though it certainly wouldn&#8217;t hurt their cause, as a team that people believe could win state. I did earnestly believe La Cueva had to beat Cleveland two weeks ago.</p> <p>However, after dropping two games to Rio Rancho last year by a combined 65 points, Manzano had better find a way to play the Rams competitively for 48 minutes. Another blowout loss will damage its status as a 6A contender about as quickly as a Jordan Byrd 100-meter dash.</p> <p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> <p>Rio Rancho remains the gold standard in 6A football. But, it is fair to say that the Rams don&#8217;t have that same unbeatable air that surrounded them last season. Clovis proved that earlier this month.</p> <p>A team that can turn Rio Rancho over in the passing game, as the Wildcats did, will give itself a legitimate chance to beat the Rams. Is Manzano capable of this? Remember, the Monarchs graduated their two best defensive backs off last year&#8217;s squad, and with Rio Rancho&#8217;s gargantuan set of receivers, Manzano&#8217;s linebacking corps and DBs face some challenges.</p> <p>Secondarily, this is an extremely demanding test for Byrd and that sensational Manzano offense. Rio Rancho&#8217;s defense remains solid, but it has surrendered some big plays this season. And the Monarchs, led by QB Byrd and receiver Andrew Erickson, certainly possess big-play capability.</p> <p>This could become a fascinating chess match; if the Rams&#8217; potent defensive front can negate Manzano running back Xavier Ivey-Saud, that switches the onus to Byrd&#8217;s arm &#8212; and, possibly, those fantastic sprinter&#8217;s legs &#8212; in the passing game. (The potential of that makes all of us, except Rio Rancho, rub our hands together in anticipatory glee.)</p> <p>MAKING THE ROUNDS: From our friend Mark Rudi of the Las Cruces Sun-News: Last weekend, for the first time since Centennial opened in 2012, all four of the city&#8217;s big schools lost on the same weekend. Take a bow, metro area. &#8230; Coach Jack Cisco led Hatch Valley to an undefeated Class 4A state title in 2015 and retired after last season. He was also a longtime top assistant coach to the late Jim Bradley at Roswell High. But his retirement didn&#8217;t last long. Cisco is calling the defense for Alamogordo this season and is working for his son A.J., the Tigers&#8217; new head coach. &#8230; Mayfield is 0-4 for the first time since 1990, and at the moment, I think we&#8217;d all agree that it is difficult to imagine a Class 6A playoff field that includes the Trojans. &#8230; Kudos to Roswell High for scratching out a come-from-behind, 22-18 win over unbeaten Los Lunas on Friday; we could see this one again in November. &#8230; Even bigger kudos to Cleveland, which not only managed to beat Las Cruces on the road last weekend, but did so with a backup QB, Justin Ainsworth, after Angelo Trujillo was forced out with a concussion from the previous week against La Cueva. &#8230; Condolences to my alma mater, Cibola, which, after enduring an impossibly difficult first three games (La Cueva, Las Cruces, Manzano) led Carlsbad 20-0 on the road Friday night, only to see the Cavemen furiously rally and steal a 21-20 victory. &#8230; It is true that Rio Grande has lost 30 games in a row, but it is equally true that the Ravens are showing improvement and fight under new coach Dennis Minidis. Take two teams who destroyed them last year, Sandia and Belen. Rio Grande played them both much closer this year, and the Ravens were only down 11 to Belen in the fourth quarter with 8 minutes to go last Thursday night in a 31-13 loss.</p> <p>IMITATION IS THE SINCEREST FORM OF LARCENY: A play that Rio Rancho has been using for years, and to great effect, is that jet sweep disguised as a short pass.</p> <p>What is interesting is that at least two other metro teams, first West Mesa and then Volcano Vista, also are running this play. West Mesa and coach Ron McMath were using it at the North-South game in late July. Both the Mustangs and the Hawks ran this play several times when they met each other on Sept. 7.</p> <p>&#8220;It&#8217;s actually so much faster,&#8221; Rams coach David Howes said, comparing this method to an actual handoff.</p> <p>Moreover, Howes said this kind of liberal borrowing among schools is common.</p> <p>&#8220;Anytime you&#8217;ve had several years of high level success, you&#8217;ll have teams say, &#8216;Oooh, something like that may benefit us,&#8217; &#8221; Howes said.</p> <p>&#8220;We&#8217;ve robbed and stolen things from Mayfield and Las Cruces and Artesia over the years, and now people are starting to do that with us. Everybody is kind of stealing from each other.&#8221;</p> <p>CANCER PLEDGE: A handful of schools &#8212; Clovis, Cibola, Las Cruces, Hatch Valley, Jemez Valley, Kirtland Central and Raton among them &#8212; are participating in the Touchdowns Against Cancer drive, pledging money to the St. Jude Children&#8217;s Research Hospital for every touchdown those schools score between Sept. 14 and Sept. 30.</p> <p>STATS: The Journal has begun publishing weekly individual football statistics. Send offensive leaders, and solo tackle leaders, by 2 p.m. each Wednesday to sports@abqjournal.com.</p>

James Yodice: Manzano gets a chance to prove it’s legit

https://abqjournal.com/1064861/james-yodice-manzano-gets-a-chance-to-prove-its-legit.html

<p>My Facebook feed tells me that a lot of people I know and love spent a significant part of Easter day working to capture cute pictures of their children in various Easter-related poses. Looking back through old family photo albums, in fact, it seems I have also been guilty of dressing my progeny in uncomfortable outfits, snapping pictures of them crawling through the bushes looking for plastic Easter eggs, and making them pose pretending they liked each other.</p> <p>While it all seems a little ridiculous, I know why we work so hard for happy Easter pictures, of course. Spring is starting to bloom all around us, our liturgy is pushing us to celebrate new life, and the closest tangible expression of new life is found in the faces and promise of our children. Even in their squirmy discomfort, their Easter pictures bring us hope; they make us think that newness is possible in a world that seems to be deteriorating all around us.</p> <p>I worry a little bit, though, that the bunny costumes and plastic Easter eggs, shiny faces and posed sibling affection may distract us a bit from the reality of new life. We all know that welcoming new life, the call and mandate of Easter, is so much more painful and messy than our Easter pictures make it out to be.</p> <p>For one thing, welcoming new life means that something old has to die. Sometimes it&#8217;s a habit or practice; sometimes it&#8217;s a relationship or a situation; sometimes we say goodbye even to people we love. There&#8217;s something in the rending of a current reality that creates the ground for new life to germinate, but there&#8217;s no avoiding the pain when that happens. I find that welcoming new life is such a fear-inducing prospect for just this reason: we have to get to a breaking point before new life can even begin.</p> <p>Further, pretty hats and high white knee socks are cute, but they are fundamentally incompatible with the welcoming of new life. In fact, while my kids look cute as can be in those old Easter pictures, I distinctly remember their entrance into the world and it was the furthest thing from cute I can think of. It was hard, and pain-filled. It involved sweat and blood, tearing and pushing, sudden exposure to bright lights and cold air, tense silence broken by shrill cries. This is the Easter story of the Gospels, too. New life didn&#8217;t just appear in pastel hues and sweet surprises while everyone slept peacefully one night. It was born of altercations with the authorities, a fear-filled upper room, and a cross.</p> <p>Likewise, learning to welcome new life as it begins to inform the old always involves sleepless nights, tears of frustration, painful self-doubt, and the unwavering conviction that this is the hardest thing you&#8217;ve ever done and you probably will never survive. As new life pushes its way into our tired realities we feel so conflicted: on the one hand, we know it needs to make its home in our hearts and lives. On the other hand, it&#8217;s so pushy! It unsettles every little corner of orderly control we&#8217;ve tried to create. New life unmoors us.</p> <p>Surely this is how the disciples felt, even after the women ran to tell them Christ is risen, even after they saw him and touched his hands and side. Resurrection was only the beginning of figuring out what it means to welcome new life.</p> <p>As the rabbit costumes are put away this year and we work our way through leftover Easter candy, let&#8217;s remember that the cute pictures of our families in their Sunday best are just a the start of resurrection. All the possibility in their eyes, the love their images evokes in us &#8212; these should be inspiration or encouragement to keep going in the Easter work of welcoming new life.</p> <p>If we have the courage to move past posed pictures of scrubbed faces and flowers and fluffy chicks, we will soon find that the task of living into the promise of new life will be less like combed hair and buttoned up vests and more like the earth trembling as a stone rolls away, blinding white light, and falling to our knees in fear and joy. But it will also be last year&#8217;s Easter sandals pinching our feet because they&#8217;re too small, our lives filled with relationships we could never have imagined just a short time ago, and our own limited dreams for our lives and for the world stretched just a little bit more, moving ever closer to the new life God hopes for all of us. Sunday was beautiful, but it was just the beginning.</p> <p>May it be so. Happy Easter!</p>

This is only the beginning of resurrection

https://baptistnews.com/article/this-is-only-the-beginning-of-resurrection/

<p>New Hampshire's largest utility has agreed to sell its power plants after months of negotiations with state officials, saying it will save customers at least $300 million.</p> <p>The agreement with Eversource Energy to sell its Public Service of New Hampshire plants was announced Thursday.</p> <p>Continue Reading Below</p> <p>Eversource will sell its nine PSNH hydro facilities and three fossil fuel plants, including the Merrimack Station in Bow, Newington Station and Schiller Station in Portsmouth.</p> <p>Eversource says the sale means customers will no longer be responsible for paying for the continued operation of the plants, will avoid potentially costly investments to meet environmental standards.</p> <p>It says upon the sale, Eversource will buy energy for its New Hampshire customers in the market, consistent with all other utilities in the state and across the region.</p>

Utility to sell hydro, fossil fuel plants, estimated to save customers at least $300M

http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2015/03/12/utility-to-sell-hydro-fossil-fuel-plants-estimated-to-save-customers-at-least.html

2016-03-05

<p>NATO aircraft have carried out a fresh raid on a compound used by Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi in Tripoli. Libyan officials say the attack killed three people. BBC Correspondent Christian Fraser visited the compound, he says three rockets hit it and caused extensive damage, hours after the Libyan leader was shown on state television for the first time since his son was killed by another NATO strike nearly two weeks ago.</p>

Fresh NATO Strikes on Gaddafi's Compound

https://pri.org/stories/2011-05-12/fresh-nato-strikes-gaddafis-compound

2011-05-12

<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p> <p /> <p>That left people on all sides of the contentious debate clinging to only shreds of information and anxiously waiting for more details.</p> <p>Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke told The Associated Press that none of the 27 monuments will be rescinded, but he said he would push for boundary changes on a &#8220;handful&#8221; and left open the possibility of allowing drilling, mining or other industries on the sites.</p> <p>The White House said only that it received Zinke&#8217;s recommendations Thursday, a deadline set months ago. But it declined to make them public or offer a timetable for when it would take action.</p> <p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> <p>Zinke previously said in a trickle of announcements this summer that no changes would be made at six monuments under review &#8212; in Montana, Colorado, Idaho, California, Arizona and Washington &#8212; and that Bears Ears on tribal lands in Utah would be downsized.</p> <p>Conservationists and tribal leaders responded with alarm and distrust, demanding the full release of Zinke&#8217;s recommendations and vowing to challenge attempts to shrink any monuments.</p> <p>Jacqueline Savitz, senior vice president of Oceana, which has been pushing for preservation of five marine monuments included in the review, said that simply saying &#8220;changes&#8221; are coming doesn&#8217;t reveal any real information.</p> <p>&#8220;A change can be a small tweak or near annihilation,&#8221; Savitz said. &#8220;The public has a right to know.&#8221;</p> <p>Groups that consider the millions of acres designated for protection by President Barack Obama and other past presidents part of a massive federal land grab voiced optimism that Zinke wants to reign in some areas. But they also expressed disappointment that the full report wasn&#8217;t available.</p> <p>&#8220;It was kind of the unmonumental monument announcement,&#8221; said Kathleen Sgamma, of the oil industry trade group Western Energy Alliance.</p> <p>Sgamma&#8217;s group is among the organizations that hope the review spurs reform of the 1906 Antiquities Act, the law that gives presidents power to unilaterally create national monuments. Zinke said in a short summary report that he found that that the creation of some of the monuments was arbitrary or politically motivated.</p> <p>If Trump adopts Zinke&#8217;s recommendations, it could ease some of the worst fears of the president&#8217;s opponents, who warned that vast public lands and marine areas could be stripped of federal protection.</p> <p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> <p>But significant reductions in the size of the monuments or changes in what activities are allowed on them could trigger fierce resistance, too, including lawsuits.</p> <p>A tribal coalition that pushed for the creation of the 2,100-square-mile (5,400-sqaure kilometer) Bears Ears monument on sacred tribal land said it is prepared to launch a legal fight against even a slight reduction in its size.</p> <p>&#8220;Our tribes stand together and are willing to go into battle in terms of litigation,&#8221; said Davis Filfred, a council delegate for the Navajo Nation council.</p> <p>New England commercial fishing groups say they&#8217;re hopeful they&#8217;ll get back rights to fish in the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, an area off the coast of New England designated last year for protection by President Obama.</p> <p>Republican Utah state Rep. Mike Noel, who has pushed to rescind the designation of Bears Ears as a monument, said he could live with a rollback of its boundaries. He called that a good compromise that would enable continued tourism while still allowing activities that locals have pursued for generations &#8212; logging, livestock grazing and oil and gas drilling.</p> <p>Other sites that might see changes include the Grand Staircase-Escalante monument in the Utah desert, consisting of cliffs, canyons, natural arches and archaeological sites, including rock paintings; Katahdin Woods and Waters, 136 square miles (352 square kilometers) of forest of northern Maine; and Cascade Siskiyou, a 156-square-mile (404-square kilometer) region where three mountain ranges converge in Oregon.</p> <p>The marine monuments encompass more than 340,000 square miles (880,000 square kilometers) and include four sites in the Pacific Ocean and an array of underwater canyons and mountains off New England.</p> <p>Zinke suggested that the same presidential proclamation process used by four presidents over two decades to create the monuments could be used to enact changes.</p> <p>Environmental groups contend the Antiquities Act allows presidents to create national monuments but gives only Congress the power to modify them. Mark Squillace, a law professor at the University of Colorado, said he agrees with that view but noted the dispute has never gone before the courts.</p> <p>Conservative legal scholars have come down on the side of the administration.</p> <p>No president has tried to eliminate a monument, but some have reduced or redrawn the boundaries on 18 occasions, according to the National Park Service.</p> <p>Zinke did not directly answer whether any monuments would be newly opened to energy development, mining and other industries Trump has championed.</p> <p>Zinke, a former Montana congressman, insisted that public access for uses such as hunting, fishing or grazing would be maintained or restored. He also spoke of protecting tribal interests. In the interview, Zinke struck back against conservationists who had warned of impending mass sell-offs of public lands by the Trump administration.</p> <p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve heard this narrative that somehow the land is going to be sold or transferred,&#8221; he said. &#8220;That narrative is patently false and shameful. The land was public before and it will be public after.&#8221;</p> <p>___</p> <p>Brown reported from Salt Lake City. Associated Press writers Michael Biesecker contributed from Washington, Felicia Fonseca from Flagstaff, Arizona; and Patrick Whittle from Portland, Maine.</p> <p>___</p> <p>Follow Matthew Brown on Twitter at <a href="http://www.twitter.com/matthewbrownap" type="external">www.twitter.com/matthewbrownap</a></p>

Changes coming to US protected lands, but details unknown

https://abqjournal.com/1053267/changes-coming-to-us-protected-lands-but-details-unknown.html

2017-08-24

<p>BY: <a href="" type="internal">Washington Free Beacon Staff</a>December 19, 2014 9:24 am</p> <p>Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson admitted that he once forgot the pledge of allegiance during an address before the Profession Services Council in Arlington, Va. on Thursday.</p> <p>Johnson revealed that his snafu occurred while he was General Counsel of the Air Force and was asked to participate in a &#8216;Principal for a Day&#8217; program at an elementary school in Queens, N.Y.</p> <p>"We said the pledge of allegiance here. I know the pledge of allegiance, like everybody here does," Johnson said. "There&#8217;s a period where I actually forgot the pledge of allegiance, I hesitate to say this."</p> <p>Johnson said that as part of the &#8216;Principal for a Day&#8217; program, he was prompted to lead the students of P.S. 143 in the pledge of allegiance during the school&#8217;s morning announcements.</p> <p>"It had been, I don&#8217;t know how long, since I said the pledge of allegiance," Johnson admitted. "I&#8217;m a trial lawyer, I&#8217;m not usually at a loss for words. But I now know how to say the pledge of allegiance."</p>

DHS Chief Admits Forgetting Pledge of Allegiance

http://freebeacon.com/national-security/dhs-chief-admits-forgetting-pledge-of-allegiance/

2014-12-19

<p>BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) _ These North Dakota lotteries were drawn Sunday:</p> <p>2 By 2</p> <p>Red Balls: 19-26, White Balls: 6-24</p> <p>(Red Balls: nineteen, twenty-six; White Balls: six, twenty-four)</p> <p>Estimated jackpot: $22,000</p> <p>Mega Millions</p> <p>Estimated jackpot: $343 million</p> <p>Powerball</p> <p>Estimated jackpot: $440 million</p> <p>BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) _ These North Dakota lotteries were drawn Sunday:</p> <p>2 By 2</p> <p>Red Balls: 19-26, White Balls: 6-24</p> <p>(Red Balls: nineteen, twenty-six; White Balls: six, twenty-four)</p> <p>Estimated jackpot: $22,000</p> <p>Mega Millions</p> <p>Estimated jackpot: $343 million</p> <p>Powerball</p> <p>Estimated jackpot: $440 million</p>

ND Lottery

https://apnews.com/d5e7259851444af8b289ad1e6c6be7d3

2018-01-01

<p><a href="" type="internal" /></p> <p>The <a href="http://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/organization.html" type="external">Nuclear Regulatory Commission</a> held a public meeting Thursday in Carlsbad, during which members discussed the process by which the <a href="http://www.songscommunity.com/about.asp" type="external">San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station</a> will be decommissioned and, importantly, who will ultimately foot the projected $4 billion bill.</p> <p>This past June, <a href="http://www.edison.com/ourcompany/sce.asp" type="external">Southern California Edison</a> unexpectedly announced it would permanently shutter the nuclear plant, which generated 2200 megawatts when fully operational, roughly 20 percent of the utility&#8217;s overall electricity production.</p> <p>Edison took San Onofre offline in January 2012 because of problems with steam generators installed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. After trying and failing for 17 months to get regulatory approval to restart its two reactors, Edison thought it best just to abandon the plant.</p> <p>NRC spokesman Victor Dricks told KGTV in San Diego that Edison has three options for mothballing San Onofre. &#8220;They can probably disassemble most of the equipment on site,&#8221; he said. &#8220;They can let time go by 10, 20, 30 years, up to 60 years. Or they can choose a third option, which is called entombment, where they basically could build a giant sarcophagus around the plant.&#8221;</p> <p>Whatever option Edison chooses, the decommissioning process will be long and expensive. And while Edison, which owns 78 percent of San Onofre, will bear some of the expense itself, the utility also expects its ratepayers to shoulder some of the cost.</p> <p>Indeed, in full-page <a href="http://www.songscommunity.com/docs/openletter_Eng_10x135_4C.PDF" type="external">newspaper advertisements</a> published last month in the Orange County Register and the Los Angeles Times, Edison stated that it is &#8220;vigorously pursuing recoveries&#8221; from both Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and the utility&#8217;s insurers, &#8220;there may be costs that are not recovered&#8221; and those &#8220;could be significant.&#8221;</p> <p>In that event, which appears highly likely, Edison believes that its ratepayers (as well as ratepayers for Sempra Energy, which owns roughly 20 percent of San Onofre, and the city of Riverside, which owns roughly 2 percent) should share the financial burden.</p> <p>&#8220;Unlike other businesses that invest, produce and sell their products for whatever price the market will bear,&#8221; stated Edison&#8217;s newspaper advertisements, &#8220;our prices are set by our regulator, the <a href="http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/NR/rdonlyres/C7E1BC55-41CA-4337-9F54-40F3F039DB60/0/AboutCPUC0410_rev3.pdf" type="external">Public Utilities Commission</a>.&#8221;</p> <p>Those prices &#8212; or rates &#8212; &#8220;allow us to recover our operating costs,&#8221; the utility explained, &#8220;without any mark-up or profit.&#8221; It also allows Edison &#8220;to recover at cost our investment in system assets, over time.&#8221;</p> <p>As such, Edison has asked the PUC to raise its electricity rates $2.4 billion over seven years to partially recover the costs of San Onofre&#8217;s decommission. Meanwhile, <a href="http://www.sempra.com/about/" type="external">Sempra Energy</a>, parent of San Diego Gas &amp;amp; Electric, has separately sought approval of an $808 million rate increase to recover its costs.</p> <p>It remains to be seen if the PUC approves the higher electricity rates sought by Edison and Sempra to defray the cost of the nuclear plant&#8217;s permanent shutdown. While the utilities may not get all they are asking for &#8212; more than $3 billion between them &#8211; they very well may get some, if not much, of it.</p>

Costly fallout from San Onofre’s decommission

https://calwatchdog.com/2013/09/28/costly-fallout-from-san-onofres-decommission/

2018-09-20

<p /> <p>I&#8217;ve got an idea. You know all those free Gideons Bibles in hotel rooms all over the world that nobody reads (how many trees' how many carbon emissions?). Let&#8217;s start a new movement. Let&#8217;s, one by one, replace them with copies of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hydrogen-Age-Geoffrey-Holland/dp/158685786X/ref=sr_1_1/103-8208004-7912666?ie=UTF8&amp;amp;s=books&amp;amp;qid=1190766774&amp;amp;sr=1-1" type="external">The Hydrogen Age: Empowering A Clean Energy Future</a>, by Geoffrey Holland and James Provenzano. It&#8217;s loaded with stories (and pictures) of one view of salvation. Don&#8217;t like hydrogen? Pick the vision/book that you offers your version of redemption.</p> <p>Julia Whitty is Mother Jones&#8217; environmental correspondent. You can read from her new book, <a href="http://julia.whitty.googlepages.com/home" type="external">&#8220;The Fragile Edge,&#8221; and other writings, here.</a></p> <p />

The New Gideons Bible Or How To Really Save The World

https://motherjones.com/politics/2007/10/new-gideons-bible-or-how-really-save-world/

2007-10-05

<p>On April 4, 2004, a barrage of grenades and small arms fire from Iraqi insurgent groups killed U.S. Army Specialist Casey Sheehan in Sadr City. Two months later, his family went to see President George W. Bush. Mr. Bush walked into the room and said, &#8220;Who we&#8217;ll honorin&#8217; today?&#8221;</p> <p>&#8220;His mouth kept moving,&#8221; recalled Specialist Casey&#8217;s mother Cindy, &#8220;but there was nothing in his eyes or anything else about him that showed me he really cared or had any real compassion at all. This is a human being totally disconnected from humanity and reality. His eyes were empty, hollow shells.&#8221;</p> <p>Cindy Sheehan joined Military Families Speak Out (MFSO), an anti-war organisation that has played an important part in raising awareness of the continued devastation in Iraq. It is because of people like Ms. Sheehan and groups like MFSO that a majority of Americans now believes that the Occupation of Iraq is going badly, and that U.S. troops must leave forthwith. These past months have seen the number of fatalities rise quite dramatically, as the Iraqi insurgents use more powerful bombs and better intelligence. Military leaders are quite openly entertaining the idea of a withdrawal, as anti-war activity continues. Mr. Bush&#8217;s personal approval rating is at an all-time low.</p> <p>On August 4, 2005, Mr. Bush retreated to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, for another vacation. He has spent a fifth of his time as President on vacation, and he is now poised to break a record: he will spend five weeks in Texas, which is longer than any President has spent away from the White House in at least 36 years. &#8220;Spending time outside of Washington always gives the President a fresh perspective on what&#8217;s on the minds of the American people,&#8221; his press secretary said. &#8220;It&#8217;s a time, really, for him to shed the coat and tie and meet with folks in the heartland and hear what&#8217;s on their minds.&#8221;</p> <p>When Mr. Bush went to Texas, a person from the heartland decided to go and meet him. Cindy Sheehan, now a seasoned activist, travelled to Crawford and dug in outside Mr. Bush&#8217;s ranch. She requested a meeting with the President, but he refused. Instead he sent his aides to assuage her when Ms. Sheehan&#8217;s vigil became a public relations nuisance. As Mr. Bush drove out of his ranch for a fund-raiser, an undaunted Ms. Sheehan stood outside with a sign that read, &#8220;Why do you make time for donors and not for me?&#8221;</p> <p>At Camp Casey, the vigil site named after Ms. Sheehan&#8217;s son, almost a hundred activists gather amidst signs and white crosses that bear the names of fallen U.S. soldiers. On August 15, in Cleveland, Ohio, Rosemary Palmer and Paul Schroeder buried their young son, 23-year-old Lance Corporal Edward Schroeder who was one of 16 Ohio marines killed by a roadside bomb. Mr. Schroeder told the press, &#8220;Our comments are not those of grieving parents. They are based on anger Mr. President, not grief. Anger is an honest emotion when someone&#8217;s family has been violated.&#8221; Ms. Palmer echoed these sentiments, and then reached out to Ms. Sheehan in Texas, &#8220;We consider her the Rosa Parks of the new movement opposing the Iraq war.&#8221;</p> <p>In 1955, Rosa Parks, refused to rise from the front seat of a segregated bus. Her act turned the eyes of the nation to the ongoing Civil Rights movement. This diminutive African-American woman exemplified courage, as she took on the immense power of U.S.-style apartheid. Only later did the country learn that this woman had not stayed in her seat because she, individually, decided that she could not sit at the back of the bus. Rosa Parks has spent many years as an activist in the Civil Rights movement, and she had trained to do just this kind of action at the Highlander School. Rosa Parks became a symbol of resilience and of civil disobedience, and her role pushed forward the movement from Birmingham, Alabama, to Washington, DC. At the March on Washington in 1963, Parks was widely recognised as one of the movement&#8217;s levers.</p> <p>Like Parks, Cindy Sheehan is not in this struggle alone. The Boston Globe (August 17) got it wrong when it characterised her vigil as &#8220;a testament to the power of the individual.&#8221; Ms. Sheehan is part of MFSO, and other likeminded organisations rushed to aid her vigil. These groups are part of a wider sentiment against the war. Mr. Schroeder and Ms. Palmer are part of that changing opinion, as they are given courage by Ms. Sheehan to speak out as they bury their son. Anti-war organisations have begun to harness this sentiment, but they are also politically savvy.</p> <p>Mr. Bush&#8217;s refusal to meet with Ms. Sheehan does not come from obduracy. His handlers know that the longer they wait, the clearer it becomes that Ms. Sheehan is not the mother that the media loves. She is a part of a movement, and if that is the case, then the administration will dismiss her as just another voice in the partisan battlefield. Ironically her relationship to the organised faction of the movement will be the weapon by which she is neutralised. This is the dance of the political strategists.</p> <p>Ms. Sheehan is a part of this political tussle, but her tragedy is real, and it manifests the heart-felt frustration and anger of the bulk of the American people. They have been hijacked by an administration notoriously able to manipulate the media and the political agenda. Cindy Sheehan is the Rosa Parks of this anti-war movement. Her movement has to be careful in how it handles her tragedy and the wiles of a government keen to spin the story.</p> <p>VIJAY PRASHAD teaches at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. His latest book is <a href="" type="internal">Keeping Up with the Dow Joneses: Debt, Prison, Workfare</a> (Boston: South End Press). His essay, &#8220;Capitalism&#8217;s Warehouses&#8221;, appears in CounterPunch&#8217;s new book, <a href="http://www.easycarts.net/ecarts/CounterPunch/CP_Books.html" type="external">Dime&#8217;s Worth of Difference</a>. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:vijay.prashad@trincoll.edu" type="external">vijay.prashad@trincoll.edu</a></p> <p>This article originally appeared in <a href="http://www.hindu.com/" type="external">The Hindu.</a></p> <p>&amp;#160;</p> <p>&amp;#160;</p> <p>&amp;#160;</p> <p>&amp;#160;</p> <p>&amp;#160;</p> <p>&amp;#160;</p> <p>&amp;#160;</p> <p>&amp;#160;</p> <p>&amp;#160;</p> <p>&amp;#160;</p> <p>&amp;#160;</p> <p>&amp;#160;</p> <p>&amp;#160;</p> <p>&amp;#160;</p> <p>&amp;#160;</p> <p>&amp;#160;</p> <p>&amp;#160;</p>

The Rosa Parks of the Anti-War Movement

https://counterpunch.org/2005/08/19/the-rosa-parks-of-the-anti-war-movement/

2005-08-19

<p /> <p>If you&#8217;re Charlie Rangel, your New Year&#8217;s resolution has got to be to dust off that congressional ethics handbook and brush up on the dos and don&#8217;ts of elected office. Lately, when the New York congressman&#8217;s name has surfaced in the press, it has often been in connection with <a href="/mojoblog/archives/2008/11/11058_the_demorats_have_a_charlie_rangel_problem.html" type="external">allegations</a> of conduct unbefitting a member of the US Congress. Today&#8217;s <a href="http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docid=news-000003001210" type="external">report</a> by CQ Politics that Rangel has, in the past two years, used more than $1500 in campaign funds to pay DC parking tickets rates relatively low on the outrage meter, particularly considering that he also stands <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/nyregion/25rangel.html" type="external">accused</a> of trading a legislative favor for a sizable contribution to the center for public service at the City College of New York that was named in his honor. But parking ticket-gate caps off a horrendous year PR-wise for the Rangeler, who also faces charges of failing to disclose <a href="http://www.nypost.com/seven/09052008/news/regionalnews/rangel_admits_to_villa_income_127682.htm" type="external">rental income</a> from his villa in the Dominican Republic; <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/nyregion/11rangel.html?_r=1" type="external">renting four below-market-rate apartments</a> in a building owned by the family of a campaign contributor; using a congressional parking garage&#8212;in violation of congressional rules&#8212;as <a href="http://www.nypost.com/seven/09182008/news/regionalnews/big_wheel_benz_the_rules_129646.htm" type="external">long-term storage</a> for his undrivable 1972 Mercedes-Benz; and receiving a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/24/nyregion/24rangel.html" type="external">tax break</a> on his DC home that he was not entitled to.</p> <p>It&#8217;s unclear whether Rangel (who rolls around DC in a PT Cruiser with the vanity plate &#8220;NYREP15&#8221;) violated campaign finance laws by paying off his tickets campaign funds. If the fines were incurred while carrying out congressional business, CQ reports, then the expenses are technically legitimate, even though they may not reflect well on the already scandal-tainted Rep. If not, Rangel may have yet another problem on his hands. Either way, this latest episode could find itself on the growing list of ethical violations the House ethics committee is already investigating.</p> <p>Rangel&#8217;s spokesman, Emile Milne, maintained that the expenditures were above board, but left his boss some wiggle room in the event that turns out not to be the case. &#8220;Given the holidays and the press of business in preparation for the new administration, we have not reconstructed the circumstances behind each ticket,&#8221; he said. &#8220;However, Congressman Rangel is confident that the National Leadership PAC and Rangel for Congress complied with all applicable laws and regulations in connection with these expenses, which were fully reported consistent with FEC requirements.&#8221;</p> <p>Apparently Rangel is not alone in using campaign funds to settle parking tickets. Since 2006, Edolphus Towns, a fellow Democratic member of New York&#8217;s congressional delegation and the incoming chairman of the House oversight committee, has paid $965 in tickets using a campaign account.</p> <p />

A Very Rangel Holiday Scandal

https://motherjones.com/politics/2008/12/very-rangel-holiday-scandal/

2008-12-30

<p>COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) &#8212; One year to the date of being sworn in as governor, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster told a joint assembly of lawmakers Wednesday that the state is at the "dawn of a new prosperity," thanks to tax cut proposals at the state and federal levels.</p> <p>"The recent tax reform bill signed by President Trump was a great victory for American taxpayers and our economy," McMaster said in his first State of the State address. "Companies have already begun announcing reinvestment and raises for employees."</p> <p>But with the federal government cutting taxes, McMaster said, it becomes incumbent on states to "do our part." The governor also touted his own executive budget proposal, which calls for cutting $2.2 billion cumulatively in taxes over the next five years.</p> <p>State officials have said that the plan would ultimately reduce state revenue by more than $750 million a year.</p> <p>McMaster's first State of the State address came on the one-year anniversary of his swearing in to replace Nikki Haley. Trump has endorsed his bid for a first full term, and McMaster faces several Republican opponents.</p> <p>Here are a few of the issues the governor addressed:</p> <p>NUCLEAR FALLOUT</p> <p>McMaster addressed the multibillion-dollar debacle related to the decision to abandon the construction of two new reactors at the V.C. Summer Nuclear Station, saying the state's viability as an economic force "requires an abundant supply of clean and affordable energy."</p> <p>SCANA Corp. and state-owned utility Santee Cooper nixed the project last summer following the bankruptcy of lead contractor Westinghouse. State and federal authorities have been probing the failure, which resulted in thousands of job losses.</p> <p>"We must carefully assess our situation," said McMaster, who has long said the state needs to sell Santee Cooper. "We must construct the best possible solution. The customers must either get the reactors or get their money back."</p> <p>SCANA ratepayers have already shouldered $2 billion of the company's loan debt on the project. Dominion Energy has proposed $1.3 billion in givebacks as part of its proposal to buy SCANA, and legislation moving through the state House would stop the company from continuing to charge customers further.</p> <p>The House is debating several bills on reforming utilities and dealing with the abandoned plants.</p> <p>CELLPHONES IN PRISON</p> <p>McMaster also called on state lawmakers to help combat contraband cellphones in the hands of state inmates. State and federal prison authorities across the country have called the phones the No. 1 security threat behind bars.</p> <p>Corrections Director Bryan Stirling has become a national leader on the issue, which McMaster said has "revolutionized criminal activity," allowing inmates and their conspirators to "practice extortion, conduct blackmail, plan and execute 'hits,' operate drug rings and run any number of fraud schemes."</p> <p>Until federal officials allow prison officials to jam cell signals, an idea Stirling and McMaster support, the governor said, states "must we must take every action, try every idea and implement any law which will stop these criminals."</p> <p>OPIOID CRISIS</p> <p>McMaster said his budget for the opioid epidemic includes more than $10 million for treatment and prevention, calling that a "crisis born of human pain and suffering."</p> <p>Over the past three years, McMaster said, South Carolina had more opioid-related deaths than homicides and drunken driving deaths combined.</p> <p>"We must take a bold new approach to this unprecedented threat," he said.</p> <p>FREEDOM OF INFORMATION</p> <p>McMaster also used his first joint legislative address to call on lawmakers to end a policy exempting themselves from state open records laws. In 2013, McMaster co-chaired an ethics panel that proposed doing away with a legislative FOIA exemption, but lawmakers have failed to adopt the suggestion.</p> <p>"That destroys public confidence," McMaster said. "This exemption must end."</p> <p>RESPONSE</p> <p>In his party's response, Rep. James Smith said Democrats are ready to work with Republicans on restoring the public's trust in its leaders following a corruption probe that has ensnared half a dozen current and former lawmakers.</p> <p>"I believe that the people of our state are tired of the partisan trench warfare," said Smith, who is seeking the Democratic nomination to challenge McMaster. "In the end, South Carolina cannot succeed if we are willing to leave some behind."</p> <p>In his address, McMaster said he opposed the Trump administration's proposal to expand drilling off the coast of states including South Carolina, saying any mistake could damage the state's "pristine" coastline and heart of its $20 billion tourism industry. McMaster has asked the Trump administration for a waiver from that proposal, following in the footsteps of Florida Gov. Rick Scott, to whom one has been granted.</p> <p>"Dammit Henry it takes you calling your buddies Trump and Sanford and ask them to give u the same pass they gave Florida," state Democratic Party Chairman Trav Robertson posted on Twitter, referencing drilling opponent and Republican U.S. Rep. Mark Sanford.</p> <p>___</p> <p>Kinnard is adding issues related to South Carolina's Legislature and state government to her beat coverage this year. Reach her at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP, and read more of her work at https://apnews.com/search/meg%20kinnard.</p> <p>COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) &#8212; One year to the date of being sworn in as governor, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster told a joint assembly of lawmakers Wednesday that the state is at the "dawn of a new prosperity," thanks to tax cut proposals at the state and federal levels.</p> <p>"The recent tax reform bill signed by President Trump was a great victory for American taxpayers and our economy," McMaster said in his first State of the State address. "Companies have already begun announcing reinvestment and raises for employees."</p> <p>But with the federal government cutting taxes, McMaster said, it becomes incumbent on states to "do our part." The governor also touted his own executive budget proposal, which calls for cutting $2.2 billion cumulatively in taxes over the next five years.</p> <p>State officials have said that the plan would ultimately reduce state revenue by more than $750 million a year.</p> <p>McMaster's first State of the State address came on the one-year anniversary of his swearing in to replace Nikki Haley. Trump has endorsed his bid for a first full term, and McMaster faces several Republican opponents.</p> <p>Here are a few of the issues the governor addressed:</p> <p>NUCLEAR FALLOUT</p> <p>McMaster addressed the multibillion-dollar debacle related to the decision to abandon the construction of two new reactors at the V.C. Summer Nuclear Station, saying the state's viability as an economic force "requires an abundant supply of clean and affordable energy."</p> <p>SCANA Corp. and state-owned utility Santee Cooper nixed the project last summer following the bankruptcy of lead contractor Westinghouse. State and federal authorities have been probing the failure, which resulted in thousands of job losses.</p> <p>"We must carefully assess our situation," said McMaster, who has long said the state needs to sell Santee Cooper. "We must construct the best possible solution. The customers must either get the reactors or get their money back."</p> <p>SCANA ratepayers have already shouldered $2 billion of the company's loan debt on the project. Dominion Energy has proposed $1.3 billion in givebacks as part of its proposal to buy SCANA, and legislation moving through the state House would stop the company from continuing to charge customers further.</p> <p>The House is debating several bills on reforming utilities and dealing with the abandoned plants.</p> <p>CELLPHONES IN PRISON</p> <p>McMaster also called on state lawmakers to help combat contraband cellphones in the hands of state inmates. State and federal prison authorities across the country have called the phones the No. 1 security threat behind bars.</p> <p>Corrections Director Bryan Stirling has become a national leader on the issue, which McMaster said has "revolutionized criminal activity," allowing inmates and their conspirators to "practice extortion, conduct blackmail, plan and execute 'hits,' operate drug rings and run any number of fraud schemes."</p> <p>Until federal officials allow prison officials to jam cell signals, an idea Stirling and McMaster support, the governor said, states "must we must take every action, try every idea and implement any law which will stop these criminals."</p> <p>OPIOID CRISIS</p> <p>McMaster said his budget for the opioid epidemic includes more than $10 million for treatment and prevention, calling that a "crisis born of human pain and suffering."</p> <p>Over the past three years, McMaster said, South Carolina had more opioid-related deaths than homicides and drunken driving deaths combined.</p> <p>"We must take a bold new approach to this unprecedented threat," he said.</p> <p>FREEDOM OF INFORMATION</p> <p>McMaster also used his first joint legislative address to call on lawmakers to end a policy exempting themselves from state open records laws. In 2013, McMaster co-chaired an ethics panel that proposed doing away with a legislative FOIA exemption, but lawmakers have failed to adopt the suggestion.</p> <p>"That destroys public confidence," McMaster said. "This exemption must end."</p> <p>RESPONSE</p> <p>In his party's response, Rep. James Smith said Democrats are ready to work with Republicans on restoring the public's trust in its leaders following a corruption probe that has ensnared half a dozen current and former lawmakers.</p> <p>"I believe that the people of our state are tired of the partisan trench warfare," said Smith, who is seeking the Democratic nomination to challenge McMaster. "In the end, South Carolina cannot succeed if we are willing to leave some behind."</p> <p>In his address, McMaster said he opposed the Trump administration's proposal to expand drilling off the coast of states including South Carolina, saying any mistake could damage the state's "pristine" coastline and heart of its $20 billion tourism industry. McMaster has asked the Trump administration for a waiver from that proposal, following in the footsteps of Florida Gov. Rick Scott, to whom one has been granted.</p> <p>"Dammit Henry it takes you calling your buddies Trump and Sanford and ask them to give u the same pass they gave Florida," state Democratic Party Chairman Trav Robertson posted on Twitter, referencing drilling opponent and Republican U.S. Rep. Mark Sanford.</p> <p>___</p> <p>Kinnard is adding issues related to South Carolina's Legislature and state government to her beat coverage this year. Reach her at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP, and read more of her work at https://apnews.com/search/meg%20kinnard.</p>

South Carolina gov: Tax cuts boosting state's prosperity

https://apnews.com/amp/2e328452903443e5865309df38a1c670

2018-01-25

<p>HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) _ The winning numbers in Monday afternoon&#8217;s drawing of the Pennsylvania Lottery&#8217;s &#8220;Pick 3 Day&#8221; game were:</p> <p>4-3-1, Wild: 3</p> <p>(four, three, one; Wild: three)</p> <p>HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) _ The winning numbers in Monday afternoon&#8217;s drawing of the Pennsylvania Lottery&#8217;s &#8220;Pick 3 Day&#8221; game were:</p> <p>4-3-1, Wild: 3</p> <p>(four, three, one; Wild: three)</p>

Winning numbers drawn in ‘Pick 3 Day’ game

https://apnews.com/ca9ebb1a39854f418c61b07d656767ba

2018-01-08

<p>Flickr/&amp;lt;a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/48089670@N00"&amp;gt;Tobym&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;</p> <p /> <p>&#8220;You&#8217;ve done just the right thing,&#8221; Colin Honess, a garrulous, pleasant man with a big white beard and matching hair, tells me. &#8220;If you&#8217;re going to put your money away, you want to make sure it&#8217;s in good hands. And this is a very good, safe place to put your money.&#8221;</p> <p>It&#8217;s a steamy mid-July morning and we&#8217;re sitting in Honess&#8217; office at Jerome E. Pyfrom &amp;amp; Co., a law firm in Nassau, capital of the Bahamas, one of the world&#8217;s premier &#8220;offshore&#8221; financial havens. Pyfrom &amp;amp; Co. specializes in setting up secret bank accounts that allow people to hide their funds&#8212;from tax collectors, law enforcement authorities, creditors, or anyone else who might have a claim on their cash. Some experts estimate that more than $5 trillion is now hidden in offshore accounts. I&#8217;ve come to the Bahamas to investigate what kind of financial services are available to wealthy Americans eager to bury their riches abroad. Since my own resources are modest, I tell Honess I&#8217;ve grown rich as a NASDAQ trader and am sick and tired of being &#8220;taxed to death&#8221; by the US government. How can Pyfrom &amp;amp; Co. be of assistance? I ask.</p> <p>I&#8217;d initially contacted the firm via email and learned there was no need to actually visit the Bahamas to open my clandestine account; I could submit a few pages of paperwork by mail, and Honess would handle the rest. But now, sitting across from him in his office, I explain to Honess that I felt it prudent to take a firsthand look.</p> <p>He hands me a packet of information, including a detailed report that lays out the advantages of stashing one&#8217;s money in the Bahamas. &#8220;Imagine a company which is not required to file any public notice of who its officers and directors are,&#8221; it begins. &#8220;No need to reveal the identity of its shareholders; no need to file any financial statements or keep any accounts. Imagine that such a company can be incorporated in an economically and politically stable country which is a member of the British Commonwealth and which imposes no income, capital gains, or inheritance tax. &#8216;Pinch me! I&#8217;m dreaming!&#8217; you may be saying if you have never been introduced to the Bahamian International Business Company.&#8221;</p> <p>For the would-be tax evader or money launderer, International Business Companies, or IBCs as they are generally known, are indeed a dream come true. These shell companies often conduct no real business&#8212;they are simply used as front operations by people trying to hide their wealth. A 1998 United Nations report says that IBCs &#8220;have few commercial or financial justifications, except to conceal the origin and destination of goods in international commerce&#8230;and to evade taxes by moving profits and assets out of the reach of the tax collector.&#8221;</p> <p>Not surprisingly, business is booming at Pyfrom &amp;amp; Co. The firm&#8217;s clients come mostly from the United States and Europe, but just that morning Honess had fielded a call from Singapore. Setting up an IBC with the company, he explains, is fast and cheap. All that&#8217;s required of me is filling out a one-page form and providing a photocopy of my passport and driver&#8217;s license. The entire incorporation process&#8212;which costs $1,000 plus annual renewable fees of $750&#8212;can be completed within 48 hours. I can then open a bank account in the name of my IBC. To help me avoid placing my money in the local offices of a US bank, Honess suggests a branch of Ansbacher, a South African financial firm that is &#8220;a little easier to work with.&#8221;</p> <p>The beauty of the whole arrangement, Honess emphasizes, is that Bahamian bank secrecy laws make it virtually impossible to determine who owns an IBC. Incorporation papers filed at the Registrar General&#8217;s office, conveniently located just half a block away, disclose only an IBC&#8217;s local office&#8212;Honess suggests that his home address could serve that purpose&#8212;and its agent, who could be another employee of Pyfrom &amp;amp; Co. or another Nassau lawyer or accountant. My paperwork and identification papers, as well as the names of my IBC&#8217;s directors and officers, would be securely guarded at his firm&#8217;s office. Local law makes it a crime to reveal account information without the owner&#8217;s permission, unless under order from Bahamian courts, and Honess can recall the latter happening only a handful of times during the past decade&#8212;and only in cases involving notorious drug dealers or other high-profile criminals.</p> <p>Now we come to a delicate matter. Setting up an offshore account is perfectly legal, but it&#8217;s a crime for an account holder not to disclose that information when filing a US tax return. Honess calls the obligation to report hidden wealth a &#8220;fine line&#8221; and a &#8220;question of conscience.&#8221; If I fail to do so, he predicts, there will be no negative consequences. &#8220;The IRS would need to spend a huge amount of money to pursue the matter and it&#8217;s unlikely that they&#8217;d succeed,&#8221; he says. &#8220;You&#8217;re no big-time criminal, so it would hardly be worth it. Your NASDAQ investments were probably far riskier than this.&#8221;</p> <p>With that, our conversation comes to a close. In less than an hour, I&#8217;ve done everything necessary to set up a secret bank account, short of filling out the one-page application and turning over the $1,000 fee to Jerome E. Pyfrom &amp;amp; Co.</p> <p>During the early part of this century, American mobsters began buying up legitimate businesses in order to explain the origins of their ill-gotten loot. Laundries and car washes were among the most popular choices; hence, the birth of the term money laundering. At roughly the same time, the Bolshevik Revolution and political instability across Europe caused the continent&#8217;s elite to seek a safe haven for their assets. Much of their money poured into Switzerland, which emerged as the first capital of &#8220;private banking.&#8221; The industry provides specialized financial services to wealthy clients&#8212;serving, in many instances, as the legal cousin of money laundering.</p> <p>Today, the practice of hiding wealth has reached epidemic proportions. Much of the money shipped abroad has its origins in arms dealing and drug trafficking. Another major source is loot plundered by corrupt government leaders, such as former Indonesian president Suharto. A growing portion of offshore money, however, is legal in origin, moved abroad by the super-rich&#8212;often through major US banks&#8212;in order to evade taxes.</p> <p>Because private banks and offshore firms work closely with clients to help cover their tracks, no one knows exactly how much money is held in secret accounts. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development tried to come up with a number for a 1998 report it prepared on the subject but gave up, saying only that the use of tax havens was &#8220;expanding at an exponential rate.&#8221; A US congressional committee estimates that the private banking industry currently manages $15.5 trillion in assets, much of which is hidden offshore.</p> <p>The boom in secret banking has enormous implications for US taxpayers, as the wealthy increasingly use offshore accounts to evade their contributions to the national treasury. In their new book, The Great American Tax Dodge, Donald Barlett and James Steele estimate that if only 10 percent of the secret wealth belongs to US citizens&#8212;a conservative figure&#8212;then Americans have squirreled away at least $500 billion overseas. The offshore arrangements, they write, &#8220;allow these people to escape payment of income taxes that add up to the equivalent of every tax dollar paid by everyone in New York state and New Jersey who earns less than $200,000 a year.&#8221;</p> <p>The roots of the offshore boom aren&#8217;t hard to find. The decade-long bull market in US stocks has produced a big upsurge in the ranks of the super-rich, the most common procurers of tax havens. According to Merrill Lynch and Gemini Consulting, the global assets of all millionaires combined rose by 18 percent last year to $25.5 trillion&#8212;including $7.6 trillion held by North Americans. And with banking increasingly digitized, the process of moving cash offshore often involves no more than the click of a computer mouse.</p> <p>&#8220;Whenever there is an unsustainable economic or stock market boom, the early winners move part of their money offshore to make sure they&#8217;ll still have it when the crash comes,&#8221; says Walker Todd, a former Federal Reserve officer. &#8220;It&#8217;s likely that the early winners in the dot-com boom took a good bit of their money off of the table by placing it in offshore accounts beyond the reach of US authorities.&#8221;</p> <p>To keep taxes low on so much new wealth, lawyers and accountants here at home have given birth to the emerging field of &#8220;asset protection.&#8221; One of the foremost practitioners is Barry Engel, a Denver-based attorney who calls his specialty &#8220;the process of planning to protect against those risks that threaten accumulated wealth.&#8221; Those risks include not only the IRS, but also messy divorces, pesky creditors, and untimely lawsuits. Engel charges $24,500 to set up an offshore trust that he claims is absolutely safe from outside prying&#8212;and absolutely legal.</p> <p>In Las Vegas, the Asset Protection Group headed by William Reed urges potential clients to &#8220;Stop Being a Target for Money-Hungry Lawyers and Insatiable Tax Collectors.&#8221; Its brochure includes testimonials from happy customers like Dr. W.L., who writes, &#8220;I was able to cut my malpractice insurance way down. The first year savings were more than twice your fee.&#8221; In addition, the brochure suggests, patients who win lawsuits against their doctors can&#8217;t collect if the doctors&#8217; assets can&#8217;t be found.</p> <p>Offshore Finance USA, a bimonthly glossy published in Montreal, is largely a how-to guide to hiding money abroad. The magazine, which bristles with ads from the Bahamas and other nations that serve as tax havens, gives subscribers the option of receiving their issues in plain envelopes. For an additional fee of $3 per issue, the magazine offers to &#8220;remove your name from the general mailing and &#8230; handle the mailing of your subscription manually from our offices.&#8221;</p> <p>Other strategies that allow people to hide their wealth offshore include &#8220;walking trusts,&#8221; which shift location to a new tax haven at the first sign of interest from law enforcement or tax authorities. Engel, the Denver attorney, co-authored &#8220;walking trust&#8221; legislation passed in 1989 by the Cook Islands, a former territory of New Zealand that offers investors a host of protective devices. In the unlikely event that hostile parties discover a Cook Island trust, for example, they are required to bring suit within one year of the trust&#8217;s establishment in a local court, since judgments from the rest of the world are not recognized. They are also required to demonstrate fraudulent intent beyond a reasonable doubt&#8212;a standard of proof, Engel has pointed out, &#8220;that could not be met in the O.J. Simpson criminal case.&#8221;</p> <p>Secret accounts have traditionally been the province of private banks in Switzerland, Austria, and Luxembourg. But those nations have lost favor among depositors in recent years as they have eased bank secrecy laws in response to international pressure. Small states in the Caribbean and the South Pacific, eager to offset declining tourism and lower prices for farm exports, have rushed to fill the void, turning to offshore banking as an easy and effective means of attracting big money from abroad (see &#8220;Tropic of Tax Cheats,&#8221; this page).</p> <p>But it&#8217;s not just microstates that are profiting from the offshore boom. The world&#8217;s largest financial institutions are also growing richer by offering private banking services to their top clients. Big-time American players include Merrill Lynch, Chase Manhattan, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs. The leading US private banker is Citibank, which administers trusts and shell corporations for some 40,000 clients through its operations in New York, London, the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, the Isle of Jersey, and Switzerland.</p> <p>To open an account, private banking clients must generally deposit at least $1 million. According to a report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, private bankers then assign the client a &#8220;relationship manager&#8221; who creates offshore trusts, handles all financial transactions&#8212;and helps ensure secrecy. &#8220;Private banks routinely create shell companies and trusts to shield the identity of the beneficial owner of a bank account,&#8221; the report states. &#8220;Private banks also open accounts under code names and will, when asked, refer to clients by code names or encode account transactions.&#8221;</p> <p>One former private banker who had more than 30 clients, each with as many as 15 shell companies, told the subcommittee that his own bank prohibited him from keeping any records linking front operations to their owners. In another case, Federal Reserve examiners asked Bankers Trust to create a database identifying the owners of shell companies. The bank complied&#8212;by setting up the database on the Isle of Jersey in the English Channel, which requires US investigators to request names on a case-by-case basis from Jersey courts. The effort to create and shelter multiple accounts &#8220;complicates regulatory oversight and law enforcement,&#8221; the Senate subcommittee concluded, &#8220;making it nearly impossible for an outside reviewer to be sure that all private bank accounts belonging to an individual have been identified.&#8221;</p> <p>The secrecy makes it easy for clients of private banks to hide their wealth, whatever its source. Citibank&#8217;s clients have included the family of Sani Abacha, the former Nigerian general who plundered billions of dollars from his nation&#8217;s treasury, and dictator Omar Bongo of Gabon, for whom Citibank established a Bahamian shell corporation to stash his looted treasure. Citibank also helped Raul Salinas, brother of former Mexican president Carlos Salinas, by transferring tens of millions of dollars out of Mexico and depositing the money in European banks under the names of untraceable companies registered in the Cayman Islands. Citibank never used Salinas&#8217; name in bank communications, referring to him instead as &#8220;Confidential Client Number 2,&#8221; or &#8220;CC-2.&#8221;</p> <p>&#8220;CC-1&#8221; was the code used to refer to Carlos Hank Rhon, who is currently facing civil charges by the Federal Reserve that he used secret offshore accounts to illegally hide his controlling interest in Laredo National Bank, the third-largest independent bank in Texas. A Mother Jones review of Fed documents reveals that Citibank handled more than $100 million for Hank Rhon, funneling his money through accounts in New York, Mexico, London, Zurich, the Bahamas, and the British Virgin Islands. According to one filing in the case, Citibank not only decided what offshore entities to establish, but designated its own employees as officers, directors, and trustees.</p> <p>Setting up and managing offshore accounts has become big business for major banks. Federal Reserve officials call private banking a &#8220;profit driver&#8221; for many financial institutions, providing returns twice as high as other services. In overseeing the Hank Rhon accounts, documents show, Citibank earned $3.2 million in fees in one year alone.</p> <p>&#8220;This is a huge piece of business for them,&#8221; says Jack Blum, a Washington, DC attorney and an expert on offshore banking. &#8220;There are significant departments at most major banks that cater to this trade. The business of hiding money offshore is one that most banks engage in.&#8221;</p> <p>Nowhere is the dazzling array of offshore banking services more evident than along the sunny streets of Nassau. Financial services are now the second-largest industry in the Bahamas after tourism, accounting for 15 percent of the gross domestic product. More than 400 banks from 36 countries are licensed to conduct business here&#8212;compared with only 154 banks chartered to do business in the state of New York, the world&#8217;s financial center&#8212;and they hold a combined $220 billion in assets, ranking the Bahamas 13th among the world&#8217;s top banking nations.</p> <p>Thanks to the boom in offshore banking, Nassau&#8217;s downtown financial district looks positively First World with its gaudy mix of Cartier and McDonald&#8217;s, Gucci and Planet Hollywood. Little of the wealth has trickled down to the majority of residents, however, in a country where the richest fifth of the population earns nearly half of all household income. A few miles beyond the center of town, modern shops and offices give way to wooden shacks and ugly concrete-block apartment buildings.</p> <p>The government heavily promotes the Bahamas as an attractive offshore haven. The country&#8217;s official Web site boasts that there&#8217;s &#8220;no better [place] for your financial investments&#8221; and urges interested parties to contact the Bahamian Investment Authority, which operates out of the prime minister&#8217;s office and is designed to &#8220;cut red tape and lay out the red carpet&#8221; for investors.</p> <p>As a tax haven, the Bahamas is made to order. English is the mother tongue&#8212;a former British colony, the Bahamas gained independence in 1973&#8212;and six international airports serve the islands. Nassau lies just 180 miles east of Miami, and the US dollar exchanges at par with the Bahamian dollar and is accepted everywhere as legal tender. The Bahamas has refused to sign any international tax treaty that would require it to share information with other countries, and its strict bank secrecy laws extend to attorneys, consultants, and other professionals in the financial sector.</p> <p>For money launderers and tax cheats, the International Business Companies&#8212;first created in 1989&#8212;are the Bahamas&#8217; most alluring feature. A tourist guidebook I pick up at my hotel boasts that 80,000 IBCs have been created here, but that figure is already long out-of-date. When I drop by the Registrar General&#8217;s office, an official tells me that IBCs now number more than 110,000. I watch as 10 employees tend to a long line of customers&#8212;mostly young men and women working for local attorneys and banks&#8212;who are requesting information and filing IBC paperwork. Incorporation papers filed in baby blue folders are scattered about in boxes and piled atop desks.</p> <p>To test the confidentiality of IBCs, I pick the name of a company at random from a logbook kept at the front counter and pay $10 to review its file. All I find for Meridian Holdings International are its memorandum and articles of association, boilerplate documents stating, among other things, that the company&#8217;s purpose is &#8220;to engage in any act or activity that is not prohibited under any law for the time being in force in The Commonwealth of The Bahamas.&#8221; Meridian&#8217;s registered agent is a local attorney named Arnold A. Forbes, whose firm has been paid to set up the IBC for its anonymous owner. Forbes&#8217; business address also serves as Meridian&#8217;s registered office and two of his employees, Sean Ferguson and Acquilla Rolle, have signed the IBC&#8217;s articles of association. No other names associated with Meridian are found in the few dozen pages available for public review. Any law enforcement agency that hopes to discover who owns Meridian Holdings will very quickly run into a brick wall. Before leaving the Registrar General&#8217;s office, I pick up a government handbook explaining the ABCs of IBCs and a handy list of local attorneys and agents who can help me set up an offshore account. There are dozens of firms to pick from, ranging from well-known giants like Citibank and Chase Manhattan to small firms run by local entrepreneurs. The former prove to be relatively discreet. The secretary at Chase Manhattan&#8217;s local branch tells me to contact its New York or Miami offices to discuss private banking services. At Citibank, an official provides a fact sheet on opening an account with its local office in the name of an IBC. The requirements are not terribly stringent, but I need to submit a letter stating my reason for opening the account and provide information about the source of my income. Citibank will not open an account via the mail or Internet, and a bank officer must personally interview all applicants. Since even a cursory investigation of my finances would quickly reveal that the NASDAQ riches I am so anxious to hide from the IRS are entirely nonexistent, I am nervous about consulting local firms. Will they run a background check before agreeing to meet? Will they ask to see a bank statement or other evidence of my finances?</p> <p>My fears prove baseless. When I apologize for dropping in unannounced at Alliance Investment Management, one of about a score of offshore firms at Beaumont House on Bay Street, company president Andre White reassures me. &#8220;It happens all the time,&#8221; he says, escorting me into his comfortable private office. I ask how simple it would be to create an IBC. &#8220;It&#8217;s the easiest thing in the world,&#8221; he replies, promising that everything can be taken care of within 48 hours. And what about creditors back home? I ask, hinting at a darker motive for moving my funds offshore. Might they get their hands on my Bahamian funds? &#8220;They can forget about it,&#8221; White says confidently.</p> <p>I also drop by the offices of Offshore Managers Limited, another firm located at Beaumont House. Offshore&#8217;s mission, states its corporate brochure, &#8220;is to provide the highest standard of professional services to persons wishing to avail themselves of a &#8216;tax-free&#8217; paradise.&#8221; And if the Bahamas doesn&#8217;t suit a client&#8217;s fancy, the company can also incorporate shell corporations in the Cayman Islands, Liberia, Panama, and other havens. Elizabeth Smith, president of Offshore, is as eager to answer my questions as White. Using a check drawn on a US bank to open my offshore account would defeat the purpose of confidentiality, I tell her. Could I bring cash in? &#8220;That&#8217;s the best way,&#8221; she says enthusiastically, adding that the Bahamas places no limit on the amount of foreign currency visitors can bring into the country. Smith gives me a service agreement to review and urges me to return it promptly so that Offshore can incorporate my IBC.</p> <p>ITI Management Limited, located in a storefront across the street from a Dunkin&#8217; Donuts, offers the broadest range of services to those eager to hide their money. I stop by at 10 a.m., shortly after the office opens, and find two police constables in smart red-and-black uniforms lounging on a sofa in the reception area. After a brief wait, the secretary, accompanied by a yapping terrier, escorts me to a woman named Renee Lockhart.</p> <p>For a fee of as little as $3,500 annually, Lockhart tells me, ITI offers a &#8220;fully managed&#8221; offshore account, which includes creating a local IBC and staffing it with nominee directors. For an added layer of protection, she urges me to create a second IBC in nearby St. Vincent, another tiny tax haven, which would be made the legal owner of my Bahamian IBC. The fully managed account also comes with a bank account in the name of the IBC. ITI had recently chartered its very own bank in St. Vincent for that purpose, but it was not yet fully up and running. In the meantime, Lockhart suggests I set up my account at Suisse Security Bank &amp;amp; Trust, a name that conjures up images of solid Swiss bankers but is in fact a firm chartered in the Bahamas.</p> <p>Suisse&#8217;s glossy catalog promises to &#8220;shelter&#8230;personal finances from the prying eyes of intrusive governments and bureaucrats.&#8221; The brochure states forthrightly that failure to declare ownership of an offshore account on tax returns amounts to tax evasion, but says that Bahamian bank secrecy laws make it &#8220;feasible to simply ignore the question and not declare an interest.&#8221; The Bahamian courts could conceivably waive secrecy if a foreign government made a direct appeal, but that&#8217;s a remote prospect. &#8220;Many people are prepared to accept this risk,&#8221; says the catalog. &#8220;Others are less comfortable with the idea.&#8221;</p> <p>Yet another feature provided to top-of-the-line ITI clients is a gold MasterCard that &#8220;provides cardholders with safe and discreet, swipe and ATM connections to a proven offshore fund from anywhere in the world.&#8221; The &#8220;infiniti Platinum Global Axxess MasterCard,&#8221; which comes with a $25,000 credit line, would enable me to deposit additional funds directly into my account. That way I could withdraw my stashed funds from anywhere in the world and leave, as Lockhart puts it, &#8220;no paper trail.&#8221;</p> <p>Lockhart offers plenty of other tips about hiding the paper trail, including a means of transferring my money offshore. Her advice: first funnel my money to my attorney or a trusted colleague. That person would in turn send it to a bank account controlled by ITI, from where it would be transferred to my anonymously owned IBC or to my Suisse Security account. &#8220;All you have to do is call me and say, &#8216;Renee, I have a transfer coming in,'&#8221; Lockhart tells me. &#8220;I&#8217;ll take care of everything from there.&#8221;</p> <p>During my brief stay in the Bahamas, the local newspapers carried daily stories about First World nations exerting increasing pressure on the country to ease its bank secrecy laws and crack down on IBCs.</p> <p>In June, a money laundering task force put together by the G-7 consortium of seven industrialized democracies placed the Bahamas and 14 other countries on a blacklist of nations that are complicit in money laundering and warned that they would be hit with sanctions if they didn&#8217;t change their laws. In July, the US Treasury Department issued a warning to American financial institutions to carefully monitor transactions with countries on the list.</p> <p>Last summer, a bill that would bar foreign financial institutions engaged in money laundering from doing business with US banks passed the House Banking and Financial Services Committee. The measure would also require US banks to disclose the identities of account holders to federal investigators. But even those pushing for reform acknowledge how difficult it will be to stop the flight of money abroad. &#8220;No sooner does one jurisdiction commit itself to meaningful countermeasures against money laundering than another pops up in some other corner of the globe to service the business flushed out of the first locale,&#8221; said Rep. James Leach (R-Iowa), chairman of the committee and sponsor of the bill.</p> <p>But while federal officials are quick to denounce money laundering, the IRS has done almost nothing to ferret out offshore tax cheats. &#8220;The IRS has known about this problem forever,&#8221; says one insider familiar with the agency. &#8220;At the rate they&#8217;re going, the whole tax base will be gone before they do anything about it.&#8221; Tax specialists say the government is reluctant to go after wealthy Americans with offshore accounts because many of them enjoy significant economic and political clout. In addition, the IRS has been demonized by Republicans on Capitol Hill, hampering its enforcement efforts. Phil Gramm of Texas, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, has blocked the bill requiring banks to fully disclose their offshore customers and has denounced other attempts at regulation. &#8220;Hardworking Americans do not deserve this invasion of their private lives,&#8221; Gramm wrote to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan last year.</p> <p>Such words provide comfort to those in the business of hiding money for wealthy clients. When I ask Honess at Jerome E. Pyfrom &amp;amp; Co. if he fears a crackdown by the Bahamian government, he remains sanguine. At worst, he predicts, the parliament will make token concessions, such as requiring disclosure of IBC shareholders. Like other offshore firms, Pyfrom &amp;amp; Co is prepared for such an eventuality. It has created a company called Altus Limited to serve as the &#8220;shareholder&#8221; for its clients&#8217; IBCs. Altus is fully controlled by Pyfrom &amp;amp; Co., but its service contract states explicitly that it will make no claim to my IBC&#8217;s assets and will faithfully follow instructions from the corporation&#8217;s true owner&#8212;me. &#8220;This way, if anyone finds out who the shareholders are, it won&#8217;t do them any good,&#8221; Honess says with a laugh.</p> <p>For now, he adds, business couldn&#8217;t be better. Demand for new IBCs is so great that Honess has taken to reserving corporate names at the Registrar General so that new clients don&#8217;t suffer needless delay in setting up their accounts. The only problem, Honess reveals, is that all the obvious names are taken. Before arriving in the Bahamas, I had requested via the Internet that Pyfrom &amp;amp; Co. reserve the name of March Ltd. for my IBC. When Honess submitted the necessary paperwork, the Registrar General informed him that the name was already being used by another local company, as were March Investments Ltd. and March Holdings Ltd. Gone, too, are the other months of the year, as well as names of well-known Bahamian flowers and birds.</p> <p>Honess is now resorting to selecting IBC names at random. As I sit in his office, he walks over to a small bookshelf, picks out an encyclopedia, and flips through the pages. &#8220;Here&#8217;s one that worked,&#8221; he says, pointing to the word Danegeld &#8212; the name of an ancient tax levied by the British crown to finance protection from Danish invasion. &#8220;I sent that one this morning and was told that it&#8217;s available. Perhaps it will work for you.&#8221;</p> <p />

Trillion-Dollar Hideaway

http://motherjones.com/politics/2000/11/trillion-dollar-hideaway-offshore-caymans

2018-11-01

<p /> <p>The US loves to point out flaws in other countries&#8217; elections. We slammed Yugoslavia&#8217;s September <a href="/news/feature/2000/09/otpor.html" type="external">presidential election</a> because international observers were not allowed to verify the fairness of the electoral process, and Peru&#8217;s recent elections after international observers said the ruling party denied opposition candidates access to the media. The same observers also accused Peru&#8217;s ruling party of using state police power to restrict the activities of opposition candidates. And government policies resulting in the disenfranchisement of ethnic minorities have often led to elections being condemned as undemocratic by outside observers. But US elections are above such unpleasantness, right? Wrong.</p> <p>If international observers were to oversee this year&#8217;s US presidential campaign, there is little doubt they would declare the process undemocratic. The ruling parties &#8212; the Democrats and the Republicans &#8212; have used their power to restrict the opposition parties&#8217; access to the most important media events of the campaign. They have used police to prevent an opposition candidate from attending a major campaign function, and have excluded an official party&#8217;s candidates from the regular ballot. And as a result of politically motivated, racially biased policies, an ethnic minority is disproportionately disenfranchised.</p> <p>One US criticism of the recent Peruvian election was the ruling party&#8217;s denial of media access to opposition parties. Meanwhile, however, Green Party candidate <a href="/news/feature/2000/07/nader.html" type="external">Ralph Nader</a> and Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan have been barred from participating in the media event that has proven to be the single most effective way to reach American voters: the debates. Exit polls in the 1988 and 1992 presidential elections showed that more voters based their decision on the debates than any other factor. This year, each debate is expected to draw an audience of up to 75 million &#8212; approximately the same number of Americans that will vote in the election. Yet far from observing democratic principles, the debates are controlled by a private club with admittance reserved for members only.</p> <p>The criteria that determines participation in the debates is established by the Commission on Presidential Debates &#8212; a private non-profit corporation that is controlled by the Republican and Democratic parties. The founders and co-chairmen of the CPD are Paul Kirk, former chairman of the Democratic Party, and Frank Fahrenkopf, former chairman of the Republican Party. The fact that third party candidates have to seek the approval of the Republican and Democratic parties in order to participate in the debates is akin to a new car manufacturer being forced to ask permission from Ford and General Motors to enter the automobile market.</p> <p>During the 1992 presidential election campaign, independent candidate Ross Perot was allowed to participate in the debates; on election day he wound up with 19 percent of the vote. Despite that impressive showing &#8212; or perhaps because of it &#8212; the CPD in 1996 barred Perot from the presidential debates because he didn&#8217;t meet their criteria of &#8220;nonmajor party candidates &#8230; who have a realistic (i.e., more than theoretical) chance of being elected the next President of the United States.&#8221; Perot had lost to Bill Clinton in the 1992 election by 24 percent of the vote &#8212; the same margin by which George McGovern lost to Richard Nixon in 1972. Everyone knew that McGovern never had a &#8220;realistic&#8221; chance of winning. The same could also be said for Walter Mondale, who lost to Ronald Reagan by 17 percent in 1984. Yet there was never any discussion about barring these two Democratic candidates from the debates.</p> <p>The CPD&#8217;s arbitrarily-established criteria for this year&#8217;s presidential debates includes the stipulation that all participants must be polling at least 15 percent &#8212; a classic Catch-22, since a third-party candidate needs the debate&#8217;s prime-time media exposure to attain high poll numbers. Furthermore, the polls target &#8220;likely voters&#8221;; a third-party candidate such as Nader appeals to disenchanted Americans who normally don&#8217;t vote, and therefore are not polled.</p> <p>If the 15-percent criteria had been applied in Minnesota&#8217;s last gubernatorial election, Reform Party candidate Jesse Ventura, who was only at 8 percent in the polls before the debates, may not have won. It certainly doesn&#8217;t reflect what the American people actually want: A Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll taken prior to the first debate showed that 64 percent of Americans thought Nader and Buchanan should be in the debates.</p> <p>Nader was not allowed even to sit in the audience at the first debate on October 3: A CPD representative and three Boston policemen physically barred him from entering. Afterwards Nader said, &#8220;A private company &#8212; controlled by the two major parties and funded by beer, tobacco, auto and other corporations &#8212; misused police power to exclude me from the premises, even though I had a ticket to enter issued by the debate commission themselves.&#8221;</p> <p>The major parties also discriminated against Nader&#8217;s Green Party in New York&#8217;s Sept. 12 Senate primary. Three weeks prior to the primary, New York City Board of Elections officials said there was no room on the electronic ballot for Green Party candidates. The largest city in the most technologically advanced country in the world told Green Party voters they would have to write their candidate&#8217;s name on a piece of paper.</p> <p>Even more troubling than anti-third-party ballot discrimination is the racial discrimination that has resulted in ever-increasing numbers of African-American men becoming disenfranchised. According to the <a href="http://www.sentencingproject.org/policy/9080.htm" type="external">Sentencing Project</a>, 14 states strip convicted felons of their right to vote, even after they have paid their debt to society. Black males constitute a disproportionate number of those disenfranchised because of drug enforcement policies that specifically target minority neighborhoods. While blacks only constitute 13 percent of the nation&#8217;s drug users, 74 percent of those in prison for drug offenses are African-American. As a result, 1.4 million African-American men &#8212; 13 percent of the black male population &#8212; have lost their voting rights for life.</p> <p>Barring opposition candidates from <a href="/mother_jones/MJ00/profits.html" type="external">major media events</a>, using police to keep them out of a debate, discriminating against them on ballots and disenfranchising minority voters &#8212; what would the international observers say? Probably that the US isn&#8217;t really so different from Yugoslavia, Peru and the many other countries that need outside monitors to verify the legitimacy of their democratic systems.</p> <p />

US Elections Need International Observers

https://motherjones.com/politics/2000/10/us-elections-need-international-observers/

2000-10-12

<p /> <p>A Spanish association representing open source software users filed a complaint against Microsoft to the European Commission on Tuesday, in a new challenge to the technology giant following a hefty fine earlier this month.</p> <p>Continue Reading Below</p> <p>The 8,000 member-strong Hispalinux, which represents users of the Linux operating system, said Microsoft had made it difficult for users of computers sold with its Windows 8 platform to switch to Linux and other operating systems.</p> <p>Lawyer and Hispalinux head Jose Maria Lancho said he delivered the complaint to the Madrid office of the European Commission at 5.00 a.m. ET.</p> <p>The European Commission fined Microsoft, the global leader in operating systems, 561 million euros ($729 million) on March 6 for failing to offer users a choice of web browser. ($1 = 0.7694 euros)</p> <p>(Reporting by Sarah Morris and Teresa Larraz; Writing by Clare Kane; Editing by Julien Toyer and Tom Pfeiffer)</p> <p>Advertisement</p>

Open Software Group Files Complaint to EU Against Microsoft

http://foxbusiness.com/features/2013/03/26/exclusive-open-software-group-files-complaint-to-eu-against-microsoft.html

2016-01-29

<p /> <p>Karachi, Pakistan January 16, 2015 Asif Hassan (L), a photographer for Agence France-Press, is helped to safety after he was shot during a protest against satirical French weekly Charlie Hebdo, which featured a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad as the cover of its first edition since an attack by Islamist gunmen. Pakistan police fired tear gas and water cannons at about 200 protesters outside the French consulate.</p> <p /> <p /> <p>Chongqing, China January 14, 2015 The 22-story Yixin Mansion collapses after demolition by explosives as part of a urbanization project.</p> <p /> <p /> <p>Ciudad Juarez, Mexico January 14, 2015 Demonstrators pull a barrier as federal policemen try to stop them during a protest against the visit of Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto.</p> <p /> <p /> <p>Lalitpur, Nepal January 12, 2015 A worker stack bricks on his head at a brick factory.</p> <p /> <p /> <p>Ankara, Turkey January 12, 2015 Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan (R) shakes hands with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas during a welcoming ceremony at the Presidential Palace.</p> <p /> <p /> <p>Tacloban, Philippines January 15, 2015 A man walks under a ship standed after typhoon Haiyan. Pope Francis is touring venues across Leyte and Manila during his visit to the Philippines. The visit is expected to attract crowds in the millions as Filipino Catholics flock to catch a glimpse of the leader of the Catholic Church in the Philippines for the first time since 1995.</p> <p /> <p /> <p>Colombo, Sri Lanka January 14, 2015 A Catholic devotee takes a picture with a mobile phone before Pope Francis arrives to lead Mass. Hundreds of thousands of people packed the capital's oceanfront to see the pontiff give Sri Lanka its first saint, a climax to a 300-year campaign to recognise the holiness of Indian-born missionary Joseph Vaz.</p> <p /> <p /> <p>Mexico City January 11, 2015 A passenger without pants waits for the subway train during "The No Pants Subway Ride." The event, the fifth organized in Mexico, is an annual flash mob and occurs in different cities around the world, according to its organizers.</p> <p /> <p /> <p>San Diego January 13, 2015 A hippopotamus swims in its enclosure at the San Diego Zoo.</p> <p />

The Week in Pictures: January 18, 2015

https://thedailybeast.com/the-week-in-pictures-january-18-2015

2018-10-03

<p /> <p>Three Iraqis working for foreign news outlets were just killed, raising the total number of Iraqi media workers killed this year to at least 27, according to the nonprofit <a href="http://www.cpj.org/killed/killed07.html" type="external">Committee to Protect Journalists</a>.</p> <p>A few days ago two Reuters employees, a photographer and driver, were killed in eastern Baghdad during what witnesses say was a U.S. helicopter attack, and then earlier today a 23-year-old reporter and interpreter for the New York Times was shot and killed on his way to work in south central Baghdad.</p> <p>In the current issue of Mother Jones, Greg Veis profiles an Iraqi Reuters journalist whose peril in war is multiplied because of his association with Western media outlets.</p> <p>&#8220;My wife has begged me to quit my job and even to leave Iraq. But I told her that every day tens of Iraqis are being killed for no reason, and they will be forgotten otherwise. To die as a journalist, I would know that I was killed while I was reporting the truth. I would die proud.&#8221;</p> <p>Veis points out the growing trend of American media outlets closing their bureaus in Iraq, or radically downsizing their presence, estimating that the current tally of American print correspondents in Iraq caps out at around 20. Which leaves the on-the-ground, dangerous reporting to Iraqis who string for most news outlets.</p> <p>And the Army&#8217;s take on Iraqis sending stories stateside? Veis talked to a lieutenant who feels they feed &#8220;the symbiotic relationship between violence and the media,&#8221; in that they have access to stories because they have a &#8220;tacit agreement&#8221; with the enemy.</p> <p>Read Veis&#8217; story soon on <a href="/toc/2007/07/index.html" type="external">motherjones.com</a>, or pick up the July/August issue from your local bookstore today.</p> <p />

Three More Iraqi Media Workers Killed Risking Their Lives For Our Headlines

https://motherjones.com/politics/2007/07/three-more-iraqi-media-workers-killed-risking-their-lives-our-headlines/

2007-07-14

<p>Camels and wrestling. Yes, the two can go together. Male camels can weigh as much as a ton. In Turkey, the animals are trained to square off in bouts of strength and skill. They do this before crowds numbering in the tens of thousands.</p> <p>As camels are tall, lumbering creatures, you don't want to get in their way. They can move surprisingly quickly, especially when two are locking necks, almost like a double helix, as they try to overpower each other.</p> <p>Turkey's largest camel wrestling tournament is held annually here in Secluk a market town of about 20,000 people.</p> <p>Camels are naturally pretty docile creatures, but get more agressive during mating season. So, that&#8217;s when competitions are held.</p> <p>Female camels aren&#8217;t welcome at the events &#8211; if they were here, things might get really serious. With about 130 male camels -- and tens of thousands of drunken spectators -- these camels are riled up enough.</p> <p>&#8220;When the tension comes, the camels get angry, they feel the anger and so they want to fight,&#8221; said Ahmet Sarsilmaz, who has been training camels for 15 years and finds them to be sensitive, intelligent creatures.</p> <p>Camels have long been critical to the economic development of this area. They carried crops like olives and figs to nearby seaports. When the railroads came about 150 years ago, camels had less practical use, so people who were fond of ra&#305;s&#305;ng them had to f&#305;nd other reasons to keep them.</p> <p>Now it's a local tradition. Local attorney Gokhan Sertcelik says he's been coming to these bouts since he was six. He says many people here revere camels almost like sports heros.</p> <p>&#8220;I've seen lots of people when their favorite camels was beaten they were crying. I've seen many scenes like that. It's not about gambling it's about love,&#8221; he said.</p> <p>The rules are simple. There&#8217;s no point system. If a camel is forced to his knees, he loses. If a camel runs away &#8211; the braver camel wins. Or, if a camel cries out in fright, that also ends the match.</p> <p>Animal welfare groups have complained about this sport, but there's no organized opposition. Efforts were made to reach out to a few animal rights activists in Turkey, but none returned requests to comment.</p> <p>But locals defend the sport. Ahmet Sogutcu, a former organizer, argues camel wrestling is neither inhumane nor a bloodsport.</p> <p>&#8220;They don&#8217;t hurt each other. If you see, their mouths are covered, they have no chance to bite. This is not camel fight, this is wrestling,&#8221; he said.</p> <p>For wealthy locals, owning a camel can be the ultimate status symbol. It can cost around $10,000 a year to keep one. And there&#8217;s no cash prize for winning an event.</p> <p>The pay off is prestige over what Sogutcu describes as bragging rights.</p> <p>&#8220;It is like a social competition,&#8221; he said.</p> <p>But it&#8217;s also an excuse to throw a big party.</p> <p>There are probably 20,000 people at the event. Booze vendors are doing a roaring trade, selling liquor by the bottle. Groups of men &#8211; it's mostly men here &#8211; sit together on long tables grilling meats and toasting each other with raki, Turkey's most cherished hard alcohol.</p> <p>Most of the men are Muslim, by the way. The Koran forbids alcohol, but drink is still an integral part of Turkish culture.</p> <p>Men from the region enjoy traveling the camel wrestling circuit &#8211; it gives them a chance to get out of their hometowns and cut loose.</p> <p>&#8220;They drink all day and night long, they get drunk because nobody knows them,&#8221; said Sogutcu &#8220;So, nobody will say you are bad, you are this, you are that. So when they return to their small society they are still seen as good father, good man, good&amp;#160; friend. It&#8217;s like that.&#8221;</p> <p>There&#8217;s also a lot meat being grilled here, camel meat. Tourists like Robert Lloyd, a Londoner who teaches English in Istanbul, was keen to try it and even bought a couple pounds as a souvenir.</p> <p>&#8220;It tastes like camel smell which is kind of off-putting but they spice it really well so it's good. I'm a fan,&#8221; he said.</p> <p>Besides the wrestling and drinking and eating, there&#8217;s also a bit of pageantRy and music. Bands of mostly Roma Gypsy musicians entertain the crowds. People stuff cash in their instruments* as tips.</p> <p>The day before the wrestling match, there was also a beauty contest... for camels dressed in their best finery.</p> <p>*Update: A previous version of this story incorrectly indicated that the instrument played at the camel wrestling event was a clarinet. It may instead be a zurna. Thanks to a listener for pointing this out.</p>

Camel wrestling ... Yes, it's a real thing

https://pri.org/stories/2014-02-10/camel-wrestling-yes-its-real-thing

2014-02-10

<p /> <p>Photo by Nico Kaiser | <a href="" type="internal">CC BY 2.0</a></p> <p /> <p>Let&#8217;s cut to the chase: Ankara 2016 is not Sarajevo 1914. This is not a prelude to WWIII. Whoever plotted the assassination of the Russian Ambassador to Turkey Andrey Karlov &#8211; a cool, calm, collected old-school diplomat &#8211; risks a mighty blowback.</p> <p>The assassin, Mevlut Mert Altintas, was a 22-year-old police academy graduate. He was suspended from the Turkish National Police (TNP) over suspected links to the Fethullahist Terrorist Organization (FETO) after the failed July 15 putsch against Erdogan but <a href="" type="internal">returned</a>&amp;#160;to duty in November.</p> <p>It&#8217;s no secret Gulenists heavily infiltrate the TNP; so a particular outcome of the attack will be an, even more, relentless Erdogan/AKP crackdown on the Gulen network. The Turkish investigation will have to focus not only on the (major) security service fail at Ankara&#8217;s modern art center &#8211; but way beyond. It&#8217;s not very reassuring that Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu put out a terse statement a very long three hours after the facts.</p> <p>The killer in a black suit and tie shouted slogans about revenge &#8220;for Aleppo&#8221; &#8211; the requisite &#8220;Allahu Akbar&#8221; included &#8211; in both Turkish and broken Arabic, something that might establish a connection to an Islamist group&#8217;s rhetoric, although that&#8217;s not conclusive evidence.</p> <p>Timing is crucial. The hit happened only one day before the Foreign Ministers of Russia, Turkey and Iran were scheduled to meet in Moscow for a key Syria strategic discussion. They were already closely in touch for the past few weeks on how to strike a comprehensive deal on Aleppo &#8211; and beyond.</p> <p>And this right after the crucial, previously established Putin-Erdogan agreement, which implied no less than thousands of &#8220;moderate rebels&#8221; responding to Turkey&#8217;s commands being able to use a &#8220;corridor&#8221; out of Aleppo. Ankara was fully on board with the plan. That in itself eliminates the possibility of an Ankara-provoked false flag.</p> <p>President Putin for his part made it very clear he wants to be informed on who &#8220;directed&#8221; the killer. That&#8217;s something that could be interpreted as subtle code for Russian intel already very much in the know.</p> <p>The Big Picture</p> <p>On the bilateral front, Moscow and Ankara are now working close together on counter-terrorism. Turkey&#8217;s defense minister was invited to Russia for anti-air defense system negotiations. Bilateral trade is booming again, including the creation of a joint investment fund. On the all-important energy front, Turkish Stream, despite the Obama administration&#8217;s obsession about its derailment, became the subject of state law in Ankara earlier this month.</p> <p>Atlanticists are appalled that Moscow, Ankara and Tehran are now fully engaged in designing a post-Battle of Aleppo Syrian future, to the graphic exclusion of the NATO-GCC combo.</p> <p>It&#8217;s under this context that the recent <a href="" type="internal">alleged capture</a>&amp;#160;of a bunch of NATO-GCC operatives &#8211; deployed under the US-led-from-behind &#8220;coalition&#8221; &#8211; by Syrian Special Forces in Aleppo must be interpreted.</p> <p>Syrian member of Parliament Fares Shehabi, the head of the Chamber of Commerce in Aleppo, published the names of the apprehended coalition officers; most are Saudi; there&#8217;s one Qatari; the presence of one Moroccan and one Jordanian is explained by the fact Morocco and Jordan are &#8220;unofficial&#8221; GCC members.</p> <p>And then there&#8217;s one Turk, one American (David Scott Winer) and one Israeli. So NATO shows up only via two operatives, but the NATO-GCC link is more than established. If this information proceeds &#8211; and that&#8217;s still a big &#8220;if&#8221; &#8211; these may well be coalition military personnel and field commanders, formerly advising &#8220;moderate rebels&#8221; and now a formidable bargaining chip in the hands of Damascus.</p> <p>Both NATO and GCC remain absolutely mum; not even non-denial denials have materialized. That might imply a made in the shade deal for the release of the high-value prisoners, further strengthening Damascus&#8217; grip.</p> <p>It was President Putin who all but established a de facto Russia-Iran-Turkey axis dealing with facts on the Syrian ground &#8211; in parallel to the rhetoric-heavy, zero-solution UN charade going on in Geneva. Moscow diplomatically emphasizes that the work of the axis complement Geneva. In fact, it&#8217;s the only reality-based work. And it&#8217;s supposed to sign and seal definitive parameters on the ground before Donald Trump enters the White House.</p> <p>In a nutshell; the five-year (and running) NATO-GCC combo&#8217;s multi-billion dollar regime change project in Syria all but miserably failed. Wily Erdogan seems to have learned his realpolitik lesson. On the Atlanticist front nevertheless, that opens myriad avenues to channel geopolitical resentment.</p> <p>The Big Picture couldn&#8217;t be more absolutely unbearable for neocon/neoliberalcon Atlanticists. Ankara slowly but surely is veering the Eurasianist way; bye bye to the EU, and eventually NATO; welcome to the New Silk Roads, a.k.a. the China-driven One Belt, One Road (OBOR); the Russia-driven Eurasia Economic Union (EEU); the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO); the Russia-China strategic partnership; and Turkey as a key hub in Eurasia integration.</p> <p>For all that to happen, Erdogan has concluded Ankara must be on board the Russia-China-Iran long-term strategy to pacify and rebuild Syria and make it a key hub as well of the New Silk Roads. Between that and an &#8220;alliance&#8221; of fleeting interests with Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the US, it&#8217;s certainly a no-brainer.</p> <p>But make no mistake. There will be blood.</p>

Who Profits from Turkey’s ‘Sarajevo Moment’?

https://counterpunch.org/2016/12/21/who-profits-from-turkeys-sarajevo-moment/

2016-12-21

<p>Janine Jackson interviewed Alvaro Bedoya on privacy, technology and the targets of surveillance for the March 11, 2016, CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.</p> <p>Alvaro Bedoya: &#8220;There is a sad and deep record of companies and the government making very poor decisions of how to treat the information of vulnerable people.&#8221;(image: <a href="http://blog.bigpicturescience.org/2015/09/big-picture-science-no-face-to-hide-alvaro-bedoya-recognizing-privacy/" type="external">Big Picture Science</a>)</p> <p><a href="" type="internal">MP3 Link</a></p> <p>Janine Jackson: Would it bother you if, when you walked into a department store, a hidden camera scanned your face and checked it against a database of VIP customers, suspected shoplifters and &#8220;known litigious people&#8221;? What if your church used facial recognition technology to see who was attending?</p> <p>You can almost divide people between those who find the idea creepy and wrong, and those who say, &#8220;Eh, all in a day,&#8221; with the latter reaction meaning maybe, &#8220;I have nothing to hide, so so what,&#8221; or maybe &#8220;it&#8217;s inevitable anyway; that ship has sailed.&#8221;</p> <p>But is this unprecedented corporate access into our lives permitted just because it&#8217;s technically possible? What expectations of privacy remain when we shop or walk down the street? How does it relate to government surveillance and, as with government surveillance, shouldn&#8217;t we ask who, when it comes down to it, is most likely to be harmed?</p> <p>Alvaro Bedoya is the founding executive director of the Center on Privacy &amp;amp; Technology at Georgetown Law. He was chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law. He joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Alvaro Bedoya.</p> <p>Alvaro Bedoya: Thank you. It&#8217;s great to be here.</p> <p>JJ: Well, I&#8217;d like to just beg the question of inevitability and assume that these things are not inevitable; technology exists, but we decide socially how to employ it. In the case of facial recognition technology, you have been part of the process seeking to figure out how it&#8217;s used, how privacy is protected. And the way that that process went is worth recounting in some detail, because it explains a lot about how we got to where we are. Tell us about those 2015 negotiations. Who was there, first of all?</p> <p>AB: These negotiations were convened by the Department of Commerce, that aimed to have privacy advocates and industry representatives come together and settle upon a set of privacy best practices that companies could basically declare, we&#8217;re going to adhere to these, and that then could be enforceable against the company for their use of facial recognition technology. They started in 2014, end of 2014, and ran actually to this day, but they broke down in the summer of 2015.</p> <p>JJ: Well, now, you were representing privacy advocates and being a privacy advocate; there were at the table tech companies, advertisers, retailers and those sort of folks, right?</p> <p>AB: That&#8217;s right. Facebook was there, Microsoft was there, the Interactive Advertising Bureau was there, industry associations like NetChoice were there, and so there were a lot of lobbyists and actual representatives from companies.</p> <p>JJ: Well, the mind-blowing part of this&#8212;and folks can find your <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/06/facial_recognition_privacy_talks_why_i_walked_out.html" type="external">article</a> about it on Slate.com&#8212;but what led to the walkout is, these groups really wouldn&#8217;t even agree to any instance in which consent was necessary. Tell us about what the stumbling block, if you will, was.</p> <p><a href="" type="internal" />AB: Sure. At its most basic level, the right to privacy is the ability to say no, leave me alone. This is how, basically, the American legal system has defined the right to privacy with respect to companies since the late 1800s. Right now, when you actually see most companies rolling out facial recognition, as a matter of practice, as a matter of what they do, Janine, they generally don&#8217;t use it on people to identify them without their permission.</p> <p>And so, in this negotiation, the privacy advocates said, well, OK, guys, here&#8217;s this common sense, actual in-practice best practice, on-the-ground best practice, that you have to get permission before using facial recognition to identify someone in general. And so we said, why don&#8217;t we use that general rule, that you have to get permission, as a baseline for these best practices? And every single company and industry group that spoke up said no.</p> <p>And so then we narrowed the ask even further. We said, can we all at least agree that when you are walking on a public street, that a company you have never heard of should have to get permission before using facial recognition to identify you by name? And again, not a single company or trade association would agree to that.</p> <p>And that&#8217;s when we said, you know what, we are arguing with a bunch of&#8212;you&#8217;ve heard of yes men? We&#8217;re arguing with a bunch of no men. We&#8217;re arguing with a bunch of folks who aren&#8217;t here to reach an agreement or a consensus; they&#8217;re here to stop this. And that&#8217;s when we walked out.</p> <p>JJ: Well, you put your finger, even more finely, on what&#8217;s going on here. Because you note that, first of all, the policy that they wouldn&#8217;t agree to on paper is the policy that the companies actually use in practice.</p> <p>AB: Most of them, that&#8217;s right.</p> <p>JJ: Because they have customers, and customers demand it. And part of what you&#8217;re identifying as the problem is that the folks who are in that room doing the lobbying&#8212;their connection to people, to customers, is rather indirect.</p> <p>AB: That&#8217;s right. And this happens at a couple different levels. First of all, the representatives from the companies aren&#8217;t the folks who are actually, you know, either on the sales floor or rolling out a product online; they are the DC lobbyists. But I want to be honest, frankly, I would have preferred to work with a bunch of actual representatives of companies with skin in the game.</p> <p>JJ: Uh-huh.</p> <p>AB: Because, at the end of the day, they do have brands and reputations to maintain. The deeper layer to this is that you have trade associations that effectively cater to the lowest common denominator of their membership. Let&#8217;s say I&#8217;m a trade association and there&#8217;s five companies who are my members; in other words, the folks who pay my bills as a lobbyist. If two of them are OK with heightened privacy standards but one of them says, no sir, I gain nothing from those, those will hurt me; I have to cater to that lowest common denominator. And so the trade associations are entities you&#8217;ve never heard of, I frankly never heard of until I entered in the negotiations in many cases, and they are putting their foot down and blocking any hope of progress to establish these best practices.</p> <p>JJ: Which is really a fascinating statement about the way the regulatory process and the lobbying decision-making process goes on in this country. It&#8217;s this tier of industry lobbyists who aren&#8217;t directly tethered to customers who are, as you put it, shutting down Washington&#8217;s ability to protect consumer privacy. I mean, it&#8217;s really quite remarkable, and something I would hope that journalists would see has implications even beyond this particular case, obviously, and is worth digging into as just kind of a &#8220;how laws get made,&#8221; you know, &#8220;how policies get made&#8221; story.</p> <p>AB: Yeah, that&#8217;s exactly right.</p> <p>JJ: Well, you also note that there are some things that are kind of structural, in the sense that when we talk about government surveillance, we have a couple of places that we can check that. Whether or not we do is another question. But when it comes to private companies, there are kind of fewer tools in the toolbox, aren&#8217;t there?</p> <p>AB: Yes. And this is a more subtle point that I think a lot of folks miss. A lot of people look at where we are in terms of government surveillance. You know, they look at the Snowden papers, they look at what the NSA, we now know, has done, and they think, oh, man, you know, we are at a low point in terms of our privacy against the government. But what people forget is that our nation was literally founded on the idea of checking government overreach. And so, you know, we have the Fourth Amendment, which protects us against unreasonable searches and seizures, and we have Congress, where it&#8217;s very easy to form bipartisan alliances to stop government overreach.</p> <p>You know, Edward Snowden released his documents, the Guardian and the Post published them, June 2013. One year later, the House had already passed a law to curtail the call records program; two years later, the president was signing that law after the Senate had passed it, and a federal judge had declared this program to be unconstitutional. And so, yes, there is government overreach on government surveillance, but we&#8217;re ready for it.</p> <p>On the other side of the coin, though, as you note, our country was not built to combat corporate overreach. The only world in which a court or a government agency steps in to protect our privacy against companies is a world where either Congress or a state legislature has passed a law allowing them to do that.</p> <p>And, unfortunately, as a result of this lobbying, Congress has stopped passing consumer privacy laws. Since 2009, only one minor expansion to consumer privacy law has occurred. And, in fact, there&#8217;s been one other thing which was a contraction of consumer privacy law, so I&#8217;d call it a wash.</p> <p>JJ: Right.</p> <p>AB: Instead, what you&#8217;re seeing is state legislatures starting to pass these bills, and that&#8217;s where I think the hope lies in terms of consumer privacy.</p> <p>JJ: Well, and I&#8217;m sure some folks will be saying that Congress could do more and that we could do more on other levels in checking government surveillance. But I think the point is, at least we have the structures, at least we have the &#8212;</p> <p>AB: That&#8217;s right.</p> <p>JJ:&#8212;mechanisms to do that, whereas when it comes to the corporate side we&#8217;re kind of grasping to use the tools that we&#8217;ve got. And they&#8217;re not doing what they might be doing, which is passing new laws. And it&#8217;s not as though nothing has changed in terms of questions that might be addressed since 2009, in terms of consumer privacy; there&#8217;s been plenty.</p> <p>AB: That&#8217;s right. And look at the technology we&#8217;re talking about now: facial recognition, geolocation technology, wearables, connected home devices like a smart TV or the Amazon Echo. These are technologies that around 2008 or so, 2007, 2009, we&#8217;d really never heard of. Maybe we heard geolocation, but all the rest of these were really products of the last five or six years. And yet all these technologies are effectively unregulated right now.</p> <p>JJ: Well, in a 2014 regulatory finding, you and the Center called on Commerce to support strong consumer controls on the collection of personal data. You noted that this kind of ubiquitous collection is not inevitable. But you also pointed out in that&amp;#160; <a href="https://www.law.georgetown.edu/academics/centers-institutes/privacy-technology/publications-filings/upload/8-5-14-Bedoya-and-Vladeck-Comment-FINAL.pdf" type="external">finding</a> that &#8220;a de-emphasis on consumer controls may be particularly harmful for traditionally disadvantaged groups, including the poor, racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, LGBT individuals and the elderly; privacy is in many ways a shield for the weak.&#8221; I wonder if you can talk a little bit about what you mean by that.</p> <p>AB: Yeah. Let&#8217;s put this in really simple terms. Right now, what a lot of folks in the government and what a lot of companies want is a world where we protect privacy after your personal information is collected. It&#8217;s kind of like shoot first and ask questions later. Maybe that&#8217;s unfair, but think about it this way. Traditionally we&#8217;ve protected privacy by empowering people, particularly in the private sector, to say, yes, I&#8217;m OK with you to collect this sensitive information; no, I don&#8217;t want you to collect that information. And this empowers people to make choices.</p> <p>Now, obviously as technology becomes more complicated, as we generate almost infinitely larger amounts of data, that exercise becomes harder. But what many in government and what a lot of folks in the private sector are arguing for now is a world where we no longer have that choice. Where instead of protecting privacy at the point of collection, privacy is purportedly protected after the fact. And the real problem here is that, who is making those decisions about how your information is used? Companies, the government. And for years and years, there is a sad and deep record of companies and the government making very poor decisions of how to treat the information of vulnerable people.</p> <p>Japanese-American children in a US internment camp during World War II.</p> <p>The government, for example, during World War II used Census data, that was supposedly only going to be used for the Census, to figure out where Japanese-Americans were living, to track them down and detain them in internment camps. Nowadays, you have data brokers who are literally creating lists of individuals who are HIV positive or individuals who are victims of sexual assault or who have diabetes or Parkinson&#8217;s disease. These are lists that, by and large, aren&#8217;t going to help the people on those lists.</p> <p>JJ: Right. They&#8217;re selling those to &#8212;</p> <p>AB: To rip people off, that&#8217;s right.</p> <p>JJ: So they&#8217;re selling them to companies. Just to be clear, they&#8217;re collecting this data and selling it to companies who might then sell things to those people or&#8230;?</p> <p>AB: Data brokers do this. And sometimes they are marketed to other companies that sell them things. Sometimes they&#8217;re actually literally purchased by fraud rings that call people up and enter them into a series of sweepstakes and other basically fraudulent enterprises that bilk them of thousands upon thousands of dollars. And, frankly, we don&#8217;t know what we don&#8217;t know about this industry, because it is unregulated. And so when I say privacy is a shield for the weak, privacy allows vulnerable people to go about their business and also make choices about their lives without powerful government entities or corporate entities second-guessing them on it and looking over their shoulder and saying don&#8217;t do this, do that, or using their data in a way that might harm them.</p> <p>JJ: Well, let&#8217;s pivot just a little bit. Government and corporate surveillance technology may be subject to different mechanisms, but they share this impulse to collect and to use information that people may not know is being used, and whose use can have a serious impact. So there&#8217;s a reason that your group is hosting a conference in early April that&#8217;s called &#8220;The Color of Surveillance.&#8221; I wonder if you could talk a little about what we ought to know about that aspect of this issue that we&#8217;re discussing.</p> <p>AB: Certainly. There is a really interesting thing going on in our country right now. What are people talking about? They&#8217;re talking about the brutality and pervasiveness of policing in the black community. That is one conversation that&#8217;s occurring. There is another conversation, though, that&#8217;s occurring about the role of government surveillance in a free and democratic society. This was triggered by the Edward Snowden revelations, and it continues to this day. And so you have these two huge debates, historic debates, and yet they almost never intersect.</p> <p>There&#8217;s no discussion of the fact that for almost the entirety of our nation&#8217;s history, the black community and people of color in general have been the disproportionate targets of unjust surveillance. People might know about Martin Luther King and how the FBI surveilled him. People don&#8217;t know that the NSA also wiretapped him. And they might not know that it wasn&#8217;t just Martin Luther King, it was Fannie Lou Hamer, it was Whitney Young of the National Urban League, it was Cesar Chavez. Before that, it was W.E.B. Dubois and Marcus Garvey.</p> <p>And before that, enslaved people in our country in cities like New York, for example, literally could not walk outside after dark without carrying a lantern on them so that everyone could see them. These were called lantern laws.</p> <p>And fast forward all the way to this day, and I realize I&#8217;m covering about 300 years of history in about six breaths and four sentences, but today activists with Black Lives Matter and journalists have revealed that the Department of Homeland Security, an agency founded to combat terrorism, is using its resources to monitor Black Lives Matter, even entirely peaceful activities. And so the purpose of this conference is to bring these communities and bring these conversations together, and show that in a world where everyone is watched, everyone is not watched equally. And we need to reckon with that, as a society and in Congress.</p> <p>JJ: Writing on this issue, Malkia Cyril <a href="http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/black-americas-state-surveillance" type="external">noted</a> that &#8220;many journalists still focus their reporting on the technological trends and not the racial hierarchies that these trends are enforcing.&#8221; What would you like to see from the press corps? I did notice a piece on the previous issue of facial recognition technology. The Times had a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/29/technology/obamas-effort-on-consumer-privacy-falls-short-critics-say.html" type="external">piece</a> on February 29, and it mentioned harm from companies collecting data, the way they might use a person&#8217;s health status or financial straits, and connect that to unfair or inferior treatment. Certainly we have seen some coverage of some spying or intervention on organizing. But in general, what would you like to see from media in putting these issues together and carrying this story forward?</p> <p>AB: Malkia&#8217;s exactly right, and frankly she&#8217;s probably the leader on these issues. What I would like to see is more attention to who the eye is watching. We spend so much time thinking about the eye, how it works, how invasive it is. But we never stop to ask, OK, in what communities are <a href="https://www.aclu.org/map/stingray-tracking-devices-whos-got-them" type="external">Stingrays</a> actually being deployed, and who is in these facial recognition databases, and what communities is predictive policing being rolled out in? And once we start asking the who of these questions and not the how, I think we will recognize that, by and large in this nation, invasive surveillance technology is almost as a rule beta tested on low-income black and Latino communities.</p> <p>That is the first issue. We need to start asking about the who and not the what. The other issue is that we tend to think of surveillance as something technological, and in the 21st century and 2016, it increasingly is. But we can&#8217;t forget about all of the run-of-the-mill surveillance techniques, like, for example, stop and frisk and racial profiling of drivers and pulling over drivers &#8220;driving while black.&#8221; And we can&#8217;t forget that stopping someone and searching them on a pretense, or for frankly no good reason at all, that is surveillance. Stopping someone while they&#8217;re driving and asking them some questions and seeing if they trip up, that is also surveillance. We can&#8217;t just think that this is about technology. What it is is about monitoring a community. And we need a comprehensive evaluation of this trend, and we need to talk about how to fix it in Congress.</p> <p>JJ: We&#8217;ve been speaking with Alvaro Bedoya of the <a href="https://www.law.georgetown.edu/academics/centers-institutes/privacy-technology/" type="external">Center on Privacy &amp;amp; Technology</a> at Georgetown Law. His articles &#8220; <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/01/what_the_fbi_s_surveillance_of_martin_luther_king_says_about_modern_spying.html" type="external">The Color of Surveillance</a>&#8221; and &#8220; <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/06/facial_recognition_privacy_talks_why_i_walked_out.html" type="external">Why I Walked Out of Facial Recognition Negotiations</a>&#8221; can both be found on Slate.com. Alvaro Bedoya, thank you so much for joining us today on CounterSpin.</p> <p>AB: It was my pleasure. Thank you so much.</p> <p>Subscribe: <a href="" type="internal">Android</a> | <a href="" type="internal">RSS</a></p>

‘Everyone Is Not Watched Equally’

http://fair.org/home/everyone-is-not-watched-equally/

2016-03-15

<p>The power of mass demonstrations to mobilize activism and move those in positions of power is minimized, first and foremost, by those opposed to popular power. Do not listen to them. Make them listen to us!</p> <p>Can you give two days to stop the slaughter of innocents and the shameless profiteering from their blood? If you can give more, so much the better. But by giving two days, you will guarantee that others will give more. You will be part of building the necessary momentum, the key ingredient in social change.</p> <p>These are the two days to give:&amp;#160;March 24 and November 11. If you can&#8217;t give those, or want more,&amp;#160; <a href="" type="internal">pick some others</a>. But here&#8217;s why I say those two, and why the top priority is to be in Washington, D.C., but just as important is to be visible everywhere else.</p> <p>March 24</p> <p>On&amp;#160;March 24&amp;#160;in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere in the U.S. (and beyond?), students and teachers and everyone else who values lives over guns will&amp;#160; <a href="" type="internal">march</a>against gun violence. But the strategy will be weak unless millions of us uninvited marchers show up to augment the message with what it is not permissible to say. The culture of gun violence is fueled by the culture of militarism and by the military. A hugely disproportionate share of mass-shooters&amp;#160; <a href="" type="internal">have been</a>U.S. military veterans. Some have been JROTC students. The recent killer in Florida was trained to kill by the U.S. Army in the very school where he killed. The JROTC&#8217;s &#8220;history&#8221; classes, the Army&#8217;s video games, the military&#8217;s role in producing Hollywood movies, the Pentagon&#8217;s unloading of old weapons on police departments and the general public &#8212; this is all done with our tax dollars. The NRA understands the connections perfectly, and churns out&amp;#160; <a href="" type="internal">advertisements</a>&amp;#160;promoting more wars. If we don&#8217;t make the connections, we won&#8217;t win. So,&amp;#160; <a href="" type="internal">bring these signs</a>.&amp;#160;And help us keep military recruiters&amp;#160; <a href="" type="internal">out of schools</a>.</p> <p>By the way,&amp;#160;March 24&amp;#160;was the day in 1999 when the United States and NATO began 78 days of bombing Yugoslavia. Here&#8217;s a&amp;#160; <a href="" type="internal">discussion</a>&amp;#160;of exactly how destructive that was. Fittingly,&amp;#160;March 24&amp;#160;is also&amp;#160; <a href="" type="internal">International Day for the Right to the Truth concerning Gross Human Rights Violations and for the Dignity of Victims</a>. A great day around which to create a new holiday tradition!</p> <p>So,&amp;#160; <a href="" type="internal">go sign up here</a>! And (this is important!) politely encourage the organizers to acknowledge the existence of the JROTC.</p> <p>November 11</p> <p>Since the United States destroyed North Korea almost 70 years ago,&amp;#160;November 11&amp;#160;has been called, in the United States, &#8220; <a href="" type="internal">Veterans Day</a>.&#8221; This year, Donald Trump proposes to stage a giant parade of weaponry through the streets of Washington, D.C. But prior to the intense propaganda campaign around the brutal bombardment that leveled most North Korean cities, and to this day in much of the rest of the world,&amp;#160;November 11&amp;#160;is known as Armistice Day, or in some places Remembrance Day.</p> <p>At&amp;#160;11 o&#8217;clock&amp;#160;on this 11th day of the 11th month, 100 years ago this year, World War I ended. It was a scheduled end to the war, with the killing and dying pointlessly continuing right up to that moment. The worldwide celebration after the armistice was euphoric. And those who had believed the propaganda about a &#8220;war to end all war&#8221; and those who had not were united in desiring to make it true. Armistice Day was for years promoted by the U.S. government among others as a day to work for global friendship and peace. Parading the instruments of death that suck down 60% of the budget Congress votes on each year is not a way to build friendship or peace.</p> <p>But our &#8220;Armistice Day, Not Trump Day&#8221; will be weak if it includes only those who have learned to reject war propaganda and dedicated themselves to ending war and weapons dealing. We need, again, from the other direction, to make the connections. We need to include in our peace parade those who reject the militarization of schools, of police, or borders, and of entertainment. Those who care about the earth&#8217;s climate must not sit by while the single greatest contributors to climate change are paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue. Those who care about investment in human needs will metaphorically shoot themselves in the foot if they fail to oppose the glorification of wasting trillions of dollars on weaponry. Those who want safety need to earn it by demonstrating to the world that people in the United States do not agree with the policy of bombing foreign countries.</p> <p>So,&amp;#160; <a href="" type="internal">go sign up here</a>, and invite people and organizations to do so too. And if we help prevent the Trumparade from happening, our celebration will go forward &#8212; even bigger and better!</p> <p>Can Madness Be Cured By Marching?</p> <p>&#8220;Madness in individuals is something rare; &#8232;but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.&#8221; &#8211;Friedrich Nietzsche</p> <p>The two marches planned for March and for November are the same march when seen from the perspective of a national psychiatrist. The racism, militarism, and extreme materialism they address are a single disease.</p> <p>The U.S. has had mass shootings on military bases full of people with guns. The U.S. has filled its schools with armed guards, who have not prevented a single shooting but have criminalized children&#8217;s behavior. Proposing to put more guns into schools is not a sane proposal.</p> <p>Other nations have banned guns, or banned the worst guns, and seen dramatic decreases in mass shootings. Throwing up one&#8217;s hands and exclaiming that nothing can be done is not the action of a population or sub-population that is thinking straight.</p> <p>The U.S. puts almost as much money into war weaponry as the rest of the world combined, with much of the rest of the world buying U.S. weaponry pushed on it by a U.S. State Department turned into a weapons dealer. The result is anti-U.S. hostility at levels other nations can&#8217;t imagine going to such expense and effort to generate. Celebrating the weapons that endanger and impoverish is a form of sickness.</p> <p>Each war kills large numbers of innocent people, disproportionately the very old and the very young. Each day, the vast majority of the people killed with U.S. weapons are outside the United States. Each war leaves a new area of the world devastated, more violent, and a greater threat to others.</p> <p>When you&#8217;re in a hole, the first step is not to use explosives to dig faster.</p> <p>There are some things, said Dr. King, to which we should insist on remaining maladjusted.</p> <p>In a time of universal deceit, said George Orwell, telling the truth becomes an act of rebellion.</p> <p>Can a large group of thoughtful, committed citizens change the world? Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.</p>

Can You Give Two Days to Stop the Slaughter?

https://counterpunch.org/2018/02/26/can-you-give-two-days-to-stop-the-slaughter/

2018-02-26

<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p> <p /> <p>Returning to the finale of the Class 1A-4A season with a chance to win it all again is all the Lady Horsemen want this time around, especially since eight members of last year's team graduated.</p> <p>"I'm really hoping that we can come together and these girls get confidence with the minutes that they get," said coach Robyn Serge. "It's basically having a brand new team and not a lot of game experience."</p> <p>Despite the losses, St. Mike's is expected to be one of the premier girls teams in the north this season.</p> <p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> <p>Likewise, Los Alamos, despite losing first-year coach A.J. Herrera to his alma mater, St. Pius, and several keys players to graduation, should be a contender again in 5A.</p> <p>Gary Ahlers takes the reins after spending a number of years with the program coaching at the junior varsity level.</p> <p>"This gives me the opportunity to give it my own little twist," Ahlers said. "Everybody has an idea of how soccer should be played. It's a pretty simple game, really, but everybody has their own ideas about it. Coaches usually make it more difficult."</p> <p>This season, however, the Hilltoppers might finally see a little challenge in their own district as Capital's steps toward improvement are beginning to pay off on the field.</p> <p>The Jaguars return virtually their entire squad from a year ago, led by Reyna Martinez and Sabrina Nottke</p> <p>The area's other top team from last season, Robertson, is facing the challenge of replacing most of its roster, including its coach as J.T. Houdek take over.</p> <p>"We have pretty much a brand new team," he said. "Ten of our players are not returning and 60 percent are eighth-graders or ninth-graders."</p> <p>That means the Cardinals will be at something of a size and experience disadvantage, at least initially.</p> <p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> <p>"We're looking for good things to come," Houdek said. "We'll get better every week as the girls see the speed at the varsity level."</p> <p>One of the keys to a strong season is taking on all comers, and St. Michael's certainly is doing that with a pre-district schedule designed to challenge and harden the squad.</p> <p>Luckily for the Lady Horsemen, their top two scorers in juniors Nique Enloe and Monse Camarena are back lighting up the net again. Enloe has actually led the class in goals the past two seasons.</p> <p>"I had some serious spots to fill," Serge said. "We're not as big and strong as we have been, but we're fast and fit. With what we have, I think it's going to work."</p> <p>Fellow junior Maggie Cain will bring additional experience to the midfield.</p> <p>The Hilltoppers recently tussled with two-time defending state champs St. Pius, losing just 2-0, which gives Ahlers some optimism for the season.</p> <p>"To me that's a win because they've really been beating up on people," he said. "We got some good shots off. We did a few good things. It's a good indication of what we all need to work on."</p> <p>The coach's daughter, Sierra Ahlers, will be counted on to take on the scoring load and captains Emily Hopkins at center midfield and defender Jordan Hanson will control the field.</p> <p>Junior midfielder Victoria Valdez is one of the few returning Cardinals with experience, but the squad is getting solid production from the younger sisters of five-time state wrestling champion Rico Montoya: freshman Gabriella Montoya and eighth-grader Maricela Montoya.</p> <p>Gabriella, in particular, has a lot of "energy and leads by example on the field," Houdek said. "There's a vein in the family that you work hard. They put in everything they've got."</p> <p>Taos, behind cross country champ Cora Cannedy, and Monte del Sol, behind sophomore Jaqueline Galaviz, should both be improved and challenging for playoff spots as well.</p> <p />

Top teams from last year contend with bringing many new players up to speed

https://abqjournal.com/639014/time-to-reload.html

<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p> <p>SIERRA VISTA, Ariz. (AP) &#8212; Federal wildlife officials will listen to comments from the public on a proposal to set aside more than 1,300 square miles in Arizona and New Mexico for the endangered jaguar.</p> <p>The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is holding a meeting in Sierra Vista, Ariz., this afternoon.</p> <p>The Arizona Game and Fish Department wants the proposed critical habitat designation withdrawn. It says land in Arizona and New Mexico isn&#8217;t essential to the rare cat&#8217;s survival because nearly all its historic range is in central and South America. The agency also says setting aside habitat would likely result in the public being denied access to lands and fewer jaguar sightings.</p> <p>The rare cat was placed on the federal endangered species list in 1997 and the habitat designation was proposed in August.</p> <p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>

Ariz. hearing today on jaguar habitat

https://abqjournal.com/227737/ariz-hearing-today-on-jaguar-habitat.html

<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p> <p /> <p>A photo taken Dec. 1 in a southern Arizona mountain range appears to show a new wild jaguar &#8212; an animal rarely seen in the country after its habitat was lost.</p> <p>The Arizona Game and Fish Department says a preliminary analysis suggests the cat is new to the area and not &#8220;El Jefe,&#8221; a jaguar that was captured on video in a nearby mountain range last year.</p> <p>Until now, El Jefe was believed to be the only jaguar in the U.S., although he hasn&#8217;t been seen in over a year.</p> <p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> <p>The jaguar in question was seen on a camera belonging to Fort Huachuca, the Army installation about 75 miles southeast of Tucson. The military shared the photo with wildlife officials including Game and Fish and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.</p> <p>Mark Hart, a spokesman for the Arizona Game and Fish Department, said jaguars migrate from Mexico to southern Arizona about every five to 10 years but that a female jaguar hasn&#8217;t been spotted in the U.S. since the 1940s.</p> <p>&#8220;So the quality of life isn&#8217;t here for the jaguar,&#8221; Hart said.</p> <p>But Arizona, New Mexico and other parts of the Southwest were home to jaguars before habitat loss and predator control programs aimed at protecting livestock eliminated them over the last 150 years. A hunter shot and killed the last verified female jaguar in the U.S. in 1963 in northern Arizona.</p> <p>&#8220;It&#8217;s so exciting that in the last 30 years or so, five or six males have shown up in the U.S. and are starting to re-establish themselves in the historical range,&#8221; said Rob Peters, a biologist with Defenders of Wildlife who is based in Tucson. Peters says that although there haven&#8217;t been any female jaguars here, the fact that males are establishing habitats is a good sign that they could come in the future.</p> <p>It could be days before experts determine whether the jaguar seen in a Dec. 1 photo is new.</p> <p>Hart says analysts will study the jaguar&#8217;s rosettes, or the spots within the spots on the cat&#8217;s fur, to figure out if it&#8217;s been seen before.</p> <p>Peters says his organization is anxiously awaiting a report by the federal government that is expected to outline a jaguar recovery plan for the area.</p> <p>&#8220;They were once found in Arizona as far north as the Grand Canyon. There were females and cubs in the Southwest,&#8221; Peters said.</p> <p>But protecting the big cats has been fraught with legal challenges.</p> <p>In March 2014, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service set aside nearly 1,200 square miles along the U.S.-Mexico border as habitat essential for the conservation of the jaguar. The New Mexico Farm and Livestock Bureau, New Mexico Cattle Growers&#8217; Association and New Mexico Federal Lands Council filed a lawsuit nearly a year later, saying the decision was &#8220;unlawful, arbitrary and capricious&#8221; action by federal authorities. That lawsuit is ongoing.</p> <p>Only El Jefe has made numerous appearances in the U.S. in several years. He first popped up in the Whetstone Mountains in 2011 when he was about 3 years old and showed up again in video in the Santa Rita Mountains south of Tucson around September 2015.</p>

Wildlife officials: Video captures possible 2nd jaguar in US

https://abqjournal.com/904350/wildlife-officials-video-captures-possible-2nd-jaguar-in-us.html

2016-12-07

<p>"Thug" is clearly a loaded word.</p> <p>It's surfaced a lot in recent months, usually surrounding&amp;#160;protests against the deaths of young black men in various American cities. And&amp;#160;it's&amp;#160;back in the news this&amp;#160;week&amp;#160;as rioters in Baltimore&amp;#160;were tagged as "thugs."&amp;#160;Even the city's mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, used the term,&amp;#160;though <a href="http://www.mediaite.com/tv/baltimore-mayor-apologizes-for-use-of-the-word-thug/" type="external">she softened her comments</a> on Wednesday.</p> <p>So it may be a surprise that the word originates far away, in India.</p> <p>"As far as I can tell, thug goes back to the 14th century," says Megan Garber, who traced the word's&amp;#160;origin for <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/04/thug/391682/" type="external">a story</a>&amp;#160;in The Atlantic. "There was a gang of criminals known as the thuggee."</p> <p>Garber says the Thugs were a huge&amp;#160;criminal network that operated&amp;#160;all around India's main roads. "They would basically befriend travelers along the roads, gain the travelers' trust," she says. "And then they would murder them, usually by strangulation, and steal their valuables. It was all very violent."</p> <p>Mark Twain was one of the first Americans to report on the group:&amp;#160;Observations about the Thugs appeared in his book, "Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World."&amp;#160;Published in 1897, the book started the&amp;#160;steady rise of "thug" in popularity and usage in American English.</p> <p /> <p>In the United Kindgom,&amp;#160;the Thugs were much better known, thanks to British colonial rule of India</p> <p /> <p>Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher used the word decades ago with relative frequency. "Thugs" were everyone from unruly soccer fans to people involved in&amp;#160;race riots.</p> <p>Garber says the word&amp;#160;thug actually&amp;#160;rebounded in American&amp;#160;popular culture, thanks in part to "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom." "There was a plotline that involved kidnapping by way of thugs," she says. "A&amp;#160;lot of Indian Americans actually protested the portrayal of the thugs in that movie, but that sort of brought it back into the cultural presence again."</p> <p>Then hip-hop took the word:&amp;#160;Tupac had it tattooed onto his body, and&amp;#160;Cleveland's&amp;#160;Bone Thugs-N-Harmony sent the word into cars and living rooms across the country.&amp;#160;</p> <p>In this conception of the word, Garber writes,&amp;#160;thugs "are both victims and agents of injustice. They are both the products and producers of violence, and mayhem, and outrage."</p> <p>She's also been listening to how people have been using the word in the Baltimore riots.&amp;#160;"It's this very effective way of suggesting that the people who are&amp;#160;doing the rioting and who are being called thugs don't actually have a right to their outrage," she says.</p> <p /> <p>That's partly why there's widespread&amp;#160;disgust in the African American community over its use. Just take this response Baltimore Councilman Carl Stokes&amp;#160;gave to CNN's&amp;#160;Erin Burnett over the word:</p> <p /> <p /> <p>But Garber isn't surprised the word has become so loaded.</p> <p>"In some sense, the history of language is about people trying to wield power over other people," she says. "And so this is just one more example of that strife and that effort."</p> <p>The World in Words podcast is on&amp;#160; <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-World-in-Words/113141975417106" type="external">Facebook</a>&amp;#160;and&amp;#160; <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/pris-world-world-in-words/id279833390?mt=2" type="external">iTunes</a>.</p>

The word 'thug' has a surprising origin

https://pri.org/stories/2015-04-29/word-thug-has-surprising-origin

2015-04-29

<p>Istanbul.</p> <p>We ended <a href="" type="internal">Part I</a>with two questions. How did Islamists gain a voice in Secularist media outlets, supportive of secularist business, in Turkey? What position do foreign media corporations take toward Islamists? We wish to clarify that in the context of our discussion &#8216;Islamist&#8217; does not mean radical Islam or Jihadism per se. Rather, Islamism, as we use it here in relation to Turkey, employs Islam primarily as a reference to a strongly held &#8220;national myth&#8221;, a mystical &#8216;reason to believe&#8217; for &#8220;greatness&#8221;, as well as a resilient propaganda leverage that undermines the old order Secularist worldview in Turkey. In this sense, Islamism appears to be a forceful and legitimate political movement within the boundaries of the parliamentary regime. It thus appears to be the new glue, uniting &#8220;the nation&#8221; within a renewed self-confidence and spirituality. If we put it in Gramscian terms, it is the new myth and ideology associated with the rising &#8220;historical bloc&#8221; which aims to create &#8220;the nation&#8221; after its own image. We sense Islam is used in a similar vein as Christianity in the U.S. as a fa&#231;ade for the patriotic worldview of team Trump, hence our parallel with the U.S. If Turkey is a Little America, then America is a Big Turkey.</p> <p>Instead of using The Apprentice TV series and Twitter as Mr. Trump to re-create the &#8216;national establishment&#8217;, Mr. Erdo&#287;an used the network of Fetullah G&#252;len, an exiled Islamic cleric now residing in the U.S. in Pennsylvania. G&#252;len was funded&#8212;although we&#8217;re not exactly sure by whom but can guess&#8212;to establish a newspaper and network of educational institutions to promote a so-called &#8220;more democratic&#8221; Turkey. From the outset this served the vested interests of AKP and helped their rise to power against old order Secularists.</p> <p>Zaman newspaper as the voice of G&#252;lenists representing the so-called moderate Islamists&#8212;from its modest beginnings in the mid-1990s&#8212;was gradually transformed into a most prestigious news outlet. Zaman won international design awards. Some independent intellectuals willingly wrote for the paper, making it credible in the public eye. By the late-2000s, sales began to rival those of secular media outlets. Meanwhile secular media tycoon Ayd&#305;n Do&#287;an of Do&#287;an Holding (sometimes dubbed as the Turkish Rupert Murdoch) saw sales fall at his media outlets.</p> <p>Mr. Erdo&#287;an repeatedly attacked Mr. Do&#287;an publicly and in the press, likening him to the gangster Al Capone. In response Do&#287;an attacked Mr. Erdo&#287;an in his Secularist press. He did so when Mr. Erdo&#287;an rejected his offer to buy stakes in an Anatolian oil pipeline. In short, the Secularist national establishment was being blocked from partaking in lucrative business deals by the Islamists.</p> <p>The Turkish media wars evolved into a space of motley, hostile voices. Since Islamists were subject to an overabundance of &#8216;flak&#8217; in secular media outlets Islamists fought to take control over a larger swath of Secularist media. In an early morning raid in 2007, the Secularist ATV television channel and parent company Sabah newspaper were forcibly taken over, put up for tender and sold to an Islamist business. Former employees were fired and replaced with Islamist ones. To justify the takeover in the public eye, Islamists charged the Secularists with tax evasion, widely slandering them in their media.</p> <p>For years now, we&#8217;ve witnessed the media war between Secularists and Islamists, sometimes on our screens and sometimes on our streets. Secularists had no choice but to emulate Mr. Erdo&#287;an&#8217;s &#8216;strong hand&#8217; style to convince their Secuarlist electorate they were capable of fighting back. Secularist business leaders pleaded with the AKP to tone down their harsh rhetoric, claiming democracy was at stake. But Mr. Erdo&#287;an has never backed down and never apologized for insults inflicted on the media, women, opposition parties, secular intellectuals, academics, students, unionists, lawyers, artists, musicians, the list is long indeed. In fact, Mr. Erdo&#287;an keeps right on going, just like Mr. Trump.</p> <p>All was well within the rising historical bloc until Mr. Erdo&#287;an clashed with G&#252;len causing a disharmony of interest within the Islamist team itself in late 2013. Now, not only the lingering Secularist-Islamist feud but also an Erdoganist-G&#252;lenist battle over conflicting business interests kept busy the political agenda of &#8220;the nation.&#8221; Due to years of endowing G&#252;lenist networks with a free hand, infiltration of their members into schools, government offices, the police and army&#8212;to name but a few institutions&#8212;was widespread. Once the fight within Islamism set in, G&#252;lenists saw arrests and takeovers of their businesses. Zaman was silenced.</p> <p>It is instructive to add that by no means are G&#252;lenists an authentic democratic actor, as this evidently surfaced in the July 15, 2016 coup attempt. And so it is with HDP (Peoples&#8217; Democratic Party), who pushed an alleged democratic agenda, also flawed for its opportunism. Founded following the 2013 Gezi Revolt, this party pilfered the unity of authentic protest voices at Gezi against the feud, only to end up supporting minority Kurdish issues over democratic issues for the majority. HDP didn&#8217;t keep their promise.</p> <p>Meanwhile Secularists kept warning what they viewed as undemocratic and highly dangerous sectarianism unfolding in Turkey. The Cumhuriyet newspaper&#8212;founded in 1924 under Atat&#252;rk that remained the most respected paper&#8212;came to be the center of a wider democratic opposition against the government of Mr. Erdo&#287;an and published accusations over AKP&#8217;s alleged involvement in the Syrian war. Cumhuriyet journalists were accused of being traitors and terrorists. In short, the &#8216;strong hand&#8217; silenced the Cumhuriyet, too.</p> <p>Then the 15 July, 2016 coup attempt and threat on Mr. Erdo&#287;an&#8217;s life happened, striking fear and loathing in the nation. The threat was real for all, including Secularists. Erdo&#287;anists swiftly purged G&#252;lenists from the state institutions through mass arrests by the thousands. The leader of the opposition party (CHP) Kemal K&#305;l&#305;&#231;daro&#287;lu&#8217;s convoy was shot at a month later, proving to Secularists that it is better to maintain their silence. Put it this way, since these horrific events last summer the media has now become a de facto &#8216;one-voice&#8217; &#8220;soft power,&#8221; promoting almost solely vested interests of Islamists.</p> <p>When it comes to international media corporations&#8217; co-ventures or take-overs of Turkish outlets, CEO&#8217;s place their bet on the best thoroughbred. They don&#8217;t care how the horse was raised. Indirectly, Fox News in Turkey furthers the views of Mr. Trump&#8217;s neo-conservative patriotic team while CNNT&#252;rk&#8212;once able to further the views of the neoliberal globalists&#8212;is now under the careful watch of Mr. Erdo&#287;an. The U.S. media war only adds salt to the open wounds of the Turkish media wars, which are now, pretty much over for us.</p> <p>It is clear to us why Mr. Trump is so against the CNN/Time Warner merger. This merger would strengthen the Democratic team corporate mouthpiece against Mr. Trump and harm his legitimacy in the public. This merger is definitely not in the Trump camps&#8217; best business interest. Fox News, owned by the Murdoch volk, is a supportive voice for Mr. Trump. Little surprise Warren Buffet bet on Clinton; that George Soros called Mr. Trump an &#8216;imposter&#8217; and Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim, all slandered Mr. Trump. These gods of finance capital don&#8217;t wish to lose their lucrative business networks of profit. As pointed out in Part I, we see conflicts in business surface daily, like Amazon and Expedia joining the Washington lawsuit against Trump; one example of many yet to come.</p> <p>What will be crucial for Mr. Trump&#8212;as it was for Mr. Erdo&#287;an in his early days&#8212;is that he delivers on promises because opposition media will constantly seek to undermine his efforts. Media pundits bash Mr. Trump with &#8216;infotainment&#8217; a term we borrow from Robert McChesney. Actually all mainstream media is &#8216;infotainment&#8217; now. Journalists with near celebrity status don&#8217;t really report news but engage in gossip-like sessions on whatever subject, including Mr. Trump, hence his lashing out at them.</p> <p>Recall the Propaganda Model and how The New York Times sets the agenda. Mr. Trump Tweeted: &#8216;I am happy to hear how badly the @nytimes is doing. It is a seriously failing paper with readership which is way down. Becoming irrelevant!&#8217; Recall Mr. Trump&#8217;s comment to the CIA &#8216;journalists are the most dishonest people in the world&#8217;. But his journalists are no less dishonest! Chief strategist Steve Bannon astutely declared &#8216;the media is the opposition&#8217; and should &#8216;shut up&#8217;. In Turkey we&#8217;ve heard similar statements time and again. Like here, journalists in the U.S. will likely be blacklisted, sacked, shot at, even jailed. While we could list countless similarities between the Turkish and U.S. predicament, for sake of brevity, we highlight the most prominent ones.</p> <p>Women are used in the feud. Despite a powerful force for progressive change, women are polarized into teams. In Turkey&#8217;s case women&#8217;s dress (headgear) was amplified in the media wars. Post 2002, there&#8217;s been an exponential increase in violence against women here. Women were told not to laugh. Women were told they should rear three children. Abortions, performed with ease here, came under fire. In the U.S. Planned Parenthood is on the chopping block. How very odd to see mainstream media outlets like CNN international provide such liberal coverage of the Women&#8217;s March on Washington, inclusive of CNN&#8217;s Van Jones partaking in and speaking at the march. No wonder Mr. Trump tweeted &#8216;bad use of celebs&#8217; (Scarlett Johansson, Gloria Steinem, Alicia Keyes, Natalie Portman, Madonna, among others) directed at the Clinton team. Team Trump uses Pro-Life women as a counter attack.</p> <p>Then there is Mr. Trump&#8217;s extreme vetting directed at Muslims. The issue promises to be a hit in the media wars to inflate polarization, witnessed in the airport protests. The war on terror, established under the Bush administration and continued under Obama, is &#8216;business-as-usual&#8217; under Mr. Trump. Peaceful, democratic organizers are accused of being terrorists, as was Linda Sarsour, the Palestinian activist involved in organizing the Women&#8217;s March on Washington.</p> <p>Then there&#8217;s voter fraud. While mainstream media is baffled why Mr. Trump is obsessed with voter numbers and turn out at his inauguration, we know why numbers matter! We lived this too when Secularists accused Islamists of inflating numbers at mass rallies by duplicating participants in Photoshop. In actuality, masses were bused in by the AKP, as visual evidence of their majority vote. Mr. Trump alluded to &#8216;Crooked Hillary&#8217; on the campaign trail and does so to challenge corporations siding with the Hillary team, just as Islamists did to Secularists. Key figures from corporations, even political office, will end up in court when Mr. Trump exercises the &#8216;rule of law&#8217; to forcibly seize corporations, bank accounts and property from the opposing team.</p> <p>Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Erdo&#287;an are masters at &#8216;othering&#8217;. Mr. Erdo&#287;an repeatedly stated that since Atat&#252;rk, no political party had done anything for the people. Mr. Trump made the same claim at his inauguration, blaming all former presidents and the political establishment for doing nothing for the American people, apart from leaving the nation in &#8216;carnage&#8217;. Incredible. This is d&#233;j&#224; vu for us.</p> <p>Religious discourse gradually seeped into everyday life in Turkey, where it wasn&#8217;t so under the Secularists, prior to AKP. Everything from bridge, road and tunnel openings, to speeches in parliament or at universities, Mr. Erdo&#287;an uses the chance to make references to Islam. At first this looked like an attempt to unite the country as Muslims but in fact it was (and still is) Mr. Erdo&#287;an&#8217;s vision for Turkey&#8217;s future, a future where youth value their religion first. While Mr. Trump may not be an overtly religious man, we cannot say the same for U.S. neo-conservatives. We predict religious rhetoric will by far surpass &#8216;may god bless America&#8217;. Ceremonies and rituals fortified with religious and militaristic fervor&#8212;to what Veblen referred so often in his writings&#8212;will be the renewed &#8216;statecraft&#8217; of the twenty-first century.</p> <p>And finally, siding with the workers. Secularists and Islamists, as with Mr. Trump&#8217;s rhetoric, pilfer from the left and convert to the right. Jobs may be promised but as Mr. Trump signed executive orders for the pipeline go ahead, another order was signed simultaneously to remove regulations. This is our Turkish experience also. We saw a splitting of Turkish unions on Islamist and Secularist lines to divide the working class. When British American Tobacco (BAT) bought TEKEL&#8212;Turkey&#8217;s near one hundred year state-owned tobacco company&#8212;they swiftly shut TEKEL down leaving thousands unemployed across the nation. When workers formed a tent city, resisting for over 72 days in Ankara in 2009, they faced severe police brutality. Mr. Erdo&#287;an called them traitors, terrorists. For us, there can be no doubt workers in America will be in for a rough ride. With no regulation, accidents can and will happen, as was the case with the Turkish Soma coal mining disaster in 2014, killing 301 miners after a mine explosion. AKP&#8217;s position over the disaster was simply that such accidents are the fate of coal miners.</p> <p>In sum, to answer our questions at the outset of this article, Secularist media was either forcibly taken over or completely silenced by Islamists, with the 15 July, 2016 coup attempt ensuring this silence. International media corporations collaborate in this enterprise. Our days of fervent struggle here have drawn to a close. One issue remains, voting on a new constitution in a referendum most probably in April.</p> <p>In the mid-2000s when one picked up a newspaper or flicked TV channels s/he could read or listen to vastly different news. Today, a few marginalized papers voice an opinion but have no sway over the masses. In the heyday of our Turkish media wars newspapers, and mainstream TV channels, were meretricious in their selective coverage, like in the U.S. today. Veblen knew this very well. For him it was &#8216;business-as-usual&#8217; in how people are told what they &#8216;like to believe&#8217;. He said:</p> <p>&#8220;The first duty of an editor is to gauge the sentiments of his readers, and then tell them what they like to believe. By this means he maintains or increases the circulation. His second duty is to see that nothing is said in the news items or editorials which may discountenance any claims or announcements made by his advertisers, discredit their standing or good faith, or expose any weakness or deception in any business venture that is or may become a valuable advertiser. By this means he increases the advertising value of his circulation. The net result is that both the news columns and the editorial columns are commonly meretricious in a high degree.&#8221; (Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Business Enterprise, 1904/2013, USA, Martino Publishing, p. 183).</p> <p>The meretricious nature of business through its representative mouthpiece media must be in harmony for the dominant class to rule, for if a &#8216;disharmony of interests&#8217; takes hold, the national establishment will be in shatters and the underlying population in disarray. This is the crisis of the state, the crisis of hegemony.</p> <p>So let&#8217;s finish. Hey &#8216;masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore&#8217; its time to rise against business feuds to build an autonomous media space and perhaps a society of autonomous individuals outside the horizon of the leisure class. If not, we&#8217;ll merely be spectators watching an endless fight for those who always want the whole cake. And it&#8217;s never certain who among them will win. Like Veblen knew so well, business is sportsmanship&#8212;like two opponents competing to outdo the other on a golf course. Let&#8217;s face it; all this media drama is far more exciting than the drudgery of work, or a TV series for that matter, right? But beware. We have to remain sober. If we cannot create an autonomous democracy then we will just watch the game go on and then the danger is we lose our senses and fall into the game too! Autonomy will be postponed to another spring. All will be hegemony, real or desperately desired.</p> <p>Anita O&#287;urlu&amp;#160;holds a Ph.D. in Humanities &amp;amp; Cultural Studies from Birkbeck (University of London). She co-authored &#8220;The Laic-Islamist Schism in the Turkish Dominant Class and the Media&#8221; with Ahmet &#214;nc&#252; in&amp;#160; <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1782386386/counterpunchmaga" type="external">The Neoliberal Landscape and the Rise of Islamist Capital in Turkey</a>, edited by Ne&#351;ecan Balkan, Erol Balkan and Ahmet &#214;nc&#252; (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015). O&#287;urlu has done extensive research on economy and culture in interwar period Germany, Britain, France and Turkey vis-&#224;-vis a specific focus on autobiographical authors from that period. Email:&amp;#160; <a href="mailto:ogurlu14@gmail.com" type="external">ogurlu14@gmail.com</a>&amp;#160;</p> <p>Ahmet &#214;nc&#252;&amp;#160;is Professor of Sociology in the School of Management at Sabanc&#305; University in Istanbul. Most recently he co-edited&amp;#160; <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/3981484274/counterpunchmaga" type="external">Absentee Ownership and its Discontents: Critical Essays on the Legacy of Thorstein Veblen</a>&amp;#160;with Michael Hudson (ISLET, 2016); and&amp;#160; <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1782386386/counterpunchmaga" type="external">The Neoliberal Landscape and the Rise of Islamist Capital in Turkey</a>&amp;#160;with Ne&#351;ecan Balkan and Erol Balkan (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015). In the aftermath of the Gezi Revolt he reinterpreted capitalist modernization in Turkey and its contradictions in &#8220;Turkish Capitalist Modernity and the Gezi Revolt&#8221; (Journal of Historical Sociology 27:2:151-176, 2014). Email:&amp;#160; <a href="mailto:aoncu@sabanciuniv.edu" type="external">aoncu@sabanciuniv.edu</a></p> <p>&amp;#160;</p>

How to Read Trump’s War Against the Media: Reflections from the Media Wars in Turkey (Part II)

https://counterpunch.org/2017/02/03/how-to-read-trumps-war-against-the-media-reflections-from-the-media-wars-in-turkey-part-ii/

2017-02-03

<p>Entry from Shock and Awe, Anna Tsing and Jennifer Gonzalez (eds), New Pacific Press, Santa Cruz, CA, to be published in Fall 2004</p> <p>In the spring of 2003 U.S. war planners and their claque in the licensed media were predicting a swift victory in Iraq. The &#8216;revolution in military affairs&#8217; would produce a collapse of resistance by means of &#8220;shock and awe&#8221;, a euphemism (with religious overtones) for old-fashioned blitzkrieg. It was not mentioned that Mesopotamia had long been a proving ground for colonial violence from the air; in 1920 Winston Churchill authorized the use of chemical weapons by the RAF &#8220;against recalcitrant Arabs&#8221;: &#8220;I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes [to] spread a lively terror&#8221;.</p> <p>In the spring of 2004 the imperial psyche, as the critic Walter Davis observed in Counterpunch, found in Mel Gibson its poet and in Abu Graib its savage feast. In a text by Raphael Patai entitled The Arab Mind it apparently found its catechism. Originally published in the early seventies, though actually belonging to an earlier, second World War, genre of &#8220;national character&#8221; studies and anthropology-at-a-distance, Edward Said had cited it as the very epitome of crude orientalism. It was reprinted in time for the invasion and became, according to Seymour Hersh, &#8220;the bible of the neo-cons in Arab behavior&#8221;, as well as a war college handbook on humiliation&#8211;in particular the chapter on &#8220;sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression&#8221;, where we are informed inter alia of &#8220;the Arab view that masturbation is far more shameful that visiting prostitutes&#8221;. In the foreword to the 2002 reprint, a Colonel De Atkine writes. &#8220;At the institution where I teach military officers, The Arab Mind forms the basis of my cultural instruction.&#8221;</p> <p>Hersh&#8217;s report helped to explain the source of so much talk of Muslim shame and sexuality, suddenly everywhere on the lips of think-tank pundits and retired generals. Now it is clear why Arabs&#8211;unlike, say, Anglo-Saxons&#8211;find being stripped naked in front of attack dogs and grinning torturers especially disturbing and shameful. Muslims, we must understand, inhabit shame-cultures, shame being more primitive than guilt, which is Judeo-Christian, enlighened, modern. And, of course, we already have it on Erik Erikson&#8217;s authority that, psychologically, guilt is a more &#8220;advanced&#8221; emotion than shame. Hardly surprising, then, that this warmed-over orientalism was coupled, in White House discussions, with vulgar racist projection&#8211;&#8220;Arabs only understand force&#8221;. Fanon understood this move and where it might lead those &#8220;of whom [the occupiers] have never stopped saying that the only language they understand is that of forceSThe argument the native chooses has been furnished by the settler.&#8221;</p> <p>Torture chambers and safehouses litter the hinterland of the base world of the American empire. The names Abu Graib and Guantanamo now stand for a gulag that encompasses the planet. Still, it should be remembered that one quarter of all the world&#8217;s prisoners are inside the United States, and they also know plenty about humiliation, sexual and otherwise. Shame.</p> <p>IAIN A. BOAL, an Irish social historian of science and technics, teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:iboal@socrates.Berkeley.EDU" type="external">iboal@socrates.Berkeley.EDU</a></p>

On "Shame"

https://counterpunch.org/2004/08/07/on-quot-shame-quot/

2004-08-07

<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p> <p /> <p>New York City plans to issue stun guns to hundreds more officers. The Milwaukee department is making crisis-intervention training mandatory. And in Akron, Ohio, police have begun working in pairs on all shifts for their own safety.</p> <p>Police departments are constantly updating training. But some of the more recent measures have been prompted by rising anger toward police. And in some cases, departments are making sure to let the public know about these changes.</p> <p>&#8220;It&#8217;s not a mistake or a coincidence that a lot of these departments are publicizing their training or are perhaps revamping their training guidelines and things like that in the wake of these really high-profile incidents,&#8221; said Kami Chavis Simmons, director of the criminal justice program at the Wake Forest University School of Law in North Carolina and a former federal prosecutor in Washington.</p> <p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> <p>Protests, largely peaceful, have flared across the country after grand juries in recent weeks declined to indict white officers in the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and the chokehold death of Eric Garner in New York City. Both men were black and unarmed.</p> <p>Lorie Fridell, a criminology professor at the University of South Florida who operates a police training business, said she has received nearly two requests a day from chiefs since protests erupted over the August shooting in Ferguson.</p> <p>&#8220;There&#8217;s a lot of well-meaning chiefs out there who want to do the right thing and they are looking for ways that they can address not just use-of-force issues but bias issues,&#8221; she said.</p> <p>Two recent police shootings in Ohio started with reports of people with guns: the killing last month of a 12-year-old boy carrying a pellet gun in Cleveland and the death last summer of a 22-year-old man holding an air rifle in a Wal-Mart in suburban Dayton.</p> <p>In both cases, the officers said they thought the victims had real guns. The officer who shot the 12-year-old resigned from a suburban Cleveland police force in 2012 after his supervisors decided he lacked the maturity to work in their department.</p> <p>Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine responded by asking the state&#8217;s police training commission last week to study possible updates in the way officers learn their jobs. &#8220;Every police officer who goes out every day has the right to come home at night,&#8221; DeWine said. &#8220;On the other hand, citizens of the state of Ohio have the right to expect that police officers are correctly trained and vetted before they&#8217;re put out on the street.&#8221;</p> <p>Several police forces were updating their practices even before the Ferguson and New York deaths, with some departments issuing body cameras to officers.</p> <p>After Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey arrived in 2008, for example, the department began placing police shooting statistics on the Web for the sake of openness and started a pilot program involving body cameras.</p> <p /> <p />

Police alter tactics after protests

https://abqjournal.com/513119/police-alter-tactics-after-protests.html

<p>COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) &#8212; Ohio&#8217;s hourly minimum wage is about to rise again, with the rate going up by 15 cents an hour Monday from $8.15 to $8.30.</p> <p>Workers who receive tips will get a wage increase from $4.08 an hour to $4.15.</p> <p>Policy Matters Ohio, a liberal leaning think tank, estimates 150,000 Ohio workers will benefit from the increase. The organization also says nearly 500,000 workers earning slightly more than the minimum wage could also receive boosts in 2018 as employers adjust their pay rates.</p> <p>A Policy Matters Ohio researcher tells Cleveland.com that the wage hikes will help boost the state&#8217;s economy.</p> <p>Ohio is one of 18 states raising the minimum wage in 2018. The federal wage rate of $7.25 an hour will remain in effect next year.</p> <p>___</p> <p>Information from: cleveland.com, <a href="http://www.cleveland.com" type="external" /> <a href="http://www.cleveland.com" type="external">http://www.cleveland.com</a></p> <p>COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) &#8212; Ohio&#8217;s hourly minimum wage is about to rise again, with the rate going up by 15 cents an hour Monday from $8.15 to $8.30.</p> <p>Workers who receive tips will get a wage increase from $4.08 an hour to $4.15.</p> <p>Policy Matters Ohio, a liberal leaning think tank, estimates 150,000 Ohio workers will benefit from the increase. The organization also says nearly 500,000 workers earning slightly more than the minimum wage could also receive boosts in 2018 as employers adjust their pay rates.</p> <p>A Policy Matters Ohio researcher tells Cleveland.com that the wage hikes will help boost the state&#8217;s economy.</p> <p>Ohio is one of 18 states raising the minimum wage in 2018. The federal wage rate of $7.25 an hour will remain in effect next year.</p> <p>___</p> <p>Information from: cleveland.com, <a href="http://www.cleveland.com" type="external" /> <a href="http://www.cleveland.com" type="external">http://www.cleveland.com</a></p>

Ohio minimum wage set to rise by 15 cents an hour in 2018

https://apnews.com/fc0f3f79bddf4a259bb9b1a31cfb70ad

2017-12-31

<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p> <p>American University players warm up during a practice session for their NCAA college basketball tournament game Wednesday, March 19, 2014, in Milwaukee. American plays Wisconsin in round two on Thursday. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)</p> <p>LOS ANGELES - Every year, the NCAA college basketball tournament gives employees a reason to goof off at their desks and root for their alma maters.</p> <p>But there's a growing source of potential headaches for bosses. Media companies like hosts CBS Corp. and Time Warner Inc.?s Turner are doing all they can to promote so-called TV Everywhere services, which add value to cable and satellite TV packages by allowing subscribers to watch live TV on smartphones and tablets while on the go - and on the job.</p> <p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> <p>Although people have long been able to stream games live over the Internet, employers have always had the option to block content to keep productivity high. That's harder to do when workers are bringing their own devices and using their cellphone data plans to engage in March Madness.</p> <p>Turner Broadcasting senior vice president Jeremy Legg says the tournament, which kicks off in earnest on Thursday, is "one of the most significant opportunities we have to promote TV Everywhere" - and stats show it's working.</p> <p>Last year, streamed video viewing of the first two weeks of the tournament more than tripled from the previous year to 14 million hours. The number of viewers using the NCAA March Madness Live mobile app more than doubled to 3.4 million.</p> <p>Jumping on the bandwagon, Dish Network Corp. started a new ad campaign Tuesday that touts how well its Hopper set-top box can help customers sneak in some game-watching at work. One of Dish's TV spots features the company's stuffed kangaroo mascot, who is streaming NCAA basketball to a tablet while at the office. The marsupial tucks the device away when a manager walks by. "Hey boss, woo! I love working," says the kangaroo.</p> <p>Dish's chief marketing officer James Moorhead says it's up to companies to trust their employees to get work done, even if they spend time watching the games. Dish is encouraging its own employees to watch games on their mobile devices during breaks at work. And the company has bolstered its Wi-Fi network to accommodate the expected increase in streaming during the NCAA tournament.</p> <p>"Who better to evangelize this than Dish?" Moorhead says.</p> <p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> <p>Although the devices employees bring to work can present challenges for managers, productivity experts suggest that well-communicated company policies set the right tone for appropriate workplace activity.</p> <p>"There needs to be clearly defined ground rules," says Robert Hosking, executive director of job placement firm Office Team. Such rules include that deadlines can't be missed, and that real money betting isn't allowed.</p> <p>But office activities can be a good way of promoting good-natured competition and friendly interactions, he says. A poll the company released two weeks ago showed that 32 percent of the 300 managers found participating in March Madness at work boosted morale, up from 20 percent who thought so a year ago. About 62 percent thought it had no impact on either morale or productivity.</p> <p>Barrett Coleman, a 30-year-old accountant in Chicago, says his former employer's no-streaming policy had a subtle effect on his behavior.</p> <p>His employer, one of the big four accounting firms, blocked Internet streams of the tournament to avoid congestion on its network. But it also set up TVs for game viewing in conference and break rooms.</p> <p>The Texas native didn't technically break any rules when he followed his Longhorns using his mobile data plan to stream live video to the iPhone he kept propped up on his desk. Then again, he sensed that following the action so closely wasn't entirely approved of.</p> <p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> <p>"You don't really want to go to the break room and be standing there for a couple of hours," said Coleman, who now works at a major consulting firm. "I can see why watching the video might have sent the wrong message to the people below me."</p> <p>Chicago-based Trustwave Holdings Inc., a provider of Web filtering and security tools, says more information technology managers are taking a moderate approach by employing measures such as time limits to keep workers focused without dampening their enthusiasm.</p> <p>"Let's say you give everybody an hour," says Steve Kelley, Trustwave's vice president of product management. "They clearly state their policy so everybody knows what the situation is, and the employees act accordingly."</p> <p>For some companies, active March Madness participation on the job can definitely help.</p> <p>Denise Sawyer, a reporter at WBOC-TV in Salisbury, Md., says her station's $5-a-bracket pool not only brings employees from different departments together, it helps strengthen the news team's bond with viewers.</p> <p>"It does produce this intangible profit," she says. "People from our viewing audience love it."</p>

Mobile devices add allure to March Madness at work

https://abqjournal.com/371266/mobile-devices-add-allure-to-march-madness-at-work.html

<p>Researchers at at Pennsylvania State University recently confirmed the anti-cholesterol benefits of almonds. Regular intake of a handful of almonds increased levels of mature HDL or &#8220;good cholesterol&#8221; particles, which are associated with cardiovascular health, by 19 percent.</p> <p>According to a study published on Friday, August 11 in the Journal of Nutrition, almonds may not only increase blood levels of HDL (good cholesterol), but also boost the transport of bad blood cholesterol to the liver.</p> <p>Previous studies have already shown that the small oleaginous fruit &#8212; which is not a true nut &#8212; has the capacity to reduce blood levels of LDL (bad cholesterol), which is associated with increased cardiovascular risk.</p> <p>Over a period of six weeks, researchers at Pennsylvania State University monitored two groups of patients with high levels of bad cholesterol. The first group of patients consumed 43 grams of almonds per day, the equivalent of a generous handful, whereas the members of the second group were given a banana muffin.</p> <p>At the end of the end of each study period, the researchers measured the levels and &amp;#160;functioning of HDL cholesterol in each participant, and compared these results with blood counts established at the outset of the experiment.</p> <p>&#8220;HDL is very small when it gets released into circulation,&#8221; study author Dr Kris-Etherton said. &#8220;It&#8217;s like a garbage bag that slowly gets bigger and more spherical as it gathers cholesterol from cells and tissues before depositing them in the liver to be broken down.&#8221; On this journey, HDL particles grow bigger until they become mature.&amp;#160;</p> <p>The study highlighted a 19 percent increase in mature HDL particles in members of the group taking almonds. At the same time, participants whose weight was within normal ranges found their bodies&#8217; ability to transport excess cholesterol to the liver improved by 6.4 percent.</p> <p>Rich in magnesium (anti-spasmodic) and potassium (anti-fluid retention), almonds are a healthy and filling snack rich in fiber and protein. A handful of ten almonds has approximately 100 calories.</p> <p>The results of this study have been published in the Journal of Nutrition.</p>

Almonds Help Rid Body of Bad Cholesterol

https://newsline.com/almonds-help-rid-body-of-bad-cholesterol/

2017-08-14

<p>Oil prices edged higher Wednesday morning, as investors looked ahead to the weekly release of official data on U.S. crude inventory levels due later in the day.</p> <p>Brent crude, the global benchmark, rose 0.36%, to $52.33 a barrel in London in midmorning trading. On the New York Mercantile Exchange, West Texas Intermediate futures were trading up 0.37% at $49.35 a barrel.</p> <p>Continue Reading Below</p> <p>If the U.S. Energy Information Administration confirms an American Petroleum Institute forecast that showed commercial crude supplies fell by 7.8 million barrels last week, it would constitute the sixth straight week of declines in U.S. oil inventories.</p> <p>That would be welcome news for a market that has been dragged down by a continuing supply glut, aided in part by consistently high U.S. production over the past few years.</p> <p>But despite the potential pullback, "the bigger picture--namely, continued production growth--remains unchanged," noted Commerzbank analysts in a note Wednesday. "By the end of 2018, [U.S.] output is set to climb to over 10 million barrels per day," the analyst wrote.</p> <p>The persistent global oversupply pushed members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and other big producers outside the cartel to implement a deal late last year aimed at reducing oil output. However, the agreement, renewed in May, has so far failed to rein in the glut, due to weak compliance by some cartel members and consistent U.S. output.</p> <p>Earlier this week, Saudi Arabia--OPEC's largest member and the world's biggest crude producer--and other deal participants such as Russia, implored Iraq, the United Arab Emirates and others to better conform to the output cuts.</p> <p>Advertisement</p> <p>The Saudis have also committed to cutting exports to most buyers in Asia--the world's largest oil consuming region--by up to 10% in September to comply with the deal, two Saudi oil officials confirmed Tuesday.</p> <p>Still, experts at oil broker PVM Group said the export pullback "may bear little impact" on rebalancing the market. "Such are the intense competitive pressures in the key Asian region that any shortfall in Saudi supplies will most likely be filled by other producers," PVM wrote in a note Wednesday.</p> <p>Meanwhile, markets were bracing for a potential impact from escalating tensions between North Korea and the U.S. A "loss of confidence" in the Asian region could weigh on global growth and subsequently on oil prices, said Olivier Jakob, an analyst at research group Petromatrix.</p> <p>Investors were also looking to monthly oil reports later this week from OPEC and the International Energy Agency.</p> <p>Among refined products, Nymex reformulated gasoline blendstock--the benchmark gasoline contract--was down 0.28% at $1.162 a gallon. ICE gasoil was at $483.75 a metric ton, roughly on par with the previous settlement.</p> <p>Summer Said contributed to this article.</p> <p>Write to Christopher Alessi at christopher.alessi@wsj.com</p> <p>Oil prices wavered between gains and losses Wednesday morning as investors evaluated U.S. data showing that oil inventories fell but gasoline stockpiles grew last week.</p> <p>The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that the amount of oil in storage fell for the sixth straight week, dropping by 6.5 million barrels in the week ended Aug. 4. Taken as a sign that the global oil glut is easing, the steady depletion of crude inventories has pushed prices higher over the past month.</p> <p>U.S. crude futures recently traded up 9 cents, or 0.2%, at $49.26 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Brent, the global benchmark rose 22 cents, or 0.4%, to $52.36 a barrel on ICE Futures Europe.</p> <p>But the amount of gasoline in storage rose by 3.4 million barrels as refiners continued to churn out fuel at high rates, raising concerns about fuel demand as the summer wanes.</p> <p>"Gasoline is a double blinking light for the whole complex," said Bob Yawger, director of the futures division at Mizuho Securities USA. "They're making a lot of gasoline -- they're using a lot of crude, but at the same time, they're making a crazy amount of product."</p> <p>U.S. refinery utilization rose to 96.3% last week, and refiners churned nearly 17.6 million barrels of oil into fuel. But demand ebbed from the previous week's record high.</p> <p>Traders and analysts had expected stockpiles of products to fall as the summer season prompted drivers to consume more fuel while traveling.</p> <p>"At the end of the day, that's a bit of a counter," said John Saucer, vice president of research and analysis at Mobius Risk Group. "And that may explain why we weren't off to the races, so to speak, when the numbers came out."</p> <p>Oil prices have been stuck in a tight range this month, hovering below $50 a barrel as investors try to gauge how much the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries will be able to influence global supply.</p> <p>Earlier this week, Saudi Arabia -- OPEC's largest member and the world's biggest crude producer -- and other deal participants such as Russia, implored Iraq, the United Arab Emirates and others to better conform to the output cuts agreed upon last year.</p> <p>However, the meeting ended with little impact on the market. Participants remain skeptical that members of the deal will be able to adhere to the planned reductions in output, especially as those exempt from the agreement, including Libya and Nigeria, increase production.</p> <p>Meanwhile, traders are keeping a close eye on production levels in the U.S. As prices have risen, U.S. shale has responded by increasing output more quickly than many expected this year. Concerns that U.S. producers will once again lock in prices on oil gains have keep U.S. futures subdued, analysts said.</p> <p>"Right now it has much more to do with the inventory numbers and much more to do with how much hedging is being done," Mr. Saucer said.</p> <p>Gasoline futures fell 0.6% to $1.6109 a gallon and diesel futures rose 0.4% to $1.6355 a gallon.</p> <p>--Christopher Alessi contributed to this article.</p> <p>Write to Alison Sider at alison.sider@wsj.com and Stephanie Yang at stephanie.yang@wsj.com</p> <p>(END) Dow Jones Newswires</p> <p>August 09, 2017 12:35 ET (16:35 GMT)</p>

Oil Gains Ahead of U.S. Stocks Report

http://foxbusiness.com/features/2017/08/09/oil-gains-ahead-u-s-stocks-report.html

2017-08-09

<p /> <p>President Donald Trump says he wants airline travelers to have the best service with minimal delays.</p> <p>Continue Reading Below</p> <p>Trump is speaking at the start of a meeting with the chief executives of several airlines, including American, Delta, United and Southwest. Executives from air cargo companies were also invited to the breakfast meeting with the president.</p> <p>Trump told the executives that believes the Federal Aviation Administration should be headed by a pilot. He says he hears airline systems are "out of whack."</p> <p>Airline officials were unhappy with the confusion surrounding the rollout of Trump's refugee and immigration ban, which is currently caught up in the court system. It's unclear whether the executives plan to raise their concerns with the president.</p>

Trump huddles with airline executives at the White House

http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/02/09/trump-huddles-with-airline-executives-at-white-house.html

2017-02-09

<p>A series of posters created by the David Horowitz Freedom Center targeting proponents of the Hamas-inspired and funded Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against the Jewish state have incited a storm of controversy on the San Diego State University campus where hundreds of students swarmed University President Elliot Hirshman to claim that he did not condemn the posters forcefully enough and demanding an apology.</p> <p>The Freedom Center's posters identified by name a number of prominent student and faculty BDS activists on the campus and described them as having "allied themselves with Palestinian terrorists to perpetrate BDS and Jew Hatred on this campus." The posters also contained the hashtag #StopTheJewHatredonCampus, the slogan of <a href="http://www.stopthejewhatredoncampus.org/" type="external">the Freedom Center campaign</a> which seeks to confront the agents of campus anti-Semitism and refute the genocidal lies spread by Palestinian terrorists and their campus allies. These lies include the claims that Israel occupies Palestinian land and that Israel is an apartheid state.</p> <p>Protestors were also incensed by a print ad taken out by the Freedom Center in the Daily Aztec. The ad states:</p> <p>There is an epidemic of Jew hatred on American campuses and at San Diego State University. This Jew hatred is incited by Students for Justice in Palestine, the Muslim Students Association and assorted leftist groups, all of whom support the terrorist organizations Hamas and Fatah.</p> <p>The ad goes on to explain that both SJP and MSA were created by operatives of the Muslim Brotherhood and that both groups "disseminate genocidal lies about Israel whose purpose is to weaken and destroy the world's only Jewish state."</p> <p>Posters for the campaign appeared on five California campuses, including at UCLA and UC-Berkeley, where they also sparked protests from anti-Israel activists, as well as university administrators who falsely characterized them as "hate speech." Images of all the posters may be viewed <a href="http://www.stopthejewhatredoncampus.org/news/posters-target-bds-activists-five-campuses" type="external">here</a>. Accounts of the protests and administrator responses can be read <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/262628/jew-haters-berkeley-and-ucla-strike-back-sara-dogan" type="external">here</a>.</p> <p>In an email sent to San Diego State's entire student body on Tuesday, Hirshman criticized the posters but also defended the importance of free speech: "First, we recognize and fully support the rights of all parties to voice their positions on political issues, whether supportive or critical. We also understand that when parties adopt a specific political position they become responsible for their actions and these actions may produce criticism."</p> <p>Hirshman's failure to outright condemn the posters did not sit well with SDSU's anti-Israel activists and the campus left. The protestors first held a silent protest of Hirshman during the swearing-in ceremony of incoming Associated Students President Jamie Miller. Following that protest, students surrounded a police car in which Hirshman was traveling and detained him for over two hours, chanting "Hirshman, Hirshman, come on out. We have something to talk about." The Daily Aztec, San Diego State's campus paper, reported the incident this way:</p> <p>After leaving the council chambers, protesters got word that Hirshman was in a police cruiser near the Cal Coast Credit Union Open Air Theater, and rushed to "trap" him. The police cruiser was surrounded for over two hours as students chanted and even began praying.</p> <p>Hirshman eventually got out of the police vehicle and stood to the side, surrounded by members of his administrative staff, who formed a barrier around Hirshman and several leaders of the protest so they could speak.</p> <p>Photos of the protest taken by the Aztec reveal students holding signs proclaiming "We Demand An Apology" and "Respect My Name."&amp;#160;A large banner hung on a fence adjacent to the protest reads "SDSU THINKS WE ARE TERRORISTS." Video footage of the protest taken by a local ABC affiliate can be viewed <a href="http://www.10news.com/news/sdsu-students-protest-against-president-hirshmans-response-to-042716" type="external">here</a>&amp;#160;and below:</p> <p>&amp;#160;</p> <p>&amp;#160;</p> <p>Despite the protestors' claims to the contrary, it is notable that neither the Freedom Center's ad nor its posters call SJP and MSA members terrorists. They merely declare that they support anti-Israel terrorists and parrot their propaganda, a claim which any photo of a mock "Israeli apartheid wall" will confirm.</p> <p>President Hirshman himself confirmed this point while speaking with protestors, saying, "I don't think they're saying our students are terrorists. If there was a statement that our students were terrorists and they weren't, I would certainly condemn that."</p> <p>Student activists interviewed by the Aztec defended their actions in detaining President Hirshman. One of the protestors, Hassan Abdinur, who was named on the Freedom Center's poster as an SJP and MSA activist, stated: "Things have been building up and building up and the university hasn't done anything so this was our opportunity to kind of stand face-to-face, really close, actually I smelled his breath, with the president of the university and tell him how we feel about what's going on."</p> <p>According to The San Diego Union-Tribune which also <a href="http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2016/apr/27/sdsu-protests-anti-muslim-fliers/" type="external">reported</a> the story, Hirshman eventually gave the student protestors a brief and nonspecific apology. "If we have done things inadvertently that have upset or hurt people, we are sorry for that," Hirshman said.</p> <p>While the protestors finally dispersed following that apology, they remain unsatisfied by Hirshman's failure to condemn the posters outright. Presumably they were looking for a reaction more in line with UCLA's Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Jerry Kang who sent&amp;#160; <a href="http://jerrykang.net/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2016/04/Crosscheck-2016-04-19-Dialogue-over-Demagoguery.pdf" type="external">an email attacking Horowitz</a>&amp;#160;to the entire UCLA community calling the Freedom Center's posters "repulsive" and "personalized intimidation" and stating that they produce "chilling psychological harm."</p> <p>"[We wanted] an apology to the entire student body for his disrespect and disregard for the student voice [and] opinion," Mustafa Alemi, a member of SDSU's Associated Students Board of Directors, and also one of the SJP and MSA activists named on the posters, told the Daily Aztec. "Without our tuition money he's not living the life he has right now and the fact that it took two to three hundred students to block his car to have a conversation with us is incredibly disrespectful."</p> <p>David Horowitz is scheduled to speak on SDSU's campus on May 5th. It will be interesting to see just how respectful the conduct of SJP and MSA activists will be during his address.&amp;#160;</p> <p>Sara Dogan is the&amp;#160;National Campus Director for&amp;#160;Students for Academic Freedom at the&amp;#160;David Horowitz Freedom Center.</p>

Hundreds Swarm SDSU President to Protest Freedom Center Anti-BDS Posters

http://truthrevolt.org/news/hundreds-swarm-sdsu-president-protest-freedom-center-anti-bds-posters

2018-10-03

<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p> <p /> <p>No, it&#8217;s not Ken Jennings.</p> <p>IBM announced Thursday that it&#8217;s investing over $1 billion to give its Watson supercomputer its own business division and a new home in the heart of New York City.</p> <p>The Armonk, N.Y.-based computing company said the new business unit will be dedicated to the development and commercialization of the project that first gained fame by defeating a pair of &#8220;Jeopardy!&#8221; champions, including 74-time winner Jennings, in 2011.</p> <p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> <p>In the years since Watson&#8217;s TV appearance, IBM has been developing the supercomputer for more practical purposes and changed it to a cloud-based service. Its massive data-crunching capabilities are currently being used in industries ranging from health care to banking.</p> <p>IBM says Watson is unique because it isn&#8217;t programed like traditional computers. It has the ability to learn from its past experiences and factor that information into its future operations.</p> <p>IBM CEO Ginni Rometty said that as a result, Watson is built for a world where big data is transforming every industry and every profession.</p> <p>&#8220;Watson does more than find the needle in the haystack,&#8221; Rometty said in remarks released ahead of the company&#8217;s Thursday presentation. &#8220;It understands the haystack. It understands context.&#8221;</p> <p>As part of its investment, IBM is building a new headquarters for the business on the edge of New York City&#8217;s East Village near New York University and other technology companies. About $100 million will go toward investing in startup companies that are building apps to be run through Watson.</p> <p>Eventually the business, which started out as a team of 27 people, will employ about 2,000, including several hundred at the new headquarters, IBM said.</p> <p>Michael Rhodin, a long-time IBM executive named to lead the new business, said the move marks the start of a new era for IBM and the new headquarters is meant to be a departure from the project&#8217;s current research facility&#8217;s sleepier surroundings about 40 miles north of the city in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.</p> <p>The angular glass building also will stand out from the rest of its neighborhood, which is home to some of the oldest buildings in the city.</p> <p>&#8220;The millennial generation gets this, they understand that this is,&#8221; Rhodin said in an interview ahead of the announcement. &#8220;This is a departure. It&#8217;s a statement on our part.&#8221;</p> <p>The will have marketing and sales capabilities, while also hosting engineering and development work and collaborations with customers and startup companies looking to utilize Watson&#8217;s capabilities.</p> <p>&#8212;&#8212;</p> <p>Bree Fowler can be reached at <a href="http://twitter.com/APBreeFowler" type="external">http://twitter.com/APBreeFowler</a></p>

IBM’s Watson supercomputer gets its own business

https://abqjournal.com/333564/ibms-watson-supercomputer-gets-its-own-business.html

<p /> <p>Some say Donald Trump made too many campaign promises. I say he didn&#8217;t go far enough. Immigration reform, repealing Obamacare, cutting taxes, repatriating offshore capital and negotiating better trade deals are a good start, but if he really wants to make America great again, he&#8217;s going to have to pull out all the stops that are holding back the economy.</p> <p>Continue Reading Below</p> <p>Since we&#8217;ll soon have our first political outsider in the White House &#8211; a self-described man of the people who isn&#8217;t beholden to anyone &#8211; here&#8217;s a list of government reforms that no President has ever had the guts, the mandate or the political capital to tackle. It&#8217;s long past time we free our economy from the tyranny of big government bureaucracy.</p> <p>Institute Congressional term limits. We don&#8217;t need career politicians creating more and more legislation. Instead of breeding lifelong bureaucrats, we need a healthy flow of leaders between the business community and Washington. Term limits are the only way to get Congress working for constituents instead of the next election cycle. Come to think of it, term limits for Supreme Court Justices isn&#8217;t a bad idea either.</p> <p>Reform tort law. We used to be a nation of laws, but we&#8217;ve become a nation of lawyers. Professionals, small businesses and corporations base far too many decisions on fear of being sued. Texas and other states have taken measures to limit frivolous lawsuits, but federal &#8220;loser pays&#8221; legislation like they have in the UK is a no-brainer that&#8217;s long overdue.</p> <p>Radically deregulate. It&#8217;s time to make the free market free of onerous, oppressive, business-chilling regulations. I&#8217;m not just talking about repealing Dodd Frank, Sarbanes Oxley and other knee-jerk laws. I&#8217;m talking about stopping the runaway train that issues thousands of new rules and regulations that make it harder to do business every year. There should be strict criteria for new regulations and a housecleaning of existing ones.</p> <p>Stop crony capitalism. The notion that regulators keep consumers safe from corporate greed and excess is nonsense. Corporate lobbyists and special interests buy power in Washington while small businesses, taxpayers and consumers get the shaft. Regulatory reform and term limits will help, but more can and should be done to ensure that regulators are not bought and paid for by lobbyists and special interests.</p> <p>Advertisement</p> <p>Reform entitlement programs. This is long overdue, and not just because Social Security and Medicare are non-self-funding Ponzi schemes. The whole notion of retiring on Social Security and Medicare is ludicrous. It&#8217;s simply not enough for those who really need it and a waste for those who don&#8217;t. There must be a more effective and efficient way to provide a safety net for the poor and middle class.</p> <p>Overhaul independent government agencies. I can think of several agencies &#8211; the FCC, FTC, EPA and the Fed, for starters &#8211; that, in my opinion, do more harm than good. I&#8217;m not entirely sure which, if any, should simply be abolished, but some, especially the EPA, have gone way off the rails of their original charter and have a far more chilling effect on business creation and GDP growth than is necessary to perform their function.</p> <p>Balance the federal budget. Of course there are times when the government has to spend more than it takes in, but those times should be exceptions, not the rule, and certainly not in perpetuity as it&#8217;s been for far too long. And here&#8217;s an idea for tackling the $20 trillion federal deficit: An External Revenue Service to tax other nations for all the services we perform in keeping the world safe.</p> <p>Restructure the executive branch. Instead of staffing executive departments with hordes of mindless bureaucrats focused more on growing their departments, their power, and their political clout than doing their jobs right, what if we make them meritocracies? Let&#8217;s incentivize them to become more productive and efficient, do more with less and outsource some of their functions, as in the private sector.</p> <p>Reform the welfare system. Our labor-force participation rate is at a multi-decade low. Instead of handing out money and food stamps, we need work training and placement programs that actually help people become productive members of society. Except in extreme cases, just about anyone can work from home and at least do part-time work for themselves, companies, the government or non-profits.</p> <p>Revive our inner cities. If it can be done in New York, it can be done everywhere. I should know. The difference in Times Square, Central Park, Harlem and all over Brooklyn where I grew up is like night and day. It&#8217;s hard to believe that this safe, thriving city was once full of violent slums and nearly bankrupt.</p> <p>These initiatives may sound radical, and they&#8217;ll all require acts of Congress, but if Trump lacks the leadership ability and the will to go to work for the working class, turbocharge the economy and turn around America, then what was the point of electing him in the first place?</p>

This Is How Trump Can Make America Great Again

http://foxbusiness.com/features/2016/11/21/this-is-how-trump-can-make-america-great-again.html

2016-11-21

<p>After the Great Crash of 1929, Andrew Mellon, one of the wealthiest men in America as well as Secretary of the Treasury, gave President Hoover a bit of advice right out of the playbook of laissez-faire capitalism.</p> <p>Liquidate, liquidate, liquidate.</p> <p>Liquidate banks, liquidate factories, liquidate commercial and private real estate, liquidate farms and liqudate ranches. Let it all collapse and then the economy would correct itself, slowly but surely, as those still in possession of capital scooped up undervalued assets, cranked up the wheels of commerce and industry, and hired back workers now willing to work for a fraction of what they used to make.</p> <p>Hoover, a conventional though not cruel or even callous man, turned a deaf ear to Mellon&#8217;s advice; like our current President, he tried to steer the country out of crisis by adopting fiscal and monetary policies informed by the &#8220;best minds&#8221; of the day.</p> <p>As we all know, those policies either proved to be too little, too late or &#8211; in the case of his trade policies &#8211; aggravated the downtown. By 1932, unemployment peaked at 24 percent and the nation&#8217;s GDP had shrunk by more than 40 percent from its high point in 1929.</p> <p>Now, it must be pointed out that, in a crude and almost autistic fashion, Mellon was correct. Allowing the country simply to go bankrupt would, eventually, have resulted in economic recovery. Certainly it was not the only road to that recovery, and surely not the one most likely to provide a decent living for the overwhelming majority of Americans.</p> <p>An amped-up version of the somewhat tepid policies of the New Deal would also have achieved full economic recovery. In the end, the version of the New Deal that was implemented helped ameliorate the worst effects of the Great Depression &#8211; at least enough to prevent revolution &#8212; without quite marshalling the resources to end it.</p> <p>In the confrontation taking place right now in Madison, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker seems to be channeling the ghost of Andrew Mellon in his attempt to liquidate that state&#8217;s public employee unions. His budgetary arguments are, of course, a sham, a cover-up for long-held ideological opposition to the union movement. At the same time, it should be pointed out that neither side is directly addressing the foundational cause of the Great Recession that lies behind the standoff: the fact that, as it &#8220;matures&#8221; (if that is the right word!), capitalism can only survive by creating ever more frequent &#8211; and desperate &#8212; crises of the kind we&#8217;re struggling with right now.</p> <p>From its beginnings in 16th and 17th century England and Holland, capitalism has depended upon a minimum 3 percent accumulated growth rate year in and year out. If growth exceeds that 3 percent &#8211; as it has lately in China and India &#8211; so much the better.</p> <p>But if the rate of growth falls below 3 percent, even for one or two quarters, capitalism, which, like the stock market, is absolutely dependent upon a faith that defies logic and anesthetizes memory, begins to sputter. Each time that faith is shaken, it becomes harder and harder to restore.</p> <p>Of course any organic system that cannot live without endless growth is ultimately doomed. Critics sometimes like to refer to capitalism as a cancer; they are closer to the truth than perhaps they realize. Another name for endless growth is malignancy. In the end, a malignant entity cannot help but cannibalize its host body. This is the process we see at work today, both in the implosion of the &#8220;American Dream&#8221; and in the spreading destruction of the global ecosystem upon which all life depends.</p> <p>Scott Walker&#8217;s assault on collective bargaining &#8211; on, in fact, the whole union movement &#8211; is no doubt driven by a mix of motives, including simple political payback. Whatever the immediate outcome, he has already lost the political war; it&#8217;s one thing to offend public school teachers, an altogether different matter to find the Governor of Wisconsin on the receiving end of opposition from members of the Green Bay Packers. As a bonus Walker has also driven one of the first nails into the coffin of the faux-populist Tea Party Movement.</p> <p>More importantly, the protests he has sparked mark some of the first death throes of American capitalism, a political economy that is no longer even particularly interested in providing meaningful work for 98 percent of the population, and manages to stagger along largely by creating speculative bubbles from which only banksters and hedge fraud managers profit.</p> <p>As the World Social Forum likes to say, &#8220;A better world is possible.&#8221; No one can foresee what might replace American capitalism when &#8211; not if &#8211; it inevitably falls. But one thing the protestors in Madison have demonstrated is that the transition need not be violent or even psychically traumatic. An effective antidote to the alienation that, along with false consciousness, is one of the only commodities produced in abundance by Stage 4 capitalism is to act in solidarity with others to bring about a better world for everyone &#8211; not just oneself.</p> <p>Certainly the public employee union members who have poured into Wisconsin this past week have, as their primary concern, the protection of hard-won rights to collective bargaining. At the same time, they may very well be in engaged in something of far greater significance.</p> <p>It is possible &#8211; very possible &#8211; that they have, with Scott Walker&#8217;s unwitting help, initiated the peaceful transformation of that part of the earth occupied by the United States of America into a better world for all its citizens.</p> <p>RICH BRODERICK lives in St. Paul and teaches journalism at Anoka-Ramsey Community College. Rich is a writer, poet, and social activist. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:richb@lakecast.com" type="external">richb@lakecast.com</a></p> <p>This essay originally appeared in <a href="http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/" type="external">TC Daily Planet</a>.</p> <p>&amp;#160;</p> <p /> <p>&amp;#160;</p> <p /> <p />

Gov. Walker and the Ghost of Andrew Mellon

https://counterpunch.org/2011/02/24/gov-walker-and-the-ghost-of-andrew-mellon/

2011-02-24

<p>The Bank of Japan may call an emergency policy meeting to consider additional monetary easing if the market turmoil persists, an adviser to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has told The Wall Street Journal. The central bank is currently scheduled to meet on Mar. 14. Etsuro Honda, a former finance ministry bureaucrat, said in <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/boj-could-consider-further-easing-amid-market-turmoil-says-abe-adviser-1455248770" type="external">comments published Friday Opens a New Window.</a> that it is now out of the question for the government to go ahead with its plan to increase sales tax next year, and instead "it should be made a priority to stimulate demand through both fiscal and monetary policies." Honda emphasized that he has no advance knowledge of the BOJ's intentions.</p> <p>Copyright &#169; 2016 MarketWatch, Inc.</p> <p>Continue Reading Below</p>

BOJ May Hold Emergency Meeting, Says Abe Adviser: WSJ

http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2016/02/12/boj-may-hold-emergency-meeting-says-abe-adviser-wsj.html

2016-02-12

<p /> <p>3D SystemsCorporation(NYSE: DDD) reported its fourth-quarter and full-year 2016 <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/02/28/3d-systems-earnings-reflect-a-continued-challengin.aspx?&amp;amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">results Opens a New Window.</a> on Tuesday, Feb. 28. The diversified 3D printing company's year-over-year quarterly revenue slid 9.5% and adjusted earnings per share declined 21%. Positively, EPS on the basis of generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) swung from a negative to a positive result.</p> <p>Continue Reading Below</p> <p>Shares of 3D Systems closed down more than 10% on the day earnings were released. The market was likely disappointed with fourth-quarter revenue and 2017 revenue guidance coming in lower than analysts were expecting. Positively, quarterly adjusted EPS beat analysts' estimates and 2017 EPS guidance, at the midpoint, surpassed estimates.</p> <p>Earnings releases generally don't provide much information beyond the numbers, but a wealth of color about a company's performance and future prospects is often shared during the analyst conference calls following these releases. Here are four key topics that you should know about from 3D Systems' Q4 call.</p> <p>Image source: 3D Systems.</p> <p>Advertisement</p> <p>From CEO VyomeshJoshi's remarks:</p> <p>3D Systems introduced its Figure 4 technology in early 2016, though it's still in the development stage. It's aa robotic, modular, stereolithography (SLA) 3D printing system designed for the production of plastic parts.It's reportedly up to 50-times faster than conventional SLA 3D printers, and a key part of 3D Systems' strategy to capitalize as 3D printing gains more traction in manufacturing applications.</p> <p>While Joshi wouldn't be pinned down on the call as to exactly when this tech will be commercialized, his statement indicates that commercialization is planned for some time this year. He also said that one large industrial customer (who he didn't name) is currently testing Figure 4.</p> <p>From Joshi's remarks:</p> <p>As for projected 2017 growth, the company expects year-over-year revenue growth between 2% and 8%, adjusted EPS growth between 10% and 20%, and GAAP EPS to swing from a negative to a positive result.</p> <p>Software and healthcare were the better performing parts of 3D Systems' business in 2016, with year-over-year revenue growth of 12% and 4%, respectively. (Healthcare includes both products and services.)3D printer sales were the weakest part of the business in 2016, with revenue declining 21% year over year. As Joshi said, the company expects 3D printer revenue to increase in 2017, driven by printers for production applications, metal 3D printers, and Figure 4.</p> <p>From CFO John McMullen's remarks:</p> <p>To provide some context, the $133.3 million in revenue generated from 3D printer sales accounts for 21.1% of the company's total revenue of $633.0 millionin 2016.</p> <p>3D Systems won't recover significantly from its current struggles, in my opinion, until it shows some solid improvement in sales of 3D printers. Sales of 3D printers are at the heart of the company'srazor-and-blade business strategy, as they are the "razors" that drive sales of the higher-margin 3D printing materials, or "blades."</p> <p>From McMullen's remarks:</p> <p>Since 3D Systems' 2017 revenue guidance includes the contribution from the recent acquisition, the company's projected organic growth rate (growth in businesses owned for at least one year) is less than the 2% to 8% total year-over-year revenue growth guidance it provided. This isn't a criticism, just a clarification. Many investors probably didn't realize that 3D Systems made an acquisition in late January.</p> <p>As for the acquired company, 3D Systems said at the time of the acquisition that it's theleading global innovator and manufacturer of photopolymer, thermoplastic, polymer and monomer materials for traditional and 3D printing dental applications. The acquisition was expected to be immediately accretive to 3D Systems' earnings and cash flow.</p> <p>While this acquisition seems a solid move, hopefully 3D Systems remains conservative for a while with respect to making acquisitions, so its relatively new top management can laser focus on strengthening the company's existing businesses.</p> <p>10 stocks we like better than 3D SystemsWhen investing geniuses David and Tom Gardner have a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, the newsletter they have run for over a decade, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has tripled the market.*</p> <p>David and Tom just revealed what they believe are the <a href="http://infotron.fool.com/infotrack/click?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fool.com%2Fmms%2Fmark%2Fe-foolcom-sa-bbn-dyn%3Faid%3D8867%26source%3Disaeditxt0010449%26ftm_cam%3Dsa-bbn-evergreen%26ftm_pit%3D6312%26ftm_veh%3Dbbn_article_pitch&amp;amp;impression=cbfd3c39-b212-479f-ae54-12d238c5a3cb&amp;amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">10 best stocks Opens a New Window.</a> for investors to buy right now... and 3D Systems wasn't one of them! That's right -- they think these 10 stocks are even better buys.</p> <p><a href="http://infotron.fool.com/infotrack/click?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fool.com%2Fmms%2Fmark%2Fe-foolcom-sa-bbn-dyn%3Faid%3D8867%26source%3Disaeditxt0010449%26ftm_cam%3Dsa-bbn-evergreen%26ftm_pit%3D6312%26ftm_veh%3Dbbn_article_pitch&amp;amp;impression=cbfd3c39-b212-479f-ae54-12d238c5a3cb&amp;amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">Click here Opens a New Window.</a> to learn about these picks!</p> <p>*Stock Advisor returns as of February 6, 2017</p> <p><a href="http://my.fool.com/profile/TMFMcKenna/info.aspx" type="external">Beth McKenna Opens a New Window.</a> has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends 3D Systems. The Motley Fool has a <a href="http://www.fool.com/Legal/fool-disclosure-policy.aspx?&amp;amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">disclosure policy Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>

4 Critical Takeaways From 3D Systems Q4 Earnings Call

http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/03/06/4-critical-takeaways-from-3d-systems-q4-earnings-call.html

2017-03-17

<p><a href="" type="internal" />A new report out today highlights the incredible money-making machine the Clintons created for themselves in recent years. <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-college-balks-at-hillary-clintons-fee-so-books-chelsea-for-65000-instead/2015/06/29/b1918e42-1e78-11e5-84d5-eb37ee8eaa61_story.html" type="external">According to a report in the Washington Post</a> this morning by Philip Rucker and Rosalind Helderman, the University of Missouri was hoping to snag Hillary Clinton as a speaker at the grand opening of their Women's Hall of Fame. However, they found her speaking fee - $275,000 - too steep. So, they went for a much cheaper option: Chelsea Clinton, who only charged $65,000. For an hour's worth of work.</p> <p>Chelsea has quickly become the generic brand option for Clinton lovers who can't afford the high cost of Hillary and Bill. The former first daughter has made a number of appearances on behalf of the Clinton Foundation, and at only 1/4 of the cost, Chelsea's cost seems reasonable. However, she still charges more for an appearance than women who have actually accomplished something with their lives, including feminist icon Gloria Steinem, who charges a measly $30,000 (and reportedly, a Taco Bell value meal) for a speaking appearance. Chelsea had previously served as an NBC correspondent, making $600,000 a year.</p> <p>The Washington Post provides more details:</p> <p>The university paid $65,000 for Chelsea Clinton's brief appearance Feb. 24, 2014, a demonstration of the celebrity appeal and marketability that the former and possibly second-time first daughter employs on behalf of her mother's presidential campaign and family's global charitable empire.</p> <p>More than 500 pages of e-mails, contracts and other internal documents obtained by The Washington Post from the university under Missouri public record laws detail the school's long courtship of the Clintons.</p> <p>They also show the meticulous efforts by Chelsea Clinton's image-makers to exert tight control over the visit, ranging from close editing of marketing materials and the introductory remarks of a high school student to limits on the amount of time she spent on campus.</p> <p>The schedule she negotiated called for her to speak for 10 minutes, participate in a 20-minute, moderated question-and-answer session and spend a half-hour posing for pictures with VIPs offstage.</p> <p>Check that last sentence again. Chelsea spent a grand total of ONE HOUR actually working for that $65,000, more than most folks make in a year. And yet, the Clintons are supposed to be relatable to the little guy.</p> <p>Remember, this fee was paid by a public university, not a Fortune 500 company, and it all went into the coffers of the Clinton Foundation, so she can claim the fee was not actual income. Even so, there was no apparent speaking fee discount offered to the university for being an educational institution, and doing things the Clintons claim to support, like making better Americans and improving the country through the advancement of knowledge.</p> <p>H/T: <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-college-balks-at-hillary-clintons-fee-so-books-chelsea-for-65000-instead/2015/06/29/b1918e42-1e78-11e5-84d5-eb37ee8eaa61_story.html" type="external">Washington Post</a></p> <p>&amp;#160;</p> <p />

Can't afford Hillary's speaking fee? Chelsea's a cheap date!

http://politicalillusionsexposed.com/cant-afford-hillarys-speaking-fee-chelseas-a-cheap-date/

<p>BOONE, N.C. (AP) &#8212; Ronshad Shabazz scored 20 points, Justin Forrest added 14 points including a key 3-pointer, and Appalachian State closed on a 5-0 surge to beat Texas State 66-62 on Friday night in a Sun Belt opener.</p> <p>Tre&#8217;Larenz Nottingham made a layup and two free throws to give Texas State a 62-61 lead with 1:41 to play. Shabazz split a pair of free throws, Forrest hit a 3 with 18 seconds left, and Isaac Johnson made one of two free throws to seal it for Appalachian State (6-8).</p> <p>Shabazz was 6 of 16 from the floor and made three 3-pointers. Forrest was just 3-of-12 shooting but made all six of his free-throw attempts. Craig Hinton chipped in 10 points for the Mountaineers.</p> <p>Nijal Pearson scored 18 points to lead Texas State (7-7). Eric Terry chipped in 12 and Nottingham finished with 10.</p> <p>BOONE, N.C. (AP) &#8212; Ronshad Shabazz scored 20 points, Justin Forrest added 14 points including a key 3-pointer, and Appalachian State closed on a 5-0 surge to beat Texas State 66-62 on Friday night in a Sun Belt opener.</p> <p>Tre&#8217;Larenz Nottingham made a layup and two free throws to give Texas State a 62-61 lead with 1:41 to play. Shabazz split a pair of free throws, Forrest hit a 3 with 18 seconds left, and Isaac Johnson made one of two free throws to seal it for Appalachian State (6-8).</p> <p>Shabazz was 6 of 16 from the floor and made three 3-pointers. Forrest was just 3-of-12 shooting but made all six of his free-throw attempts. Craig Hinton chipped in 10 points for the Mountaineers.</p> <p>Nijal Pearson scored 18 points to lead Texas State (7-7). Eric Terry chipped in 12 and Nottingham finished with 10.</p>

Appalachian State beats Texas State 66-62 in Sun Belt opener

https://apnews.com/1d79c47663fc4a3ea7a72c06991bcbd0

2017-12-30

<p><a href="" type="internal" />Feb. 13, 2013</p> <p>By Laer Pearce</p> <p>On Jan. 31, the strained California electricity grid marked the one year anniversary of the <a href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/01/unit-shut-down-at-san-onofre-nuclear-plant.html" type="external">shutting down of Unit 3</a> at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. The reactor was taken off-line when pinhole leaks were discovered in water pipes that carry heated radioactive water from the reactor to a steam generator.</p> <p>The process of shutting down the reactor caused a much publicized release of radioactive steam &#8212; which contained about as much radioactivity as one year&#8217;s worth of emissions from your home smoke detector. But its long-term effect is more worrisome and less publicized.</p> <p>The negative impact on California&#8217;s electricity grid was made worse by the routine shut-down of San Onofre&#8217;s Unit 2 <a href="http://pbadupws.nrc.gov/docs/ML1208/ML120890550.pdf" type="external">earlier in January</a> for routine maintenance and refueling. It has been off-line ever since because it&#8217;s now under the same regulatory hold as Unit 3. (SONG&#8217;s Unit 1 was decommissioned in 1992 following 24 years of uneventful service.)</p> <p>When the two reactors are on-line, they generate up to 2,200 megawatts of power &#8212; enough for 1.4 million homes and businesses. Besides supplying so much power, the power stations are critical to California&#8217;s electrified life because they provide essential voltage support. Voltage support functions like water pressure in a water system. A minimum amount of pressure is needed within the system to ensure water will move through pipes, just as a minimum amount of voltage support is necessary to ensure electrons will move through power lines.</p> <p>Without sufficient voltage support, California will experience brownouts and blackouts when demand peaks. Yet last summer, with San Onofre completely off-line, we dodged brownouts. Southern California Edison, which co-owns the plant with San Diego Gas &amp;amp; Electric and the city of Riverside, attributes that to the lucky alignment of four factors:</p> <p>* New transmission lines switched on in 2012, so more power could be brought in from elsewhere;</p> <p>* Different places in the service area had hot spells at different times;</p> <p>* Edison was able to buy power from AES&#8217; 900 megawatt natural gas-fired power plant in Huntington Beach;</p> <p>* People conserved.</p> <p>This year, only the fourth factor remains certain. Businesses and individuals will conserve power when it&#8217;s needed, especially since many have traded 100 percent reliability for lower rates.&amp;#160; But no new transmission lines will come on-line this year, and last year&#8217;s Southern California weather, which saw hot spots migrating from location to location instead of covering the entire region, was unusual and not likely to be repeated.</p> <p>What about the AES generating plant in Huntington Beach?&amp;#160; It&#8217;s still there and the natural gas pipeline is still connected to its boilers. So why is it that we won&#8217;t be able to get even a single kilowatt of power from it when we&#8217;ll need it this summer? The answer can be found in California&#8217;s fixation on single-handedly saving the planet from the ravages of global warming.</p> <p>One keystone to that quixotic quest is California&#8217;s first-in-the-nation state-run <a href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/01/unit-shut-down-at-san-onofre-nuclear-plant.html" type="external">cap and trade program</a>, which kicked off last November with the state&#8217;s first carbon credit auction.&amp;#160; AES decided to sell the plant&#8217;s carbon credits at the auction, and because it did, no greenhouse gases can be emitted from its stacks this year.&amp;#160; As far as California&#8217;s electricity grid is concerned, the plant might as well have been wiped out by a tsunami.</p> <p>Could it really be that a slip of paper from a harebrained and costly auction &#8212; an auction that will not accomplish one whit of planet-saving &#8212; may result in brownouts and blackouts this summer? The answer to that question, unfortunately but not at all unexpectedly, is yes.</p> <p>With long-time environmentalist Gov. Jerry Brown at California&#8217;s helm, green-leaning Democrat super-majorities in both houses of the state legislature and entrenched eco-crats ruling the state&#8217;s regulatory agencies, the AES plant is certain to remain shuttered no matter what the summer may bring. The carbon crusaders simply cannot afford to allow a high-profile precedent to undercut the centerpiece of their carbon-fighting battle so early in the auction&#8217;s history.</p> <p>So, should brownouts and blackouts return to California this summer, remember this: It wasn&#8217;t really problems at the San Onofre nuclear power plant that caused them. It was problems in the thinking of California&#8217;s leadership.</p> <p>Laer Pearce, a veteran of three decades of California public affairs, is the author of &#8220; <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&amp;amp;field-keywords=crazifornia" type="external">Crazifornia: Tales from the Tarnished State</a>.&#8221;</p>

Crazifornia: Will it be Gov. Brownout?

https://calwatchdog.com/2013/02/13/crazifornia-will-it-be-gov-brownout/

2018-02-20

<p>Unlike Santa Claus, Federal Express is conceding it won&#8217;t be able to make all its scheduled deliveries on Christmas Eve.</p> <p>FedEx is hoping to ease the disappointment by delivering packages on Christmas Day and opening counters at its Express offices across the U.S. so customers can pick up the gifts themselves.</p> <p>The carrier blames the delayed shipments on inclement weather in parts of the U.S. and a last-minute surge of holiday shopping.</p> <p>The counters at the Express offices will be open Friday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. FedEx&#8217;s other offices will be closed.</p> <p>Household deliveries will be given top priority on Friday.</p> <p>Customers can find out if their delayed shipment is scheduled for Christmas day delivery or available for pick up by checking at <a href="http://www.fedex.com" type="external">fedex.com</a> or calling 800-463-3339.</p> <p>Unlike Santa Claus, Federal Express is conceding it won&#8217;t be able to make all its scheduled deliveries on Christmas Eve.</p> <p>FedEx is hoping to ease the disappointment by delivering packages on Christmas Day and opening counters at its Express offices across the U.S. so customers can pick up the gifts themselves.</p> <p>The carrier blames the delayed shipments on inclement weather in parts of the U.S. and a last-minute surge of holiday shopping.</p> <p>The counters at the Express offices will be open Friday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. FedEx&#8217;s other offices will be closed.</p> <p>Household deliveries will be given top priority on Friday.</p> <p>Customers can find out if their delayed shipment is scheduled for Christmas day delivery or available for pick up by checking at <a href="http://www.fedex.com" type="external">fedex.com</a> or calling 800-463-3339.</p>

FedEx isn’t coming to town with all gifts on Christmas Eve

https://apnews.com/ae82bb04f7734b018897f9c0431ae634

2015-12-24

<p>Three years of President Obama, as of today. Count and weep. Just over a year from now Americans will be deciding whether to reelect Barack Obama or&#8230; probably Mitt Romney. In the latter case this is to assume that that Mitt, a Mormon and family man &#8211; both danger flares &#8212; &amp;#160;doesn&#8217;t get caught up in the minefield known as &#8220;charges of sexual harassment,&#8221; as has Herman Cain, one of his rivals for the Republican nomination. Study recent photographs of a broken Frenchman named Dominique Strauss-Kahn if you want to be reminded of what such charges can do to a candidate for high office.</p> <p>Do any of the present candidates, Obama included, offer an answer to America&#8217;s crisis &#8211; one &amp;#160;accelerated by forty years of neo-liberal onslaught? No they don&#8217;t, because there is no answer available within the terms and boundaries of the present political system.</p> <p>The middle class has &#8211; at least two thirds of it &#8211; crashed into &amp;#160;hard times. Americans&#8217; store of value and savings &#8211; the house &#8211; is worthless; the always pathetic social safety net has eroded. Thirty million Americans are without work or working part-time. Nearly 6 million manufacturing jobs in the United States have disappeared since 2000, and more than 40,000 factories have closed. African-Americans have endured the greatest loss in collective assets in their history. Hispanics have seen their net worth drop by two-thirds. Millions of whites have been pitchforked into desperation. Students emerge from higher education crushed by debt.</p> <p>This is the mulch that has created the Occupy Wall Street movement.</p> <p>Its strength lies in the simplicity and truth of its basic message: the few are rich, the many are poor. In terms of its pretensions the capitalist system has failed. There was amusing confirmation of this in Friday&#8217;s New York Times, which carried a big article by Jason deParle, Robert Gebeloff and Sabrina Tavernise &amp;#160;headlined &#8220;Bleak Portrait of Poverty is Off the Mark, Experts Say.&#8221;&amp;#160; The story focused on the fact that the official government poverty measure &amp;#160;&#8220;overlooks hundreds of billions of dollars the needy receive in food stamps and other benefits&#8221;, also&amp;#160; &#8220;the similarly formidable amounts they lose to taxes and medical care.&#8221;</p> <p>There threatens to be a new government measure, long promised, which in current political conditions will no doubt perform the sort of chicanery practiced by the Clinton administration when the Consumer Price Index inflation measure dictating such important items as Social Security payments suddenly had energy and food removed from the basket.</p> <p>But if we&#8217;re talking about&amp;#160; capitalism as the system that best addresses the collective needs of a society, the issue is whether the &#8220;free market&#8221; can deliver the goods to keep millions of people from starvation or death from exposure without huge government outlays, and the answer is obviously No. Michael Doliner has an amusing piece on the weekend&#8217;s website addressing the conservative absurdities and contradictions on this issue of &#8220;the free market.&#8221;</p> <p>Writing these lines at the start of November, after digesting CounterPunch writers&#8217; daily reports from the national OWS battlefield (Zuccotti Park in Manhattan, Oscar Grant Plaza on Oakland, kindred venues in Austin, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Nashville, Portland&#8230;), my eyes flicker across the world map to Greece, and my heart beats faster. Here surely is the core class conflict of our times, brilliantly evoked &amp;#160;by the OWSers, in starkest form: finance capital v. the have-less and have-nots.</p> <p>With Greece an optimist can savor the whiff of a pre-revolutionary situation and a pessimist can seize on a central truth about the European Union, that with each year that passes it is more visibly the Iron Heel of international capital. The one thing the EU&#8217;s Iron Heel cannot countenance is any formally expressed&amp;#160; demonstration of popular rejection. Last week it was the threat of a popular referendum on the Papandreou coalition&#8217;s submission to the Iron Heel&amp;#160; in Greece. In years gone by there were the referenda in Ireland, France and Portugal, all overwhelming in their rejection of the emerging contours of the EU, all instantly overridden and dismissed by the EU&#8217;s oligarchs.</p> <p>I&#8217;ve no doubt that if by chance the left in Greece today were to evict the local political agents of the international banks, it would not be long before a NATO intervention, covert and then overt, was under way, using the usual arsenal of assassination, drone attacks and armed support for whatever security forces do not defect to the left.</p> <p>Having briefly tasted batons and pepper spray, OWSers should know that when capital feels it is being pushed to the wall, it will stop at nothing to crush any serious challenge. The cop puts away his smile. The indulgent mayor imposes a curfew. &#8220;Exemplary&#8221; sentences are handed down. The prisons fill up. The FBI dusts off the Cointelpro blueprint. Organized repression can only be defeated by organized resistance, nationwide. How to mount this is the OWSers&#8217; long-term&amp;#160; challenge. These are very early days in the formation of the&amp;#160; movement. In Oakland, on Wednesday, OWS staged a rally calling for a General Strike. That was optimism of the intelligence. That was most certainly thinking along the right lines.</p> <p>And Now, A Quiet Word&#8230;&amp;#160;&amp;#160;ABOUT OUR FUNDRAISER</p> <p>We &#8216;re two thirds of the way through it, and here at CounterPunch we&#8217;re getting first hand testimony about the depth of the economic Depression. Many CounterPunchers are rallying as they do year after year, but telling us times are tight. All we can ask is, give if you can and as much as you feel you can afford. We truly need every penny and every dollar to keep the show on the road.&amp;#160;</p> <p>Once again, let me direct your attention to the extraordinarily generous offer made by a CounterPunch supporter. He has pledged to match every donation of $100 or more, to a combined total of $25,000. That means that any of you out there&amp;#160;thinking of donating $50 should know that if you donate a further $50, CounterPunch will receive an additional $100.&amp;#160; And if you plan to send us &amp;#160;$200 or $500 or more, he will give CounterPunch a matching $200 or $500 or more.</p> <p>CounterPunchers! Please don&#8217;t let this offer ebb away unfulfilled.&amp;#160; Double your clout right now. &amp;#160;Step up to the plate, and reach for the phone, or your check book or <a href="http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/Donations.html" type="external">hit the online donation button</a>.</p> <p>Down the years we have accumulated many wonderful friends of CounterPunch, who rally each October and November. And we have also built up a formidable cadre of regular contributors whose contributions you can savor week after week on our site. Here are some of their testimonials:</p> <p>MICHAEL HUDSON: &#8220;CounterPunch is my favorite site to find the best collection of left-wing criticism of the U.S. and global economic meltdown. That&#8217;s why I write for it.&#8221;</p> <p>PAUL KRASSNER: &#8220;CounterPunch lives up to its name, responding to lies with facts, to distortion with reality, and to demagoguery with insights.&#8221;</p> <p>KATHY KELLY:&amp;#160;&#8220;CounterPunch editors and contributors won&#8217;t let us fall asleep at the wheel. &amp;#160;Sitting up straight and paying attention never felt so good as it has since I began learning from perspectives aired on CounterPunch.&#8221;</p> <p>WILLIAM BLUM: &#8220;I send my monthly Anti-Empire Report directly&amp;#160;to thousands of people on my mailing list, but each month I usually&amp;#160;get more responses from people who see it on CounterPunch than from any other source.&amp;#160; CounterPunch clearly&amp;#160;has a great audience worldwide.&#8221;</p> <p>PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS: &#8220;CounterPunch is a first class site with a first class audience. Cockburn and St Clair assemble menus that offer to readers interesting perspectives and factual analyses that are essential to navigating our chaotic times.&amp;#160; I always read the CounterPunch page&#8221;</p> <p>DIANA JOHNSTONE:&amp;#160;&#8220;As someone on both the reading and writing ends of CounterPunch, I find it indispensable. The messages I receive in response to my articles are proof that CounterPunch has a vast audience of attentive readers.&#8221;</p> <p>MIKE WHITNEY: &amp;#160;&#8220;I admit it; I&#8217;m addicted to CounterPunch. It&#8217;s as much a&amp;#160; part of my morning routine as coffee and toast. And&#8211;like many of you&#8211;I depend on CP to fill me in on the news behind the mainstream blabber.&#8221;</p> <p>Dig as deep as you can in your pockets. The cause is good and the need is great. Use our secure server make <a href="http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/Donations.html" type="external">a tax-deductible donation</a> to CounterPunch today or purchase <a href="http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/Annual_Subscriptions.html" type="external">a subscription</a> and <a href="http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/Annual_Subscriptions.html" type="external">a gift sub</a> for someone or one of <a href="http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/CounterPunch_Books.html" type="external">our award winning books</a> (or a crate of books!) as holiday presents.</p> <p>To contribute by phone you can call Becky or Deva toll free at: 1-800-840-3683.</p> <p>Our Latest Newsletter</p> <p>We offer two terrific pieces, by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Fred Gardner. A distinguished anthropologist,&amp;#160; Scheper-Hughes is one of our favorite writers. Indeed your CounterPunch editors listed her Death Without Weeping in its top 100 non-fiction books published in English in the 20th Century.&amp;#160; A few months ago we ran her amazing investigation of the international trade in body parts.&amp;#160; This time she contributes a very powerful piece &#8211; in part autobiographical &#8211; on the slow death of the Roman Catholic Church, centered on the Vatican&#8217;s&amp;#160; appalling response to the&amp;#160; disclosures of the past few years of the sexual predations of Catholic priests on children, among them indigenous peoples.</p> <p>On September 23, 2011,&amp;#160; Scheper-Hughes writes, human rights lawyers and former clerical sex abuse victims filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court in the Hague, asking for an investigation to prosecute Pope Benedict XVI and three of his top officials, including William Levada, a cardinal, and the former bishop of the diocese of San Francisco, for crimes against humanity.</p> <p>&#8220;The request to war crimes court may seem theatrical. The Vatican did not ratify the Rome statute that created the court, although both Germany (Benedict&#8217;s birthplace) and Italy (home of the Vatican) have done so. The ICC only has jurisdiction over war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide committed after 2002. Nonetheless, the International Criminal Court has agreed to examine the papers, and a spokesperson has said that the case has merit.</p> <p>So, finally, what&#8217;s a former Catholic to do when her Church is corrupt and moribund? Today, the defections are not just of unhappy priests and nuns, but of the global Catholic community at large. Churches are closing in European and in American cities. The will and the desire to fight the Vatican are mostly gone. The damage, beyond the current sex scandal, to women&#8217;s bodies, the indifference to maternal and infant mortalities, to the populations at risk of the AIDS epidemic, especially in Catholic parts of Africa, are too much to bear.</p> <p>&#8220;Some former Catholics take solace in other spiritual traditions. Given the animistic quality of Catholic ancestor worship, some former Catholics embrace a cult of everyday saints, virgins, and martyrs, adding Steven Biko, Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Einstein, Dorothy Day, and Harvey Milk to their older devotion to Saint Joan, San Antonio, and Saint Francis of Assisi. Others look to a green theology based on reverence for earth, and sky and sea, and all the critters that slither and crawl, walk and swim. Some, like Paul Farmer, continue along the Vatican-savaged remains of a once vibrant liberation theology, a theology of hope.</p> <p>&#8220;I am grieved and not relieved by my loss of a faith that once gave beauty, richness and fullness to my life. The secular humanism of anthropology offers an alternative form of discipleship, built around the practice of studied observation, contemplation and reflection. I know that anthropology is a powerful tool capable of taming unruly emotions, replacing disgust with respect, ignorance with understanding, hatred with empathy, and a practice of compassionate and modest witnessing to human sorrows. But it is cold comfort for the former believer, when the mystery is gone and with it the light has gone out of one&#8217;s soul.&#8221;</p> <p>Don&#8217;t miss this marvelous essay.</p> <p>Also don&#8217;t miss Fred Gardner&#8217;s contribution to our ongoing series on Obama&#8217;s record. Gardner examines the pledges on medical&amp;#160; marijuana&amp;#160; he made on the campaign trail and his substantive record thereafter and the current onslaught of the Justice Department on medical marijuana dispensaries in California. Gardner&#8217;s question to the leaders of the marijuana reform movement: Did they really read his lips? Did they &#8220;over-read&#8221; and too optimistically interpret what the candidate was saying.</p> <p><a href="http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/Annual_Subscriptions.html" type="external">SUBSCRIBE NOW!</a></p> <p>Alexander Cockburn can be reached at <a href="mailto:alexandercockburn@asis.com" type="external">alexandercockburn@asis.com</a></p>

The Iron Heel and the Resistance

https://counterpunch.org/2011/11/04/the-iron-heel-and-the-resistance/

2011-11-04

<p>On the day that marks the second month of Santiago Maldonado's disappearance, rallies were held all over the country. Santiago's brother, Sergio, read a letter in which he asked the president of Argentina, "Where is Santiago Maldonado""</p> <p>As if it was rush hour, Buenos Aires' metro was packed this Sunday afternoon while thousands of people headed downtown to Plaza de Mayo. Santiago's family called for a rally to demand that Santiago Maldonado be returned alive. It's been two months since he disappeared during a large-scale repressive operation in the south of Argentina led by the gendarmerie against the Mapuche. The indigenous Mapuche were occupying the land of their ancestors that is today "legally" owned by the Benetton company.</p> <p>In the past two months, Mauricio Macri's government did everything in its power to obstruct and divert the investigation in order to preserve the prestige of the gendarmerie, the only police force in Argentina that enjoys a good reputation. Macri's government can't afford poor public opinion as it gears up to pass a <a href="" type="internal">new austerity program</a> that would attack the working-class even further.</p> <p>Although all the facts point to the gendarmerie being responsible for Santiago's disappearance, the government's strategy has been to cover up the evidence and to start a campaign against the Mapuche people and Santiago's family. Aided by the big corporate media, they spread ludicrous hypotheses - such as the unsubstantiated claim that he drowned - that have been all proved decisively wrong.</p> <p>This case turned into a political crisis for the government as they started to feel the social pressure that peaked on September 1st when an enormous crowd filled Plaza de Mayo asking "Where is Santiago Maldonado?"</p> <p>This Sunday, large crowds reconvened at Plaza de Mayo and other locations throughout the country, including human rights organizations, unions, political parties including the PTS as part of the Left Front, and thousands of non affiliated people, gathered to demand the government provide an answer to the same question.</p> <p>In the words of Sergio, Santiago's brother: "I would like to ask to the maximum authority of the country, Mr&amp;#160;Mauricio Macri and to all his ministers. I would like to ask Where is Santiago Maldonado?"</p> <p>Related</p> <p><a href="Santiago-Maldonado" type="external">Santiago Maldonado</a>&amp;#160;&amp;#160;&amp;#160;/&amp;#160;&amp;#160;&amp;#160; <a href="Argentina" type="external">Argentina</a></p>

Two Months Asking Where Is Santiago Maldonado?

https://leftvoice.org/Two-Months-Asking-Where-Is-Santiago-Maldonado

2017-10-03

<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p> <p /> <p>Also at Bookworks, Albuquerque author David Wagner will present his new Rick Montoya mystery, &#8220;Cold Tuscan Stone,&#8221; at 3 today. Rick Montoya has just moved from Santa Fe to Rome when his school friend Beppo, now senior in the Italian Art Squad, recruits him for an unofficial undercover role.</p> <p>Rita Mosiman will be at the bookstore at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 24 with &#8220;Serenity and Beauty.&#8221; As an avid hiker feeling a strong connection to the land and nature&#8217;s artistry, she decided to create an art book to assuage the gloomy clouds of recent global economic woes.</p> <p>New York Times best-selling author Margaret Coel will talk about and sign her book &#8220;Killing Custer&#8221; at 7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 26 at Bookworks. In her latest Wind River novel Arapaho attorney Vicky Holden and Father John O&#8217;Malley are caught between two cultures that won&#8217;t let go of the past and a killer who won&#8217;t leave any witnesses.</p> <p>Bookworks is at 4022 Rio Grande NW.</p> <p>At 7 p.m. Friday, Sept. 27 Bookworks will host Eric Schlosser, author of &#8220;Command and Control,&#8221; at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History, 601 Eubank NE. Tickets are $5 at <a href="http://www.bkwrks.com/eric-schlosser" type="external">www.bkwrks.com/eric-schlosser</a>. The famed investigative journalist digs deep to uncover secrets about the management of American&#8217;s nuclear arsenal.</p> <p>AUTHOR SPEAKS: Pamela Christie, author of &#8220;The King&#8217;s Lizard&#8221; and &#8220;Dead Lizard&#8217;s Dance&#8221; historical novels, will speak at Croak and Dagger, the Albuquerque chapter of the national Sisters in Crime at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 24. The meeting will be at the James Joseph Dwyer Memorial Police Substation, 12700 Montgomery NE, one block east of Tramway. It is free and open to the public.</p> <p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> <p>AT UNM: Gene Lessard will sign his book &#8220;Grandfather&#8217;s Tale: The Story of Human Evolution and Dispersal&#8221; from noon-3 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 26 at the UNM Bookstore, 2301 E. Central.</p> <p>Nasario Garcia will be at the bookstore at 3 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 25 to discuss and sign his book &#8220;Grandma&#8217;s Santo on Its Head: Stories of Days Gone By in Hispanic Villages of New Mexico.&#8221;</p> <p>AUTHOR LECTURE: Native American writer N. Scott Momaday will speak at 7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 26 at the UNM English Department&#8217;s fourth annual Rudolfo and Patricia Anaya Lecture. It will be in the SUB Grand Ballroom. It is free and open to the public. A reception will follow.</p> <p>MEMOIR WRITING: Lynn C. Miller and Lisa Lenard-Cook will be at Title Wave Books, 2318 Wisconsin NE, from 4-5:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 27 with their book &#8220;Find Your Story, Write Your Memoir.&#8221; They will do a short writing demonstration and sign the book.</p> <p />

Author probes true story of faith, madness

https://abqjournal.com/267038/author-probes-true-story-of-faith-madness.html

2013-09-22

<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p> <p>DENVER &#8212; A new report from the state shows a decline in the number of people pursuing education as a career field in Colorado for the sixth year in a row.</p> <p>The Denver Post reports ( <a href="http://dpo.st/2fMe40Q" type="external">http://dpo.st/2fMe40Q</a> ) that figures from this year&#8217;s Legislative Educator Preparation Report show a 2.2 percent drop in the number of people completing teacher preparation programs at College colleges and universities. There were fewer than 2,500 people who completed the programs during the 2015-16 school year.</p> <p>The total represents a 24 percent decrease from 2010.</p> <p>State education officials say the state&#8217;s growing teacher shortage affects all Colorado schools, but particularly those in rural areas.</p> <p>___</p> <p>Information from: The Denver Post, <a href="http://www.denverpost.com" type="external">http://www.denverpost.com</a></p> <p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>

Report sheds light on Colorado’s growing teacher shortage

https://abqjournal.com/900466/report-sheds-light-on-colorados-growing-teacher-shortage.html

<p>CAPAC, Mich. (AP) &#8212; Teams participating in this year's FIRST Robotics competition will be taking a step back so they can make several steps forward.</p> <p>The challenge is based on classic arcade video games such as Donkey Kong. Teams will be required to build robots that can pick up and stack power cubes.</p> <p>"It's very doable," said Janet Antilla, who coaches the Capac High School Metal and Soul team with her husband, John Antilla, and the help of three of the four Antilla children.</p> <p>"We have stacked things before ... and we have hung a robot before," she told the <a href="http://www.thetimesherald.com/story/news/local/2018/01/06/robotics-teams-venture-into-8-bit-universe/1010216001/" type="external">Times Herald</a> . "It's similar to things we have done, but it's also different from things we have done."</p> <p>Students representing 21 teams from throughout Michigan were at Capac High School on earlier this month for the reveal of the 2018 challenge. Brennan Master, 16 and a junior at Marysville High School, came prepared with a Super Mario Odyssey cap.</p> <p>"I figured this year would be based on a video game," the member of the Marysville Vi-Bots said. "I figured for the occasion I would wear something that was in tune with a video game, and Mario was good for that."</p> <p>The reveal stayed with the retro theme, using an animation based on an 8-bit arcade game.</p> <p>Students were urged to compete with what FIRST's Woodie Flowers calls "gracious professionalism" &#8212; competing hard, but playing well with others.</p> <p>"Gracious professionalism to me is sportsmanship, but it goes a little bit farther," Janet Antilla said.</p> <p>Her husband, John Antilla, also coaches the Capac team. He said FIRST in the Thumb has grown from eight teams to the current 21.</p> <p>"It stimulates real-world interest in science, technology, engineering and math," he said. "It gives them that hands-on experience...</p> <p>"More than that, it allows the student to interact with adults ... and learn adult behavior in the workplace."</p> <p>FIRST is not merely a robot-building competition, he said. Students are required to create a business plan and to find sponsors.</p> <p>"It really is a microcosm of real-world business," John Antilla said.</p> <p>Jon Smith, a teacher at Marysville High School and the coach of the Vi-Bots, said his team has grown to 38 kids who had been looking forward to Saturday since the start of the school year.</p> <p>"I was doing fine until about 10:30 last night," he said. "That's when the anxiety set in."</p> <p>The Vi-Bots, as they have done the past two years, will be playing host to a FIRST District event, April 5-8. Smith said 40 teams have signed up to compete in Marysville.</p> <p>Rachel Foster and Chris Foster, of Armada, are members of Da Moose, an independent team not affiliated with a high school. They were looking forward to the big reveal.</p> <p>"I like having things to go out and do," said Rachel Foster, 17. She said friends told her and her brother about Da Moose.</p> <p>"This is a team that is willing to accept new people," she said.</p> <p>Chris Foster, 14, said he had another reason for becoming a member of Da Moose.</p> <p>"My mom made me," he said.</p> <p>Sandy Foster said her two kids have embraced FIRST and being on Da Moose.</p> <p>"I had to drag them to the first meeting, but they loved it once they went," she said.</p> <p>Bryson DenUyl, 16 and a member of the Vi-Bots, agreed that being in FIRST Robotics is almost as fun as the Port Huron to Mackinac Island sailboat race. He was a member of a class-winning crew in the 2017 race.</p> <p>"It's more of a long-term thing," he said.</p> <p>Joseph Herrick, 14, was at his first reveal. He's a ninth-grader at Brown City High School.</p> <p>"I like robots and stuff," he said.</p> <p>His father, Randy Herrick, said the competition builds life skills.</p> <p>"Right now, he's learning a skill that he can turn into a profit when he's out of school," Herrick said.</p> <p>FIRST Robotics is the brainchild of entrepreneur and innovator Dean Kamen, who appeared briefly in the reveal animation to give students a pep talk.</p> <p>"It doesn't matter how many times you fail if you are trying to do something that has never been done," he said.</p> <p>___</p> <p>Information from: Times Herald, <a href="http://www.thetimesherald.com" type="external">http://www.thetimesherald.com</a></p> <p>CAPAC, Mich. (AP) &#8212; Teams participating in this year's FIRST Robotics competition will be taking a step back so they can make several steps forward.</p> <p>The challenge is based on classic arcade video games such as Donkey Kong. Teams will be required to build robots that can pick up and stack power cubes.</p> <p>"It's very doable," said Janet Antilla, who coaches the Capac High School Metal and Soul team with her husband, John Antilla, and the help of three of the four Antilla children.</p> <p>"We have stacked things before ... and we have hung a robot before," she told the <a href="http://www.thetimesherald.com/story/news/local/2018/01/06/robotics-teams-venture-into-8-bit-universe/1010216001/" type="external">Times Herald</a> . "It's similar to things we have done, but it's also different from things we have done."</p> <p>Students representing 21 teams from throughout Michigan were at Capac High School on earlier this month for the reveal of the 2018 challenge. Brennan Master, 16 and a junior at Marysville High School, came prepared with a Super Mario Odyssey cap.</p> <p>"I figured this year would be based on a video game," the member of the Marysville Vi-Bots said. "I figured for the occasion I would wear something that was in tune with a video game, and Mario was good for that."</p> <p>The reveal stayed with the retro theme, using an animation based on an 8-bit arcade game.</p> <p>Students were urged to compete with what FIRST's Woodie Flowers calls "gracious professionalism" &#8212; competing hard, but playing well with others.</p> <p>"Gracious professionalism to me is sportsmanship, but it goes a little bit farther," Janet Antilla said.</p> <p>Her husband, John Antilla, also coaches the Capac team. He said FIRST in the Thumb has grown from eight teams to the current 21.</p> <p>"It stimulates real-world interest in science, technology, engineering and math," he said. "It gives them that hands-on experience...</p> <p>"More than that, it allows the student to interact with adults ... and learn adult behavior in the workplace."</p> <p>FIRST is not merely a robot-building competition, he said. Students are required to create a business plan and to find sponsors.</p> <p>"It really is a microcosm of real-world business," John Antilla said.</p> <p>Jon Smith, a teacher at Marysville High School and the coach of the Vi-Bots, said his team has grown to 38 kids who had been looking forward to Saturday since the start of the school year.</p> <p>"I was doing fine until about 10:30 last night," he said. "That's when the anxiety set in."</p> <p>The Vi-Bots, as they have done the past two years, will be playing host to a FIRST District event, April 5-8. Smith said 40 teams have signed up to compete in Marysville.</p> <p>Rachel Foster and Chris Foster, of Armada, are members of Da Moose, an independent team not affiliated with a high school. They were looking forward to the big reveal.</p> <p>"I like having things to go out and do," said Rachel Foster, 17. She said friends told her and her brother about Da Moose.</p> <p>"This is a team that is willing to accept new people," she said.</p> <p>Chris Foster, 14, said he had another reason for becoming a member of Da Moose.</p> <p>"My mom made me," he said.</p> <p>Sandy Foster said her two kids have embraced FIRST and being on Da Moose.</p> <p>"I had to drag them to the first meeting, but they loved it once they went," she said.</p> <p>Bryson DenUyl, 16 and a member of the Vi-Bots, agreed that being in FIRST Robotics is almost as fun as the Port Huron to Mackinac Island sailboat race. He was a member of a class-winning crew in the 2017 race.</p> <p>"It's more of a long-term thing," he said.</p> <p>Joseph Herrick, 14, was at his first reveal. He's a ninth-grader at Brown City High School.</p> <p>"I like robots and stuff," he said.</p> <p>His father, Randy Herrick, said the competition builds life skills.</p> <p>"Right now, he's learning a skill that he can turn into a profit when he's out of school," Herrick said.</p> <p>FIRST Robotics is the brainchild of entrepreneur and innovator Dean Kamen, who appeared briefly in the reveal animation to give students a pep talk.</p> <p>"It doesn't matter how many times you fail if you are trying to do something that has never been done," he said.</p> <p>___</p> <p>Information from: Times Herald, <a href="http://www.thetimesherald.com" type="external">http://www.thetimesherald.com</a></p>

Michigan student groups prepare for robotics competition

https://apnews.com/amp/847a66f777534a95801cd0d613bb0bc0

2018-01-15

<p /> <p>Air conditioners just got a little bit, well, cooler.</p> <p>Continue Reading Below</p> <p>On Thursday, Quirky and GE introduced the Aros, an 8000-BTU smart air conditioner. The sleek white unit, available for preorder on Amazon for $300, looks more like an iPod than a traditional AC unit. According to the companies, the Aros can be programmed to turn off and on based on user schedules, and can be controlled via a smartphone app.</p> <p>Users can also set a budget using the app, and the Aros unit will program itself accordingly, according to its makers.</p> <p>&#226;&#8364;&#339;AC units are usually ugly beige boxes that are pretty nasty,&#226;&#8364;&#157; says Quirky CEO Ben Kaufman. &#226;&#8364;&#339;We wanted to make something you&#226;&#8364;&#8482;d be proud to have on the wall.&#226;&#8364;&#157;</p> <p>New York-based Quirky is an innovation platform that allows community members to submit ideas, which are then developed by the crowd. The members who work on a product receive a percentage of sales in the event Quirky decides to put the idea into production. Quirky has raised a reported $175 million, most recently landing a $79 million Series D round in November. Kaufman says $30 million of that round came from GE.</p> <p>Advertisement</p> <p>Kaufman says Quirky found the idea for Aros in early December. It was submitted initially by Garthen Leslie, a Department of Energy vet who wanted to create a predictive AC unit.</p> <p>A lot of the most important Aros features came directly from Leslie, says Kaufman, including Aros&#226;&#8364;&#8482;s air-flow design. Generally speaking, AC units both release cold air and suck in warm air through their front-facing vents, which Kaufman says isn&#226;&#8364;&#8482;t an ideal setup.</p> <p>&#226;&#8364;&#339;You lose a lot of efficiency, because a lot of cold air is sucked right back into the unit,&#226;&#8364;&#157; says Kaufman.</p> <p>Kaufman says the Quirky community was able to perfect the rest of the design, with GE providing reliability testing and insight into the regulatory approval process.</p> <p>Leslie and the other Quirky members who contributed to the Aros design will split 10% of the sales revenue. Kaufman declined to share details of how GE and Quirky will split the remaining 90%.</p> <p>&#226;&#8364;&#339;The Quirky and GE relationship is a bit less transparent, because GE is invested in Quirky and is incentivized to make Quirky successful,&#226;&#8364;&#157; says Kaufman.</p> <p>The first round of Aros units is expected to be delivered to customers in late April or early May.</p>

Quirky, GE Debut New ‘Smart’ Air Conditioner

http://foxbusiness.com/features/2014/03/19/quirky-ge-debut-new-smart-air-conditioner.html

2016-04-08

<p>It&#8217;s the revolt of the geeks. Edward Snowden is John Peter Zenger digitized, a post-Internet free-press hero soaring above the security obsessions of the past decade to assert the inalienable requirements of individual sovereignty in a wired world.</p> <p>It was Zenger whose journalistic efforts to expose the wrongdoing of a colonial governor appointed by the crown landed him in jail facing the charge of &#8220;seditious libel,&#8221; quite similar to that brought against Snowden for exposing the NSA&#8217;s illegal spying.</p> <p>Their defense is the same: True patriotism demands a vigilant confrontation with government infamy. &#8220;I know not what reason is,&#8221; Zenger published in his defense back in 1734, &#8220;if sapping and betraying the liberties of a people be not treason.&#8221; After Zenger spent more than eight months in jail, a jury of his peers exonerated him and his cry for an unfettered free press came to be enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.</p> <p>The patriotic ideology that drives Snowden is a throwback to that innate American sense of personal liberty in the face of government excess for which Zenger stood. In every interview Snowden has relied on the simple notion that informed the founders of our nation regarding the primacy of truth in public discourse.</p> <p /> <p>His commitment to that ideal cannot be comprehended by a mass media culture of careerism informed by public relations that trivializes all differences of truth and logic into incomprehensible mulch. His is instead the simple veracity of the once honored slogan that the truth shall set us free and that it is overwhelming government power that is most threatening to that freedom.</p> <p>What is at issue in the information Snowden&#8217;s courageous actions have revealed is our government&#8217;s denial of the core principles of the enlightenment: rule by, and of, an informed and thoughtful citizenry that has come to be smothered by the omnipresent corporatized national security state.</p> <p>He has translated those ideals from a technologically vastly more primitive time into a cry for freedom in the age of an Internet that contains both the seeds of human liberty in an increasingly informed and cosmopolitan public and its opposite, in the wired world&#8217;s capacity to totally obliterate the right to personal privacy that is the essential oxygen of a free society.</p> <p>As power came to be ever more concentrated and its rewards more inequitably distributed, it was all rationalized as somehow harmonizing because of the onslaught of a neutral sounding technological revolution whose new billionaires seemed to profit not by exploitation but by enhancing the lives of the masses.</p> <p>Rather suddenly, as technological revolutions go, people ended up with a gadget in hand that informed them as to the best choices they might make, not merely in consumption of goods and services but in all matters including politics and education. So much so that school districts, Los Angeles being the latest, have equated the distribution of tablets with meaningful mass education. But few seemed to notice that the adjective &#8220;consumer&#8221; had come to be the essential modifier of &#8220;sovereignty,&#8221; and that education and journalism were now synonymous with shopping.</p> <p>For most, this was an acceptable bargain, and they freely turn over not only the details of their physical location, expenditures, mail and reading habits, but also, and increasingly the most significant, biometric identifiers of self to any commercial agency eager to exploit their tastes.</p> <p>So far so good, until the government entered the game and in the aftermath of 9/11 came to overwhelm the prerogatives of the private sector.</p> <p>As long as it was only a matter of private corporations, even those as omnipresent as Google, doing the snooping, it fit the demands of freedom defined as consumer sovereignty in that one&#8217;s freedom of market choices was infinitely refined, and when it was not, the service provider could be exchanged for another.</p> <p>Not so with the government, as its activities are revealed in the documents leaked by Snowden. Its snooping began in friendly alliance with the corporate giants that appeared in control of the Internet, but as they have since protested in the wake of the Snowden revelations, even mammoth multinational corporations like Google, Apple and AT&amp;amp;T are subject to the whims of government agencies, whose intrusive powers into the World Wide Web of communications shocked even the most knowledgeable of Internet engineers.</p> <p>We learned, again thanks to Snowden, that there are no rights of the individual that are any longer inviolate, and the very notion of the sovereignty of the individual, in his or her home or minds, as guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights, is now a fiction.</p> <p>Hence the revolt of the geeks, and Snowden soon will be recognized as one of many. These are folks of no clear party or cause other than the fear of unbridled government power. Like John Peter Zenger, they know, &#8220;every crime against the public is a great crime.&#8221;</p>

The NSA Plays Mad King George in This Revolution

https://truthdig.com/articles/the-nsa-plays-mad-king-george-in-this-revolution/

2014-01-07

<p>One member of the #NeverTrump movement who is pledging to never vote for Donald Trump refuses to rule out a vote for Hillary Clinton, <a href="http://miami.cbslocal.com/2016/03/24/republican-curbelo-open-to-voting-for-clinton/" type="external">CBS Miami</a> reported.</p> <p /> <p>When asked about who he would vote for in November, Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-FL) said that while both Clinton and Trump are &#8220;flawed&#8221; candidates, he&#8217;d couldn&#8217;t bring himself to vote for Trump.</p> <p>&#8220;I think both Donald Trump and Mrs. Clinton are flawed candidates, if you look at the polls the majority of Americans have negative views on both of them,&#8221; Curbelo said. &#8220;So I am going to wait and see what happens on our side, but I have already said I will not support Mr. Trump, that is not a political decision that is a moral decision.&#8221;</p> <p>While many have reported that Curbelo would not emphatically say that he would not vote for Clinton, Kim Romano, executive director of a woman&#8217;s clinic in Key West, took it a step further saying Curbelo told her during a recent meeting that given the choice between Trump and Clinton he would vote for Clinton.</p> <p>Upon seeing the Facebook post, Curbelo clarified his comments.</p> <p>&#8220;I told Kim, and Kim is a fantastic person and a good friend from Key West, is that a lot of Republicans, Republicans that I know would vote for Hillary Clinton, instead of Donald Trump,&#8221; he said. &#8220;What I&#8217;ve said publicly over and over again to the media is I will not support Mr. Trump under any circumstances. That does not mean automatically supporting Hillary Clinton.&#8221;</p> <p />

GOP Rep Refuses To Rule Out Voting For Clinton If Trump Is Nominated

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/curbelo-gop-hillary-nevertrump

<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p> <p>WASHINGTON &#8212; The Obama administration says starting this weekend, consumers can get an early peek at 2015 premiums and plans under the president&#8217;s health law.</p> <p>Open enrollment starts Nov. 15, a week from Saturday. But Lori Lodes, spokeswoman for HealthCare.gov, said Friday that consumers will be able to &#8220;window shop&#8221; for plans before then.</p> <p>The lack of such a feature was one of the initial problems last year for HealthCare.gov.</p> <p>Most e-commerce sites allow people to browse anonymously and don&#8217;t require account creation until consumers are ready to buy. As originally designed, the Obama administration&#8217;s website worked the opposite way, overloading the balky system.</p> <p>Consumers will have to set up an account &#8212; or go back to their existing account &#8212; to enroll in a plan for 2015.</p> <p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>

Consumers to get peek at 2015 health law premiums

https://abqjournal.com/493057/consumers-to-get-peek-at-2015-health-law-premiums.html

<p>After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, European Humanities University became one of the few private universities in Belarus to offer a western-style, liberal arts education. But it didn&#8217;t last long. Belarus&#8217;s autocratic president, Alexander Lukashenko, shut it down in 2004.</p> <p>But then the head of the university got an interesting offer from the across the border in Lithuania: re-open EHU as a Belarussian university &#8212; in Vilnius.</p> <p>Now, about 200 freshmen a year make the short journey from Belarus to Vilnius to study at EHU. I wondered, though, if it was hard for people growing up in a communist-style dictatorship to cross the EU border for an education.</p> <p>Not for Jan Guardian.</p> <p>&#8220;The idea of studying in Europe was kind of sexy,&#8221; he says.</p> <p /> <p>Jan Guardian</p> <p>Courtesy of EHU</p> <p>Guardian, who graduated high school in the Belarussian capital, Minsk, wanted to study law. His parents actually encouraged him to go to EHU in Lithuania, because he wouldn&#8217;t have to take Belarus-mandated classes like &#8220;National Ideology&#8221; &#8212; and he could take other classes that might get omitted at home.</p> <p>&#8220;In Belarus, you would not get the subject of &#8216;International Human Rights standards&#8217; because human rights is something that is not spoken of in this country,&#8221; Guardian says.</p> <p>Anton Mazeika arrived at EHU by a different route. After high school, he became a bartender at one of Minsk&#8217;s hottest dance clubs, but he had a sort of quarter-life crisis.</p> <p>&#8220;I grew disenchanted with the life of late nights, alcohol and stripteases,&#8221; he says.</p> <p>Then Mazeika stumbled on an online announcement that EHU was re-opening in Vilnius and applied to study philosophy.</p> <p>His family was not happy.</p> <p>&#8220;No one in my family was supportive,&#8221; he says, laughing, &#8220;especially my mom. There was a big scandal at home, but you know, moms are moms. They never want you to move away, especially to a foreign country.&#8221;</p> <p>A lot of Belarussian students use EHU as a springboard to a life in the West &#8212; and it looked like Jan Guardian and Anton Mazeika would too. After graduating, Guardian got a master&#8217;s degree in Italy, and Mazeika took a job at EHU and stayed in Vilnius.</p> <p>Today, though, both are back in Belarus. Guardian returned three years ago, for health reasons, and has no plans to leave.</p> <p>&#8220;I work as a marketing specialist with a Belarussian IT company,&#8221; Guardian says. &#8220;My job is extremely satisfying.&#8221;</p> <p /> <p>Anton Mazeika studied philosphy at EHU. Now he's a self-taught filmmaker.</p> <p>Courtesy of Anton Mazeika</p> <p>Mazeika still works for EHU in Vilnius, only now he commutes back and forth.</p> <p>&#8220;Maybe two to three years ago, something changed,&#8221; Mazeika says. &#8220;I started feeling homesick and suddenly realized: I have a home and it&#8217;s not in this country. It&#8217;s back in Belarus.&#8221;</p> <p>But their years at a liberal arts school also changed them. This year, Mazeika opened a <a href="http://vazhnykadr.by/#home_bel" type="external">film studio in Minsk</a>. He&#8217;s been making documentary shorts, including on the <a href="https://vimeo.com/115480278" type="external">first school in Minsk</a> to mainstream autistic students.</p> <p>It&#8217;s just a passion project for now, he says, but he has hopes for a filmmaking career.</p> <p>&#8220;I&#8217;m completely self-taught,&#8221; Mazeika says, &#8220;something I was only able to do because EHU probably gave me that confidence to take crazy risks with my life.&#8221;</p> <p>Guardian also credits his experience at school with making a self-starter out of him. He recently taught himself how to code and created an <a href="http://kyky.org/life/kak-i-zachem-ya-delal-forskver-dlya-lyudey-s-invalidnostyu" type="external">online access map for people with disabilities in Belarus.</a></p> <p>That same entrepreneurial spirit is what leads about 40 percent of EHU graduates to leave Belarus. The one alumnus on the school&#8217;s governing board, Artiom Anisimov, actually lives California.</p> <p>For Anisimov, applying to EHU was a no-brainer &#8212; he&#8217;d already spent his sophomore year of high school in the US, among the last groups of Belarussian students to participate in an exchange program sponsored by the US State Department before Lukashenko shut it down.</p> <p>But even after he moved to Vilnius to study law at EHU, Anisimov went home almost every weekend &#8212; a trip that wasn&#8217;t always easy.</p> <p>&#8220;Even though they were so close geographically, they were so distant in the way you feel yourself in a society,&#8221; he says. &#8220;Every time you cross the border, you could feel the difference. Many of us were searched or questioned.&#8221;</p> <p>Anisimov ended up specializing in international space law, which led to grad school in the US and a job in Silicon Valley. But he&#8217;s still helping to determine the future of EHU, and in a way, Belarus. He recently took part in a controversial vote to appoint the first non-Belarussian head of EHU &#8212; an American who doesn&#8217;t speak Belarussian or Russian.</p> <p>But as Anisimov points out, even though EHU is a Belarussian university, it doesn&#8217;t get any funding from Belarus. It&#8217;s largely subsidized by public and private sources in Europe and the US, including the European Commission, the Nordic Council of Ministers&amp;#160;and the MacArthur Foundation.</p> <p>&amp;#160;Of course, he says, it would be great if things improved in Belarus and the university could stop operating in exile.</p> <p>&#8220;That always has been the plan. I hope EHU returns to Belarus,&#8221; Anisimov says.</p> <p>But with President Lukashenko apparently cruising toward his fifth electoral victory in October, that&#8217;s unlikely to happen anytime soon.</p>

When Belarus closed its last liberal arts school, the university went into exile

https://pri.org/stories/2015-07-14/when-belarus-closed-its-last-liberal-arts-school-university-went-exile

2015-07-14

<p>BRUSSELS - Seven hours into the European Union's key summit and there's little to please Angela Merkel.</p> <p>Not only is the German leader reportedly very unhappy with proposals on the summit table that call for euro-bonds to share out Europe's debt burden. Her country's soccer team lost 2-1 to Italy, in a game that turned into a nail-biter at the end.</p> <p>And sources close to the talks said Merkel was furious over the <a href="http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_data/docs/pressdata/en/ec/131201.pdf" type="external">blue print</a> for ending the debt crisis put forward by the summit chairman Herman Van Rompuy.&amp;#160;</p> <p>For the chancellor, the plan places too much emphasis on euro bonds and other measures that would "mutualize" the debt of the euro-zone's troubled members, and not enough on her demands for a fiscal union that would impose budget discipline on wayward spending states.</p> <p>Merkel is also reportedly unhappy with other leaders planning to push a proposal floated by Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti for the EU's 800 billion euro bailout funds to intervene automatically to buy up the bonds of troubled countries if their interest rates rise to dangerous levels.</p> <p>Although the summit is scheduled to wrap up Friday afternoon, Monti had said he was prepared to stay through the weekend if needed to hammer out an agreement. Merkel however has to attend a parliamentary debate in Berlin on Friday and has reportedly told fellow leaders she does not intend to return to Brussels for an extended summit.</p> <p>Beyond such snippets, there was little news filtering out of the behind-closed-door talks to the approximately 1,800 journalists sweltering under the glass roof of the summit center's main press room.</p> <p>None of the leaders had been down to brief and their spokespeople were keeping a low profile, usually a sign of tension in such talks.</p> <p>Van Rompuy, the former Belgian prime minister who chairs EU summits reported told leaders they should not be watching the European Championship semi-final between Germany and Italy because they had serious work to do.</p> <p>So officials said Merkel and Monti were being kept informed of the scores by aides during the first half, where Italy took a two goal lead.&amp;#160;</p> <p>More from GlobalPost: <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/120628/eu-summit-merkel-monti" type="external">Europe's summit to end all summits</a></p>

Euro summit: Merkel displeased by developments

https://pri.org/stories/2012-06-28/euro-summit-merkel-displeased-developments

2012-06-28

<p>Sen. Ted Cruz misrepresented an academic study when he claimed that the &#8220;overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats.&#8221;</p> <p>The claim is based on research that found a majority of ex-felons in three states registered as Democrats. But that was a study of all ex-felons, not just violent criminals, as Cruz framed it. Also, a follow-up study of three additional states by the same authors found the majority of ex-felons in those states were neither Republican nor Democrat.</p> <p>Another study estimated ex-felons are more likely to vote Democratic than Republican, but the authors caution that that doesn&#8217;t mean criminality is associated with partisanship. Rather, it is a reflection that those in the criminal justice system are more likely to be black, Latino or poor whites.</p> <p>Cruz&#8217;s comment came during <a href="http://www.hughhewitt.com/senator-ted-cruz-planned-parenthood-attacks-freedom-act-2016-illegal-immigration/" type="external">an interview</a> with Hugh Hewitt, who referenced the recent Planned Parenthood shooting and said that despite frequently participating in &#8220;pro-life events&#8221; he had &#8220;never met, not once, a single pro-life activist who is in favor of violence of any sort. Have you, Senator Cruz?&#8221;</p> <p>Cruz, Nov. 30: I have not, and I would note that this whole episode has really displayed the ugly underbelly of the media. You know, every time you have some sort of violent crime or mass killing, you can almost see the media salivating, hoping, hoping desperately that the murderer happens to be a Republican so they can use it to try to paint their political enemies. Now listen, here&#8217;s the simple and undeniable fact. The overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats. The media doesn&#8217;t report that.</p> <p>We reached out to the Cruz campaign for backup and did not hear back, but in response to a similar query from <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/30/politics/ted-cruz-democrats-felons/index.html" type="external">CNN</a>, the Cruz campaign cited <a href="http://ann.sagepub.com/content/651/1/220.full#ref-17" type="external">research</a> published in January 2014 in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and written by <a href="http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~marcmere/" type="external">Marc Meredith</a>, an associate professor in the University of Pennsylvania&#8217;s Department of Political Science, and Michael Morse, a Ph.D. student in the <a href="http://www.gov.harvard.edu/" type="external">Department of Government at Harvard University,</a> who once worked as an <a href="" type="internal">undergraduate fellow</a> at FactCheck.org.</p> <p>Their research into whether voting rights notification laws increase ex-felons&#8217; voter turnout found that in three states &#8212; New York, New Mexico and North Carolina &#8212; a majority of ex-felons registered post-incarceration as Democrats. The breakdown was as follows: New York, 61.5 percent Democrat, 9 percent Republican; New Mexico: 51.9 percent Democrat, 18.9 percent Republican; and North Carolina, 54.6 percent Democrat, 10.2 percent Republican.</p> <p>But that&#8217;s far from the full story.</p> <p>&#8220;Cruz is misinterpreting our research,&#8221; Morse told us via email. &#8220;We only calculate the registration rates by party for discharged felons, and do not break this down by type of crime &#8230; So our work cannot speak to the partisanship of &#8216;violent criminals.&#8217; &#8221;</p> <p>Moreover, the two men published <a href="http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~marcmere/workingpapers/IowaFelons.pdf" type="external">another paper</a> in March 2014 with data from three other states &#8212; Iowa, Maine and Rhode Island &#8212; and the results were different. In all three of those states, a plurality was affiliated with no party (though in every case, there were far more registered as Democrats than Republicans).</p> <p>&#8220;Ex-felons&#8217; partisan affiliations vary across states and I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s enough evidence to claim that the national ex-felon population is &#8216;overwhelmingly Democratic,&#8217; at least in terms of party registration,&#8221; Morse said. &#8220;There is more evidence that ex-felons are not very supportive of the Republican Party.&#8221;</p> <p>Morse pointed to the book &#8220;Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy&#8221; &#8212; written by <a href="http://sociology.as.nyu.edu/object/JeffManza" type="external">Jeff Manza</a> of New York University and <a href="http://cla.umn.edu/about/directory/profile/uggen001" type="external">Christopher Uggen</a> of the University of Minnesota &#8212; which he said estimated that about 73 percent of ex-felons would vote Democratic.</p> <p>Manza told us via email that their research, based mainly on data from Oregon and Minnesota, was an estimate that relied on matching the felon population with &#8220;all the demographic characteristics we could to estimate the partisanship of similar people in the general population (that is, an average voter with the same education, race, gender, marital status, etc. of the felon population). It is an indirect method of trying to figure out how felons and ex-felons might have voted (and how many of them might have voted if they were eligible).&#8221;</p> <p>Indeed, Manza told us that he is aware of no direct survey of the felon population that asked about partisanship, meaning Cruz &#8220;has no direct evidence for what he said.&#8221;</p> <p>More broadly, Uggen told us in a phone interview that Cruz&#8217;s statement is &#8220;quite a stretch&#8221; of the research on the subject.</p> <p>&#8220;I think the main things that are responsible for that correlation (between criminality and Democratic Party affiliation) are race and poverty,&#8221; Uggen said. &#8220;If you look closely, it isn&#8217;t criminality that is so clearly associated with partisanship. We know very clearly that the criminal justice system falls more heavily on people of color in urban areas and people who are farther down the rungs of the socioeconomic ladder.&#8221;</p> <p>Uggen noted that their research focused mainly on Oregon and Minnesota and so, &#8220;I can&#8217;t really speak to the national picture with confidence.&#8221; However, he said, &#8220;it is certainly the case (among ex-felons) that there are likely more individuals who would identify as Democrats rather than would identify as Republicans.&#8221;</p> <p>Part of what their study is picking up is the race effect, he said. According to the <a href="http://sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/inc_Facts%20About%20Prisons.pdf" type="external">Sentencing Project</a>, 38 percent of people in state or federal prisons in 2011 were black, though black people make up just <a href="http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html" type="external">13 percent</a> of the overall U.S. population. According to the <a href="http://www.people-press.org/2015/04/07/a-deep-dive-into-party-affiliation/?utm_expid=53098246-2.Lly4CFSVQG2lphsg-KopIg.0&amp;amp;utm_referrer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pewresearch.org%2Fdata-trend%2Fpolitical-attitudes%2Fparty-identification%2F" type="external">Pew Research Center</a>, about 80 percent of the black population in the U.S. aligns with the Democratic Party.</p> <p>Cruz also said that any time there is a violent crime or mass killing &#8220;you can almost see the media salivating, hoping, hoping desperately that the murderer happens to be a Republican.&#8221; That&#8217;s an opinion, but we would note that the media generally focuses on the political leanings of a mass shooter when the possibility of political motivation arises. For example, it was <a href="http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/01/10/accused-gunman-had-no-party-affiliation/" type="external">widely</a> <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix/house/jared-lee-loughner-was-a-regis.html" type="external">reported</a> that Jared Lee Loughner, who shot and killed 6 people and seriously wounded Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, was registered as an independent.</p> <p>In the Planned Parenthood shooting case, the political leanings of the alleged attacker, Robert L. Dear, received media scrutiny after reports from an unidentified senior law enforcement official that Dear told police &#8220;no more baby parts&#8221; after his arrest.</p> <p>Dear&#8217;s ex-wife told the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/us/robert-dear-suspect-in-colorado-killings-preferred-to-be-left-alone.html" type="external">New York Times</a> that Dear was &#8220;generally conservative, but not obsessed with politics&#8221; and that &#8220;he believed that abortion was wrong, but it was not something that he spoke about much.&#8221; Colorado <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20151128051547/http://coloradovoters.info/by_number/6010/10372_robert_lewis_dear.html" type="external">voting records</a> listed Dear as unaffiliated. (The voter registration indicated Dear was female, which led some in the blogosphere to speculate that he was a transgender person &#8212; reports <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/30/politics/ted-cruz-planned-parenthood-transgendered-leftist-activist/" type="external">repeated</a> by Cruz &#8212; but that turned out to be simply a <a href="http://gazette.com/clerical-glitch-causes-speculation-about-colorado-springs-shooting-suspects-gender-identity/article/1564656" type="external">clerical error</a>.)</p> <p>Cruz criticized the media for refusing to report that &#8220;the overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats.&#8221; But the claim is unsupported by research.</p> <p>The researchers behind the study cited by Cruz&#8217;s campaign say their research doesn&#8217;t look at violent criminals &#8212; they only looked at ex-felons generally, violent or not. Nor does their ex-felon population represent all criminals, just those who were arrested by police. And finally, they say, they&#8217;re not even sure that with all those qualifiers it&#8217;s even true that a majority of ex-felons go on to register as Democrats. That&#8217;s true in some states studied, but not others, and no national data is available.</p> <p>Cruz was on firmer ground when he went on to say that Democrats &#8220;go in and fight to give the right to vote to convicted felons. Why? Because the Democrats know convicted felons tend to vote Democrat.&#8221; There is evidence from the studies that ex-felons are more likely to register as Democrats than Republicans when their voting rights are restored.</p>

Cruz on Violent Criminals and Democrats

https://factcheck.org/2015/12/cruz-on-violent-criminals-and-democrats/

2015-12-01

<p>Medical device maker Medtronic (NYSE:MDT) disclosed on Tuesday a 19% drop in fiscal fourth-quarter profits and issued tepid guidance for the new fiscal year.</p> <p>The Minneapolis-based company said it earned $776 million, or 72 cents a share, in the quarter ended April 29, compared with a profit of $954 million, or 86 cents a share, a year earlier. Excluding one-time items, it earned 90 cents, trailing the Street&#8217;s view of 92 cents.</p> <p>Continue Reading Below</p> <p>Sales grew by 2.4% to $4.3 billion, essentially matching consensus calls from analysts for $4.29 billion.</p> <p>&#8220;We saw steady growth across most of our businesses and geographies, which was offset by challenging dynamics in the U.S. implantable cardiac defibrillator (ICD) and spinal markets,&#8221; CEO Bill Hawkins said in a statement.</p> <p>Medtronic said cardiac and vascular sales gained 1% to $2.32 billion, while restorative therapies posted a 4% jump in sales to $1.97 billion.</p> <p>At the same time, Medtronic said it expects to earn $3.43 to $3.50 a share in fiscal 2012 on a 1% to 3% rise in sales. However, analysts had been forecasting stronger full-year EPS of $3.62 on sales of $16.69 billion.</p> <p>Shares of Medtronic lost ground on the results and guidance, sliding 2.57% to $40.20 ahead of Tuesday&#8217;s open. The stock had been up more than 11% on the year as of Monday.</p> <p>Advertisement</p>

Medtronic Profit Falls 19% on Charges

http://foxbusiness.com/features/2011/05/24/medtronic-4q-profit-falls-1-charges-revenue.html

2016-01-28

<p>In a fiery Instagram video posted Monday, rapper Snoop Dogg slammed the History Channel's decision to produce a <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3315386/" type="external">new Roots 4-part mini-series</a> and air the first episode on Memorial Day, declaring that it's time to move on from retelling "the abuse we took hundreds and hundreds of years ago" and "create our own sh&#8212;" based on "today."</p> <p>Roots, along with productions like <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2024544/?ref_=nv_sr_1" type="external">12 Years a Slave</a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4522400/" type="external">Underground</a>, suggested the rapper, were just examples of entertainment companies attempting to keep black people focused on the past.</p> <p>"No disrespect, but I can't watch no motherf&#8212;in' more black movies with n&#8212;ers getting dogged out: 12 Years a Slave, Roots, Underground, I can't watch none of that sh&#8212;," said Snoop Dogg in the post (below).</p> <p>"I'm sick of this sh&#8212;. How the f&#8212; are they going to put Roots on, on Memorial Day? They going to just keep beating that shit into our heads about how they did us, huh?" he asked. "I don't understand it, man. They just want to keep showing us the abuse that we took hundreds and hundreds of years ago. But guess what? We're taking the same abuse &#8212; think about that part."</p> <p>"When ya'll going to make a muthaf&#8212;in&#8217; series about the success that black folks is having? The only success we have is Roots and 12 Years a Slave, and sh&#8212;t like that, huh?" he said, before calling on his fellow "real" black people to join him in boycotting such productions.</p> <p>"I ain't watching that shit, and I advise you motherf&#8212;ers as real n&#8212; like myself; f&#8212; them television shows," he said. "Let's create our own shit based on today, how we live and how we inspire people today. Black is what's real. F&#8212; that old shit."</p>

Snoop Dogg Won't Watch 'Roots.' Here's Why.

https://dailywire.com/news/6148/snoop-dogg-wont-watch-roots-heres-why-james-barrett

2016-05-31

<p>&amp;lt;a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-304544159/stock-photo-new-york-march-hillary-clinton-speaks-during-the-step-it-up-for-gender-equality-event.html?src=DbPDDgy84tfIAbGiIyr_-w-1-1"&amp;gt;JStone&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;/Shutterstock</p> <p /> <p>Last weekend, Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton made an unexpectedly strong statement about her intentions for coal country. <a href="" type="internal">As I reported</a>:</p> <p>Speaking in Ohio about her plans to revitalize coal country, Clinton said, &#8220;We&#8217;re going to put a lot of coal companies and coal miners out of business.&#8221; That comment was immediately preceded by a promise to invest in the clean-energy economy in those places, and immediately followed by a pledge to &#8220;make it clear that we don&#8217;t want to forget those people.&#8221; But it&#8217;s not hard to guess which comment will end up as a sound bite in attack ads in coal states during the general election.</p> <p>Unsurprisingly, the comment was quickly condemned by lawmakers from coal country. In response, Clinton sent a letter to West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin (D), to &#8220;clarify&#8221; what she meant. In the letter, she says that her comment about lost coal jobs was intended to describe an existing downward spiral in the coal industry, rather than a promise to intentionally put coal miners out of work through her policy decisions. You can read the letter below. It&#8217;s a helpful bit of context, but I doubt it will be enough to keep Donald Trump, or whoever her general election opponent turns out to be, from using the soundbite against her.</p> <p>&amp;lt;br /&amp;gt; &amp;lt;a href="https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2767046/Letter-to-Senator-Manchin.pdf"&amp;gt;Letter-to-Senator-Manchin (PDF)&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;br /&amp;gt; &amp;lt;br /&amp;gt;&amp;lt;a href="https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2767046/Letter-to-Senator-Manchin.txt"&amp;gt;Letter-to-Senator-Manchin (Text)&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;br /&amp;gt;</p>

Hillary Clinton Really Regrets Saying She’d Put Coal Miners Out of Work

https://motherjones.com/politics/2016/03/hillary-clinton-just-walked-back-controversial-statement-about-coal/

2016-03-17

<p /> <p /> <p /> <p /> PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay. We're continuing our series 23 Things They Don't Want You to Know About Capitalism. Joining us again, Ha-Joon Chang. Thanks for joining us. Okay. We're up to Number 19: Despite the fall of communism, we are in fact living in planned economies. So explain that. This is supposed to be free market. <p /> <p />HA-JOON CHANG, UNIV. OF CAMBRIDGE: That's right. Yeah. I mean, that's what people think. But, you know, just think about it. When Karl Marx was writing about central planning, there was actually no centrally planned economy. Where did he get the idea? He got it from corporations. So corporations might look free, kind of, when it interacts with other corporations, but internally it's a very hierarchical organization. <p /> <p />JAY: And Wal-Mart would've blown Marx away. I mean, there's the internal--. <p /> <p />CHANG: Oh, absolutely, yeah, planning on a global scale. So, I mean--. <p /> <p />JAY: I've often thought, if you want to have a planned economy in the United States, the American government should just buy all the shares of Wal-Mart. You'd have the seeds of a planned economy. <p /> <p />CHANG: No, no, exactly. No, actually, that's exactly what Marx thought was going to happen. I mean, companies become bigger and bigger, they plan more and more of the economy, and in the end it becomes more rational to run it as a whole kind of separate unit. <p /> <p />JAY: And he never imagined digitization. When you add digitization to the planning process and computerization, places like Wal-Mart, they're tremendous in the amount of planning [incompr.] <p /> <p />CHANG: Yeah, but, I mean, you know, as the failure of Soviet Union shows, it wasn't really about the lack of information and so on. It was a more complex problem. I mean, when you have, like--I mean, when you're poor and trying to feed people, then there are relatively few things to plan. But when you reach a higher stage of material development, people want diversity, people want different things, and so on. And, therefore, how do you plan an economy with millions of corporations and billions of products? I mean, is that--I mean, there is a reason why central planning didn't work. But, however, this doesn't mean that there's no planning. I mean, governments still plan many things. I mean, there are a lot of industrial development in the United States is actually planned by the government, in the sense that it finances a huge amount of money used in the corporate research and development, or it provides it indirectly through federal defense research and health research and so on. All these companies are planning things more and more. I mean, not just--we are not within national borders anymore. I mean, they are transnational and there are a lot of planning elements. Now, therefore, I argue that the question is not whether to plan or not, because we are already planning. The question is what to plan, exactly, at what level. <p /> <p />JAY: And for who. <p /> <p />CHANG: Exactly. Yeah. The Soviet experience has shown that this internally centralized kind of uniform planning doesn't work. On the other hand, it's not as if there is any real-world economy that is not planned at all. <p /> <p />JAY: And to be fair, in the Soviet model, it did work for a time. To go from, you know, semi-feudal-- <p /> <p />CHANG: Yeah. Exactly. When things were simpler--. <p /> <p />JAY: --to sending a Sputnik, there was a--. <p /> <p />CHANG: [crosstalk] things were simpler, it work very well. <p /> <p />JAY: And then it couldn't--then it got stuck. <p /> <p />CHANG: Or so--when--. Yeah. When they had, like, one or two kind of very clearly defined objective, like Sputnik or winning the Second World War, it worked brilliantly. I mean, after all, during the Second World War, the US economy and the British economy were also centrally planned, rationing and everything. So it's not, I mean, that planning never works, because if that was the case, all these giant corporations collapse. But, you know, I mean, there are areas and there are tasks for which planning works better. <p /> <p />JAY: I mean, the other thing with the Soviet model is the idea that everything had to be owned by one central state in order to plan it, gave rise to dictatorship. But that doesn't mean that there isn't ways to plan with a diversity of ownership with some kind of public interest. <p /> <p />CHANG: Yeah. I mean, there was some experiment along that line in Yugoslavia with self-management and so on, but it had its own problem, because the one main justification for planning was to coordinate the activities across different enterprises, trying to distill that--some kind of unified national interest out of diverse demands. So if you decentralize too much, this becomes dysfunctional. So, I mean, it's not easy, but yes, I mean, there was definitely that problem this centralization naturally led to. <p /> <p />JAY: So where do you go from this, then? If there is a lot of planning in the economy and people don't want to admit it, then what? <p /> <p />CHANG: No. I mean, you know, there are certain things that we really need central planning for. <p /> <p />JAY: Like, we're talking about a new green economy [crosstalk] <p /> <p />CHANG: Green growth. Exactly. Yeah. Without a concerted, centralized effort, also globally coordinated, it's not going to happen. I mean, if you just leave it to the market, the market [incompr.] says, yes, keep pumping oil out; I mean, destroy Alaska; destroy Mexican Gulf. You know, it doesn't matter. I mean, it's not going to happen if you left it to the market. So this is exactly the kind of thing that you need central planning for. <p /> <p />JAY: And you're constantly hearing in the financial pages, you know, praising China, how China's doing this, China's doing that. <p /> <p />CHANG: Oh, yeah. I mean, today [snip] China putting huge money and government direction behind developing the solar cell industry. You know. <p /> <p />JAY: That's planning. <p /> <p />CHANG: Yeah. They came from nowhere to become the biggest solar cell producer in the world. I mean, still a bit lower quantity than in other countries, but they are coming up very, very fast. And when the tests are very clearly defined and your objective is clear, the planning is much better than market. <p /> <p />JAY: Okay. Moving on, Number 20: Equality of opportunity may not be fair. What's that mean? <p /> <p />CHANG: Well, you know, a lot of people argue that we don't want equality of outcome, because that's counterproductive. Only thing that we have to guarantee is equality of opportunity. So if you have a 100 meter race, they all have to start from the same starting point. You know, if one has a head start and another that runs 20 meters--from 20 meters behind the starting line is unfair. That's what they mean by equality of opportunity. So once you make sure that everyone runs from the same starting line, then we have to accept the result. Now, what these people don't tell you, however, is that in the race, some of the kids might actually have only one leg, or, you know, some of them are so badly malnourished that they hardly can run. But it is not because these kids are, you know, inherently incapable. It's because they were not properly catered for. If you have a disabled kid, then, you know, you have to have a program to fit an artificial leg to this kid so that he can actually run. <p /> <p />JAY: So in terms of public policy, what are the implications of that? <p /> <p />CHANG: Yeah, in terms of public policy, this basically means that equalizing the parental income to an extent--I mean, not completely. I mean, I--. <p /> <p />JAY: Well, especially in the US now, where you're getting what's essentially a two-tier education system, where private schools are giving kids excellent educations, and public school education in many areas is so defunded. <p /> <p />CHANG: Exactly. Yeah. I mean, in the US, the problem is particularly serious, because you fund education with local taxes. You know. So, I mean, the quality of education is basically determined by the wealth of your neighborhood, which reproduces this social inequality. I mean, in European countries, education funding's much more centralized. Even deprived areas get basically a similar amount of funding. Now, funding good schools, good public schools, is one solution. Another is you need to give some stability and minimum degree of income to all parents, because, you know, I mean, schools can only do so much. I mean, if the parents are constantly worried about money and, you know, because of that--fighting with each other all the time, I mean, the kids cannot have a secure environment to study. And if you--at the end of that kind of home environment this kid doesn't do well, it's not necessarily because the kid is less capable. So you have to make sure that these minimum condition for competition is met. <p /> <p />JAY: Okay. Number 21: Big government makes people more open to change. How's that? We're told big government destroys innovation. <p /> <p />CHANG: That's right, yeah, exactly, yeah. In the United States especially, people believe that big government made people lazy because they give free handouts to these people who don't want to work. But, you know, this is one of the biggest kind of misconceptions that we have, you know, this notion that you need to make people really afraid for them to do things, work hard, think creatively. No. I mean, this actually is counterproductive. I mean--. <p /> <p />JAY: Unless your objective is a low-wage, disciplined labor force. <p /> <p />CHANG: Exactly. I mean--but that's probably not the recipe that countries like the United States should pursue. <p /> <p />JAY: Well, no, they don't pursue it with--publicly they don't say these things. <p /> <p />CHANG: That's right. Yeah. If you have, I don't know, $300 per capita income like Ethiopia, maybe even low-wage, well-disciplined work force is what--I mean, something that you can contemplate. But, you know, in a economy with $40,000 per capita income with one of the highest skill levels in the world, I mean, aiming for this low-wage economy is ludicrous. But, you know, the point that I'm trying to make is that by actually giving people some minimum degree of security in basic things like health care and education and so on, and old age and so on, you actually make people more progressive, you make people more willing to take chances. And this is exactly what goes on in the Scandinavia countries like Sweden, Finland, Norway. They have a huge welfare state, spending in proportional terms double the money that Americans spend, triple the money in some countries, in social spending. But these countries actually are as dynamic, actually even more dynamic than the United States, because their workers are willing to take chances with their career. I mean, they, you know, do not--I mean, no one likes--. <p /> <p />JAY: And if nothing else, they sleep better, which actually is a big factor. Like, if you're up all night worried about losing your job and your house, you're not getting to be very creative about things. <p /> <p />CHANG: Yeah. So these people, they are not only provided the basic health care, education, and minimum income support; they also are provided with this retraining skills, which means that you lose your job. Okay, I mean, no one likes to lose their job, but, I mean, even if you lose the job, it's not the end of the world, because you have the minimum living standard. You will get retrained and probably find another job, whereas in America you don't want to lose your current job ever, because it means no health care, no retraining. You are likely to be thrown on the heap of history, the rubbish heap of history. So this is why, actually, the American workers are a lot more resistant to foreign competition. <p /> <p />JAY: Right. Okay. In the next segment of 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, we're at 22 coming up: Financial markets need to become less--not more--efficient. Please join us for that on The Real News Network. <p /> <p />End of Transcript <p /> <p />DISCLAIMER: Please note that transcripts for The Real News Network are typed from a recording of the program. TRNN cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism Pt.7

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option%3Dcom_content%26task%3Dview%26id%3D31%26Itemid%3D74%26jumival%3D6600

2011-04-23

<p>Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) was told by the Virginia Supreme Court that he couldn't snap his fingers and say that 206,000 ex-felons can vote. But McAuliffe is still going to let thousands of felons vote anyway.</p> <p>ABC News <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/va-gov-terry-mcauliffe-restores-voting-rights-felons/story?id=41572956" type="external">reports</a> that McAuliffe announced at the Civil Rights Memorial on Capitol Square in Richmond on Monday that 13,000 felons will now be allowed to vote.</p> <p>"The Virginia Constitution is clear," McAuliffe said. "I have the authority to restore civil rights without limitation.</p> <p>The governor claimed that he had the power to review "cases individually" to allow felons to vote.</p> <p>"Let me put this in plain English: We will proceed," McAuliffe declared.</p> <p>Back in July, the Virginia Supreme Court struck down McAuliffe's blanket voting rights restoration to 206,000 felons, with the majority writing that "grant blanket, group pardons" from the governor was not compatible with the state constitution.</p> <p>"Never before have any of the prior 71 Virginia governors issued a clemency order of any kind &#8212; including pardons, reprieves, commutations, and restoration orders &#8212; to a class of unnamed felons without regard for the nature of the crimes or any other individual circumstances relevant to the request," <a href="http://www.richmond.com/news/virginia/government-politics/article_718d04d8-70b2-5bfb-aa8c-0ff1ca108b8d.html" type="external">wrote</a> Chief Justice Donald W. Lemons. "To be sure, no governor of this commonwealth, until now, has even suggested that such a power exists. And the only governors who have seriously considered the question concluded that no such power exists."</p> <p>But McAuliffe wasn't going to let the Virginia Supreme Court get in the way of his scheme to add more Democrats to the voting rolls.</p> <p>"I will expeditiously sign nearly 13,000 individual orders to restore the fundamental rights of the citizens who have had their rights restored and registered to vote," was McAuliffe's <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/22/politics/virginia-supreme-court-voting-rights-felons/" type="external">response</a> to the ruling. "And I will continue to sign orders until I have completed restoration for all 200,000 Virginians. My faith remains strong in all of our citizens to choose their leaders, and I am prepared to back up that faith with my executive pen."</p> <p>The <a href="" type="internal">current process</a> in Virgina allows for ex-felons to vote only on a case-by-case when their applications are thoroughly examined; the process clearly differentiates between non-violent and violent crimes.</p> <p>Maybe the 13,000 felons who can now vote had applications that warranted restoration of their voting rights. But McAuliffe seems to be focused eventually going around the court to get all of the 206,000 ex-felons to vote, and it's for one purpose only: electing his friend Hillary Clinton. Seven-in-ten felons vote Democrat, after all.</p> <p>Clinton does appear to have Virginia won easily, as a recent <a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/swing-states-2016-election/2016/08/poll-virginia-clinton-trump-227315" type="external">poll</a> shows her up by 16 points over GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump. But adding more Democrats to the state's electorate will provide with extra cushion on the off-chance that the race becomes close.</p>

VA Gov. Will Let Felons Vote Despite Court Order

https://dailywire.com/news/8609/va-gov-will-let-felons-vote-despite-court-order-aaron-bandler

2016-08-23

<p>President Barack Obama&#8217;s forthcoming visit to India in November comes amid a noticeable increase in tensions in US-Pakistan relations and a favorable climate for Washington&#8217;s ties with India. His visit to China almost exactly a year ago was a prickly reminder to Delhi of Beijing&#8217;s undeniable importance for Washington. However, Obama&#8217;s China experience ended with no significant breakthrough on relations with Iran or trade, heavily in favor of Beijing because of an artificially low exchange rate of the Chinese currency. The trade war has intensified in the year gone by, with Congress recently passing legislation that would punish China for undervaluing its currency.</p> <p>On the other hand, the muted resentment felt in India&#8217;s official circles at Obama&#8217;s victory in the 2008 presidential election has evaporated to some extent. In a strange contrast to the negative sentiment about the Bush presidency in the United States and much of the world, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India even told the outgoing president at a White House news conference in September 2008, &#8220;The people of India deeply love you.&#8221; Such was the Indian prime minister&#8217;s gratitude to George W. Bush for delivering the civilian nuclear deal to India in the final months of his presidency.</p> <p>Nearly two years on, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and India&#8217;s External Affairs Minister S. M. Krishna met in Washington in late September, they dubbed President Obama&#8217;s forthcoming India visit as a &#8220;defining moment.&#8221; The United States thanked India for its &#8220;commitment to Afghanistan.&#8221; Washington and New Delhi both have their own imperatives. Pakistan has not delivered the expected in the &#8220;war on terrorism,&#8221; but remains crucial for the US administration. As Obama approaches his preferred deadline of July 2011 for starting a &#8220;drawdown&#8221; of troops from Afghanistan, India is emerging as a willing ally for America&#8217;s strategy in the region, and an enthusiastic agent to counter China, indisputably the superior military and economic power. As Obama ponders ways of reducing direct military involvement in Afghanistan after Iraq, the administration needs to contract out its role to proxies, with India the principal contender. The Obama administration and the Congress Party-led coalition government in India are playing for high stakes, but the stakes are higher for India in the long run.</p> <p>At this point, I want to make some general observations that reflect the situation in South Asia, and how this situation has evolved. Foreign policy is to protect national security and prosperity. The goal is to develop relations as harmonious as possible, to avoid war which is destructive and bad for prosperity. Successful foreign policy depends on internal peace, because internal conflict almost always invites outside interest, if not intervention, and enflames unrest. India has a serious conflict in Kashmir and uprisings in other deprived parts of the country by tribal communities, inappropriately labeled as Maoists. India&#8217;s relations with neighbors are hostile, adversarial, and reflect distrust and suspicion. Yet the Indian elite&#8217;s consciousness is heavily occupied with achieving impressive statistics of growth &#8211; 7, 8, maybe 10 percent. Questions such as: &#8220;How can we compete with, and beat, China and build military power.&#8221; India&#8217;s ambition is to become a superpower, and soon. All very impressive, but there is a cost &#8211; growing poverty, hunger, small farmers constantly squeezed, city slums and eviction of slum-dwellers. There are two very different narratives running side by side in rising India.</p> <p>India&#8217;s foreign policy has become distinctly radicalized over the last sixty years. Its historical development is worth examining to understand the mindset and ambitions of India&#8217;s neoliberal elite today. I will look at certain noteworthy events that have played a determining part in this process in the decades gone by.</p> <p>The 1950s were the most difficult period for India, an infant, fragile nation. Yet in a way, it was also the best period. India was known for its huge capacity to provide moral leadership in the growing community of emerging nations. It stood for values such as peaceful coexistence, non-alignment and the need for self-sufficiency to reinforce its independent status. It seemed willing to walk away from instant gains in the interest of these objects. Then two significant events happened in the 1960s: the defeat by China in October 1962, and two years later China becoming a nuclear weapons state. Soon after came territorial gains for India in the 1965 war with Pakistan. Many Indians felt that their country had shaken off the 1962 defeat against China. But the Tashkent agreement reversed those gains under Soviet pressure, because the Indian army was required to withdraw from the territory it had seized from Pakistan.</p> <p>Two further events happened in the 1970s. First, the 1971 India-Pakistan war that resulted in the dismemberment of Pakistan and the emergence of Bangladesh in its eastern half. That was when India finally shook off the &#8220;China syndrome.&#8221; Second, in 1974 India carried out its first nuclear test, which triggered Pakistan&#8217;s nuclear program. With Pakistan&#8217;s nuclear arsenal a reality now, that advantage, at least with respect to Islamabad, has diminished. In 1975 the Bangladesh leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was assassinated in a military coup. India lost a close ally and much of the strategic gains made in the 1971 war. Looking back, the 1971 victory over Pakistan has been a mixed blessing. In the late 1980s Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi thought it was possible to impose peace in Sri Lanka&#8217;s ethnic conflict under the India-Sri Lanka Accord. He sent a large military force to the island state. It did not work out as had been intended. On the contrary, the feeling was reinforced among neighbors that India was behaving like the &#8220;big brother.&#8221;</p> <p>India went through a domestic trauma in 1992. Hindu fundamentalists demolished a medieval mosque in the northern town of Ayodhya, where they claimed Lord Ram was born. Communal riots followed in which thousands, mostly Muslims, perished. These events signified the rise of Hindu nationalism in India, a mirror image of the phenomenon of Muslim fundamentalism in Pakistan in the previous decade of Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. By helping Islamist groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan with weapons and money to fight the Soviet occupation forces, the United States had greatly contributed to the phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalism throughout the region. In the 1990s reverberations began to be felt across the border in the form of Hindu radicalization, with India witnessing the ascent of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party to power. Those events radicalized not only Indian society, but also the country&#8217;s foreign policy.</p> <p>The irony was that India, with its illustrious past, reacted at best with muted criticism of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. And it came to support the US-led invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Then as now the primary motive was to counter Pakistan and China. Today, the environment around India is unfriendly. So India has built a flyover &#8211; a super highway &#8211; to Israel, bypassing the Muslim and Arab world. That flyover goes from Tel Aviv straight to Washington. The space between India and Israel has been left to other players. As India and Pakistan remain locked in a decades-long cold war, each country maneuvers to have the United States punish the other. And each of the two rivals seeks to demonstrate that it, not the other, is the true ally of America in the war on terrorism. But as has been seen once again in recent years, abuse of military power against own citizens and those of other countries has a corrosive and destructive effect in the long run. India should consider whether its foreign policy would do better with a different balance of military and referent power.</p> <p>DEEPAK TRIPATHI set up the BBC Bureau in Afghanistan in the early 1990s and was the resident correspondent in Kabul. His latest book <a href="" type="internal">Overcoming the Bush Legacy in Iraq and Afghanistan</a> <a href="" type="external">is available from Amazon.com. His next book Breeding Ground: Afghanistan and the Origins of Islamist Terrorism (Potomac Books, Inc), an inside account of the Afghan conflict and great power intervention in the country since the 1970s, is to be published in August 2010. He can be reached at:</a> <a href="mailto:DandATripathi@gmail.com" type="external">DandATripathi@gmail.com</a> <a href="" type="external">.</a></p>

India’s High Stakes Foreign Policy

https://counterpunch.org/2010/10/12/india-s-high-stakes-foreign-policy/

2010-10-12

<p>The man who took such glee in celebrating the deaths of <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/03/02/scotus.westboro.church/" type="external">military</a>, <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/westboro-church-vows-picket-monteith-funeral-article-1.1400545" type="external">celebrities</a>and <a href="http://www.religionnews.com/2012/12/17/fred-phelps-son-condemns-westboros-plan-to-picket-newtown-funerals/" type="external">innocent children gunned down</a> has to expect to see a little dancing on his grave in the not-so-distant future:</p> <p>The news comes via <a href="http://www.natephelps.com/" type="external">Nate Phelps</a>, one of Fred's estranged children, who wrote this <a href="https://www.facebook.com/NatePhelps/posts/10151924300961765?stream_ref=5" type="external">in a Facebook post Saturday night</a>.</p> <p>I've learned that my father, Fred Phelps, Sr., pastor of the "God Hates Fags" Westboro Baptist Church, was ex-communicated from the "church" back in August of 2013. He is now on the edge of death at Midland Hospice house in Topeka, Kansas.</p> <p>I'm not sure how I feel about this. Terribly ironic that his devotion to his god ends this way. Destroyed by the monster he made.I feel sad for all the hurt he's caused so many. I feel sad for those who will lose the grandfather and father they loved. And I'm bitterly angry that my family is blocking the family members who left from seeing him, and saying their good-byes.</p> <p>The news that Phelps was excommunicated from Westboro Baptist last year surprised me as well. <a href="http://cjonline.com/news/local/2014-03-16/wbc-spokesman-declines-say-whether-church-founder-has-been-excommunicated" type="external">WBC refused to confirm the excommunication</a>, but also said that they have no new leader of the church, because they don't have designated leaders.</p> <p>It would be terribly ironic if the Phelps family demands a private funeral. Personally, I'd like to see it become a rainbow coalition event, complete with parade.</p>

Fred Phelps 'Near Death' At Kansas Hospice

http://crooksandliars.com/2014/03/fred-phelps-near-death-kansas-hospice

2014-03-16

<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p> <p>WASHINGTON &#8212; U.S. special operations forces captured a militant in Libya accused of playing an instrumental role in the Benghazi attacks, officials said Monday, in a high-stakes operation designed to bring the perpetrators to justice five years after the deadly violence.</p> <p>President Donald Trump identified the militant as Mustafa al-Imam and said his capture signified that the four Americans who died &#8220;will never be forgotten.&#8221; Justice Department officials were escorting al-Imam by military plane to the United States, where he&#8217;s expected to be tried in federal court.</p> <p>&#8220;Our memory is deep and our reach is long, and we will not rest in our efforts to find and bring the perpetrators of the heinous attacks in Benghazi to justice,&#8221; Trump said.</p> <p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> <p>The Navy SEAL-led raid marked the first publicly known operation since Trump took office to target those accused of involvement in Benghazi, which mushroomed into a multiyear political fracas centered on Republican allegations of a bungled Obama administration response. Those critiques shadowed Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time of the attacks, through her presidential campaign.</p> <p>U.S. forces captured al-Imam just before midnight local time Sunday in Misrata, on Libya&#8217;s north coast, U.S. officials said. He was taken to a U.S. Navy ship at the Misrata port for transport by military plane to Washington, where he&#8217;s expected to arrive within the next two days, one of the officials said.</p> <p>Once on American soil, al-Imam will face trial in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia as the FBI continues to investigate, the Justice Department said. He faces three criminal charges that were filed in May 2015 but only recently unsealed: killing or conspiring to kill someone during an attack on a federal facility, providing support for terrorists, and using a firearm in connection with a violent crime.</p> <p>It wasn&#8217;t immediately clear how al-Imam was involved in the Sept. 11, 2012, violence. The U.S. attorney&#8217;s office said he is a Libyan national and about 46 years old.</p> <p>Trump said he&#8217;d ordered the raid, and thanked the U.S. military, intelligence agencies and prosecutors for tracking al-Imam and enabling his capture. The U.S. officials said the operation was coordinated with Libya&#8217;s internationally recognized government. They weren&#8217;t authorized to speak publicly on the matter and demanded anonymity.</p> <p>Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said he&#8217;d spoken with the relatives of some of the Americans who died in Benghazi: U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, State Department information management officer Sean Patrick Smith, and contract security officers Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty. Tillerson said the U.S. would &#8220;spare no effort&#8221; to ensure al-Imam is held accountable.</p> <p>Al-Imam will face court proceedings in U.S. District Court, officials said, in an apparent departure from Trump&#8217;s previously expressed desire to send militants to the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.</p> <p>In an interview last March with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Attorney General Jeff Sessions called Guantanamo &#8220;a very fine place for holding these kind of dangerous criminals.&#8221;</p> <p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> <p>The commando raid also came amid an ongoing debate about the use of U.S. forces to pursue insurgents in Africa and other locations outside of warzones like Iraq and Afghanistan. Four U.S. soldiers were killed in an ambush in Niger earlier this month under circumstances that have remained hazy and prompted Democrats and Republicans in Congress to express concerns.</p> <p>Earlier this month, another man accused in the Benghazi attack, Abu Khattala, went on trial in federal court in Washington. Khattala, captured during President Barack Obama&#8217;s tenure, has pleaded not guilty to the 18 charges against him, including murder of an internationally protected person, providing material support to terrorists and destroying U.S. property while causing death.</p> <p>The Benghazi assault started in the evening when armed attackers scaled the wall of the diplomatic post and moved through the front gate. Stevens was rushed to a fortified &#8220;safe room&#8221; along with Smith, but were then siphoned off from security officers when attackers set the building and its furniture on fire. Libyan civilians found Stevens hours later in the wreckage, and he died of smoke inhalation in a hospital, becoming the first U.S. ambassador killed in the line of duty in more than three decades.</p> <p>A nearby CIA annex was attacked by mortar fire hours after the diplomatic complex, killing Woods and Doherty, who were defending the rooftop.</p> <p>The attack became fodder for multiple congressional investigations to determine what happened and whether the Obama administration misled the public on the details of the bloody assault. Initial accounts provided by administration officials, notably Obama&#8217;s U.N. ambassador, Susan Rice, said the attack grew out of a protest against an anti-Muslim internet film. Later, the administration said it was a planned terrorist attack.</p> <p>A two-year investigation by a House Benghazi committee focused heavily on Clinton&#8217;s role and whether security at the compounds and the response to the attack was sufficient. It was the Benghazi probe that revealed Clinton used a private email server for government work, prompting an FBI investigation that proved to be an albatross for her presidential campaign.</p> <p>___</p> <p>Associated Press writers Maggie Michael and Sadie Gurman contributed to this report.</p>

Trump vows justice as US captures key Benghazi militant

https://abqjournal.com/1085476/trump-vows-justice-as-us-captures-key-benghazi-militant.html

2017-10-30

<p>Published time: 21 Sep, 2017 10:01</p> <p>As the saber-rattling between the US and North Korea continues to escalate, a damning report has found that the &#8216;rogue state&#8217; owes the City of New York over $150,000 in unpaid parking tickets.</p> <p>&#8220;It is false. Whenever we have a ticket, we pay. Because, you know, if we have three tickets the city does not allow us to renew their permission,&#8221; Jong Jo, secretary of North Korea&#8217;s UN mission, told <a href="http://www.nbcnewyork.com/investigations/North-Korea-Parking-Tickets-United-Nations-New-York-Diplomat-Vehicle-Investigation-446105633.html" type="external">NBC</a>.</p> <p>The North Korean diplomatic mission to the United Nations owes more than $156,000 for 1,300 unpaid parking tickets, dating back to the 1990s. Other parking offenders include Iran ($184,987), China ($398,736), Syria ($362,550) and Russia ($104,231).</p> <p>In 2002, the US State Department issued a memorandum of understanding which stated that parking privileges for diplomats can be revoked if they accumulate more than three parking tickets. This led to a massive drop in diplomatic parking violations, with the cumulative total of fines incurred by foreign diplomats in the city since reaching $700,000.</p> <p>&#8220;The Department strictly enforces the rules and associated consequences concerning our extension of driving privileges to foreign mission members in the United States,&#8221; a US Department of State spokesperson said in a statement as cited by NBC.</p> <p>&#8220;This is a responsibility that we take very seriously, meaning we ensure that, irrespective to an individual&#8217;s entitlement to immunity, there are consequences when a foreign mission member fails to comply with U.S. motor vehicle laws.&#8221;</p> <p>The removal of parking privileges has also been used recently as a punitive measure as diplomatic relations between the US and Russia have cooled.</p>

North Korea owes NYC $156k in unpaid parking tickets

https://newsline.com/north-korea-owes-nyc-156k-in-unpaid-parking-tickets/

2017-09-21

<p><a href="" type="internal">Ann Coulter</a> Monday called <a href="" type="internal">President Obama</a> a &#8220;retard&#8221; after his impressive performance at the third and final presidential debate.&amp;#160;&#8220;I highly approve of Romney&#8217;s decision to be kind and gentle to the retard,&#8221; she wrote, via Twitter.</p> <p>Coulter, whose&amp;#160;current book is&amp;#160; <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1595230998/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;amp;camp=1789&amp;amp;creative=390957&amp;amp;creativeASIN=1595230998&amp;amp;linkCode=as2&amp;amp;tag=thenewcivrigm-20" type="external">Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama</a>,&amp;#160;is not a Barack Obama fan, needless to say. She is, however, a fan of being non &#8220;PC,&#8221; because this way you can share what&#8217;s truly in your heart. You know, in a Glenn Beck/Tea Party, &#8220;Not Racist Not Violent No longer silent&#8221; sort of way.</p> <p>&amp;#160;</p> <p>&#8220;Professional troll Ann Coulter,&#8221;&amp;#160; <a href="http://gawker.com/5954424/special-olympics-athlete-with-down-syndrome-pens-amazing-open-letter-to-ann-coulter-after-she-calls-obama-a-retard" type="external">Neetzan Zimmerman at&amp;#160;Gawker</a> notes, &#8220;later cemented her status as the petulant child of the punditry world when she replied to a Politicker request for clarification&amp;#160; <a href="http://politicker.com/2012/10/ann-coulter-calls-obama-the-retard/" type="external">by saying</a>&amp;#160;&#8216;the only people who will be offended are too retarded to understand it&#8217;.&#8221;</p> <p>READ:&amp;#160; <a href="" type="internal">Ann Coulter: President Obama Is A &#8216;Retard&#8217;</a></p> <p>Yesterday, John Franklin Stephens, a Special Olympics athlete with Down syndrome, wrote Coulter <a href="http://specialolympicsblog.wordpress.com/2012/10/23/an-open-letter-to-ann-coulter/" type="external">an open letter that will break your heart</a>. It would break Coulter&#8217;s heart, too, if she had one.</p> <p>&#8220;Come on Ms. Coulter, you aren&#8217;t dumb and you aren&#8217;t shallow. So why are you continually using a word like the R-word as an insult?,&#8221;&amp;#160;Stephens asks.</p> <p>I&#8217;m a 30 year old man with Down syndrome who has struggled with the public&#8217;s perception that an intellectual disability means that I am dumb and shallow. I am not either of those things, but I do process information more slowly than the rest of you. In fact it has taken me all day to figure out how to respond to your use of the R-word last night.</p> <p>I thought first of asking whether you meant to describe the President as someone who was bullied as a child by people like you, but rose above it to find a way to succeed in life as many of my fellow Special Olympians have.</p> <p>Then I wondered if you meant to describe him as someone who has to struggle to be thoughtful about everything he says, as everyone else races from one snarkey sound bite to the next.</p> <p>Finally, I wondered if you meant to degrade him as someone who is likely to receive bad health care, live in low grade housing with very little income and still manages to see life as a wonderful gift.</p> <p>Because, Ms. Coulter, that is who we are &#8211; and much, much more.</p> <p>After I saw your tweet, I realized you just wanted to belittle the President by linking him to people like me. You assumed that people would understand and accept that being linked to someone like me is an insult and you assumed you could get away with it and still appear on TV.</p> <p>I have to wonder if you considered other hateful words but recoiled from the backlash.</p> <p>Well, Ms. Coulter, you, and society, need to learn that being compared to people like me should be considered a badge of honor.</p> <p>Indeed.</p> <p>And we&#8217;re still awaiting <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/02/sarah_palins_response_to_retar.html" type="external">Sarah Palin&#8217;s response</a>&#8230;</p> <p>[crickets...]</p> <p>Image of&amp;#160;John Franklin Stephens via&amp;#160; <a href="http://specialolympicsblog.wordpress.com/2012/10/23/an-open-letter-to-ann-coulter/" type="external">The World of Special Olympics</a></p> <p>Related:</p> <p><a href="" type="internal">Ann Coulter To Parents Of LGBTQ Kids: &#8216;Disown Your Son&#8217; If They&#8217;re Gay</a></p> <p><a href="" type="internal">Whoopi Goldberg Tells Ann Coulter Her History Of Black America Is &#8216;Bullshit!&#8217;</a></p> <p><a href="" type="internal">Ann Coulter: Civil Rights Not For Gays Or Immigrants, Just &#8216;For Blacks&#8217;</a></p> <p>Tagged as: <a href="" type="internal">Ann Coulter</a>, <a href="" type="internal">Barack Obama</a>, <a href="" type="internal">coulter</a>, <a href="" type="internal">insult</a>, <a href="" type="internal">John Franklin Stephens</a>, <a href="" type="internal">Special Olympics</a>, <a href="" type="internal">Special Olympics Athletes</a></p> <p>Friends:</p> <p>We invite you to <a href="http://visitor.r20.constantcontact.com/manage/optin?v=001whLQo73KzGhEjdskYG07rHNy_XoDDkSBBO4INZHx6oD9kfp2yeeQAJeMQUu9oTviZa0VEl5k0rNiLifxlZsOFScMz8rVGmIaN-FFOO3GTKc%3D" type="external">sign up for our new mailing list</a>, and&amp;#160; <a href="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=TheNewCivilRightsMovement&amp;amp;amp;loc=en_US" type="external">subscribe to The New Civil Rights Movement via email</a> or <a href="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/thenewcivilrightsmovement" type="external">RSS</a>.</p> <p>Also, please&amp;#160; <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-New-Civil-Rights-Movement/358168880614" type="external">like us on Facebook</a>, and <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/gaycivilrights" type="external">follow us on Twitter</a>!</p>

Special Olympics Athlete To Ann Coulter: ‘Why Are You Using The R-Word As An Insult?

http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/special-olympics-athlete-to-ann-coulter-why-are-you-using-the-r-word-as-an-insult/news/2012/10/24/51997

2012-10-24

<p>GAINESVILLE, Fla. (AP) &#8212; KeVaughn Allen was long overdue for a game like this.</p> <p>It surely helped that he faced the team from his home state.</p> <p>Allen ended a three-week shooting slump by scoring a season-high 28 points, reaching double figures for the first time in 2018, and Florida used a fast start to beat Arkansas 88-73 on Wednesday night.</p> <p>"I'm so happy for him," Gators coach Mike White said. "Man, he was great. He needed it, and we needed it."</p> <p>Coaches and teammates have been on Allen all season, pleading with him to keep shooting through his struggles. Students jumped on the bandwagon, too. They held up large pieces of paper that spelled out "shooters shoot" as a reminder for Allen to be aggressive.</p> <p>"I saw that," said Allen, a junior from Little Rock, Arkansas, and the team's leading scorer last season. "It was funny to me."</p> <p>He also knew it was intended for him. And he responded, making 8 of 12 shots that included 6 of 7 from 3-point range. The junior had been quiet for weeks, scoring a combined 17 points over the last four games while missing 17 of 24 shots and 11 of 14 treys.</p> <p>"He came out locked in to shoot the ball," said Razorbacks guard Jaylen Barford, who scored a team-high 28 points. "He was just scoring left and right."</p> <p>Daniel Gafford chipped in 14 points and 10 rebounds for Arkansas (12-6, 2-4 Southeastern Conference), which fell to 0-4 on the road this season and dropped its 13th straight in Gainesville. The Razorbacks have now lost eight in a row against Florida.</p> <p>Jalen Hudson added 21 points for the Gators (13-5, 5-1 SEC), who won for the seventh time in their last eight games.</p> <p>This one wasn't even close.</p> <p>Florida hit 11 of its first 15 shots, building a 15-point lead in the opening 12 minutes of the game, and pretty much coasted from there. Allen and Hudson sank back-to-back 3-pointers a few minutes later, pushing the lead to 41-23.</p> <p>Arkansas coach Mike Anderson kept searching for ways to slow Allen and the Gators down, but nothing worked.</p> <p>"That was not good defense," Anderson said. "KeVaughn shot lights out. Jalen Hudson shot lights out. And the rest was history."</p> <p>The Razorbacks cut it to single digits midway through the second half when C.J. Jones hit from behind the arc, but Allen quickly answered on other end.</p> <p>"He got his groove back," Hudson said. "After he hit a couple of tough ones, we knew it was going to be a good night for him."</p> <p>BIG PICTURE</p> <p>Arkansas: The Razorbacks haven't won at the O'Connell Center since 1995, a lengthy drought that dates to the playing days of Corliss Williamson. More pressing, they need to win away from Bud Walton Arena to notch quality wins that will be important to the NCAA Tournament selection committee.</p> <p>Florida: The Gators played without center Gorjok Gak (concussion) and forward Chase Johnson (illness), further depleting their post presence. They have been without centers John Egbunu and Isaiah Stokes all season. Both are recovering from knee injuries and expected to return later this month. Florida also got guard Deaundrae Ballard (illness) back after a two-game absence.</p> <p>MISSING MEN</p> <p>Arkansas lost starting guard Anton Beard (ankle) and forward Trey Thompson (hamstring) in the first half. Neither played after the break.</p> <p>"That had a big impact on the game," Anderson said.</p> <p>INJURY SCARE</p> <p>Florida point guard Chris Chiozza left midway through the first half after getting hit in the left eye with an elbow. He was evaluated for a concussion and cleared to return. The senior finished with seven points and nine assists.</p> <p>UP NEXT</p> <p>Arkansas: Returns home to face Mississippi on Saturday.</p> <p>Florida: Plays at No. 18 Kentucky on Saturday night.</p> <p>___</p> <p>More AP college basketball: <a href="http://www.collegebasketball.ap.org" type="external">www.collegebasketball.ap.org</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/AP_Top25" type="external">https://twitter.com/AP_Top25</a></p> <p>GAINESVILLE, Fla. (AP) &#8212; KeVaughn Allen was long overdue for a game like this.</p> <p>It surely helped that he faced the team from his home state.</p> <p>Allen ended a three-week shooting slump by scoring a season-high 28 points, reaching double figures for the first time in 2018, and Florida used a fast start to beat Arkansas 88-73 on Wednesday night.</p> <p>"I'm so happy for him," Gators coach Mike White said. "Man, he was great. He needed it, and we needed it."</p> <p>Coaches and teammates have been on Allen all season, pleading with him to keep shooting through his struggles. Students jumped on the bandwagon, too. They held up large pieces of paper that spelled out "shooters shoot" as a reminder for Allen to be aggressive.</p> <p>"I saw that," said Allen, a junior from Little Rock, Arkansas, and the team's leading scorer last season. "It was funny to me."</p> <p>He also knew it was intended for him. And he responded, making 8 of 12 shots that included 6 of 7 from 3-point range. The junior had been quiet for weeks, scoring a combined 17 points over the last four games while missing 17 of 24 shots and 11 of 14 treys.</p> <p>"He came out locked in to shoot the ball," said Razorbacks guard Jaylen Barford, who scored a team-high 28 points. "He was just scoring left and right."</p> <p>Daniel Gafford chipped in 14 points and 10 rebounds for Arkansas (12-6, 2-4 Southeastern Conference), which fell to 0-4 on the road this season and dropped its 13th straight in Gainesville. The Razorbacks have now lost eight in a row against Florida.</p> <p>Jalen Hudson added 21 points for the Gators (13-5, 5-1 SEC), who won for the seventh time in their last eight games.</p> <p>This one wasn't even close.</p> <p>Florida hit 11 of its first 15 shots, building a 15-point lead in the opening 12 minutes of the game, and pretty much coasted from there. Allen and Hudson sank back-to-back 3-pointers a few minutes later, pushing the lead to 41-23.</p> <p>Arkansas coach Mike Anderson kept searching for ways to slow Allen and the Gators down, but nothing worked.</p> <p>"That was not good defense," Anderson said. "KeVaughn shot lights out. Jalen Hudson shot lights out. And the rest was history."</p> <p>The Razorbacks cut it to single digits midway through the second half when C.J. Jones hit from behind the arc, but Allen quickly answered on other end.</p> <p>"He got his groove back," Hudson said. "After he hit a couple of tough ones, we knew it was going to be a good night for him."</p> <p>BIG PICTURE</p> <p>Arkansas: The Razorbacks haven't won at the O'Connell Center since 1995, a lengthy drought that dates to the playing days of Corliss Williamson. More pressing, they need to win away from Bud Walton Arena to notch quality wins that will be important to the NCAA Tournament selection committee.</p> <p>Florida: The Gators played without center Gorjok Gak (concussion) and forward Chase Johnson (illness), further depleting their post presence. They have been without centers John Egbunu and Isaiah Stokes all season. Both are recovering from knee injuries and expected to return later this month. Florida also got guard Deaundrae Ballard (illness) back after a two-game absence.</p> <p>MISSING MEN</p> <p>Arkansas lost starting guard Anton Beard (ankle) and forward Trey Thompson (hamstring) in the first half. Neither played after the break.</p> <p>"That had a big impact on the game," Anderson said.</p> <p>INJURY SCARE</p> <p>Florida point guard Chris Chiozza left midway through the first half after getting hit in the left eye with an elbow. He was evaluated for a concussion and cleared to return. The senior finished with seven points and nine assists.</p> <p>UP NEXT</p> <p>Arkansas: Returns home to face Mississippi on Saturday.</p> <p>Florida: Plays at No. 18 Kentucky on Saturday night.</p> <p>___</p> <p>More AP college basketball: <a href="http://www.collegebasketball.ap.org" type="external">www.collegebasketball.ap.org</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/AP_Top25" type="external">https://twitter.com/AP_Top25</a></p>

Allen breaks out for 28, Florida beats Arkansas 88-73

https://apnews.com/amp/a0c7b22fb01441f49dd96285b0cf68ac

2018-01-18

<p /> <p>Hey, my mother&amp;#160;and sister are in town for a short stay, so I&#8217;ll be on a mini vacation for the next few days. &amp;#160;Hopefully I&#8217;ll be back Monday March 27th. A.F. Branco Vacation &#169;2017.</p> <p><a href="http://patriotdepot.com/comically-incorrect-a-collection-of-politically-incorrect-comics-volume-1/" type="external">A.F.Branco Coffee Table Book</a> &amp;lt;&#8212;- Order Here! <a href="http://paypal.me/AntonioBranco" type="external">Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated</a>&amp;#160;&#8211; &amp;#160;$1.00 &#8211; $5.00 &#8211; $10 &#8211; $100 &#8211; &amp;#160;it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. &#8211;&amp;#160;THANK YOU!</p> <p>&amp;#160;</p>

Branco Mini Vacation

http://comicallyincorrect.com/2017/03/22/mini-vacation/

2017-03-22

<p>A 98-year-old woman in India and her son got life sentences Thursday for a brutal murder.</p> <p>The two were accused of tying a man down and dousing him with kerosene before setting him on fire, <a href="http://www.hindustantimes.com/India-news/UttarPradesh/98-year-old-woman-gets-life-term-for-murder/Article1-999379.aspx" type="external">said the Hindustan Times</a>.</p> <p>Justice in small-town India is apparently slow.</p> <p>The grisly murder occurred in December 1996 and was reported by the nephew of the murdered man.</p> <p>He accused the elderly women, her husband and son of commiting the murder, after both families had a romantic feud that remains unclear, <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/noida/98-year-old-woman-son-get-life-for-murder/articleshow/18174420.cms?" type="external">reported the Times of India</a>.</p> <p>Since then, the elderly woman's husband has died.</p> <p>They were also fined 5000 rupees.</p> <p>More from GlobalPost:&amp;#160; <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/weird-wide-web/baby-elephant-rescued-villagers-india-video" type="external">Baby elephant rescued from a well by villagers in India (VIDEO)</a></p> <p>&amp;#160;</p>

98-year-old woman gets life sentence for brutal murder

https://pri.org/stories/2013-01-25/98-year-old-woman-gets-life-sentence-brutal-murder

2013-01-25

<p>I think this is the third post I&#8217;ve started with some version of this incredulity. But I still cannot believe the Charleston Massacre has triggered quite this total a collapse of support, not just for flying the Confederate battle flag in places of honor at Southern state capitols, but for public display and honor for the Confederacy and the War of the Rebellion in almost any form. Whatever the precise cause or convergence of under-noticed trends, there now seems like no doubt that we are witnessing a watershed in the country&#8217;s long, wretched and denial-ridden wrestling with the public memory of the Civil War.</p> <p /> <p>As a distinct but obviously related point, purely as a matter of incentives, can we get the message out to nutball racists and similar monsters that no, your horrific race massacre will not trigger a race war. We hear this line again and again and I know at some level it&#8217;s more a statement than an actual prediction. But no, your mass murder will not trigger a race war. We now sadly have enough examples to have statistically significant data to confirm that your race massacre will not trigger your race war. In fact, I think that Dylann Roof&#8217;s attack will likely be remembered, for better or worse, as much for this watershed as for the deaths of the innocents he killed.</p> <p>But back to our main story.</p> <p>Just today, Alabama Gov. <a href="" type="internal">Robert Bentley</a> (R) quietly ordered the removal of the Confederate flag from the state capitol. Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker (R), the successor to Trent Lott, whose public career was upended by Confederate nostalgia in 2002, <a href="" type="internal">said his state should ditch its current flag</a> (which incorporates the Confederate battle flag) and create an entirely new state flag.</p> <p>The one that really jumped out at me though was Mitch McConnell <a href="" type="internal">coming out to say that Kentucky should remove</a> the statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis from the state capitol.</p> <p>Statue of Jefferson Davis overlooks statue of President Abraham Lincoln in Kentucky Capitol Rotunda. Standing in rock and metal for eternity, the shadows of both men are likely saying, WTF?</p> <p>Let&#8217;s review a few things about this. Kentucky was not even part of the Confederacy, though it was a slave state and the Confederacy laid claim to parts of it. Davis is also one of the less objectionable members of the Confederate pantheon. He&#8217;s actually just a lackluster figure altogether. One of the reasons for the growth of the cult of Robert E. Lee was that Davis so obviously paled in comparison to Abraham Lincoln that another exemplar of the Southern cause had to be found. Someone like Nathan Bedford Forrest is both a fascinating historical figure and a true monster. So honoring him is a very different thing from honoring Davis.</p> <p>Now, before getting further, I&#8217;m not shedding any tears for Davis disappearing from the pantheon of public honor in Kentucky or anywhere else. Far, far from it. Throughout the almost twenty years I&#8217;ve been a working journalist and writer, the valorization of the Confederacy and the Antebellum South has been a recurring focus of my work. And not just because the Confederacy is entirely bound up with white supremacy, which would be more than enough, but because the Confederacy was treason. You&#8217;ll note that yesterday I referred to the &#8220;pretended Confederate States of America.&#8221; This is an intentional and specific usage, one that was sometimes employed by the Union during the war and after, more often in the form of the &#8220;so-called Confederate States of America.&#8221; The point is simple. Secession is illegal and unconstitutional. The Confederate states never legally left the Union, though the CSA exercised de facto control over much of the South for four years. No foreign governments ever recognized the CSA either.</p> <p>As I <a href="" type="internal">wrote two years ago</a>, the country was stitched back together with a &#8220;tacit compromise [which] was the decision to mollify Southern defeat by elevating Southern &#8216;valor&#8217; above that of the North. It&#8217;s no surprise this was done in the South. But in the 1880s and 1890s this was increasingly done in the North as well. A tacit bargain: you lost, we won, and we&#8217;re all living in the USA. But we&#8217;ll let you win the battle of memory and valor and nostalgia. Both a cause and effect of this national reconciliation was the slackening Northern commitment to protecting the former slaves, now citizens in the South, and their eventual abandonment.&#8221; Tony Horwitz <a href="" type="internal">explores similar themes far better than I could</a> in this piece he wrote today, which I can&#8217;t tell you how proud we were to publish.</p> <p>As we take stock of the cost the country paid &#8211; and especially the freedpeople and their descendants paid &#8211; for this act of historical amnesia, we should also remain cognizant of why it was done and what was gained. America could have become a country debilitated by endemic sectional violence and instability. But on balance it was not. Yet the simple fact is that today, men who were unambiguously and proudly guilty of treason hold a place of public honor throughout a large swath of the country. They did so explicitly for the preservation of slavery and their remembrance is extricably tied to the defense of white supremacy after the war.</p> <p>So all of this is salutary but where does it stop exactly?</p> <p>Let me note just two examples, in addition to the countless streets, parks, lakes, buildings, and schools that commemorate the Southern rebellion.</p> <p>The United States Army <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/opinion/sunday/misplaced-honor.html?_r=1&amp;amp;" type="external">maintains at least ten military bases</a> &#8211; including some of the largest &#8211; named in honor of Confederate generals. There is a unique irony in the United States Army, which lost hundreds of thousand of soldiers defeating the Confederacy, naming its biggest military compounds for generals who helped with the killing. I realize that this is a very big can of worms to open. But if it is inappropriate to have a statue of Jefferson Davis in the Kentucky capitol building can it really be appropriate for our largest Army bases to be named after Confederate generals? As of now, the Pentagon says there is &#8220; <a href="http://thehill.com/policy/defense/245977-pentagon-no-discussions-to-rename-bases-named-after-confederate-officers#.VYrhZTQ5eEo.twitter" type="external">no discussion</a>&#8221; of renaming those bases.</p> <p>The Robert E. Lee Monument on Richmond&#8217;s Monument Avenue</p> <p>Here&#8217;s another: Monument Avenue in Richmond. A centerpiece of Richmond, Virginia is the architecturally beautiful, if rather stately and a bit archaic, Monument Avenue, a central boulevard with some of the city&#8217;s priciest real estate. It&#8217;s lined with monumental statutes of the great worthies of the Confederacy. The main statues are of Robert E. Lee, J.E.B. Stuart, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson and Matthew Fontaine Maury. In a bizarre if well-intentioned addition, in 1996 the city added a statue of the late tennis great, Arthur Ashe, creating a sort of Frankenstein&#8217;s monster of neo-Confederate nostalgia and black achievement. But again, if Jefferson Davis doesn&#8217;t belong anywhere in the Kentucky state capitol, does he really belong in a central place of honor in the Virginia capital? Jeb Stuart? Robert E. Lee?</p> <p>Where does it end?</p> <p>Again, this isn&#8217;t doleful coming from me. None of it should have existed in the first place in my mind. But the ghost of the Confederacy and the almost countless public honors inscribed on the land are close to inoperable. They run so deep. They are so numerous and pervasive.</p> <p>Do we follow the righteous logic of recent days to its logical conclusion?</p>

The Righteous Logic of the Neo-Confederate Watershed

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-righteous-logic-of-the-neo-confederate-watershed

<p>PITTSBURGH (AP) - The 38-year-old linebacker, the one who retired for 18 days last fall, provided the pressure. The 30-year-old cornerback that never gets hurt and never gets credit provided the pick-six that swung momentum decisively in favor of the Pittsburgh Steelers.</p> <p>Oh, and don't forget the 33-year-old tight end fighting off a promising newcomer, or the 32-year-old running back with a chip on his shoulder roughly the size of Altoona.</p> <p>Even at the tail end of a youth movement a half-decade in the making, the old guys can still play. Pittsburgh's latest December surge includes a handful of familiar faces making familiar contributions at a time in their career when the window was supposed to be closing, if not already completely shut.</p> <p>James Harrison. William Gay. DeAngelo Williams. Heath Miller. All on the wrong side of 30 in an increasingly young man's game. All still vital parts of a team that suddenly looks as dangerous as any in the AFC as the Steelers (8-5) prepare to face Denver (10-3) on Sunday.</p> <p>Miller played through a rib injury that forced him to sit out a week by catching 10 passes for 66 yards, including a handful of third-down grabs that extended drives. He's providing a silent, steadying force in a huddle that includes a trio of 20-something wide receivers and a handful of linemen who were still in high school when Miller entered the league in 2005.</p> <p>"When (Miller) is on the field, he gets you going," said Steelers offensive guard David DeCastro. "Making those tough catches in traffic with those sore ribs. You just try to mirror the way he plays."</p> <p>It's why coach Mike Tomlin offered a slight correction last week when asked if he was getting more comfortable with rookie tight end Jesse James as "a starting tight end" while Miller dealt with his rib injury.</p> <p>"Let's hold out on the starting tight end," Tomlin said. "Jesse is doing some nice things."</p> <p>But he's not Miller, whom quarterback Ben Roethlisberger (33 himself) called "the best teammate I've ever been around." Miller, in his typical fashion, downplays any such praise. Last he checked, he's just doing his job, one of the reasons he barely noticed all the chirping done on both sides in Pittsburgh's decisive 33-20 victory.</p> <p>"Between the whistles we know it's going to be physical," Miller said. "What happens before or after, I don't really pay attention to because it doesn't matter. You want to bring that mindset into every game. We knew it was going to be a playoff-type game."</p> <p>So maybe it's no surprise some of the most impactful plays were made by a handful of guys with a Super Bowl ring (or two) at home.</p> <p>With the Steelers leading by nine early in the third quarter and the Bengals attempting to generate momentum, Harrison crashed in from the edge on second-year quarterback AJ McCarron. The soft, late throw gave Gay all the time he needed to step in front of the pass and race 23 yards to the end zone to put Pittsburgh up 23-7.</p> <p>The score was Gay's fifth of his career, tying him with Hall of Famer Rod Woodson for the franchise record. Heady territory for a guy who has spent most of his career in the shadow of higher profile teammates Troy Polamalu and Ike Taylor. Both are gone now, and Gay is suddenly the wise sage, though one who knows how to have a good time. His extended celebration included some serious dance moves, a semi-elaborate handshake with safety Mike Mitchell, and a flag for excessiveness.</p> <p>Maybe Gay got carried away because there was a moment when his availability was in doubt. Gay went through the NFL concussion protocol for the first time after getting dinged late in a win over Indianapolis on Dec. 6, the result of "a 190-pound guy hitting a 300-pound guy," momentarily putting his streak of consecutive appearances in jeopardy. Tomlin gave him a day off after doctors cleared Gay, but he was back at practice by the end of the week and back in the lineup for the 141st straight game.</p> <p>"Will is a guy who is always highly prepared and always does a nice job of playing the game from an above-the-neck standpoint," Tomlin said. "When you're a guy who is consistently where you're supposed to be and seeing what it is you're supposed to see, you're generally opportunistic. I think he really embodies that. The older he gets I think the more it's highlighted."</p> <p>The same goes for Williams, who scored twice against the Bengals and has eight touchdowns this season, the second-highest total of his career.</p> <p>"He means what he says in that he wants to win and he wants to be a part of it," Tomlin said. "Statistics are less important to him, winning is most important to him. I really appreciate that."</p> <p>___</p> <p>AP NFL website: www.pro32.ap.org and <a href="http://twitter.com/AP_NFL" type="external">http://twitter.com/AP_NFL</a></p> <p>PITTSBURGH (AP) - The 38-year-old linebacker, the one who retired for 18 days last fall, provided the pressure. The 30-year-old cornerback that never gets hurt and never gets credit provided the pick-six that swung momentum decisively in favor of the Pittsburgh Steelers.</p> <p>Oh, and don't forget the 33-year-old tight end fighting off a promising newcomer, or the 32-year-old running back with a chip on his shoulder roughly the size of Altoona.</p> <p>Even at the tail end of a youth movement a half-decade in the making, the old guys can still play. Pittsburgh's latest December surge includes a handful of familiar faces making familiar contributions at a time in their career when the window was supposed to be closing, if not already completely shut.</p> <p>James Harrison. William Gay. DeAngelo Williams. Heath Miller. All on the wrong side of 30 in an increasingly young man's game. All still vital parts of a team that suddenly looks as dangerous as any in the AFC as the Steelers (8-5) prepare to face Denver (10-3) on Sunday.</p> <p>Miller played through a rib injury that forced him to sit out a week by catching 10 passes for 66 yards, including a handful of third-down grabs that extended drives. He's providing a silent, steadying force in a huddle that includes a trio of 20-something wide receivers and a handful of linemen who were still in high school when Miller entered the league in 2005.</p> <p>"When (Miller) is on the field, he gets you going," said Steelers offensive guard David DeCastro. "Making those tough catches in traffic with those sore ribs. You just try to mirror the way he plays."</p> <p>It's why coach Mike Tomlin offered a slight correction last week when asked if he was getting more comfortable with rookie tight end Jesse James as "a starting tight end" while Miller dealt with his rib injury.</p> <p>"Let's hold out on the starting tight end," Tomlin said. "Jesse is doing some nice things."</p> <p>But he's not Miller, whom quarterback Ben Roethlisberger (33 himself) called "the best teammate I've ever been around." Miller, in his typical fashion, downplays any such praise. Last he checked, he's just doing his job, one of the reasons he barely noticed all the chirping done on both sides in Pittsburgh's decisive 33-20 victory.</p> <p>"Between the whistles we know it's going to be physical," Miller said. "What happens before or after, I don't really pay attention to because it doesn't matter. You want to bring that mindset into every game. We knew it was going to be a playoff-type game."</p> <p>So maybe it's no surprise some of the most impactful plays were made by a handful of guys with a Super Bowl ring (or two) at home.</p> <p>With the Steelers leading by nine early in the third quarter and the Bengals attempting to generate momentum, Harrison crashed in from the edge on second-year quarterback AJ McCarron. The soft, late throw gave Gay all the time he needed to step in front of the pass and race 23 yards to the end zone to put Pittsburgh up 23-7.</p> <p>The score was Gay's fifth of his career, tying him with Hall of Famer Rod Woodson for the franchise record. Heady territory for a guy who has spent most of his career in the shadow of higher profile teammates Troy Polamalu and Ike Taylor. Both are gone now, and Gay is suddenly the wise sage, though one who knows how to have a good time. His extended celebration included some serious dance moves, a semi-elaborate handshake with safety Mike Mitchell, and a flag for excessiveness.</p> <p>Maybe Gay got carried away because there was a moment when his availability was in doubt. Gay went through the NFL concussion protocol for the first time after getting dinged late in a win over Indianapolis on Dec. 6, the result of "a 190-pound guy hitting a 300-pound guy," momentarily putting his streak of consecutive appearances in jeopardy. Tomlin gave him a day off after doctors cleared Gay, but he was back at practice by the end of the week and back in the lineup for the 141st straight game.</p> <p>"Will is a guy who is always highly prepared and always does a nice job of playing the game from an above-the-neck standpoint," Tomlin said. "When you're a guy who is consistently where you're supposed to be and seeing what it is you're supposed to see, you're generally opportunistic. I think he really embodies that. The older he gets I think the more it's highlighted."</p> <p>The same goes for Williams, who scored twice against the Bengals and has eight touchdowns this season, the second-highest total of his career.</p> <p>"He means what he says in that he wants to win and he wants to be a part of it," Tomlin said. "Statistics are less important to him, winning is most important to him. I really appreciate that."</p> <p>___</p> <p>AP NFL website: www.pro32.ap.org and <a href="http://twitter.com/AP_NFL" type="external">http://twitter.com/AP_NFL</a></p>

Veterans providing steadying presence for Steelers

https://apnews.com/5687845568d44727a2d92551f462deea

2015-12-15

<p>Latin America has seen its fair share of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caudillo" type="external">caudillos</a>, so-called 'strongmen,' autocrats, despots, warlords, guerrilla insurgents, communists, and self-righteous l <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_theology" type="external">iberation theologians</a> grace the corridors of state power. This the first time, however, that a comedian has joked his way into the presidency.</p> <p>"Jimmy Morales, a former TV comedian who has never held office, swept to power in Guatemala's presidential election on Sunday after milking public anger over a corruption scandal that deepened distrust of the country's political establishment," <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/26/us-guatemala-election-idUSKCN0SJ04G20151026" type="external">reports</a>Reuters.</p> <p>In a landslide election victory, Morales' center-right National Convergence Front (FCN) party crushed center-left candidate Sandra Torres, an ex-first lady of Guatemala's ruling class.</p> <p>Despite a policy platform of unconventional ideas, including a campaign pledge to "tag teachers with GPS devices to ensure they attend class" and a push to revive "a historic land dispute with neighboring Belize," Morales effectively harnessed the tides of anti-establishment anxieties to his favor, garnering a staggering 68% popular support.</p> <p>After an unprecedented UN-backed <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/26/us-guatemala-election-idUSKCN0SJ04G20151026" type="external">investigation</a>tackling an epidemic of rampant corruption in Guatemala and other regional neighbors, Central American political parties that have long been guaranteed de facto power succession are beginning to collapse under the weight of institutionalized fraud and unsustainable foreign debt.</p> <p>"The election is a wake-up call to the impoverished Central American country's established parties, which have been shaken by investigations led by the Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), the U.N.-backed anti-corruption body," <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/26/us-guatemala-election-idUSKCN0SJ04G20151026" type="external">notes</a>Reuters. "Morales, a former theology student with socially conservative leanings, has applauded CICIG's work and vowed to extend its remit. But now he will now face a test of just how honest he can make the government under the watch of the CICIG."</p> <p>"The election is a wake-up call to the impoverished Central American country's established parties, which have been shaken by investigations led by the Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), the U.N.-backed anti-corruption body."</p> <p>Reuters</p> <p>In less than a year, Morales has forsaken a life of bawdy humor and parody sketches for the office of the presidency.</p> <p>"As president I received a mandate, and the mandate of the people of Guatemala is to fight against the corruption that is consuming us," Morales <a href="" type="external">announced</a>to a sea of supporters on Sunday night.</p> <p>Years of corruption and failed governance have pushed Guatemala's electorate to the precipice of a brave new world. Perhaps we too are destined for the same fate.</p>

Funny Story: Comedian Elected President of Guatemala

https://dailywire.com/news/694/funny-story-comedian-elected-president-guatemala-joshua-yasmeh

2015-10-26

<p>Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security</p> <p /> <p>Did new thinking and new ideas end the Cold War? Or were Soviet policymakers mainly influenced by material considerations? Many scholars claim that ideas played a decisive role. Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth of Dartmouth College marshal evidence from recently released sources to argue that shifting material pressures resulting from changes in the structure of global production had a much greater influence on Soviet foreign policy in the 1980s than previously thought. Ideational factors, they contend, were endogenous to these shifting material conditions and, as such, do not explain Soviet retrenchment and eventual engagement with the West in the 1980s.</p> <p />

Power, Globalization, and the End of the Cold War: Reevaluating a Landmark Case for Ideas

http://belfercenter.org/publication/power-globalization-and-end-cold-war-reevaluating-landmark-case-ideas

2018-10-04

<p>The <a href="" type="internal">Federal Reserve</a> said the U.S. economy expanded modestly in January through mid-February as hiring picked up a bit across several districts.</p> <p>The U.S. central bank's <a href="" type="internal">Beige Book</a> released on Wednesday had much the same cautiously upbeat tone as the previous report, and pointed to some improvement even in the battered housing sector.</p> <p>Continue Reading Below</p> <p>"Residential real estate market conditions improved somewhat in most districts," the report, an anecdotal report on business activity, said. "Hiring increased slightly across several districts."</p> <p>Manufacturing appeared to be a bright spot, with many of the Fed's 12 regional districts reporting rises in new orders, shipments or production, and several pointing to more robust investment spending.</p> <p>In testimony on Wednesday, Fed Chairman <a href="" type="internal">Ben Bernanke</a> expressed concern that the sharp recent drop in the unemployment rate may not be sustained. The jobless rate has fallen to 8.3 percent from around 9 percent last summer.</p> <p>"The decline in the unemployment rate over the past year has been somewhat more rapid than might have been expected, given that the economy appears to have been growing during that time frame at or below its longer-term trend," Bernanke told the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee.</p> <p>U.S. economic growth for the fourth quarter was revised up to 3 percent on Wednesday, but forecasters see the first quarter's rate coming in closer to 2 percent.</p> <p>Advertisement</p> <p>Fed officials have been debating another possible round of monetary stimulus through bond purchases, but some improvement in the outlook in recent weeks has dampened the prospect for such action.</p> <p>The Beige Book report portrayed inflation as subdued, but it warned that some businesses were expecting to pass higher input costs - presumably linked to the recent spike in energy costs - along to consumers.</p> <p>(Reporting By Pedro da Costa; Editing by Neil Stempleman)</p>

Fed: Economy Improved Modestly in January, Early February

http://foxbusiness.com/politics/2012/02/29/fed-economy-improved-modestly-in-january-early-february.html

2016-03-03

<p>Los Angeles Times | L.A. ObservedMichael Kinsley told Maureen Dowd when she got her New York Times column: "You've got to write boy stuff. The future of NATO. Campaign spending reform. Throw weights. Otherwise, they won't take you seriously." He writes: "Dowd wisely ignored me, and proceeded to reinvent the political column as a comedy of manners and a running commentary on the psychopathologies of power." ON OPINION PAGES ADDING A DIVERSITY OF VIEWS: "In recent years that, frankly, has led to reverse discrimination in favor of conservatives. And an unpleasant reality is that each type of diversity is at war with the others. If pressure for more women succeeds &#8212; as it will &#8212; there will be fewer black voices, fewer Latinos, and so on." (Kinsley column <a href="http://www.laobserved.com/archive/003248.html" type="external">observation</a>.) &amp;gt; <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/03/20/EDG8OBQ25C1.DTL" type="external">Saunders can't be accused of being a token female columnist (SF Chron)</a> &amp;gt; <a href="http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/03/20/dissing_the_distaff_pundits/" type="external">Goodman: People told my mom I used to be such a nice child (BG)</a> &amp;gt; <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB111136506370484713-IJje4NnlaR4op2qZXmIb6aDm4,00.html" type="external">Op-ed editor thought content -- not gender -- was what mattered (WSJ)</a> &amp;gt; <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-0503200394mar20,1,6224692.column?coll=chi-news-col" type="external">Wise women aren't crying out for tokenism, gender quotas (ChiTrib)</a> &amp;gt; <a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050404&amp;amp;s=pollitt" type="external">Pollitt: How hard could it be to "find" an Ehrenreich or Lithwick? (Nation)</a> &amp;gt; <a href="http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0503/20/rs.01.html" type="external">Overholser couldn't be more pleased that issue has been raised (CNN)</a></p>

Dowd ignored the "terrible" advice she got from Kinsley

https://poynter.org/news/dowd-ignored-terrible-advice-she-got-kinsley

2005-03-21

<p>NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - Country music artist Mickey Gilley and his son were injured in a car accident in Texas, but both are recovering after minor injuries.</p> <p>A statement from Gilley's publicist on Thursday said the two were injured Wednesday when their car rolled over near Corrigan, Texas. The 81-year-old singer has a fractured ankle and fractured right shoulder and will reschedule his next concert scheduled for Greeneville, Texas, on Jan. 6.</p> <p>Gilley's namesake Texas honky tonk club inspired the 1980 film "Urban Cowboy" and the resulting nationwide fad for Western-themed nightspots in the 1980s. He experienced his first success on the charts with "Room Full of Roses," and his other hits included "Stand By Me," "Window Up Above" and the honky-tonk anthem "Don't the Girls All Get Prettier at Closing Time."</p> <p>NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - Country music artist Mickey Gilley and his son were injured in a car accident in Texas, but both are recovering after minor injuries.</p> <p>A statement from Gilley's publicist on Thursday said the two were injured Wednesday when their car rolled over near Corrigan, Texas. The 81-year-old singer has a fractured ankle and fractured right shoulder and will reschedule his next concert scheduled for Greeneville, Texas, on Jan. 6.</p> <p>Gilley's namesake Texas honky tonk club inspired the 1980 film "Urban Cowboy" and the resulting nationwide fad for Western-themed nightspots in the 1980s. He experienced his first success on the charts with "Room Full of Roses," and his other hits included "Stand By Me," "Window Up Above" and the honky-tonk anthem "Don't the Girls All Get Prettier at Closing Time."</p>

Country singer Mickey Gilley injured in car accident

https://apnews.com/5b1d4e05769643a38b4b03c0947b38d4

2018-01-05

<p /> <p /> <p>In a huge blow to the Bernie Sanders campaign, the Democratic National Committee claims that they caught Team Bernie&amp;#160;accessing Hillary Clinton&#8217;s voter files in direct violation of&amp;#160;their party rules, and they&#8217;re suspending him from&amp;#160;voter data access for it.</p> <p /> <p>Watch below:</p> <p /> <p /> <p>More <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/18/politics/bernie-sanders-campaign-dnc-suspension/index.html" type="external">from CNN:</a></p> <p>The Democratic National Committee has suspended Sen. Bernie Sanders&#8217; presidential campaign from accessing its voter database after the campaign took advantage of a software error to access Hillary Clinton&#8217;s confidential voter information.</p> <p>The suspension is a setback for the Vermont senator because the database is a goldmine of information about voters nationwide. Campaigns usually use that data to plot their next moves.</p> <p>The DNC database keeps the information gathered by different campaigns separated by a firewall.</p> <p>But the data systems vendor that runs the program dropped the firewall for a brief period Wednesday, during which time the data was accessed.</p> <p>The Washington Post was the first to report the incident.</p> <p>According to the Sanders team, one staffer has been fired.</p> <p>&#8220;That behavior is unacceptable and that staffer was fired immediately,&#8221; Sanders&#8217; spokesman Michael Briggs said.</p> <p>The New York Times said the staffer was the campaign data director. Searches were run from four user accounts while data from Clinton&#8217;s campaign was exposed, the Times said. But it&#8217;s difficult to say what that means, since one person could have had more than one user account.</p> <p>The Sanders campaign will remain suspended until it provides the DNC with a full explanation of the episode and provides proof that any accessed data has been discarded.</p> <p>With the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries now less than two months away, this suspension will likely be an obstacle for the Sanders campaign.</p> <p>Hmmm&#8230; looks like they might be in big trouble. Perhaps Bernie&amp;#160;should consult his latest advisor, Killer Mike:</p> <p>I&#8217;m thinking Killer Hillary might have just gotten rid of her biggest electoral adversary in the Democrat primary election.</p> <p /> <p>What do you think? Does this spell the end for the socialist Democrat candidate and thereby a coronation for Hillary? Let us know what you think in the comments section below!!</p> <p />

BREAKING! Democrat Bernie Sanders Caught CHEATING – Gets SUSPENDED!!

http://thepoliticalinsider.com/democrats-have-suspended-bernie-sanders-from-their-voter-files-because-they-did-this/

2015-12-18

<p>RIYADH (Reuters) &#8211; Britain and Saudi Arabia signed a framework deal on military and security cooperation, Saudi state news agency SPA said on Tuesday, redoubling efforts to counter Iran in the Gulf region and defeat Islamic State.</p> <p>Prime Minister Theresa May said in December that Britain would invest over 3 billion pounds ($4.05 billion) in defense in Gulf Arab states over the next decade as it seeks to build on traditionally strong ties with the conservative, oil-wealthy monarchies before its planned departure from the European Union.</p> <p>British Defence Secretary Michael Fallon discussed military cooperation with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who serves as the kingdom&#8217;s defense minister and deputy prime minister, the SPA report said without providing details of the agreement.</p> <p>Gulf Arab states say Iran is trying to expand its influence in Arab countries, including Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Since March 2015, Saudi Arabia and Arab allies have been waging war against Iran-aligned Houthi forces that seized control of much of Yemen.</p> <p>Britain&#8217;s close relationship with Gulf states has drawn concern from human rights groups, including criticism of Saudi air strikes in Yemen&#8217;s war that have killed hundreds of civilians. British military personnel have been working with the Saudi forces.</p> <p /> <p>Fusion Media or anyone involved with Fusion Media will not accept any liability for loss or damage as a result of reliance on the information including data, quotes, charts and buy/sell signals contained within this website. Please be fully informed regarding the risks and costs associated with trading the financial markets, it is one of the riskiest investment forms possible.</p>

Britain, Saudi Arabia sign military cooperation deal: state media

https://newsline.com/britain-saudi-arabia-sign-military-cooperation-deal-state-media/

2017-09-19

<p>WASHINGTON (Reuters) &#8211; U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan said on Friday that lawmakers will replenish a federal disaster relief fund to keep federal aid flowing to Hurricane Harvey victims but that full assistance will come from Congress in installments.</p> <p>&#8220;We won&#8217;t fully know what all is needed for some time. But we do know that the cash drain is fast. And so we&#8217;re going to have to do some quick responses,&#8221; Ryan said in an interview with WCLO Radio in his hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin.</p> <p>&#8220;We&#8217;re fashioning legislation right now in concert with the administration to get the resources in the FEMA fund quickly so that that fund stays full and doesn&#8217;t run out, while the larger assessment is done.&#8221;</p> <p /> <p>Fusion Media or anyone involved with Fusion Media will not accept any liability for loss or damage as a result of reliance on the information including data, quotes, charts and buy/sell signals contained within this website. Please be fully informed regarding the risks and costs associated with trading the financial markets, it is one of the riskiest investment forms possible.</p>

House Speaker Ryan plans Harvey aid &apos;installments&apos;

https://newsline.com/house-speaker-ryan-plans-harvey-aid-039installments039/

2017-09-01

<p>Zombie attacks have waned in the last few months but that didn't stop Canadian politicians from discussing the possibility in the legislature Wednesday.</p> <p>At a House of Commons meeting, member of parliament Pat Martin from the New Democratic Party asked the Foreign Affairs Minister about Canada's zombie apocalypse preparations, <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/02/14/172019554/canada-to-zombies-drop-dead-eh" type="external">said NPR</a>.</p> <p>The rather out-of-the-blue question was posed on the House floor in a serious tone to the bemusement of other members.</p> <p>Playing along with the farce, Foreign Affairs chief, John Baird, replied:</p> <p>"Mr. Speaker, I want to assure this member and all Canadians that I am dead-i-cated to ensuring that this never happens."&amp;#160;</p> <p>He added, "I want to say categorically to this member and through him to all Canadians that under the leadership of this prime minister, Canada will never become a safe haven for zombies. Ever!"</p> <p>On Friday afternoon the video had nearly half a million view on Youtube.</p> <p /> <p />

Zombie apocalypse preparations debated in Canadian parliament (VIDEO)

https://pri.org/stories/2013-02-15/zombie-apocalypse-preparations-debated-canadian-parliament-video

2013-02-15