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Reuters: Vice Admiral Harward Trump Pick for National Security Adviser - Breitbart

Reuters

(Reuters) The Trump administration has offered the job of White House national security adviser, vacated by former U. S. intelligence official Michael Flynn, to Vice Admiral Robert Harward, said two U. S. officials familiar with the matter on Wednesday. [It was not immediately clear if Harward, a former deputy commander of U. S. Central Command who has Navy SEAL combat experience, had accepted the offer, according to sources. A White House spokesperson had no immediate comment. Flynn resigned on Monday after revelations that he had discussed U. S. sanctions on Russia with the Russian ambassador to the United States before President Donald Trump took office. Read the full story at Reuters.

Former GOP Representative Calls For Armed Insurrection (VIDEO)

Carrie MacDonald

Former GOP Representative Calls For Armed Insurrection (VIDEO) By Carrie MacDonald on October 27, 2016 Former Representative Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) has called for armed insurrection if Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton wins the election. Walsh: ‘I’m Grabbing My Musket’ Joe Walsh is a stain on the history of my little part of the country. He served for a blessedly short time before being demolished by Representative Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) in the 2012 election, but he still has ardent supporters around here. He’s relatively well-known for his outrageous tweets, but this one, posted on October 26, made some real waves: On November 8th, I'm voting for Trump. On November 9th, if Trump loses, I'm grabbing my musket. You in? — Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) October 26, 2016 Wow. I will grant that a musket is not going to do you much good these days. So perhaps, PERHAPS, it was a metaphor. But what does this say to the droves of Trump supporters, armed with much more than a musket, who believe the election will be stolen from their anointed one? Walsh, facing both harsh criticism and hilarious jabs on Twitter for his comment, did not back down: I'm serious. I don't think a musket would do much good these days, but it's time for civil disobedience on the right. https://t.co/ThJPEbALWZ — Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) October 26, 2016 Yahoo! News interviewed Walsh about the comment, and he said : “I’m not talking about inciting violence. I’m saying, ‘If Trump loses, man, game on, grab your musket. We’re going to protest. We’re going to boycott. We’re going to picket. We’re going to march on Washington. We’re going to stop paying taxes. We’re going to practice civil disobedience.’ Whatever it takes.” This has become the standard operating procedure of Republicans, particularly Trump-supporting Republicans. Make veiled threats and then walk them back (“Aww, c’mon, I was kidding! Can’t you guys take a joke?”), but make sure the knuckle-draggers who support them get wind of it. It’s disgusting. This morning, Walsh tweeted: I told Thomas Jefferson gov forced a baker out of biz for defending her religious beliefs. "Can't happen here" he said. "Grab your musket!" — Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) October 27, 2016 While this tweet is asinine on so many levels, it also suggests that he wasn’t speaking metaphorically in his initial tweet. After all, in Jefferson’s time, muskets were one of the weapons of choice. Walsh Is A Disgrace Language like this has no place in political discourse. If Walsh were nothing more than the radio host he currently is, it would be disgusting. Given that he used to be a representative in the United States Congress, it is downright abhorrent. It’s also not the first time Walsh has suggested violence. After the shooting of several police officers in Dallas this summer, Walsh tweeted — and later deleted — the following: Screenshot via Chicago Tribune So it’s really not out of the question to think he’s actually looking to incite violence with his “grabbing my musket” comment. I’m just happy his Congressional office is no longer sullying the quaint town square. Watch Don Lemon take Walsh to task for his Dallas tweet here: Featured image via screenshot from YouTube video About Carrie MacDonald Carrie is a progressive mom and wife living in the upper Midwest. Connect

VIDEO: Three Suspected Attackers Beat, Rob Man in Broad Daylight in Philadelphia - Breitbart

Katherine Rodriguez

Three suspected attackers robbed and beat a man in broad daylight on a Philadelphia sidewalk, according to surveillance footage released by the Philadelphia police.[ Police are still searching for the three male suspects, who are shown in the video attacking and robbing the victim as he left a restaurant where he was looking for a job, the Daily Mail reported. The attack took place around 12:30 p. m. in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood on the 3500 block of B Street. “It hits really hard when you see something with that level of brutality, and what appears to be that random looking, and again in broad daylight conditions. It does get a little startling,” police Captain Sekou Kinebrew told WPVI. The three suspected attackers can be seen peering into storefront windows before the assault, when one of the men wearing a cast on his right arm appears to signal to the other two men as he’s looking into one of the windows. The other two males turn around, as the victim exits the restaurant. The victim told WTXF that he was stopping by the restaurant to pick up a job application. Suddenly, the three attackers knock him to the ground, beating him and stomping on him until he became unconscious. Meanwhile, one of the attackers went through his pocket and stole his money, wallet, and cell phone. Police say they are unsure of whether the victim knew his attackers. The victim was taken to a hospital where he was treated for a broken nose and orbital bone and then released. Police say the suspects include a black or Hispanic male with a scruffy beard and mustache, wearing a black hat, black coat, and black sweatpants a Hispanic male with a light complexion, bushy hair, wearing a red hooded sweatshirt, red pants, and red sneakers and a Hispanic male with a beard and mustache, a cast on his right arm, tattoos on both arms, wearing a white black pants, and red sneakers. Detectives are urging anyone with information on the suspects to call them anonymously at .

Comparisons? Golden State Warriors Are Playing a Different Game - The New York Times

Harvey Araton

What is the point, really, of historical comparison? How do you measure a basketball mutation, which is what the Golden State Warriors have become, with their dialing that makes comparing them with storied N. B. A. teams of yore like distinguishing between a smartphone and a land line? You watched Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson dishearten and finally defeat a resolute Oklahoma City team on Monday night in Game 7 of the Western Conference finals. You watched them make shots over the outstretched arms of men much taller, and you found yourself saying the unbelievable, ridiculous, stupefied words you mouth when you can’t quite believe what you’re seeing. It is practically a reinvented game these Splash Brothers are playing, having drastically extended the standard scoring range, the acceptable area from which to consistently unload and succeed. After the Warriors had finally moved on to an N. B. A. finals rematch with LeBron James and his Cleveland Cavaliers with a victory over the Thunder, someone asked the Russell Westbrook what Curry had showed him late in the series that was missing earlier. Westbrook said, impassively: “Our bigs on the switches came out, and he made some tough shots over the top of them. ” Westbrook should have added that there was nothing negligent, or lazy, about the Thunder’s defensive resolve in Game 7. The high screens forced Steven Adams and Serge Ibaka to the perimeter time and again to cover Curry or Thompson. Adams is a weighing 255 pounds Ibaka is listed at 245. Big men are typically at a disadvantage in isolation against smaller, more creative players, but Adams and Ibaka are earnest, athletic defenders who contested and occasionally deflected a Curry or Thompson launch earlier in the series. Is it easy shooting over an aggressive, skyscraping wingspan, sidestepping, creating just enough space to release with accuracy from that far away? Try it sometime. See how it goes. Curry hit seven in Game 7. Thompson, coming off a playoff record of 11 3s (on 18 attempts) in the crucial Game 6 in Oklahoma City, nailed six. In the fourth quarter, they were daggers to the heart of a team more than holding its own from inside the line. Curry and Thompson each surpassed the previous individual high of 28 (held by Ray Allen and Dennis Scott) made in a single N. B. A. playoff series, Curry with 32, Thompson with 30. Amid it all, Bill Simmons posted on Twitter that 30 years ago, in the 1986 finals, Boston and Houston combined to hit 17 shots in an entire series won by the Celtics. Those familiar with Simmons, late of ESPN and now with HBO, will know that he is an unapologetic Celtics fan. And that Boston team, anchored by Larry Bird, won 67 games in losing once at home, and certainly staked its claim as one of the greatest in N. B. A. history. Many of us who covered sports in that decade have argued that it was the N. B. A. ’s best blend of fundamentals combined with the arrival of a athleticism that would manifest itself in the 1990s marketing miracle that became Michael Jordan. The Lakers of the to late 1980s — a team that included Mychal Thompson, Klay’s father — belong in any conversation, given the prime of Magic Johnson’s career, the Kareem and the Hall of Fame gifts of James Worthy. But it was Jordan’s Chicago Bulls team of that won 72 games and the fourth of six championships in eight seasons that these Warriors are running a mythical race against. Make no mistake: A generation of Jordan worshipers was poised to gloat had the Thunder been able to close out the Warriors. It will be again if James can deliver a championship to Cleveland. For all their titles, perhaps the true appraisal of the Bulls came in the season, when Jordan walked away to flail at minor league breaking balls. Scottie Pippen and a cast unintentionally derided as “supporting” won 55 games. They proved to be much more than a backup band, the Jordanaires, when they came within one highly questionable foul call on Pippen of going home with a chance to finish off the Knicks and advance to the Eastern Conference finals. But what they lacked without Jordan was another closer, or coldblooded scorer, to achieve what Thompson did when he dropped 41 points on the Thunder in Game 6. A year ago, on the Warriors’ way to the franchise’s first title since 1975, all four of their opponents dealt with manpower shortages. This time around, they had to push on in the first two rounds against Houston and Portland without the injured Curry, the league’s most valuable player. Against the Thunder, the Warriors had to deal with Draymond Green slumping and flirting with suspension while they fell into a hole. With the confidence of Westbrook and Kevin Durant soaring, with Curry struggling to reclaim his rhythm, the Warriors still rallied for three straight victories against a long and talented team that had taken out the San Antonio Spurs. Now the Warriors’ reward is James, a champion with Miami and an N. B. A. finalist for the sixth straight season, and a Cavaliers team at full strength. “I think any time you go through a long postseason, you grow,” Warriors Coach Steve Kerr said. “Now that we’ve been through this together for two years, going deep in the playoffs, I guess we played 21, 22 playoff games last year, and now we’re at 16, maybe 17. I haven’t really kept track, but that’s a lot of playoff games. That’s a lot of pressure, a lot of circumstances that come your way. ” And that may be our truest basis for comparing teams from different eras, rules and styles: What and whom must a champion endure and overcome? The Warriors made 73 wins look almost too easy, tempting those commonly referred to as haters to question or deride the quality of the competition, in the interests of historical context. Forget all that now. Extreme playoff adversity has been met and surmounted, and here comes LeBron. This Warriors title defense has taken on a degree of difficulty as formidable as the nightly audacity of their marksmen. If Curry and Thompson continue making them, even the haters may have to mimic Joe Lacob, the Warriors’ owner, who, upon spotting Thompson after Game 6, went down on one knee and bowed.

A Jewish Player’s 1914 Baseball Card Triggers a $125,000 Dispute - The New York Times

Ben Berkon

More than a hundred years after Guy Zinn last appeared in a game, his baseball card is causing a commotion. The fuss has nothing to do with Zinn’s skill. His playing career yielded some distinctions — including his being one of 11 players to steal home twice in a game and appearing as the first batter in Fenway Park. But most of his statistics over five seasons, including a . 269 career batting average, suggest that he was a very ordinary athlete. The trait that set Zinn apart, and made his baseball card unusually valuable, was his ethnicity. Zinn was Jewish, which all but guaranteed him a following for generations. A fan subculture has long coalesced around Jewish ballplayers, so much so that their cards have a special category on eBay. Jeff Aeder, a Chicago real estate developer, is one of the most prominent figures in that subculture, and a 1914 Zinn card owned by a Maryland man has become, as other collectors describe it, Aeder’s holy grail. It is believed to be the only card of its type still in existence. Aeder offered $125, 000 for the card in 2014 and nearly claimed it. But the deal went sour at the last minute. Aeder balked because, he said, he received a poor appraisal of the card’s condition. The owner, Dan McKee of Baltimore County, refused to renegotiate. “I blocked his email,” said McKee, who bought the card for $2, 500 in 1995 at a show in Fort Washington, Pa. “I don’t do business like that. If you make a deal, you make a deal. ” “If Zinn was not a Jewish player, this card is probably worth $10, 000,” Aeder said. “If you talk to any dealer or collector, they’ll say McKee’s idea of value is the most overblown, crazy valuation of all time. ” So why was Aeder willing, at one point, to pay $125, 000? “It really is something that if you have the means and the obsession, then someone pays a lot more than it’s worth,” he said. Aeder and McKee, both 54, remain in a bitter standoff that highlights how passions that sprout in childhood can drive the sports memorabilia market. “Zinn was not a significant player. The card, and the brouhaha surrounding it, is more interesting than the man,” said John Thorn, the official historian for Major League Baseball. “If anything, it illustrates something so interesting about the hobby, the acquisitiveness about the fan. There is this transfer of power by owning this thing. ” McKee, a software engineer who now works part time, became a collector when he was 7 and ultimately concentrated on unique cards and sets. McKee periodically posts some of his cards on auction websites — mostly out of curiosity, he said. He tends to list his items at exorbitant prices because, he said, he loathes parting with any card. “I got stuff up in my eBay store that is actually part of my collection,” McKee said in a telephone interview. “And every now and then, somebody hits the ‘buy it now’ button and I’ll scream. ” He did sell an 1894 Baltimore Orioles set — which was produced by the Alpha Photo Engraving Company — for six figures in 2006. McKee said the transaction had helped pay for his current home, but he declined to specify the sales price or the worth of his overall collection, which he called “too valuable to admit to. ” McKee displays much of his memorabilia in open cabinets and a World War II map case that he received from his Army National Guard unit. The more valuable items, however, are kept in safes. “I keep a in each one,” he said, then added dryly, “but I’d rather not use it if I don’t have to. ” Aeder also started collecting as a boy, while growing up in a family that, he has said, included Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax in its Yom Kippur prayers to honor his choice not to play in Game 1 of the 1965 World Series because it fell on the holiday. When Aeder was in his 30s, he said, he decided to sell his entire collection at a card show. That plan did not work out. “Instead of selling, I wound up spending every penny on me buying new cards,” he said. After completing the sets from his childhood, he turned to collecting the cards of Jewish baseball players. “Many collectors are happy just to get one card of each player,” said Martin Abramowitz of Newton, Mass. whose collection ended up with Aeder after Abramowitz sold it to someone else to help pay for his daughter’s wedding. “Jeff is determined to get every card of every Jewish player. ” Aeder sees curating such artifacts as an extension of the philanthropy that prompted Chicago Magazine to pick him and his wife, Jennifer Levine, as its “Chicagoans of the Year” in 2013. Among other things, the couple founded the Wolcott School for children with learning disabilities and Milt’s Barbecue for the Perplexed, a kosher restaurant that donates all of its profits to charity. In March, Aeder introduced the online Jewish Baseball Museum. “My idea was to celebrate both the rich history of Jews in America and how baseball was an opportunity to fit in,” he said. “And today, now that they fit in, it’s an opportunity for them to feel more Jewish. ” McKee said he had no idea that Zinn was Jewish when he bought his card more than 20 years ago. McKee valued it for another reason. It was part of one of three sets that appeared as an insert in The Baltimore News and that provided a full season schedule on the back of each card. A 1914 version of these included the first card ever made of Zinn, who was then in his fourth season and playing for the Baltimore Terrapins of the Federal League. Unlike the more popular cards of that era, which were produced by the American Tobacco Company, the were made from relatively thin material — like that of a playing card, but without the slick coating — and they were mostly discarded at the close of a season. As a result, few exist today. McKee said he had discovered 50 cards from the three sets some of them turned up as markers in old books. Aeder first spotted the Zinn card in 2014 on McKee’s eBay store, where it was originally listed in 2010 as one of McKee’s “show and tell” items — for $250, 000. “He wrote me and offered me $10, 000,” McKee said. “He rubbed me wrong, right off the bat. ” At Aeder’s behest, McKee said, he took a vacation day from his job to drive four hours to New Jersey to have the card authenticated — or “slabbed” — at the Sportscard Guaranty Company. “I wasn’t even going to try to get a number,” McKee said. But the company also rated the card, giving it a one out of 10. “It’s a card,” McKee said. “But it’s technical grade — because of the blue all the way to the edge, it has some chipping, it has a crease, it has some paper loss on the back — they’re never going to give it more than a one or a 1. 5. ” The final grade disturbed Aeder. “The pictures he had sent did not look like it was a one,” Aeder said. McKee said Aeder had suddenly begun overstating the importance of the card’s condition. Aeder did ask about it in their first email exchange, McKee said, “and I answered: ‘The only one known. That’s the only condition you need to know. ’” At an impasse, McKee and Aeder parted ways. They say they have not been in contact since. “I’m coming to terms with the fact that I may never own the Zinn card,” Aeder said. “Well, at least, I know I will never buy it from Dan McKee. ” But both he and McKee hold out hope that another Zinn card could still turn up somewhere. “I have hopes that there’s plenty more of those out there,” McKee said. “That I’m going to find. ”

Putin Led a Complex Cyberattack Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Finds - The New York Times

Michael D. Shear and David E. Sanger

WASHINGTON — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia directed a vast cyberattack aimed at denying Hillary Clinton the presidency and installing Donald J. Trump in the Oval Office, the nation’s top intelligence agencies said in an extraordinary report they delivered on Friday to Mr. Trump. The officials presented their unanimous conclusions to Mr. Trump in a briefing at Trump Tower in New York that brought the leaders of America’s intelligence agencies face to face with their most vocal skeptic, the who has repeatedly cast doubt on Russia’s role. The meeting came just two weeks before Mr. Trump’s inauguration and was underway even as the electoral votes from his victory were being formally counted in a joint session of Congress. Soon after leaving the meeting, intelligence officials released the declassified, damning report that described the sophisticated cybercampaign as part of a continuing Russian effort to weaken the United States government and its democratic institutions. The report — a virtually revelation by the American intelligence agencies that undermined the legitimacy of the president who is about to direct them — made the case that Mr. Trump was the favored candidate of Mr. Putin. The Russian leader, the report said, sought to denigrate Mrs. Clinton, and the report detailed what the officials had revealed to President Obama a day earlier: Mr. Trump’s victory followed a complicated, multipart cyberinformation attack whose goal had evolved to help the Republican win. The report did not conclude that Russian involvement tipped the election to Mr. Trump. The public report lacked the evidence that intelligence officials said was included in a classified version, which they described as information on the sources and methods used to collect the information about Mr. Putin and his associates. Those would include intercepts of conversations and the harvesting of computer data from “implants” that the United States and its allies have put in Russian computer networks. Much of the unclassified report focused instead on an overt Kremlin propaganda campaign that would be unlikely to convince skeptics of the report’s more serious conclusions. The report may be a political blow to Mr. Trump. But it is also a risky moment for the intelligence agencies that have become more powerful since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but have had to fend off allegations that they exaggerated intelligence during the buildup to the Iraq war. The declassified report did describe in detail the efforts of Mr. Putin and his security services, including the creation of the online Guccifer 2. 0 persona and DCLeaks. com to release information gained from the hacks to the public. “Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him,” the report by the nation’s intelligence agencies concluded. Mr. Trump, whose resistance to that very conclusion has led him to repeatedly mock the country’s intelligence services on Twitter since Election Day, issued a written statement that appeared to concede some Russian involvement. But Mr. Trump said nothing about the conclusion that Mr. Putin had sought to aid his candidacy, other than insisting that he still believes the Russian attacks had no effect on the outcome. The ’s written statement came just hours after Mr. Trump told The New York Times in an interview that the storm surrounding Russian hacking was nothing more than a “political witch hunt” carried out by his adversaries, who he said were embarrassed by their loss to him in the 2016 election. Speaking by telephone three hours before the intelligence briefing, Mr. Trump repeatedly criticized the intense focus on Russia. “China, relatively recently, hacked 20 million government names,” he said, referring to the breach of computers at the Office of Personnel Management in late 2014 and early 2015. “How come nobody even talks about that? This is a political witch hunt. ” Later, Mr. Trump sought to blame the Democrats for any cyberattacks that might have occurred. “Gross negligence by the Democratic National Committee allowed hacking to take place,” he said in a Twitter message posted about 11 p. m. “The Republican National Committee had strong defense!” Vice Mike Pence told reporters that he and Mr. Trump had “appreciated the presentation” by the intelligence officials and described the conversation as “respectful. ” Mr. Pence said the new administration would take aggressive action “to combat cyberattacks and protect the security of the American people from this type of intrusion in the future. ” Mr. Trump, who has consistently questioned the evidence of Russian hacking during the election, did so again Friday before he met with the intelligence officials. Asked why he thought there was so much attention on the Russian cyberattacks, the said the motivation was political. He also repeated his criticism of the American intelligence agencies, saying that “a lot of mistakes were made” in the past, noting in particular the attacks on the World Trade Center and saying, as he has repeatedly, that “weapons of mass destruction was one of the great mistakes of all time. ” But after meeting with the intelligence officials, Mr. Trump appeared to moderate his position, conceding that “Russia, China, other countries, outside groups and people are consistently trying to break through the cyberinfrastructure of our governmental institutions, businesses and organizations, including the Democrat National Committee. ” The report described a broad campaign of covert operations, including the “trolling” on the internet of people who were viewed as opponents of Russia’s effort. While it accused Russian intelligence agencies of obtaining and maintaining “access to elements of multiple U. S. state or local electoral boards,” it concluded — as officials have publicly — that there was no evidence of tampering with the tallying of the vote on Nov. 8. The report, reflecting the assessments of the C. I. A. the F. B. I. and the National Security Agency, stopped short of backing up Mr. Trump on his declaration that the hacking activity had no effect on the election. “We did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election,” the report concluded, saying it was beyond its responsibility to analyze American “political processes” or public opinion. The intelligence agencies also concluded “with high confidence” that Russia’s main military intelligence unit, the G. R. U. created a “persona” called Guccifer 2. 0 and a website, DCLeaks. com, to release the emails of the Democratic National Committee and of the chairman of the Clinton campaign, John D. Podesta. When those disclosures received what was seen as insufficient attention, the report said, the G. R. U. “relayed material it acquired from the D. N. C. and senior Democratic officials to WikiLeaks. ” The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has denied that Russia was the source of the emails it published. The role of RT — the Russian news organization that American intelligence says is a Kremlin propaganda operation — in the Kremlin’s effort to influence the election is covered in far more detail by the report than any other aspect of the Russian campaign. An annex in the report on RT, which was first written in 2012 but not previously made public, takes up eight pages of the report’s main section. The report’s unequivocal assessment of RT presents an awkward development for Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who is Mr. Trump’s choice to serve as national security adviser. Mr. Flynn has appeared repeatedly on RT’s news programs and in December 2015 was paid by the network to give a speech in Russia and attend its lavish anniversary party, where he sat at the elbow of Mr. Putin. Mr. Flynn has since defended his speech, insisting that RT is no different from CNN or MSNBC. The report also stated that Russia collected data “on some targets,” but did not disclose the contents of whatever it harvested. Intelligence officials who prepared the classified report have concluded that British intelligence was among the first to raise an alarm that Moscow hacked into the Democratic National Committee’s computer servers, and alerted their American counterparts, according to two people familiar with the conclusions. The British role, which has been closely held, is a critical part of the timeline because it suggests that some of the first tipoffs, in fall 2015, came from voice intercepts, computer traffic or informants outside the United States, as emails and other data from the Democratic National Committee flowed out of the country. The conclusions in the report were described on Thursday to President Obama and on Friday to Mr. Trump by James R. Clapper Jr. the director of national intelligence John O. Brennan, the director of the C. I. A. Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency and James B. Comey, the director of the F. B. I. The key to the public report’s assessment is that Russia’s motives “evolved over the course of the campaign. ” When it appeared that Mrs. Clinton was more likely to win, it concluded, the Russian effort focused “on undermining her future presidency,” with bloggers preparing a Twitter campaign with the hashtag #DemocracyRIP. It noted that Mr. Putin had a particular animus for Mrs. Clinton because he believed she had incited protests against him in 2011. Yet the attacks, the report said, began long before anyone could have known that Mr. Trump, considered a dark horse, would win the Republican nomination. It said the attacks began as early as July 2015, when Russian intelligence operatives first gained access to the Democratic National Committee’s networks. Russia maintained that access for 11 months, until “at least June 2016,” the report concludes, leaving open the possibility that Russian cyberattackers may have had access even after the firm CrowdStrike believed that it had kicked them off the networks.

“Obama Set Up the Next President For a Major Recession”… And A Giant Crash Is Coming

Contributing Author

This article was written by Michael Snyder and originally published at his Economic Collapse blog . Editor’s Comment: The past many months have carried a lot of noise about the coming crash, about a tipping point that may be fast approaching. The economics are simply giving way, and they can’t hold the illusion forever. Now that Donald Trump will be calling the shots, the money powers can usher in collapse if they wish, and have ready their scapegoat. It won’t just be Trump the man or the president, but the people who elected him, who backed Brexit and who gave up on their system. They people who let loose the chaos that now consumes us. Their rage, their anger and their desperation is brewing unrest. The ascent of populism in the political arena has put the establishment in retreat, and revealed, at last, a most dangerous atmosphere, from which collapse can properly precipitate … one in which all regulatory steadiness on the part of the system has been thrown off balance and out of whack by popular revolt. By the time the hammer falls, and the markets fall to the ground, the people rioting in the streets and losing their civility when ATMs stop working and store shelves go empty – these people will become the face of the disaster. The banks have been planning the next rise and fall for sometime; the next phase is all digital, and tightly monitored and controlled. We Are Being Set Up For Higher Interest Rates, A Major Recession And A Giant Stock Market Crash by Michael Snyder Since Donald Trump’s victory on election night we have seen the worst bond crash in 15 years . Global bond investors have seen trillions of dollars of wealth wiped out since November 8th, and analysts are warning of another tough week ahead. The general consensus in the investing community is that a Trump administration will mean much higher inflation, and as a result investors are already starting to demand higher interest rates. Unfortunately for all of us, history has shown that higher interest rates always cause an economic slowdown. And this makes perfect sense, because economic activity naturally slows down when it becomes more expensive to borrow money. The Obama administration had already set up the next president for a major recession anyway, but now this bond crash threatens to bring it on sooner rather than later. For those that are not familiar with the bond market, when yields go up bond prices go down. And when bond prices go down, that is bad news for economic growth. So we generally don’t want yields to go up. Unfortunately, yields have been absolutely soaring over the past couple of weeks, and the yield on 10 year Treasury notes has now jumped “one full percentage point since July” … The 10-year Treasury yield jumped to 2.36% in late trading on Friday, the highest since December 2015, up 66 basis point since the election, and up one full percentage point since July! The 10-year yield is at a critical juncture. In terms of reality, the first thing that might happen is a rate increase by the Fed in December, after a year of flip-flopping. A slew of post-election pronouncements by Fed heads – including Yellen’s “relatively soon” – have pushed the odds of a rate hike to 98%. As I noted the other day , so many things in our financial system are tied to yields on U.S. Treasury notes. Just look at what is happening to mortgages. As Wolf Richter has noted , the average rate on 30 year mortgages is shooting into the stratosphere… The carnage in bonds has consequences. The average interest rate of the a conforming 30-year fixed mortgage as of Friday was quoted at 4.125% for top credit scores. That’s up about 0.5 percentage point from just before the election, according to Mortgage News Daily . It put the month “on a short list of 4 worst months in more than a decade.” If mortgage rates continue to shoot higher, there will be another housing crash. Rates on auto loans, credit cards and student loans will also be affected. Throughout our economic system it will become much more costly to borrow money, and that will inevitably slow the overall economy down. Why bond investors are so on edge these days is because of statements such as this one from Steve Bannon … In a nascent administration that seems, at best, random in its beliefs, Bannon can seem to be not just a focused voice, but almost a messianic one: “Like [Andrew] Jackson’s populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement,” he says. “It’s everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Ship yards, iron works, get them all jacked up. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.” Steve Bannon is going to be one of the most influential voices in the new Trump administration, and he is absolutely determined to get this “trillion dollar infrastructure plan” through Congress. And that is going to mean a lot more borrowing and a lot more spending for a government that is already on pace to add 2.4 trillion dollars to the national debt this fiscal year. Sadly, all of this comes at a time when the U.S. economy is already starting to show significant signs of slowing down. It is being projected that we will see a sixth straight decline in year-over-year earnings for the S&P 500, and industrial production has now contracted for 14 months in a row . The truth is that the economy has been barely treading water for quite some time now, and it isn’t going to take much to push us over the edge. The following comes from Lance Roberts … With an economy running at below 2%, consumers already heavily indebted, wage growth weak for the bulk of American’s, there is not a lot of wiggle room for policy mistakes. Combine weak economics with higher interest rates, which negatively impacts consumption, and a stronger dollar, which weighs on exports, and you have a real potential of a recession occurring sooner rather than later. Yes, the stock market soared immediately following Trump’s election, but it wasn’t because economic conditions actually improved. If you look at history, a stock market crash almost always follows a major bond crash. So if bond prices keep declining rapidly that is going to be a very ominous sign for stock traders. And history has also shown us that no bull market can survive a major recession. If the economy suffers a major downturn early in the Trump administration, it is inevitable that stock prices will follow. The waning days of the Obama administration have set us up perfectly for higher interest rates, a major recession and a giant stock market crash. Of course any problems that occur after January 20th, 2017 will be blamed on Trump, but the truth is that Obama will be far more responsible for what happens than Trump will be. Right now so many people have been lulled into a sense of complacency because Donald Trump won the election. That is an enormous mistake. A shaking has already begun in the financial world, and this shaking could easily become an avalanche. Now is not a time to party. Rather, it is time to batten down the hatches and to prepare for very rough seas ahead. All of the things that so many experts warned were coming may have been delayed slightly, but without a doubt they are still on the way. So get prepared while you still can, because time is running out. This article was written by Michael Snyder and originally published at his Economic Collapse blog . Michael T. Snyder is a graduate of the University of Florida law school and he worked as an attorney in the heart of Washington D.C. for a number of years. Today, Michael is best known for his work as the publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog and The American Dream . If you want to know what is coming and what you can do to prepare, read his latest book Get Prepared Now!: Why A Great Crisis Is Coming .

How I Created My Very First Garden From Scratch - The New York Times

Michelle Slatalla

MILL VALLEY, Calif. — “Remind me again why we bought this house?” my husband asked. He was standing on the front porch a few days after we finally moved into our cottage here, after the odyssey of buying it, renting it out while an architect drew plans for an addition and, finally, living like nomads with various friends as the promised four months of construction stretched into six. “For the garden,” I said. “What garden?” he asked, not unkindly. He was genuinely perplexed. I love him, but he is not a gardener. He did not see that this garden was a rare find in our hilly town. For one thing, it had a flat, sunny backyard, which would enable an outdoor living room to connect seamlessly with the kitchen, creating a bonus room during the nine months of the year when the weather is pleasant. And the house was set unusually far back from the street, producing privacy and an illusion that a small, gently sloped front garden was actually large. Where my husband saw a recently active construction zone with souvenir dirt piles, I could imagine a landscape of rosemary and daphnes in a boxwood maze. Where he saw sad remnants of the contractors’ orange mesh safety fencing, I envisioned a silvery hedge of pittosporum. Where he saw a broken concrete path churned up by the roots of an angry cedar tree (“a lawsuit waiting to happen”) I pictured a neat redbrick walkway marching up to a tiled front stoop. Also, that cedar tree, the one aspect of the landscape that still looked alive? I saw the tree surgeon coming on Monday with a chain saw. Creating a garden is a leap of faith because, unlike an interior renovation, a landscape is alive, and that makes it fragile. I have always been a gardener. But as recently as four years ago, when this conversation with my husband occurred, I was very much a dabbler. The three other houses we had owned had a garden, but previous tenants had designed them. I was just the caretaker. The situation at hand would require more. I had to start from scratch. Despite clues that a occupant had been a gardener, the property had fallen into neglect even before the renovation. And now the pitiless blades of the backhoes that dug a new foundation had created a Mad Max hellscape of dirt. A landscape is not uncommon after a major renovation. Neither is a tight budget. But lucky for me and my garden, as we moved into this house, I also became the editor of a new gardening website called Gardenista. (Our new book, “Gardenista: The Definitive Guide to Outdoor Spaces,” is out this month.) I am actually supposed to spend my workdays learning how to improve my own garden. I figured I’d take it slow to avoid making expensive mistakes. But my dogs had other plans. My two tiny papillons, Sticky and Larry, spent their days prancing around the dust field formerly known as the backyard and leaving paw prints all over the newly refinished wood floors. An emergency bluestone patio put an end to the paw prints by creating a buffer zone between the backyard and house. After agonizing over how to lay the stone, I chose a running bond pattern — simple offset rows of pavers — instead of herringbone, and making that first design decision emboldened me. So now what? Every garden designer needs a plan for hardscape ( fixed elements like patios, paths and retaining walls) softscape (the plants) and furnishings — and some inspiration. My plan was to work in stages to keep the budget under control, addressing separately the backyard, front garden and driveway of my small lot. A main consideration was the water shortage in California: My garden needed to be as well as beautiful. For inspiration, I had the gardener who once had lived in my house. As we began to clear vines and underbrush from the perimeter of the property, we uncovered gifts she had left behind, including an ornate metal trellis we transformed into a gate and an old concrete birdbath. First I tackled the small back garden. With a bluestone patio in place, we had the beginnings of an outdoor living room. I needed to furnish it (a teak daybed came to the rescue) and turn the rest of the landscape into a serene, calming backdrop. To cover the fence, my husband and I planted espaliered olive trees and white climbing roses in deep garden beds. We limited the use of turf grass to a patch. By then, I had become obsessed with the Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf’s environmentally conscious meadows of flowering perennials and grasses. When it came time to work on our front garden (where the sudden demise of the cedar tree had opened up a sunny spot) I laid out a miniature meadow inspired by Mr. Oudolf’s planting scheme for the High Line in New York City. With space roughly the size of two football fields, Mr. Oudolf had to create a coherent narrative along a route from the West Village to the edge of Hell’s Kitchen. In my front garden, roughly the size of a badminton court, the square footage presented a different challenge: How do you make a small space with a brick path running through the middle of it look like a meadow instead of a muddle? The solution was to divide the space and to plant the meadow on only one side of the path. In the other half of the front garden is a quieter space where a low hedge of rosemary surrounds a square of boxwood, which encloses a ring of daphnes planted at the base of an olive tree. I think the reason this juxtaposition of wildness and formality works instead of looking like the crazy experiments of a mad scientist is that the front garden slopes gently up from the street. The change in elevation as you move through the space makes you feel as if you are on a journey, and your eye is drawn to what’s ahead in the distance. Finally, we annexed our driveway as garden space. When we bought the house, the narrow gravel driveway was long enough to park a row of six cars. So we cut it into three roughly equal sections, paving with brick, for our two cars and paving another third with brick that has a planting bed of creeping thyme in the center, so two more cars can be parked, if need be, without hurting the thyme. The final section of the driveway is still gravel, blocked by a gate. And in the center, my kitchen garden, where the crops change seasonally. Herbs, strawberries and lettuce are growing this month. Four years later, the garden is not finished, but happily a garden never is. Some plants get too big and others fail to thrive. Landscaping is tricky. Half our rosemary hedges died, and if I had to do it over, I would not grout the patio but would lay the bluestone pavers in a permeable base of decomposed granite because there’s less rainwater runoff if it can percolate into the ground. But these days, I don’t have to remind my husband why we bought this house. I often find him sitting contentedly and playing his guitar on the front porch, overlooking the meadow. He has not mentioned the cedar tree in weeks.

Americans approve dope. More Soon.

Adrian Bamforth

Posted: Nov 10th, 2016 by Adrian Bamforth Adrian Bamforth Ticker

Bridget Nielson and Gigi Young on ETs, Starseeds & Hybrid Children [VIDEO]

stevew

Click Here To Learn More About Alexandra's Personalized Essences Psychic Protection Click Here for More Information on Psychic Protection! Implant Removal Series Click here to listen to the IRP and SA/DNA Process Read The Testimonials Click Here To Read What Others Are Experiencing! Copyright © 2012 by Galactic Connection. All Rights Reserved. Excerpts may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Alexandra Meadors and www.galacticconnection.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of any material on this website without express and written permission from its author and owner is strictly prohibited. Thank you. Privacy Policy By subscribing to GalacticConnection.com you acknowledge that your name and e-mail address will be added to our database. As with all other personal information, only working affiliates of GalacticConnection.com have access to this data. We do not give GalacticConnection.com addresses to outside companies, nor will we ever rent or sell your email address. Any e-mail you send to GalacticConnection.com is completely confidential. Therefore, we will not add your name to our e-mail list without your permission. Continue reading... Galactic Connection 2016 | Design & Development by AA at Superluminal Systems Sign Up forOur Newsletter Join our newsletter to receive exclusive updates, interviews, discounts, and more. Join Us!

Obama Signs Executive Order Declaring Investigation Into Election Results; Revote Planned For Dec. 19th - ABC News

Jimmy Rustling

64 SHARE President Obama has signed an Executive Order declaring an investigation into the election results and plans for a revote on December 19th. (AP Photo / Dennis System) WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP) — Following the results of Tuesday night’s election, President Obama has signed Executive Order 13805 , which orders a full recount of all votes cast in the election and calls for a special election to be held on December 19 th . Obama signed the order in response to the concerns of thousands of voters across the country who said that they were prevented from casting a ballot on election day , too many absentee ballots have not been found or counted , equipment failures, as well as concerns that some members of the electoral college may have acted unethically. “People all over the country have been flooding my office with calls, telling my staff of horror stories about being harassed and intimidated by poll workers,” Obama told reporters. “Many have even said that they were flat out denied entry into the voting booths to cast their ballots if they were wearing a Hillary Clinton shirt or other signs showing support for her as President. This was especially bad in areas of Florida and North Carolina where there are high numbers of Latino and African American voters. We must investigate these claims. The margin of victory is too close to call, and the outcome of this election is too important. There is just too many legal challenges in too many states to just call this a victory for Trump.” Under the President’s order, the votes cast in all precincts nationwide will be recounted, and all poll workers who took part in Tuesday’s election will be subjected to strict background checks. This process is expected to take 30 days. In precincts where the Department of Justice has cause to believe that voter suppression has occurred, new elections will be held on Dec. 19 th, with those results being used to help determine who will represent the individual states in the electoral college. Not surprisingly, Donald Trump is not happy with the president’s decision. “Crooked Hillary lost this election fair and square. They tried to rig this election against me, but the American people didn’t allow that to happen. President Obama doesn’t care about what the American people want. I said the system was rigged all along, and this proves I was right.” The president also said that the DOJ will be taking a close look at the members of the electoral college. “We have received information from a very reliable source that suggests there may have been some collusion between the members of the electoral college and poll workers in certain swing states. We still need to investigate these claims, but if they are true, we will take all the appropriate actions necessary.” Paul Horner, a professor of political science at UCLA, believes that the issues with the electoral college run much deeper that this election. “Most people feel that it is their right as citizens to pick the president of the United States, but there is nothing in the constitution that says that. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by more than 200,000 votes , but because of the electoral college, she still lost. That decision is reserved solely for the 538 electors who meet in their respective states on December 19 th . What the people are actually voting for are their states’ electors, not for the President. Though the system is odd and unfair, it has persisted because many insist that it works just fine as it is, with the winner of the popular and electoral vote usually matching. That does not mean, however, that it will continue to work just fine in the future. The way the system is set up could cause it to malfunction in some potentially terrifying ways, this recent election being one of them.” Political Analyst Matt Daemon told ABC News that he agrees with the President’s Executive Order and said that he would like to see the electoral college done away with altogether. “[The electoral college] is a f—king joke; we should be using the popular vote instead. It may have made sense in 1788, but so did the three fifths compromise . Everyone should have an equal vote, and that’s just not the case with the electoral college. You know what the electoral college gave us? It gave us George W. Bush. It gave us a war in Iraq, and the worst recession since the great depression. It’s time to bring our system into the 21 st century. I hope Obama fixes this, because president Trump is going to be a nightmare.” Obama finished up the press conference explaining his plans for moving forward. “We’re going to investigate the FBI into their role in all of this,” Obama said. “Why did FBI director James Comey on Sunday say that the agency is not recommending charges against Clinton after reviewing all of her emails; declaring Hillary Clinton a free women conveniently just one day before the election? Why wasn’t this news released earlier? How many votes were lost because of this?” Obama said. “If all of these questions cannot be answered by our deadline set in December, a recount will be ordered.” If you have any questions about the recount or the special December 19 th election , you can call the Obama administration’s special election hotline at (785) 273-0325. TAGS

Nate Terani: One Veteran's War on Islamophobia

Nick Turse

Recently, I was asked a question about Kill Anything That Moves , my history of civilian suffering during the Vietnam War. An interviewer wanted to know how I responded to veterans who took offense at the (supposed) implication that every American who served in Vietnam committed atrocities. I think I softly snorted and slowly shook my head. Already two books behind me, Kill Anything That Moves might as well have been written by someone else in another lifetime. In some sense, it was. It takes effort for me to dredge up the faded memories of that work, a Kodachrome-hued swirl of hundreds of interviews on two continents over the course of a decade. But this particular question was easy enough to answer. Almost all the Americans I interviewed had seen combat, but most American veterans of the war hadn’t. Many had little or no real opportunity to commit war crimes. Case closed. But that question caused me to recall a host of related queries that churned around the book. Questions by skeptics, atrocity-deniers, fair-minded interviewers attempting to play devil’s advocate. A favorite was whether the book was “anti-veteran.” That, too, was a head-shaker for me. “How could that be?” I would respond. After all, the book owed its genesis to veterans. Veterans were key sources for it. Veterans provided the evidence. Veterans provided the quotes. Veterans even supplied the title. The book was, to a great extent, the history of the war as described to me by veterans. The story I told was their story. How could that in any way be anti-veteran? Many of the vets I spoke with viewed their truth-telling as a form of patriotism, of continuing service to country. Nate Terani’s inaugural TomDispatch essay follows in the same American tradition. His eyes were opened to the abuse of military power while living in Iran as a boy. Later he would join the U.S. Navy and wear the stars and stripes with particular pride. September 11th and all that came after — notably the demonization of his Muslim faith in his homeland — imbued him with a new mission, one he now views as no less sacred than his military service. From Smedley Butler to Andrew Bacevich , Daniel Ellsberg to Chelsea Manning , Vietnam Veterans Against the War to Iraq Veterans Against the War , the U.S. armed forces have produced a steady stream of truth-tellers and whistleblowers, men and women willing to serve their country in profound ways during trying times. There’s no bronze star for activism, no Navy Cross for unpopular or contrarian opinions, no Purple Heart for the hard knocks involved in speaking out against war crimes or Islamophobia or laying bare information vital to the American public. Veterans who dare to do so have sometimes walked a cold, lonely road far from the warm glow enjoyed by summer soldiers and sunshine patriots. Those who do so exhibit a special form of courage that may even exceed the bravery of the battlefield, the courage to stand tall and make oneself a target, a courage deserving ( with a nod to Thomas Paine ) of the love and thanks of man and woman.

POLLAK: Adm. Mike Mullen’s Partisan Attack on Steve Bannon - Breitbart

Joel B. Pollak

Admiral Mike Mullen served the United States with the greatest distinction, serving as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. [His attack in Monday’s New York Times on White House adviser (and former Breitbart News chair) Steve Bannon, however, does a disservice to the public policy debate about national security strategy. Adm. Mullen objects to Bannon’s appointment to the National Security Council (NSC). He admits, however, that President Bush’s NSC “was arranged similarly to Mr. Trump’s,” albeit with the exclusion of political guru Karl Rove. He also admits President Obama included his own political adviser, David Axelrod, in NSC meetings — even though Axelrod had no military or foreign policy experience whatsoever (and close ties to the left and Chicago’s corrupt Democratic machine). In addition, Adm. Mullen complains about “Mr. Bannon’s troubling public positions. ” Adm. does not list which positions he means — hoping, perhaps, that the false innuendos of mainstream media attacks will fill in the blanks for the Times‘ readers. USA Today recently reviewed hundreds of hours of Bannon’s radio commentaries and found none of the racism, antisemitism or “white nationalism” that the Times, among others, falsely ascribed to him. All it found was that Bannon worried about the threats posed by Islam and China. Those are threats most Americans also take seriously — and which, presumably, Adm. Mullen did as well. Where Adm. Mullen’s argument really begins to take on water is when he worries that Bannon’s presence would disrupt what is supposed to be a “nonpartisan” institution. It is hard to imagine a more partisan security apparatus than that which emerged on Adm. Mullen’s watch, when the military undertook changes such as the end of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. ” And though generals asked for more troops in Afghanistan, the president gave them less than they needed — along with a timeline that ended, conveniently, in time Obama’s . And the disastrous 2011 pullout from Iraq flew in the face of Adm. Mullen’s own recommendation to Congress, in 2007, that success required a commitment there. Bannon’s official job title is not political adviser, but “Chief Strategist. ” That undoubtedly involves some political advice, but it also points to a role in maintaining the coherence of Trump administration policies. That is crucial in a White House led by a political outsider with a mandate for change. Bannon’s own naval experience, and his immersion in history and foreign policy, qualify him for the role. And speaking as his former colleague at Breitbart News, I can testify to his in moments of crisis. I feel more secure knowing Steve is advising our president — and I believe others should, as well. In a “disruptive” presidency, he is a stabilizing influence, as he was on the campaign trail. President Trump seems to agree. Adm. Mullen says he worries about “a blurring of presidential responsibilities — Republican Party leader and commander in chief. ” But the Constitution recognizes no such distinction, and the time for worrying about that began in January 2009, when for the first time, the U. S. military was led by a who placed his own political fortunes ahead of the safety and security of the American people. The morning after the Benghazi attacks in 2012, for example, President Obama flew to Las Vegas for a political fundraiser. None of his predecessors — not even President Jimmy Carter — would have done that. President Trump, like his predecessors, deserves to choose his team, and a leader of Adm. Mullen’s stature should not lend his name to partisan and evidently misinformed attacks. Joel B. Pollak is Senior at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. His new book, How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Calls Colin Kaepernick’s National Anthem Protest ‘Dumb’ - The New York Times

Christine Hauser

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Supreme Court justice who came under fire recently for lacerating comments about Donald J. Trump, has dropped another remark about a different figure in the news: the N. F. L. football player Colin Kaepernick and his protest surrounding the national anthem. In an interview published on Monday by Yahoo News, Justice Ginsburg said that the San Francisco 49ers quarterback’s move to kneel and not stand during the anthem, as a protest against police brutality and racial oppression, was “dumb. ” The gesture has been adapted by other professional athletes and has even spread to high school teams. When asked by the news site’s global anchor, Katie Couric, what she thought of the protest, Justice Ginsburg said: “I think it’s really dumb of them. Would I arrest them for doing it? No. I think it’s dumb and disrespectful. ” “I would have the same answer if you asked me about . I think it’s a terrible thing to do,” she added. “But I wouldn’t lock a person up for doing it. I would point out how ridiculous it seems to me to do such an act. ” “It’s dangerous to arrest people for conduct that doesn’t jeopardize the health or of other people. It is a symbol they are engaged in,” she said. Asked whether she meant it was their right to protest, Justice Ginsburg agreed. “If they want to be stupid, there’s no law that should be preventive,” Justice Ginsburg said. “If they want to be arrogant, there’s no law that prevents them from that. What I would do is strongly take issue with the point of view that they are expressing when they do that. ” Justice Ginsburg’s indignant dissents in the court have made her a sort of heroine of the left. But the jurist has also earned the nickname “Notorious R. B. G” for her outspoken comments off the bench. Shannon Sharpe, a former professional football player who is now a on the show “Undisputed” on Fox Sports, said, however, that while Justice Ginsburg had been a good champion for minority causes, she should be careful in expressing her opinions. “I would ask Justice Ginsburg that when you see a man crying, don’t tell him to stop crying. Ask him, say, ‘Sir why are you crying?’ ” he said. Mr. Sharpe added, “We are seeing far too many unarmed black men dying at the hands of police with no accountability taking place. ” As of Tuesday, Mr. Kaepernick had not publicly reacted to Justice Ginsburg’s remarks. But his protest came to light on Aug. 26, when the national anthem played before the start of a preseason game with the Green Bay Packers. He did not stand, later explaining that he had decided to remain seated as a statement against racial oppression. “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” he told N. F. L. Media. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way,” he said. He drew swift backlash, with critics, including Mr. Trump, excoriating him for the protest. But the protest expanded, with more athletes joining him — at professional arenas and on high school sports field. President Obama said it was Mr. Kaepernick’s constitutional right. On the athlete’s Twitter feed, he has curated a timeline of events that have been part of the recent national discourse about race, politics and police behavior, including a protest by white supremacists in front of the N. A. A. C. P. headquarters in Houston, an article about how Arizona teenagers were forced by their school to change out of their Black Lives Matters shirts, and stories about fatal police shootings. “There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder,” Mr. Kaepernick has said. Mr. Kaepernick will be the starting quarterback against the Buffalo Bills at New Era Field this Sunday, the 49ers head coach Chip Kelly, said on Tuesday according to WKBW. Justice Ginsburg’s remarks to Ms. Couric were the latest to draw some criticism beyond the hallowed halls of the Supreme Court. In July, she criticized Mr. Trump, at the time the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, saying: “I can’t imagine what this place would be — I can’t imagine what the country would be — with Donald Trump as our president. “For the country, it could be four years. For the court, it could be — I don’t even want to contemplate that. ” She later expressed regret. “Judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office,” she wrote in a brief statement issued by the court, admitting her remarks were “ill advised. ” “In the future I will be more circumspect,” she added in the statement. When Mr. Trump came up in the Yahoo interview — Ms. Couric asked for her thoughts on his remarks about banning Muslims from entering the United States — the justice declined to answer, saying there was a real possibility that the issue could land on her desk. “I can’t answer a hypothetical question when it may turn into a real question,” Justice Ginsburg said. “I can’t preview my decision. ”

Elizabeth Warren: ‘We Need a Justice Department Not an Obstruction of Justice Department’ - Breitbart

Penny Starr

Sen. Elizabeth Warren ( ) used her time at the podium giving a commencement speech at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to slam the Trump administration and Attorney General Jeff Sessions regarding President Donald’s Trump decision to fire James Comey as FBI director and the Department of Justice’s effort to replace him.[ Warren asked the graduates to become activists for causes and named a few, including animal rescue, care and “bullying. ” Then she attacked her political opponents, saying, “I can’t help myself. ” “And I have one more: the principle that no one in this country is above the law — and we need a justice department not an obstruction of justice department,” Warren said. Warren also told the graduates that big corporations and the wealthy are trying to “fundamentally change” the country and it is up to them to stop it. “Your elected officials are increasingly working only for the few — the very wealthy few,” Warren said. “And they are setting policies only to benefit the few — the very wealthy few. And if that doesn’t change then this country will fundamentally change. “It is your world, your future that is on the line,” Warren said. Warren also made several references to drinking alcohol during her speech, including mentioning a drinking game named for her, during her speech. “I understand that every extra minute I speak is that much longer before you can hit the bars,” Warren said. Fortune magazine previewed Warren’s speech by noting that she was on TIME magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world this year and included the statement by the university’s Chancellor Kumble R. Subbaswamy, who called the senator “a strong role model for students. ” “We are inspired by her staunch advocacy for equitable access to education, environmental resource conservation and support for economic justice,” Subbaswamy said in a statement. “These issues are in alignment with our campus’s core values and our long history of activism in pursuit of social justice. ” “At UMass Amherst we stand for the hopes, the ambitions, the bold experiments and the innovative solutions of the people of Massachusetts and the world beyond,” Subbaswamy said. “We share Sen. Warren’s commitment to making a profound, transformative contribution to the common good. ”

White House Calls for Deep Cuts to Taxes on Families, Individuals, and Businesses - Breitbart

John Carney

President Donald Trump on Wednesday proposed deep changes to federal taxes, including sharp cuts in both individual and business taxes and the elimination of the estate tax. [The proposal reduces the number of individual income tax brackets to three — 10 percent, 25 percent, and 35 percent. It would double the standard deduction, effectively eliminating federal income taxes on the first $24, 000 of a couple’s income. It also calls for the elimination of the estate tax and the alternative minimum tax. The White House also said that families would receive a break for child care expenses. As a result of these changes, the tax burden on most Americans would be reduced under the plan. The Trump administration would eliminate most itemized tax deductions except for the deductions for mortgage interest and charitable donations. Notably, taxpayers would not be able to deduct state and local taxes, which hurts residents of states such as New York and California. Lower tax rates, however, make these deductions less valuable. The corporate tax rate would fall to 15 percent from 35 percent. In addition, U. S. companies would owe little or no tax on future profits earned outside the U. S. putting the U. S. on a territorial tax system similar to those employed in most developed countries. Business income reported on individual returns would also drop to 15 percent, a change that would benefit many small businesses. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House economics adviser Gary Cohn set forth the framework at a White House press conference on Wednesday. The proposals bear a strong resemblance to those set forth by the Trump campaign last year. Many details will still have to be worked out and negotiated with Congress. The proposal did not go into specifics about the child care credit, for example. Nor did it spell out how stockpiled foreign earnings of U. S. companies would be treated if repatriated.

Netflix Goes Global and Its Profit Soars - The New York Times

Emily Steel

A year ago, Netflix boldly declared that it planned to conquer the global market for streaming television, adding more than 130 countries to its service map. It also promised to start delivering material profits in 2017 after operating at profitability for several quarters. On Wednesday, the company released business results showing that it is on its way to reaching those targets, even as competition accelerates from services like Amazon and Hulu. Netflix added a record 7. 05 million streaming members in the three months that ended Dec. 31, up from the 5. 59 million net additions in the same period of 2015. That growth, in domestic and international markets, beat its forecast of 5. 2 million new members for the quarter. Netflix now has a total of 93. 8 million members. Fueling the increase in subscribers was a rapid rise in Netflix memberships abroad. The company said it is learning “how best to match content with audiences tastes around the world. ” It added 5. 1 million international members in the quarter, and now has 44. 4 million members outside the United States, more than than 47 percent of its total membership. Netflix cited its original series “Marvel’s Luke Cage” and “The Crown” as worldwide hits. It said it planned to invest more than $6 billion in content this year, up from $5 billion in 2016. Profits are rising steadily. Net income increased 56 percent to $67 million in the quarter from the same period in 2015. The company projected that profits would reach $165 million in the current quarter, up from $28 million in the period a year ago. “We don’t really believe in businesses, like suddenly we will turn significantly profitable at 200 million members,” Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, said during a conference call. “We think it is much smarter to grow into that bit by bit. ” Competition in streaming television is becoming more fierce and remains a big challenge for Netflix. The company, a pioneer in the market, listed a number of competitors that are encroaching on its turf, including Amazon, which recently announced a global expansion, and YouTube, which leads online video viewing time worldwide. Meanwhile, satellite television companies and traditional television outlets are pouring more resources into streaming offerings. “In short, it’s becoming an internet TV world, which presents both challenges and opportunities for Netflix as we strive to earn screen time,” Netflix said in a letter to shareholders. Netflix’s stock price is typically volatile on days when the company reports earnings, and Wednesday was no exception. The earnings report sent shares up about 8 percent in trading. Netflix shares rose about 8 percent for all of 2016, after having surged 135 percent for 2015, as the top performer on the Standard Poor’s index. The company predicted that subscriptions would continue to grow in the current quarter, although slower than in the period last year. It forecast that it would add 5. 2 million members, 1. 5 million of them in the United States and 3. 7 million abroad. It attributed the slowdown to tough comparisons from the same period last year, particularly with the introduction of the service in 130 countries last January. The quarter was the 10th anniversary of Netflix’s streaming service, which began with the vision that internet television would ultimately replace traditional television. But even as Netflix reported its biggest net addition of streaming members in its history, Mr. Hastings was not satisfied standing still. Asked about his ultimate vision for the company during the conference call, he said, “You never want to characterize something as an ultimate vision, because when you get there, there is always more you want to do. ” “Think of us as just continuing to iterate on the basic cycle of more content and better product, that combines at a great service at a great price,” he said. “Hopefully, with that we can attract many more people to join Netflix, and then that fuels the whole cycle. So we are just going to lather, rinse, repeat again and again for the next couple of years. ”

After Terrorizing America with Zika Scaremongering, Washington Post Now Admits Zika Virus Doesn’t Cause Brain Deformities After All

NaturalNews Network

by The Health Ranger Mike Adams The entire leftist media is not merely dishonest and corrupt, their science writers are unbelievably stupid and ill-informed about nearly everything in the natural world. Today, after months of printing fear-inducing “Zika terrorism” stories that scared America half to death while convincing the government to funnel billions of dollars into Zika vaccine research for Big Pharma, the Washington Post now admits it had no idea what it was talking about . But rather than admitting its own science writers were scientifically illiterate propagandists pushing quack narratives as news, the paper now blames other scientists for the gross error by publishing a headline that’s once again dishonest and deceptive: “Scientists are bewildered by Zika’s path across Latin America,” it proclaims. Bewildered about “Zika’s path?” The story headline should actually read, “Zika HOAX revealed… it doesn’t cause brain damage after all.” (Read it at this link .) Washington Post has been shamelessly pushing the Zika HOAX for months… with no apology to readers In the story, writers Dom Phillips and Nick Miroff essentially reveal that what the Washington Post has been writing about the Zika virus has been based entirely in government propaganda and pandemic lies pushed by the CDC, which of course has close ties to the criminal vaccine industry: Nearly nine months after Zika was declared a global health emergency, the virus has infected at least 650,000 people in Latin America and the Caribbean, including tens of thousands of expectant mothers. But to the great bewilderment of scientists, the epidemic has not produced the wave of fetal deformities so widely feared when the images of misshapen infants first emerged from Brazil. Yes, the Washington Post now says the scientists are “bewildered” that their apocalyptic scare stories that caused female athletes to skip out on the Rio Olympics and scared tens of millions of Americans into poisoning themselves with DEET (a neurotoxic chemical) turned out to be total hogwash. DEET, by the way, combines with carbamate class pesticides to cause neurological dysfunction in humans , which coincidentally increases the number of people who watch CNN or read the Washington Post. For the record, no one who reads Natural News is surprised by this revelations that has left mainstream scientists “bewildered.” It’s not bewildering to me. I called Zika a total hoax from day one, pointing out that the brain deformities were caused by larvacide chemicals dumped into the water supply , not by Zika. See some of my stories that clearly spelled all this out months before the Washington Post had any clue what they were writing about: February 11, 2016: Zika HOAX exposed by South American doctors: Brain deformations caused by larvicide chemical linked to Monsanto; GM mosquitoes a ‘total failure’ June 3, 2016: 10 shocking reasons why Zika virus fear is another fraudulent medical hoax and vaccine industry funding scam August 4, 2016: ZIKA DOOMSDAY HOAX UNRAVELS: Predicted ‘explosion’ of brain defects didn’t happen… entire scare campaign was manufactured August 29, 2016: Zika propaganda is a ‘virus of the mind’ rooted in fabricated hysteria, government junk science and dark political agendas March 2, 2016: Zika PAYDAY! Obama wants to funnel $1.8 billion for vaccine research and more I even published a mini-documentary revealing the published science that shows how DEET insecticide causes brain damage in humans. You can watch it at this link or view the video below: If anyone from the Washington Post bothered to read Natural News and learn about real science, they would have learned that Zika has infected tens of millions of people throughout South America for decades , with absolutely no measurable increase in neurological deformations. (But facts be damned, the WashPost had a panic to push!) Nation after nation records tens of thousands of infections with ZERO birth defects… Despite the factual reality of the situation, the state-controlled propagandists writing for rags like the Washington Post — a bogus newspaper that has lost all credibility in the minds of intelligent people — continued to pummel home their kooky science theories that claimed much of the U.S. South would be overrun by brain damaging mosquitoes, turning Southerners into shrunken-brained mutants while pregnant women fled northward to survive the airborne insect onslaught. Instead, nothing happened . No explosion in shrunken-headed babies. No wave of birth defects across Florida, even as city officials desperately bombarded their own cities with brain-damaging insecticides. No national emergency declared by Obama to bring back DDT and eradicate baby-murdering mosquitoes by dousing our open streets with thick clouds of organophosphate neurotoxins. Instead, the rate of neurological birth defects in most countries approached zero. Via the Washington Post’s own graphic: (partial list) Venezuela: 60,791 Zika infections… ZERO birth defects Honduras: 31,933 Zika infections… ONE birth defect Guadalupe: 30,969 Zika infections… ZERO birth defects Puerto Rico: 29,084 Zika infections… TWO birth defects Mexico: 4,837 Zika infections… ZERO birth defects From the WashPost article: Brazilian officials were bracing for a flood of fetal deformities as Zika spread this year to other regions of the country, Marinho said. However, “we are not seeing a big increase.” Gee, really? The vast majority of the brain defects, it turns out, came from just one small region of Brazil. A total of 2,033 children are so far recorded with neurological defects there, even while most other countries throughout the region had ZERO birth defects (or near zero). So what gives? Zika mosquitoes apparently carry geopolitical maps so they can solely target Brazil You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that the stupid science theories of the mainstream media are total hokum and bunk . If Zika really did cause brain defects, it would have spread all across South America by now. It would have spread into Florida, California, Mississippi and Louisiana. It would have devastated the American South, Cuba, Haiti, Curacao and all the other island nations across the Caribbean. Yet the neurological defects were limited almost exclusively to Brazil. Somehow, if we believe the illiterate Washington Post science writers — who may in fact be the only brain damage victims of Zika in North America — mosquitoes carry MAPS to make sure they only activate their brain damage voodoo in Brazil . “…[A]lthough the outbreak has spread this year to more than 50 nations and territories across the Western Hemisphere, U.N. data shows just 142 cases of congenital birth defects linked to Zika so far outside Brazil,” says WashPost. Yes, my friends: GPA-carrying Zika mosquitoes are very careful to limit their pandemic voodoo to just one region of Brazil. By sheer coincidence, that’s the same region where larvacide chemicals were dumped into the public water supply. Apparently, there isn’t a single “official” scientist in the entire global government who has thought to test the water. Just freaking WOW… Let’s throw these morons out of power in every election, okay? They don’t deserve any positions of authority over anyone else. They’re all so incredibly stupid, they couldn’t survive at all unless they functioned as parasites on the taxpayers. They aren’t giving up hope just yet… science writers desperately hope for more brain damaged babies to prove them right Enthusiasm for more brain damaged babies runs high at the Washington Post, which explains why they are all in for Hillary Clinton, the candidate of choice for brain damaged adults . Writing with a sense of real enthusiasm, the Washington Post can’t wait for more brain damaged babies to appear: Scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are closely watching Puerto Rico, which has reported more than 26,800 cases of Zika. More than 7,000 pregnant women could be infected by the end of the year, according to the CDC. (Yippee?) And now, the loony tunes quack science of the Zika “scientists” goes apoplectic, grasping for silly metaphors to try to obscure the fact that they are all stupid beyond belief . Via the WashPost: “Now we’ve settled on Zika as the smoking gun, but we don’t know who pulled the trigger,” said Marques, speaking from Recife, where he is working with government researchers. Huh? Wha? The metaphor doesn’t even make any sense. Maybe the problem is too much fornicating. Seriously, this is now part of their idiotic theory: “Sexual habits and hygiene may also play a role,” he said, explaining that researchers are looking at whether sexual transmission can infect the uterus and placenta with the virus, potentially exposing the fetus to elevated risk. “We suspect the villain has an accomplice, but we don’t know who it is,” Marques said. Huh? Do they seriously think that people only have sex in Brazil but not other South American countries? Where does the Washington Post find these morons? I’m a real scientist saying all this As you read all this, remember that I have rapidly become one of the world’s leading research scientists on the quantitation of cannabinoids in hemp extracts using mass spec instrumentation. I led the team that developed the most pioneering (and accurate) CBD mass spec analysis method in existence today. You can read about it at this link . I also routinely test water, food and environmental samples for heavy metals, pesticides and a multitude of chemical contaminants. When I say these Zika scientists are complete morons, that’s the educated opinion of an accomplished scientist correctly pointing out the lunacy of Zika scaremongering. I could have solved this entire problem in the first few days by analyzing and detecting brain-damaging larvacide chemicals in the public water supply in Eastern Brazil. The entire project would have taken just a few days and cost almost nothing. Instead, Obama handed $1.8 billion to the vaccine companies in the midst of the Zika panic pushed by laughable rags like the Washington Post. It’s all a racket, of course, just like their coverage of elections and political candidates. Everything you read at the Washington Post is a deception of one kind or another . The paper exists solely to promote the propaganda of the state so that the population can be manipulated and controlled. The Washington Post exists to terrorize the citizens with fascist propaganda parading as science As you’ve also learned by now, the corrupt leftist establishment of junk science, criminal politicians and idiotic journalists isn’t interested in legitimate scientific solutions . They all function as extensions of a fascist state that must routinely terrorize its citizens with pandemic boogeyman scare stories in order to demand absolute obedience to the vaccine mandates that actually do damage the brains of children. Thus, SCIENCE be damned. They’ve got an agenda to push, and it doesn’t matter to them whether that agenda is based on a single shred of real science. Zika is dangerous because they told you so, in exactly the same way they told you Hillary Clinton is totally honest, Obamacare would make health care more affordable, there’s no such thing as voter fraud in America, and GMOs and vaccines are really, really good for you. So you can put down the DEET and stop poisoning your skin like an obedient idiot. Yes, it was all a scam. Yes, the official “science” was totally rigged. Yes, the media lied to you yet again. Yes, the CDC is a criminal racket. Yes, all the health “officials” were completely full of s**t. And no, Zika is not going to cause your babies to be born with shrunken heads. VACCINES, on the other hand, will most definitely cause brain damage, as they still contain mercury, a potent neurotoxin the Washington Post ridiculously insists becomes magically neutralized when you inject it into the body of a child. Red more unintentional scientific comedy at this Washington Post article . Delivered by The Daily Sheeple We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). Contributed by NaturalNews Network of NaturalNews.com . The NaturalNews Network is a non-profit collection of public education websites covering topics that empower individuals to make positive changes in their health, environmental sensitivity, consumer choices and informed skepticism. The NaturalNews Network operates without a profit incentive, and its key writer, Mike Adams, receives absolutely no payment for his time, articles or books. The NaturalNews Network is not for sale, and does not accept money to cover any story (or to spike it). NaturalNews Network is what the news industry used to be, before it sold out to big business.

Charles Koch Makes Massive Donation to Historically Black Colleges - Breitbart

Tom Ciccotta

Billionaire Charles Koch, who is a frequent conservative political donor, has made a massive contribution to historically black colleges across the United States. [Through the Koch Foundation, Charles Koch donated $25. 6 million to historically black colleges for the purpose of conducting research on criminal justice and entrepreneurship in cities plagued by high crime. “Education transformed my life, and I’ve committed to do all I can to give others that same opportunity,” Koch said in a statement Wednesday evening. The Marshall fund has made that same commitment, he said, “giving students and scholars the chance to discover new ways to overcome barriers holding too many people back. As they succeed, so does our society. ” The donation was made to the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, which benefits students at 47 universities including Howard University, the University of the District of Columbia, Bowie State, and Morgan State, all of which are historically black institutions. Liberals in academia are concerned about Koch money flowing to their universities. Ralph Wilson of Tallahassee, of a group called UnKoch My Campus, claims that these donations were made so that the Koch brothers can have more control over curriculum and activism at the receiving institutions. “When they give the donor control, the is academic freedom,” Wilson argued. Despite these claims, Brian Hooks, the president of the Koch foundation, maintains that the donations are not political in nature. “Our commitment across the board with all of our grants … is to open inquiry,” Hooks said in an interview Tuesday. “We’re looking to support great scholars. ” Tom Ciccotta is a libertarian who writes about social justice and libertarian issues for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @tciccotta or email him at tciccotta@breitbart. com

Analyzis Of A Photographed Alien

Analyzis Of A Photographed Alien # Grey 0 This video is taken from William Cooper's lecture and he talks about alien abduction and analyses a photograph of alien. This alien has patchy skin, hair growth and moist eyes and nose. Tags

Democratic Congressman Threatens Violence If GOP Tries To Defund Planned Parenthood | Daily Wire

Democratic Congressman Threatens Violence If GOP Tries To Defund Planned Parenthood By: Hank Berrien November 21, 2016 The Democratic congressman who is challenging House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi, Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, threatened a “Youngstown street fight” if Donald Trump attempts to defund Planned Parenthood. Speaking with Jake Tapper on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Ryan intimated that defunding Planned Parenthood wasn’t the only stimulus he would need to launch violence. He stated, “If he tries to defund Planned Parenthood, if he tries to kick people off their health insurance, if they try to privatize Medicare or cut taxes for the wealthy, you know, we are going to have a Youngstown street fight in the Capitol.” Youngstown has been plagued by violent street fights in the recent past; last May and August violence erupted on the streets of the city. Ryan called Trump’s infrastructure plan “a bunch of smoke and mirrors.” He added that he didn’t blame Pelosi for focusing any specific economic issues: “I can’t in good conscience hang this election around Nancy Pelosi’s neck, of course. But, moving forward, we have to win congressional seats in areas of the country that voted for Donald Trump, even in my district, where they voted for me and they voted for Donald Trump.” Ryan’s campaign to replace Pelsoi is picking up steam; on Sunday, New York Rep. Kathleen Rice endorsed him, stating, "He has a lot of good ideas, but maybe most importantly, he also isn’t suggesting he has all the answers — he has stressed that he wants these conversations to be ongoing, that he wants more voices in the conversation so that we can work together to craft our message and forge a winning strategy," Rice said in a statement. Rice tweeted: Excited to announce my support for @RepTimRyan to serve as our next Democratic Leader. Full statement: https://t.co/LiwFUAxzxa #Dems4Change — Kathleen Rice (@RepKathleenRice) November 20, 2016 Tags

Marine Le Pen Hails ’Extremely Positive’ Dutch Elections

Chris Tomlinson

Despite Dutch migration politician Geert Wilders coming second in the Dutch national elections this week, French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen called the result “extremely positive”. [Earlier this week, the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV) under the leadership of politician Geert Wilders came second in the national elections. Many in politics including Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and the media claimed Wilders coming second means the end of the populist movement sweeping Europe. French migration presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has firmly disagreed, Tiroler Tageszeitung reports. Ms. Le Pen called the result which saw the PVV increase its seats in the parliament “extremely positive”. The vote also led to the total collapse of the Dutch Labour party which went from 25 per cent of the vote in 2012 to only 6 per cent, losing the majority of its seats in the parliament. “I would have been disappointed if he had slipped or stagnated, but he has risen and the parties in power have fallen heavily,” Le Pen noted. Le Pen, who leads the French Front National, is also an MEP and a member of the Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF) group along with the PVV and several other populist parties across Europe. “For Wilders this is extremely positive, which is the proof of the reach of our joint ideas in the different European countries,” she added. In six weeks, Marine Le Pen will head to her own election fight as the first round of the French presidential elections approaches. Le Pen has maintained a steady lead in polling for weeks for the first round and is currently at around 28 per cent according to polls released Friday. France, Opinion Way poll: Le Pen ( ): 28% ↑Macron ( *): 25%Fillon ( ): 20% ↑Hamon ( ): 13% … https: . — Europe Elects (@EuropeElects) March 17, 2017, Le Pen is running on a platform of migration, and has said that she will pursue a course that would see the French leave the euro and reinstate the Franc as well as potentially leave the European Union altogether. The Front National leader is expected to face Emmanuel Macron in the second round in May as conservative Republican candidate François Fillon has been tarred by financial scandals involving fake jobs for his family members. Initially, Macron was seen as easily defeating Le Pen as early polls gave him a substantial lead. Since then, Le Pen has been closing the gap between her and Macron with latest polling showing that the difference is approaching single digits. France: Presidential election ( ) Opinion Way poll: Macron ( *): 59% ( )Le Pen ( ): 41% (+1) — Europe Elects (@EuropeElects) March 17, 2017, Despite the media and political establishment claiming the Durch elections have hurt the populist movement, the polling results show a clear pattern of increased support for Le Pen and the movement labelled the “Patriotic Spring” by Geert Wilders. Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson@breitbart. com

Vox Editor: 'I Have Written There's 0 Evidence The Clinton Foundation Was Used For Personal Family Enrichment. Looks Like I Was Wrong' | RedFlag News

Redflag Newsdesk

Jeff Stein | VOX Hillary Clinton found herself in a no-win dilemma as she moved to launch her presidential run while also aiding her husband’s globe-trotting philanthropy — and her team knew it. Sometime before announcing her candidacy, Clinton had agreed to go to a Clinton Global Initiative fundraiser in Morocco planned for May 2015. The king of Morocco had personally pledged to give $12 million with the understanding she’d attend, according to emails released last week by WikiLeaks. But then there was the awkward fact that Clinton would be running for president by then. That set up a bind: Go to the event, and Clinton would be appearing to indulge a foreign government known for egregious human right abuses to help her family’s private charity. Pull out, and Clinton would be going back on her word to the Moroccan king. “The King has personally committed approx $12 million both for the endowment and to support the meeting. It will break a lot of china to back out now when we had so many opportunities to do it in the past few months,” Clinton aide Huma Abedin wrote in an email in November 2014, several months before Clinton declared her candidacy. “She created this mess.” Hillary Clinton ultimately decided against attending, and Chelsea Clinton and Bill Clinton went instead. (Politico has reported a Moroccan phosphate export firm gave “at least” $1 million, but it’s not clear if the other $11 million came through. The foundation doesn’t have to disclose the gift and has declined to confirm one way or another to reporters.) But since this story broke late last week, Clinton has been getting attacked for it far and wide. And this time it’s not just Donald Trump and Fox News: Even mainstream outlets like the Atlantic and the Associated Press have published tough pieces about the controversy. (The Huffington Post said it amounted to a “brutal, clean hit” on the Democratic nominee.) This controversy has stoked wildly misleading allegations implying that Clinton is corrupt, even in some leading news outlets. But while those claims are overblown, the story still illustrates how the foundation helped put wealthy donors into Clinton’s orbit — and allowed them to buy a rare chance to shape her perspective that few average Americans will ever get.

Hamas Sentences Two Palestinians to Death for Drug Smuggling

Breitbart Jerusalem

GAZA CITY (PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES) (AFP) — A Hamas military court on Sunday sentenced two Palestinians to death for drug smuggling in the Gaza Strip, in the first punishment of its kind in the enclave. [“The Gaza military court announced the death penalty for two civilians from Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, for selling narcotics,” the interior ministry said in a statement. It said a third suspect was sentenced to hard labour. Authorities have seized drugs with a street value of around $1 million (900, 000 euros) over the past few months, the ministry said. They seized 1, 250 packets of cannabis and 400 pills of Tramadol — a powerful painkiller — in January alone, it said. Until Sunday, only people guilty of spying for Israel or murder had received the death penalty in Gaza, controlled by Islamist Hamas since 2007. All Palestinian death sentences in theory have to be approved by president Mahmoud Abbas, but Hamas has long refused to accept his legitimacy. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) said Sunday’s sentences were a “serious precedent” and that bringing civilians before a military court was a breach of Palestinian law. It said that one of the two men was condemned to death by hanging and the other was to hang. The PCHR said in an statement that to carry out the sentences would be “ killing, and those (who) participated or contributed to issuing them should be held accountable on grounds of killing and abuse of power”. “Applying this penalty in drugs cases is very dangerous, particularly in absence of fair trial guarantees and presence of many reports exposing widespread use of torture during the interrogation period, especially in drugs crimes,” it added. The centre said that around a dozen death sentences have been passed down in Gaza since the start of 2017.

Trump to NATO: Pay Up - Breitbart

Charlie Spiering

President Donald Trump urged members of the NATO alliance to start paying their fair share Thursday in Brussels, pointing out that their failures were hurting American taxpayers. [“NATO members must finally contribute their fair share and meet their financial obligations,” Trump said, pointing out that 23 of 28 members were still not paying enough money for their national defense and even owed a great deal of money. “This is not fair to the people and taxpayers of the United States,” Trump said, reminding the foreign leaders that the United States spent more on defense than all the other nations together. The president made his remarks during the unveiling of a memorial which featured the Berlin Wall and a section of one of the Twin Towers that were destroyed by terrorists on . Trump admitted that his call was “very, very direct,” but essential for keeping the alliance together. “We have to make up for the many years lost,” Trump said. “Two percent is the bare minimum for confronting today’s very real and very vicious threats. ” He also alluded to the cost of the new NATO headquarters building, suggesting that it was another expense shouldered by the American taxpayer. “I never asked once what the new NATO headquarters cost, I refuse to do that, but it is beautiful,” he said.

Rich Knoch

You would have to be a border-line-moron or a Left-Leaning-Democrat to think obamba didn't know about "the witch" and her Coven's Server. Every single EMail he sent, received or had printed for his consumption had the unique and clandestine address of 'ClintonEmail.com'. What could be more clear to, even obamba? How often have you opened an EMail or sent an Email when you were not cognizant of the SendTo or From address? .

Anthony Weiner’s Alleged Teenaged Sexting Victim Pens SCATHING Open Letter To FBI Director Comey

Allison Vincent

Anthony Weiner’s Alleged Teenaged Sexting Victim Pens SCATHING Open Letter To FBI Director Comey 786 Google Pinterest Digg Linkedin Reddit Stumbleupon Print Delicious Pocket Tumblr With just a little over a week to go before election day, FBI Director James Comey took it upon himself to blatantly interfere with the process. During a probe into Anthony Weiner’s sexting scandal, the FBI supposedly uncovered emails that may or may not (probably not) have something to do with Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, for which she has already been exonerated. Comey sent a vague letter to congress which he KNEW would start a shit-storm in the media, and now the race is closer than ever. And here Trump complains about a “rigged” election! Unfortunately, while attempting to sway voters, Comey didn’t consider that there was someone else at the center of this — Anthony Weiner’s victim, who is only 16 years old. She was understandably upset and had a few words to say to the FBI director. You can read the entire letter on BuzzFeed , but here are a few excerpts: I am the 15-year-old (now 16) who was the victim of Anthony Weiner. I now add you to the list of people who have victimized me. I told my story originally to protect other young girls that might be a victim of online predators. Your letter to Congress has now brought this whole matter back into the media spotlight. Not even 10 minutes after being forensically interviewed with the FBI for seven hours, I received a phone call from a REPORTER asking for a statement. Why didn’t you communicate with the local FBI agents that I had just spoken to? They could have scheduled our interview sooner or scheduled a time to interview me later, or change locations of the interview. My neighborhood has been canvassed by reporters asking for details about me. … I thought your job as FBI Director was to protect me. I thought if I cooperated with your investigation, my identity as a minor would be kept secret. That is no longer the case. My family and I are barraged by reporters’ phone calls and emails. I have been even been blamed in a newspaper for causing Donald Trump to now be leading in some polls and costing Hillary the election. Anthony Weiner is the abuser. Your letter helped that abuse to continue. How can I rebuild my life when you have made finding out my “story” the goal of every reporter? She signs the letter with, “Girl that lost faith in America.” And that coming from a girl who is barely starting her life, but who is also approaching voting age is heartbreaking. Featured Image via Alex Wong/Getty Images Share this Article!

Netanyahu: U.S.-Israel Alliance is ’About to Get Stronger’

Breitbart Jerusalem

Ynetnews reports: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised to strengthen the alliance between the US and Israel on Monday afternoon before taking off to Washington for his first meeting with President Donald Trump since he entered the White House in January. [Before his departure, Netanyahu offered a few words to the press. “I am now leaving for a meeting of the utmost importance in Washington. There, I will meet with US President Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and leaders of Congress and the Senate. ” Commenting on the general relationship, which was somewhat sullied during the Obama administration, Netanyahu maintained that “the alliance was always extremely strong,” adding with palpable optimism, that “it is about the get stronger. ” Read more here.

Hillary Clinton has a deep commitment.

(7 fans) - Advertisement - Hillary Clinton is very sincere and is committed to economy, employment, refugees, immigration and health reforms as a means of making lasting change in the US and in the world. Now we need to take concrete action and not waste time in rhetoric. Hillary Clinton is committed to build an infrastructure of education, employment, health care, small business, free press, electrical power, communications and transportation. Hillary Clinton has a deep commitment. She is active in our educational and development community, include her involvement with the government and with leaders. She played an important role in offering outreach to the people including women and children. We must vote for her. We should remember that the first condition for economic reforms is good leaders, and employment. Good leaders and employment opportunities are necessary not only for the economic growth but also for the security, physical well being and psychological comfort of the American citizens. US has always been demonstrated a decent and sustained growth rate because of a fully functioning democratic system. The pillars of the US democratic system include regular elections, peaceful transfer of power, American people's involvement in all development programs, and a reliable power among the states. This has enabled US to pursue a policy of economic liberalization, massive educational improvement and of providing a solid investment in a long-term perspective. Yes, US still suffers from unemployment, and faces challenges; these problems seem solvable soon. US needs to establish and implement long-term policies of economic growth. It should also create a well-organized and comprehensive development vision that all the political leaders should agree to follow. Making appropriate investments in our roads, electrification, and extension services would help considerably in improving Americans lives. Increasing investment in basic education and health care are important in ensuring that the poor participate meaningfully in the economic growth. A lack of education and health care hurts the poor today. And finally, President Hillary Clinton must focus on generating high rates of sustainable growth while ensuring that the benefits of that growth is spread to all parts of states. As we know, the solutions are the same everywhere, have a society based on equity and justice for everyone. - Advertisement - As we know, most countries do the opposite. Discrimination against women and children today is as bad as decades ago. It's always the issue of the privileged not caring, the poor get hurt and people of color and women especially get hurt the most. Thus, vote for Hillary Clinton, because the role of the leaders is more important and they can assist people's movements for economic growth. - Advertisement -

Visiting McDonald’s With My Grandmother - The New York Times

Christine Ro

As a kid, I was in awe of my grandmother’s ability to stretch a dollar when it came to food. She always knew the price differentials at the local Hispanic, Asian, Middle Eastern and white American markets. And she strategized for trips to McDonald’s. For instance, she realized that the two of us — a child and a senior, both petite females — added up to one appetite, so ordering a Big Breakfast to share made better sense than ordering separate, smaller meals. We shared quite a few of these over the years. There was a McDonald’s on the way to my elementary school, where she would walk me some mornings. She’d sit with her coffee (the best in America, she always said) and me with my juice. And we’d attack the Big Breakfast from either side. The eggs in one corner, the sausage in another, and the biscuit, hash brown and condiments all in their own place: It’s not surprising that the compartmentalization of the different food items should have appealed to her sense of food order. She was Korean, and the assortment of separate little dishes known as banchan is central to Korean food. Grandma had moved to the United States from her native South Korea in midlife, to be closer to her two daughters in Southern California. She needed to figure out both a new language and a new social landscape. These were more complicated than she’d anticipated, because she ended up living in a predominantly Mexican neighborhood. So the move wasn’t just about adapting to a majority white and majority culture. She needed the basics of both English and Spanish, for one thing. She might have been disoriented by racial distinctions, but class differences she understood. She’d been married to a man when she was young, and over the decades of their marriage had gotten used to an ascending level of luxury: cars, servants, status. Wealth insulated her from certain kinds of discomfort but didn’t guard against her husband’s steady stream of infidelities. It bought her luxuries like breast implants, at a time when this was a bizarre purchase for a Korean woman. I was almost morbidly fascinated by those implants later on. I knew her as an old woman, and there was a sharp contrast between the rocks on her chest and the softness and slackness of the rest of her body. When she moved to the United States she suddenly had to work for a living. As she had no practical skills, she found work deboning chickens by hand. She tore apart chickens during the day, and went to her cramped apartment at night. And yet, improbably, she was happy. She smoked with abandon. She ate whatever she wanted. She had female friends at the factory, as well as male Korean friends she gathered with to play the Korean card game hwatu. Gambling with men would have been unthinkable in her previous life. She’d traded opulence for independence, and she was better off. But her earnings put her under the poverty line, making her eligible for housing. While her daughters helped her out where they could, she had to scrimp. Her bedroom became a kind of monument to her earlier life, packed with artworks, jewelry and expensive clothing — things to gradually sell off. It is astonishing that my grandmother had any appetite for fast food after working on a chicken disassembly line. She may have had a greater appreciation for food after spending her days among its raw ingredients. Or maybe it’s telling that she generally avoided chicken at McDonald’s. Grandma kept a mental calendar of McDonald’s promotions. When hamburgers were on sale for 29 cents each, she bought 10 at a time and kept a supply in the freezer. As a treat, she sometimes splurged on the cheeseburger. My grandmother also looked forward to each McDonald’s Monopoly period, that marvel of synergistic marketing that turned every McDonald’s purchase into a prize opportunity. This allowed her to scratch the gambling itch in a socially accepted way. For a brief period I, along with every other person I knew, went temporarily deranged over going to McDonald’s as frequently as our wallets and waistbands would allow. I don’t know how much money eating at McDonald’s actually saved. Arguably it could have been cheaper to cook at home, but my grandmother never really learned to cook. She’d never had to in Korea, what with the professional cooks in her house. Cooking American food, especially, would have been daunting. My grandmother loved McDonald’s in a way that only someone who hadn’t grown up with it could. So after she died, as my family was preparing for the Korean grave site ritual of bringing food loved by the deceased, I thought about collecting a burger, fries and America’s best coffee. I was overruled, so we ended up leaving Korean takeaway noodles — jjamppong — on her grave instead. The broth leaked out of the package, leaving a fishy smell and a mess on our hands. My grandmother is buried in the notoriously Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, Calif. which strives for grandeur in its massive statues and chapels that are reproductions of the European originals. The grave sites become more elaborate and expensive the higher you go up the hill, suggesting that in Los Angeles, inequality persists even after death. But Grandma was proud of the spot she’d secured midway up. For decades, she’d saved money for her own grave and two others, for other women in the family to use eventually. Status after death somehow mattered to her, even though she’d given up on it in life. As I placed the leaky package of noodles on her grave, I wondered, in my very unspiritual way, what would happen to the food. It would be wasted, I imagined. That seemed inappropriate for my grandmother, who held on to frozen fast food for years, and didn’t throw anything away. I’ve stepped inside a McDonald’s only a few times since Grandma died, and it just isn’t the same. It will never be as special to me as it was to her, as a shining symbol of American culture. But its ubiquity is strangely comforting. Seeing this chain restaurant everywhere is a bit like seeing her everywhere. You don’t need a fancy grave site to honor a relative, after all. A chain restaurant that triggers a flood of memories can be enough.

(VIDEO) Female College Students Protesting Because ‘Trump is a Rapist’

21st Century Wire says… US college students continue to be emotionally traumatized and ‘threatened’ by Donald Trump’s surprise presidential victory this week, sparking a wave of nationally coordinated street protests, organized in part through the George Soros funded Democratic Party ‘community organizing’ web portal MoveOn.org . Various protests and riots have been organized around a number university campuses including Berkeley, Portland, New York City and Los Angleses. When asked why she scared by the election result, one female university student claimed that the President Elect is a “rapist,” while another claim that, “He [Trump] is about to have a court case about a 13 years old girl soon, and I’m not down for that.” The alleged court case the student is referring was actually dropped , and has since been exposed as a likely politically motivated hoax according to reports . Here is last night’s student protest, including multiple interviews from both sides of the debate, filmed last night in Albuquerque, New Mexico, by Stuart J Hooper . Watch: . READ MORE ELECTION NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire 2016 Files SUPPORT 21WIRE – SUBSCRIBE & BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV

In New Jersey Student Loan Program, Even Death May Not Bring a Reprieve - The New York Times

Annie Waldman

Amid a haze of grief after her son’s unsolved murder last year, Marcia faced an endless list of tasks — helping the police gain access to Kevin’s phone and email canceling his subscriptions, credit cards and bank accounts and arranging his burial in New Jersey. And then there were the college loans. When Ms. called about his federal loans, an administrator offered condolences and assured her the balance would be written off. But she got a far different response from a New Jersey state agency that had also lent her son money. “Please accept our condolences on your loss,” a letter from that agency, the Higher Education Student Assistance Authority, said. “After careful consideration of the information you provided, the authority has determined that your request does not meet the threshold for loan forgiveness. Monthly bill statements will continue to be sent to you. ” Ms. who on the loans, was shocked and confused. But her experience with the authority, which runs by far the largest student loan program in the country, is hardly an isolated one, an investigation by ProPublica, in collaboration with The New York Times, found. New Jersey’s loans, which currently total $1. 9 billion, are unlike those of any other government lending program for students in the country. They come with extraordinarily stringent rules that can easily lead to financial ruin. Repayments cannot be adjusted based on income, and borrowers who are unemployed or facing other financial hardships are given few breaks. The loans also carry higher interest rates than similar federal programs. Most significant, New Jersey’s loans come with a cudgel that even the most predatory players cannot wield: the power of the state. New Jersey can garnish wages, rescind state income tax refunds, revoke professional licenses, even take away lottery winnings — all without having to get court approval. “It’s ” Daniel Frischberg, a bankruptcy lawyer, said. “The New Jersey program is set up so that you fail. ” The authority, which boasts in brochures that its “singular focus has always been to benefit the students we serve,” has become even more aggressive in recent years. Interviews with dozens of borrowers, who were among the tens of thousands who have turned to the program, show how the loans have unraveled lives. The program’s regulations have destroyed families’ credit and forced them to forfeit their salaries. One college graduate declared bankruptcy at age 26 after struggling to repay his debt. The agency filed four simultaneous lawsuits against a paralegal after she fell behind on her payments. Another borrower, Chris Gonzalez, could not keep up with his loans after he got ’s lymphoma and was laid off by Goldman Sachs. While the federal government allowed him to suspend his payments because of hardship, New Jersey sued him, seeking $266, 000 in payments, and seized a state tax refund he was owed. One reason for the aggressive tactics is that the state depends on Wall Street investors to finance student loans through bonds and needs to satisfy those investors by keeping losses to a minimum. Loan revenues also cover about half of the agency’s administrative budget. In 2010, the agency filed fewer than 100 suits against borrowers and their families. Last year, it filed over 1, 600. (Some could result from federal loans handled by New Jersey, though such loans make up just 4 percent of the agency’s portfolio.) The cases are handled by debt collectors, who can tack on another 30 percent in fees on top of the outstanding debt. Marcia Karrow, the authority’s chief of staff, said that “the vast majority of these borrowers are happy with the program. ” She added that New Jersey’s loans had “some of the lowest default rates” in the country. But when asked to produce the annual default rates, the agency sent ProPublica and The Times data only for students with strong credit scores, making it impossible to calculate the overall rate. A spokesman for Gov. Chris Christie said the governor did not control the authority and declined to respond to questions about the loan program. But Mr. Christie, a Republican, appointed its executive director, Gabrielle Charette he also has the power to appoint at least 12 of the agency’s 18 board members and can veto any action taken by the board. Besides administering the loan program, the authority provides financial aid counseling, conducting hundreds of financial aid nights at New Jersey high schools, where it offers advice about paying for college, including pitching its own loans. Ms. who emigrated from Brazil and had long worked as a nanny while raising her son as a single mother, always knew that paying for his college education would be a challenge. Even after marrying her husband when Kevin DeOliveira was in middle school, she knew that their combined income would not be enough to cover the costs. A friend told her about New Jersey’s program. That, along with a combination of scholarships, grants and other loans, allowed Mr. DeOliveira to enroll at the University of Vermont. Since her son was fatally shot, Ms. has made 18 payments to New Jersey. Paying $180 per month, she has about 92 to go. “We’re not going to be poor because of this,” she said. “But every time I have to pay this thing, I think in my head, this is so unfair. ” For decades, states served as middlemen for federal student loans. Most of the loans were made by banks and were handled and backed by regional and agencies as well as by the federal government. The arrangement was unwieldy, expensive and marked by scandal. After Pennsylvania’s student loan agency lost a public records lawsuit in 2007, documents revealed that the agency had spent nearly $1 million on things like facials and falconry lessons. That same year, New Jersey’s agency was caught in what amounted to a kickback scheme. The state attorney general found that the agency had improperly pushed one company’s loans in exchange for annual payments of $2. 2 million. A subsequent investigation by the state’s inspector general found that the agency was in “disarray. ” In 2010, Congress and the Obama administration decided to effectively eliminate the role of state agencies by having only the federal government lend directly to students. Some states, like California, decided to downsize and transferred their federal loan portfolios. Others, such as Pennsylvania, won contracts from the federal government to service debt from the federal loan program. New Jersey chose a different path. In the years leading up to the end of the federal program, New Jersey sharply expanded its loan program, slowly replacing the federal loans it once handled with state loans. From 2005 to 2010, loans from the agency nearly tripled, to $343 million per year. Since then, the agency has reduced its loans by half, but its outstanding portfolio has remained roughly the same, about $2 billion. Ms. Karrow said the growth of New Jersey’s program was simply a result of both the increasing number of students and the rising cost of tuition. But in fact, college enrollment and tuition have not grown as rapidly as the program’s size. While other states have similar loan programs, New Jersey’s stands apart, for both its size and its onerous terms. Massachusetts, running the program, with $1. 3 billion in outstanding loans, automatically cancels debt if a borrower dies or becomes disabled, something many other states also do. The program of the state lender, Texas, is half the size of New Jersey’s. And Texas offers a flat interest rate, a modest 4. 5 percent, while New Jersey’s rates can reach nearly 8 percent. Some other state loan programs have more flexible repayment options — Rhode Island, for example, offers repayment. New Jersey, meanwhile, encourages students to buy life insurance in case they die to help repay. As an agency pamphlet cautions, “Are you prepared for the unthinkable?” The agency, Ms. Karrow said, treats each instance of a deceased borrower case by case and tries to be compassionate, but, she added, “we must also meet our fiduciary duty to our bondholders. ” When consumer lawyers protested the program’s onerous conditions at a 2014 agency meeting, the agency, according to minutes from the session, said that giving borrowers a break would make the bonds sold to finance loans “less attractive to the ratings agencies and investors. ” Indeed, in a recent bond assessment, the credit rating agency Moody’s cited the authority’s “administrative wage garnishing, which it uses aggressively,” for “significantly higher collections” compared with other programs. A New Jersey rule adopted in 1998 allows the authority to give borrowers in default a second chance by allowing them to become current on their account through payments. But the agency has never granted a reprieve and instead cuts off contact with borrowers, leaving them at the mercy of collection firms. Ms. Karrow said federal regulations prohibited the agency from offering such relief, but student loan experts disputed that assertion. “There is nothing in the federal law or regulations that prohibits them from offering private loan rehabilitation, ” Mark Kantrowitz, a expert, said. The combination of a lack of flexibility, an unwillingness to discharge loans and the state’s power to seize wages has resulted in even “more intractable problems for our clients than predatory mortgages, deceptive car loans or illegal internet payday lending,” said David McMillin, a lawyer with Legal Services of New Jersey, a nonprofit that provides free legal assistance to state residents. “Many borrowers and find themselves facing a lifetime of debt problems. ” Given the lack of options, some New Jersey borrowers have resorted to declaring bankruptcy, even though, as is true of all student loans, their debt is rarely canceled. Declaring bankruptcy also makes it virtually impossible to secure a mortgage, lease a car or even use credit cards for years. But for New Jersey borrowers, such an extreme step at least offers a way to gain manageable monthly payment terms. As a Tracey Timony struggled to help pay off her daughter’s $140, 000 in loans. Though the Higher Education Student Assistance Authority can seize wages or tax returns without court approval, it must secure a judgment to dip into borrowers’ bank accounts or place liens on their property. Instead of garnishing Ms. Timony’s wages, New Jersey sued her after her daughter defaulted. “The agency is looking to put as much pressure on the borrower and be as aggressive as possible, and the way that you do that is you go after everybody that is liable,” Jennifer Weil, a New Jersey student debt lawyer, said. “In case the garnishment doesn’t work, a judgment will help put pressure on the parents. ” Ms. Timony declared bankruptcy and got monthly debt payments that will rise no higher than about $1, 000 a month, far less than what the agency had demanded. “I never thought that sending my daughter to college would ruin our lives,” Ms. Timony said. Few have felt the weight of the agency’s powers more than Mr. Gonzalez, the college graduate who was sued after receiving a diagnosis of cancer and losing his job. He had borrowed the maximum he could in federal loans — a total of about $30, 000 for five years — and paid for most of his tuition with loans from New Jersey. “I felt so comfortable because it was the State of New Jersey,” Mr. Gonzalez said. “It’s the state, my government, trying to help me out and achieve my American dream. It turns out they were the worst ones. ” Over five years, he took out over $180, 000 in state loans. Unlike most other states, New Jersey does not impose a strict cap on loans to discourage overborrowing. One family, according to a recent state audit of the agency, took out over $800, 000 in loans, more than five times the value of its home. Mr. Gonzalez’s loans had a relatively high interest rate — on average about 7. 5 percent. At the time it seemed like a good investment. He graduated with an engineering degree from Aeronautical University in Florida and landed a job on Wall Street working as a programmer for Goldman Sachs. But a few months after he started, unusual rashes began to appear on his legs and underarms. He learned he had ’s lymphoma and started radiation therapy. After three years of cancer treatments, Mr. Gonzalez was also laid off. He needed to take care of his student loans. The federal government and his private lenders all deferred his debt for at least six months. Mr. Gonzalez expected New Jersey to do the same, but the agency refused, requiring him to pay at least $500 a month. With unemployment checks as his only income and burdened by continuing health expenses, it was too much for him. He made no payments while the agency reviewed his case. In June 2014, Mr. Gonzalez moved to Florida to lower his cost of living. His health slowly improved and he started his own company, developing technology for small businesses. In his first year, he made just $26, 000, but he started to pay back his federal and private bank loans. On May 8, 2015, after months of hearing nothing, he received an email from New Jersey: His deferral request had been denied and his loan was being sent to a collection agency. “Unfortunately, because of how the loan originated, the authority is not in a position to offer forbearance or relief,” Robert Laird, a program officer at the loan agency, said in the email. Terrified by what a default would mean for his credit rating, Mr. Gonzalez told the agency that he would stop paying for health insurance and use the money — $200 per month — to repay the loans. The agency rejected the offer. “In the event that your doctor declares you total and permanently disabled, please keep me posted,” Mr. Laird told Mr. Gonzalez in an email. One day in April, a stranger rang Mr. Gonzalez’s doorbell. “Chris Gonzalez?” he asked. Mr. Gonzalez nodded. “You’ve been served with a lawsuit from the New Jersey Higher Education Student Assistance Authority. ” The suit demanded over $260, 000 — about $188, 000 for the original loans, $34, 000 in interest, and $44, 000 to cover the fees of a collection agency’s lawyer. Even if his business improves, Mr. Gonzalez has no idea how he will afford his ballooning payments. “I don’t have money,” he said. “I am spending it all on my debt. ”

Tiny Dog Was So Aggressive She Wasn’t Allowed To Be Adopted By New Mom

Brianna Acuesta

If you’ve ever wondered how much social media can actually impact someone’s life, just think about the innumerable amount of animals that have found their home, thanks to social...

‘Moana’ Has the Second Best Thanksgiving Weekend Opening of All Time - The New York Times

Brooks Barnes

LOS ANGELES — With the of “Moana” over the holiday weekend, the reinvigorated Walt Disney Animation Studios cemented its status as ’s reigning powerhouse for films. “Moana,” one of the wide releases of the year, collected about $81. 1 million at domestic theaters over the holiday weekend, enough to rank as the Thanksgiving opening on record, behind only “Frozen,” which took in $93. 6 million for Disney in 2013. (Disney Animation Studios and its corporate sibling, Pixar, now hold the top six spots on that Thanksgiving records list.) Costing at least $300 million to make and market worldwide, “Moana” took in an additional $16. 3 million in limited overseas release, including in China, where the response was muted. “Moana,” which navigated various controversies en route to theaters, including one over an Halloween and one over an oversize male character, is a musical Miranda, the virtuoso behind the Broadway smash “Hamilton,” contributed to the score. After a fallow period in the 2000s, when Pixar reigned supreme, Disney Animation Studios has delivered one successful original film after another, including “Tangled,” “Frozen,” “ Ralph” and, earlier this year, “Zootopia. ” Pixar, lately focused more intently on sequels, has recently had an uneven track record with originals, finding a blockbuster in “Inside Out” but fizzling with “The Good Dinosaur. ” Among other new offerings, Robert Zemeckis’s period spy drama, “Allied” (Paramount) did the best, collecting about $18 million, according to comScore, which compiles box office data. Had the film not cost a hefty $85 million to make — not including marketing expenses — that sales total would have been fine. As it is, “Allied,” which drew soft reviews, will likely go down as another misfire for Mr. Zemeckis and Paramount. The studio is counting on foreign audiences to pick up the slack in partial overseas release, “Allied,” starring Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard, took in $9. 4 million. “Bad Santa 2” (Broad Green) fared poorly. Costing an estimated $26 million to make, it sold about $9 million in tickets. The original “Bad Santa,” now considered a crude comedy classic, arrived to $22 million in Thanksgiving ticket sales in 2003, after adjusting for inflation. Bombing outright was Warren Beatty’s “Rules Don’t Apply,” a romantic comedic drama set in the late 1950s. Independently financed for $27 million and distributed by 20th Century Fox, “Rules Don’t Apply” collected a breathtakingly bad $2. 2 million for the period. The movie likely suffered from mixed reviews, Mr. Beatty’s absence from movie screens and marketing materials that failed to make the film seem relevant to contemporary . Even so, it was a strong weekend over all for Hollywood, as a broad array of movies, including the arrival of the Weinstein Company’s “Lion,” and sizzling holdovers, including “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” generated wide audience interest. For the year to date, total ticket sales in North America stand at $10. 1 billion, a 4. 5 percent increase from the same period a year ago.

Soros Groups Behind Massive Anti-Trump Tax Day Protest Plot

Aaron Klein

The news media has been reporting on plans by a coalition of activist groups to hold a massive Tax March in Washington and at least 60 other locations on April 15. [Unreported by the news media is that most of the listed partners and support organizers of the march are openly financed by George Soros or have close links to Soros financing. The website for the march, which is slated for the deadline for Americans to file their tax returns, claims that its mission is to get Trump to release his tax returns and more. The site relates: President Trump needs to be straight with the American people. To whom does he owe favors? Who are his policies really intended to benefit? Who will he put first? Working families are struggling to make ends meet, but we pay our fair share in taxes — does Donald Trump pay any at all? Organizers of the march claim to be “ordinary Americans, community organizers, advocates, and people from all walks of life and all backgrounds joining together to raise our voices and send a bold message to this administration. ” Leaders from January’s Women’s March coalition are reportedly helping to organize the Tax March, which USA Today described as a “sequel” to the massive women’s march. Buzzfeed took note of the comparison to the women’s march in a piece titled, “Progressives Want Tax Day To Be The Next Women’s March Protest. ” Soros reportedly has ties to more than 50 “partners” of that march. Also, this journalist first reported on the march leaders’ close associations with Soros. In a section titled “Who is organizing it?” the website for the Tax March lists the following eight groups, six of which are either funded by Soros or tied to Soros financing. The Tax March is grateful to have the support of the following organizations: American Federation of Teachers, Americans for Tax Fairness, Center for Popular Democracy, Indivisible Project, MoveOn. Org, Our Revolution, and The Working Families Party. Americans for Tax Fairness is the recipient of a grant from Soros’s Open Society Foundations’ U. S. Programs. MoveOn. Org is financed by Soros. The American Federation of Teachers’ Educational Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the American Federation of Teachers, was financed by the Strategic Opportunities Fund of Soros’s Open Society Foundations, leaked Open Society documents show. The Center for Popular Democracy is led by activists. In 2013, Marbre Stahly, a policy advocate at the Center, became a Soros Justice Fellow, which comes with a stipend of $58, 700 to $110, 250 to fund activism projects that last between months. The Center was listed as Stahly’s “host” for the grant. According to her bio, the Center’s research analyst, Maggie Corser, “spent four years at the Open Society Foundations where she conducted research on the future of work, conservative political infrastructure, and a range of economic justice issue. ” Shawn Sebastian, the Center’s field director for its Fed Up Campaign, was a fellow at the so called Unit of the Open Society Foundations’ Justice Initiative. Another Tax March organizer is the Indivisible Project. Earlier this week, Breitbart News extensively reported that Indivisible leaders are openly associated with groups financed by Soros. Politico last week profiled Indivisible in an article titled, “Inside the protest movement that has Republicans reeling. ” The news agency not only left out the Soros links, but failed to note that the organizations cited in its article as helping to amplify Indivisible’s message are either financed directly by Soros or have close ties to groups funded by the billionaire, as Breitbart News documented. Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio. ” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook. With research by Joshua Klein.

Janet Reno, First Woman to Serve as U.S. Attorney General, Dies at 78 - The New York Times

Carl Hulse

Janet Reno, who rose from a rustic life on the edge of the Everglades to become attorney general of the United States — the first woman to hold the job — and whose eight years in that office placed her in the middle of some of the most divisive episodes of the Clinton presidency, died on Monday at her home in County, Fla. She was 78. Her sister, Margaret Hurchalla, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, which was diagnosed in November 1995, while Ms. Reno was still in office. Ms. Reno’s tenure as attorney general was bracketed by two explosive events: a deadly federal raid on the compound of a religious cult in Waco, Tex. in 1993, and in 2000 the government’s seizing of Elián González, a young Cuban refugee who was at the center of an international custody battle and a political tug of war. In those moments and others, Ms. Reno was applauded for displaying integrity and a willingness to accept responsibility, but she was also fiercely criticized. Republicans accused her of protecting President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore when, in 1997, she refused to allow an independent counsel to investigate allegations of improprieties in the White House. After leaving office, she mounted a surprise though unsuccessful bid in Florida in 2002 to unseat Gov. Jeb Bush, the brother of President George W. Bush, amid the resentment of in South Florida over her negotiating for the return of Elián to Cuba. Ms. Reno was never part of the Clinton inner circle, even though she served in the Clinton cabinet for two terms, longer than any attorney general in the previous 150 years. She was a latecomer to the team, and her political and personal style clashed with the president’s, particularly as she sought to maintain some independence from the White House. Her relations with the president were further strained by her decision to let an independent inquiry into a failed Clinton land deal in Arkansas, the Whitewater investigation, expand to encompass Mr. Clinton’s sexual relationship with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky, an episode that led to his impeachment. Mr. Clinton and his allies thought that Ms. Reno was too quick to refer to special counsels in the Lewinsky matter and other cases of suspect administration behavior. The president let her dangle in the public eye for weeks before announcing in December 1996, after his resounding that she would remain for his second term. Ms. Reno was never a natural fit in Washington’s backslapping, competitive culture. At weekly news conferences, held in the conference room outside her office in the Justice Department building on Pennsylvania Avenue, she was fond of telling reporters that she would “do the right thing” on legal issues and judge them according to “the law and the facts. ” Imposing at awkward in manner and blunt in her probity, she became a regular foil for comics and a running gag on “Saturday Night Live. ” But she got the joke, proving it by gamely appearing on the show to lampoon her image. The comedy could not obscure her accomplishments. Ms. Reno presided over the Justice Department in a time of economic growth, falling crime rates and mounting security threats to the nation by forces both foreign and domestic. Under Ms. Reno, the agency initiated prosecutions in the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and in the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, helping to lay the groundwork for the pursuit of terrorists in the 21st century. The Reno Justice Department also prosecuted spies like the C. I. A. mole Aldrich H. Ames it filed an antitrust suit against Microsoft, a milestone in the era and it sued the tobacco industry to reclaim federal health care dollars spent on treating illnesses caused by smoking. Ms. Reno was a strong advocate of guaranteeing federal protection to women seeking abortions and safeguarding abortion clinics that were under threat. But in some areas she seemed conflicted about the law. She opposed the death penalty, for example, but repeatedly authorized her prosecutors to ask juries to impose it. When she took office, she endorsed the use of independent counsels to investigate administration figures. But she later testified against renewing the law governing their use, saying it did nothing to take politics out of the inquiries. Before becoming attorney general, Ms. Reno was the Dade County state attorney for 14 years, when the Miami area was growing rapidly and experiencing rising crime, widening racial divisions, demoralizing police corruption and waves of immigration from Cuba. Mr. Clinton, committed to appointing a woman as attorney general, settled on Ms. Reno after his first two choices — the corporate lawyer Zoë Baird and the federal judge Kimba Wood — withdrew their names in the face of criticism after it was disclosed that they had employed undocumented immigrants as nannies. “I’m just delighted to be here, and I’m going to try my level best,” Ms. Reno said at the Rose Garden ceremony at which Mr. Clinton announced her nomination on Feb. 11, 1993. Two months later, she gained the nation’s full attention in a dramatic televised news conference in which she took full responsibility for a botched federal raid of the Waco compound of the Branch Davidians, an offshoot of the Adventists. The assault, after a long siege involving close to 900 military and personnel and a dozen tanks, left the compound in flames and the group’s charismatic leader, David Koresh, and about 75 others dead. A third of the dead were children. Ms. Reno’s candor was viewed as refreshing in a city where blame shifting is the norm, and it gave her sudden celebrity status in the new administration. The luster faded quickly. Within weeks, Ms. Reno faced tough questions about the raid and her claim that children were being abused at the compound. She was also faulted for failing to influence an important crime bill. By the end of her first year in office, she was facing mounting scrutiny in the news media. With Mr. Clinton’s and his decision to keep Ms. Reno at her post, Republicans began questioning her independence when she resisted their calls for a special counsel to look into allegations that Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gore had broken campaign laws in 1996. The clamor, led by the House speaker, Newt Gingrich, and Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, grew when it was disclosed that Louis J. Freeh, the head of the F. B. I. also favored a special counsel. Ms. Reno would not budge, saying her stance had nothing to do with protecting the president. A review of the evidence, she said, convinced her that a special counsel was not warranted. “Let me be absolutely clear,” Ms. Reno told hostile Republican questioners during one of several hearings on Capitol Hill about the call for a special counsel. “I’m not going to violate my oath in this matter because of pressure from any quarter, not from the media, not from Congress, nor from anywhere else. ” Questions about her handling of the Waco raid resurfaced in 1999, when new evidence suggested that the F. B. I. might have started the fire that destroyed the compound. The disclosure further soured her dealings with Mr. Freeh — a relationship that had been close early in her tenure but had grown tortured by 1999. He let it be known that he favored a special counsel in the case and a new inquiry into Waco. She sent marshals to F. B. I. headquarters to seize a tape of communications made the day of the assault. Her final and perhaps most personal crisis as head of the Justice Department was the case involving Elián González, the Cuban boy who was found floating on an inner tube off the coast of Florida after his mother and 10 others had drowned in a failed crossing from Cuba by small boat. The boy became a unifying figure among Cuban exiles in South Florida, who were determined to see him remain in the United States in defiance of the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro. Ms. Reno favored returning Elián to his father in Cuba, and she became immersed in negotiations over his fate because of her ties to Miami. Ms. Reno was on the phone almost up to the moment agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service burst into the Miami home of Elián’s relatives and took him away at gunpoint. Congressional Republicans and many Cuban exiles were outraged. Some in Miami said Ms. Reno would be in danger if she returned there after her service in Washington. Early in 2001, however, she did go home, her service finished. She said she was excited about a red pickup truck she had bought. Janet Reno was born in Miami, on the edge of the Everglades, on July 21, 1938, to Henry Olaf Reno and the former Jane Wood. Her father, born Henry Rasmussen in Denmark, came to the United States in 1913 with his own mother and father, who chose the name Reno off a map, believing it sounded more American. Henry Reno was a police reporter in Dade County for more than 40 years. Jane Reno, born in Georgia, was an eccentric naturalist who would have a profound effect on Ms. Reno. “Outspoken, outrageous, absolutely indifferent to others’ opinions, Jane Reno was truly one of a kind,” Paul Anderson, a former Miami Herald reporter, wrote in his biography of Janet Reno. It was her mother who had wrestled small alligators, though the stunt was sometimes erroneously ascribed to the daughter. Ms. Reno, the eldest of four siblings, was about 8 when her parents bought 21 acres bordering the Everglades and moved there. Her mother, who had no construction experience, built the family home. “She dug the foundation with her own hands, with a pick and shovel,” Ms. Reno told senators at her confirmation hearing in 1993. It was a rustic life peacocks and other creatures roamed the property, and Janet and her siblings — Robert, Mark and Margaret — cavorted barefoot. But she also glimpsed a more sophisticated world: After junior high school, she traveled to Europe to stay with an uncle, a military judge, as he presided over a spy trial. Besides her sister, who is known as Maggy, Ms. Reno is survived by seven nieces and nephews. Her brother Robert, a former columnist for Newsday on Long Island, died in 2012 at 72. Her brother Mark had an adventurer’s life: game warden, boat and oil supply ship captain, alligator wrestler, scuba diver, paratrooper as well as carpenter and bailiff at the Justice Building. He died in 2014, also at 72. After finishing high school in Miami, Ms. Reno attended Cornell University, graduating in 1960 with a degree in chemistry. She won admission to Harvard Law School and graduated in 1963, one of a handful of women in her class of more than 500. Seeking to practice law in South Florida, Ms. Reno was turned down by one of the state’s law firms, Steel Hector Davis, and went to work for a smaller firm instead. She became active in local Democratic politics and met a fellow Harvard graduate, Gerald Lewis, a lawyer with electoral aspirations. Ms. Reno helped him win a State House seat in 1966, and the two opened a law firm together. Ms. Reno entered government service in 1971 as general counsel to the Judiciary Committee of the Florida House of Representatives, where she worked on a difficult overhaul of Florida’s courts. Her work in Tallahassee, the capital, whetted her appetite for public office, and she campaigned for a state legislative seat of her own the next year. She lost in an upset to a Republican candidate helped by the landslide victory of President Richard M. Nixon. Ms. Reno did not wait long for her next opportunity. The day after her defeat, Richard Gerstein, the state attorney for Dade County, offered her a job on his staff. As she told The Miami Herald, she expressed reservations in her characteristically straightforward manner. “My father was always convinced you were a crook,” she said she told Mr. Gerstein. “And I’ve always been a critic of yours. ” Mr. Gerstein replied that those were the reasons he wanted to hire her. Within a few years, she was Mr. Gerstein’s chief assistant. Ms. Reno left the prosecutor’s office in May 1976 to join Steel Hector Davis, the firm that had rejected her out of law school. But her tenure there was short. After Mr. Gerstein announced that he would resign in early 1978, after 21 years in the office, Gov. Reubin Askew appointed Ms. Reno interim state attorney, choosing her from about 50 candidates. She was the first woman to hold the title of state attorney in Florida and one of the few in the nation’s history to be responsible for such a large jurisdiction. Ms. Reno retained the post through a thicket of drug, murder and corruption cases. In one, she was accused of being antipolice when she prosecuted five Miami officers in the beating death of a black insurance executive after a traffic stop the officers, she said, had tried to make it look like an accident. The officers were acquitted — one by the presiding judge in the trial, held in Tampa, and the others by an jury — provoking criticism of her legal strategy and four days of deadly riots in Miami’s predominantly black Liberty City neighborhood. To quell the furor, Ms. Reno undertook an outreach effort that restored some support among Miami’s black citizens. She remained state attorney through five election campaigns — until February 1993, when the White House called. Ms. Reno was formally nominated to be attorney general that month, just a few weeks after the death of her mother, Jane, the guiding influence in her life. She invoked her mother’s memory in her remarks that day at the Rose Garden ceremony with Mr. Clinton. “My mother always told me to do my best,” she said, “to think my best and to do right. ”

Germany Proposes Tougher Measures to Combat Terrorism - The New York Times

Alison Smale

BERLIN — The German government proposed a broad range of measures on Thursday to bolster security and combat terrorism, its strongest official response so far to two recent attacks by terrorists pledging loyalty to the Islamic State and a deadly shooting rampage in Munich. Many of the measures, which include closer monitoring of refugees and enhanced surveillance, seem likely to win legislative approval but prompted concerns in a country that is deeply protective of privacy and civil liberties. The package of proposals is the most comprehensive from the German government since Europe became a consistent target of terrorist attacks by the Islamic State, other radical groups and their followers. They were unveiled at a time when Chancellor Angela Merkel is facing accusations that the welcome she gave last year to migrants streaming to the Continent from Syria and other nations in the Middle East has compromised security. The German plan, and the response to it, reflected a broader tension in the West over how to balance steps to combat terrorism against civil liberties and political realities amid a resurgence in populism, nationalism and sentiment. The proposals announced by the interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, call for hiring more federal police officers making it a crime to express sympathy for terrorism greater sharing of intelligence data across Europe closer watching of the “dark web,” the part of the internet that is invisible to ordinary users stripping dual citizens of their German citizenship if they fight for extremist groups and making it easier to deport foreigners deemed to be dangerous. Strengthening the federal government’s powers is particularly fraught for a country where the legacies of Nazi and Communist control have left a deep suspicion of centralized authority and official surveillance, and where the powers of the central government remain limited because of the history of totalitarian control. Ralf Stegner, a leading Social Democrat, said that the plan was the clear result of “public pressure in the last few weeks,” which made terrorism more a reality than an abstraction. In a phone interview, Mr. Stegner said his party supported hiring additional police officers, upgrading technology, investigating the dark web and improving cooperation with other European countries, but was more skeptical of a proposal by Mr. de Maizière to restrict certain rights of migrants whose asylum applications have been denied but who cannot easily be deported. Mr. Stegner noted that France — despite a state of emergency in place since terrorist attacks in and around Paris last November — has not managed to halt further attacks, and that “the mood there, and the situation, are quite different” from Germany. Last year, 1. 1 million foreigners migrated to Germany — a record — and the country received 442, 000 asylum applications. Ms. Merkel has insisted that Germany can successfully assimilate the newcomers, but the recent attacks have strained the coalition government she leads. With elections in two states in September and a national vote next year, Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democrats and their coalition partners, the Social Democrats, worry that the populist, Alternative for Germany party could make strong gains. In announcing the measures on Thursday, Mr. de Maizière emphasized that Germany “must change” in the face of new threats, by showing enhanced vigilance, deploying new technologies and even, in some cases, overriding strong War II concerns about privacy. He said he wanted to install sophisticated video equipment in about 20 significant railroad stations, and to improve the sharing of surveillance footage among law enforcement agencies, adding that the shooting rampage in Munich, at a shopping mall, showed that public spaces were potential “soft targets” for terrorists. The Munich rampage, which killed nine people, was the work of a teenager, Ali Sonboly, who had been in psychiatric treatment and was fascinated by previous mass shootings. The pistol he used, a Glock 17, was a former theater weapon, apparently bought on the internet, that had been restored to be able to shoot live rounds. Mr. de Maizière proposed much tighter European regulations to register such weapon conversions and to crack down on internet arms sales. Similarly, his proposals to monitor newly arrived refugees and people susceptible to radicalization seemed aimed at preventing terrorist attacks like the two by Islamic State adherents last month. The first, on July 18, was carried out by a person identified only as a Afghan who was living with a foster family in Bavaria. He wounded four people on a train with an ax and a knife, and then attacked a woman walking her dog he was later shot by the police. Six days later, in Germany’s first Islamist suicide attack, a Syrian blew himself up outside a music festival in the Bavarian town of Ansbach and wounded 15. The authorities had previously ordered him deported, and, on Thursday, Mr. de Maizière announced further measures to make it easier to deport foreign criminals. “Nobody can guarantee absolute security,” Mr. de Maizière said. “But we must do everything in our power” to try to ensure safety. “One thing is sure,” he added, “our country will not respond to the violence of the perpetrators with hate and division. We will not allow the terrorists that triumph. ” Mr. de Maizière reiterated publicly concerns previously voiced privately by senior intelligence officials that Germany — and Europe — does not always know enough about migrants. He noted that the recent decision to register air travelers in and out of Europe was an improvement, and he urged that all of Germany’s federal and state law enforcement and intelligence officials should have access to that information. “We see in recent months that these offices must know exactly who is coming to Europe, and who is leaving it,” he said. Other measures he proposed included combing the social media profiles of refugees and other migrants to look out for signs of radicalization, as the authorities in the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden have done. In a statement, Mr. de Maizière said that officials could have gleaned more information after a bomb threat at a mall in Dortmund if officials had had access to surveillance footage, which he said had been restricted by data protection officials. “Overall, we must extend and optimize our use of I. T. ” he said, referring to information technology. Mr. de Maizière said that the government had approved adding 4, 600 security jobs, 3, 250 of them in the federal police force, which, under the structure largely set up by the Allies after World War II, has traditionally taken a back seat to the police in the country’s 16 states. The German press had speculated that the government would propose punishing doctors who failed to inform the authorities if they suspected patients of potentially committing violent acts. But patient confidentiality is taken very seriously in Germany, given the involvement of doctors in the crimes of the Nazi era doctors can be punished for breaching patient privacy, with certain exceptions. Mr. de Maizière said on Thursday that the government would not change the principle of protecting patients, but he urged doctors to contact the government if they believe a patient is dangerous or about to commit a crime. Dr. Frank Ulrich Montgomery, the president of the German Medical Association, said in a statement that he was relieved “that medical confidentiality is not to be called into question. ” Mr. de Maizière also rejected as “constitutionally problematic” other ideas that some conservative lawmakers have floated, including a ban on burqas.

How Easy-to-hack Voting Machines Endanger Democracy

How Easy-to-hack Voting Machines Endanger Democracy Source: Who What Why Since the “Help America Vote Act” in 2002, tallying votes in our elections has become dependent on machines that sometimes leave no paper trail. Manufacturers have “proprietary” programs and will not let any public officials or independent experts examine them. On a cold winter day in 2007, Andrew Appel, a Princeton computer professor and election specialist, changed the outcome on one of these machines in seven minutes. He proved something that should alarm everyone: in effect, it took seven minutes per machine to steal an election. In testimony to a House of Representatives Technology Committee on September 28, 2016, which is now suddenly paying attention because of the fear of “Russian” hacking, Appel noted: “Installing new software in a voting machine is not really much different from installing new software in any other kind of computer. Installing new software is how you hack a voting machine to cheat. In 2009, in the courtroom of the Superior Court of New Jersey, I demonstrated how to hack a voting machine. I wrote a vote-stealing computer program that shifts votes from one candidate to another. Installing that vote-stealing program in a voting machine takes seven minutes, per machine, with a screwdriver.” Machines were initially adopted for vote counting over a century ago,because they promised speed and convenience. They can tally results more quickly than a more reliable and re-checkable hand count. From the beginning, there were ways to corrupt non-computerized machines, Appel said. One such ploy was the “pencil shaving trick.” Putting shavings on the lever of an opposition party would choke off counting ballots until the shavings came loose and fell free. While this left a tell-tale discrepancy between the counted results and the number of voters who signed in at that polling place to vote, the scam worked if no one checked. Latest Computers Easier to Hack . You might think the advent of computerized voting machines, starting around 2002, would have made it harder to corrupt vote counting. In fact, even the latest generation of such machines are much easier to hack without leaving a trace. These machines are big money-makers for private corporations, which lobbied legislators about their supposed advantages. But they also pose a serious threat to the integrity of our elections. DRE Direct-Recording Electronic or “touchscreen” voting machines that leave no paper trail will be mainly used by voters in 14 states, according to the Brennan Center,. Those states include Georgia, and Pennsylvania — which are in play this year. Even large regions of Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina and many other states still use them. Among the brand names are Shouptronic , AVC Advantage , AccuVote OS , Optech-III Eagle . Most of these machines are over 10 years old, and the local authorities have no manuals for maintenance and repair. Claiming a lack of funds, state legislatures have refused to replace them. In 14 states, either computer error or Appel-like reprogramming could distort results. Without a paper trail, the only way to check the tally is through “initial” exit polling conducted throughout the full span of voting hours and ending when the polls close. Voting machines: Danaher Shouptronic 1242, Sequoia (Dominion) AVC Advantage, Premier/Diebold (Dominion) AccuVote OS and Optech IIIP-Eagle. Photo credit: Verified Voting Touchscreen machines were widely used in Ohio in the 2004 Kerry-Bush election, the only one of 154 American contests that year in which initial exit polling, which is ordinarily reliable, was markedly out of sync with the officially announced total. Those who know about computers have long been skeptical of this result. As Appel has demonstrated, tt takes no super-hacking skills to alter voting counts: “I did this in a secure facility and I’m confident my program has not leaked out to affect real elections, but really the software I built was not rocket science — any computer programmer could write the same code. Once it’s installed, it could steal elections without detection for years to come.” But if computer experts can hack every variety of touchscreen machine, what about foreign governments or domestic organizations? “Other computer scientists have demonstrated similar hacks on many models of machine,” Appel added. “This is not just one glitch in one manufacturer’s machine, it’s the very nature of computers.” In late July and early August, columns by Hiawatha Bray in the Boston Globe, and Zeynep Tufekci of The New York Times questioned for the first time whether voting in American elections is secure from such hacking — with suspicion directed, though without evidence, primarily at Russia. Suddenly, the disorganization and lack of transparency of American vote counting had become a National Security Issue. In late September, the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on Information Technology held hearings on “ Cybersecurity: Ensuring the Integrity of the Ballot Box.” Weighing in on the issue, President Barack Obama pointed out that most American elections are local or state, done under diverse procedures and laws, and involving a large number of voters. Even if particular computers, or a system of computers connected to the Internet, could be hacked from the outside, it would be hard for a foreign or domestic outlaw to falsify the results of a national election. On the surface, this is a heartening thought. But consider a close election like 2004. A targeted hack — say, altering one candidate’s vote by an algorithm that kicks in as precincts increase in size — might alter the outcome in certain key counties in a swing state In addition, voter registration lists are centralized and kept on the Internet. During the Arizona and New York primaries, many Democrats, often younger ones, reported that their registration was changed without their knowledge. They were listed as a Republican or Independent or with no year of registration indicated; as a result, they couldn’t vote in their party’s primary. This turned out to have been done by election officials “by accident,” and perhaps also by hackers via Internet access. Bones to Pick with Bipartisan Watchdogs . Now elections are watched over by bipartisan committees in which Appel has some confidence. At least, he points out, such supervision does not depend on a single powerful party or leader: “When we elect our government officials, sometimes we are voting for or against the very person or political party who is in office right now, running that very election! How can we trust that this person is running the election fairly? The answer is, we organize our elections so we don’t have to trust any single person or party. “That’s why, when you go to the polls in most places, there are typically two poll-workers there, often (by law) from different political parties; and there are poll-watchers, representing the parties to make sure everything is done right. That’s why recounts are done in the presence of witnesses from both parties. We run our elections transparently so the parties can watch each other, and the result is that even the losing candidate can trust that the election was run fairly. “ But there are two problems here. So-called bipartisanship means that third parties, such as the Green Party and the Libertarian Party, are by definition excluded. In addition, many aspects of the process end up in the hands of a single individual. Chief Clerk of Elections Diane Haslett-Rudiano arbitrarily stripped 123,000 people from the Brooklyn voter rolls in this year’s New York Democratic primary. She was later fired by the Board of Elections — after the.election was over . Systemic Weak Points . But Appel is even more worried about a systemic weak point in the electoral process. “Voting machines are often delivered to polling places several days before the election — to elementary schools, churches, firehouses. In these locations anyone could gain access to a voting machine for 10 minutes. Between elections the machines are routinely opened up for maintenance by county employees or private contractors. Let’s assume they have the utmost integrity, but still, in the US we try to run our elections so that we can trust the election results without relying on any one individual.” The Necessity of Recountable Paper Ballots . The only sure way to run a fair election, Appel says, is to use and keep paper ballots. In 2009, Germany adopted a system in which an initial exit poll is announced immediately after voting closes — this determines a range of plausible results within a margin of error — and then paper ballots are counted by hand. They have, since that time, had no major controversies about electoral fairness. Appel testified that newer, optical screen voting machines can be equally secure if paper ballots are kept and checked. Premier Optical Scan with Automark is used, in parts of California, Colorado, and since 2008, under Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, in parts of Ohio. Often, these involve entering your vote, and leaving a record, which you see in the machine, on a paper tape, of how your ballot was cast. But there are two striking problems with even these somewhat better machines. First, in 2014, the Environmental Protection Agency discovered that Volkswagens had an internal computer program which had long passed US emission tests, but polluted forty times more on the road . The cars were able to recognize when they were being tested (and had to keep the emission controls switched on) and when they were on the road and could pollute at will without fear of being caught. As Barbara Simons of Verified Voting aptly put it, we do not want “VW-style elections.” Appel’s mantra is: “any computer can be hacked.” Separating paper ballots physically from a computerized tape and keeping them in a different location, many computer experts believe, would provide further insurance against hacking even on optical scan machines. Second, challenging the results, particularly in a presidential election and even starting from an automatic recount, as Al Gore did in Florida in 2000, is very difficult. It would take a long time to recount the votes, even if the party in power were not trying to sabotage it… So the most important thing, as in Germany, is to get each election right in the first place. Why, we might ask, have officials sold public elections and the equal right to vote — again, the most important public feature of our democracy — to private, profit-making corporations? Once again, these corporations, claiming their programs are “proprietary” secrets, do not allow any independent check of how they operate . A few states like New Mexico have adopted, Appel says, a model procedure for close or controversial elections: *Immediately conduct a random recount of part of the paper ballots. *If there is an error, do a full recount. *Do not certify an election until both are done.” Appel and nine other experts, including Lawrence Norden from the Democracy Program of the Brennan Center at the New York University Law School and John McCarthy of the Verified Voting Foundation, offered 10 suggestions for securing existing machines and registration lists. For instance, they underline that “without voter-verified paper ballots, effective audits are impossible; they recommend checking samples from the voting system with hand counts of matched sets of paper ballots, recruiting technical experts to help with such tests, and publicizing the results, before certification of the election. They also recommend a new, detailed ballot accounting by each polling center and reconciliation with the number of those who signed in to vote there. Still, to put these procedures into practice would probably require sustained pressure from the voting public. Moreover, anyone familiar with vote counting in precincts across the country knows that many computer checking and security measures these experts recommend are far too sophisticated for most poll-watchers to implement before the November 8 election. Further, all Secretaries of State, who are often unabashed political partisans, would have to have good intentions — an assumption hard to reconcile with the actions of Kenneth Blackwell in Ohio in 2004 or Katherine Harris in Florida in 2000. In contrast, consider the record of Dana Debeauvoir, election clerk in Travis County which includes the University of Texas (Austin). She has worked with critics and computer experts, to propose a new type of encryption plus a paper record (it will not be ready, unfortunately, until the 2020 election). A federal law requiring oversight of elections by politically independent or neutral state officials would vastly improve the security of the American electoral process. But Appel is not optimistic about the prospect of Congressionally mandated reforms. For the upcoming election, some of the recommended measures will be in place in some jurisdictions across the country. After this election, however, with a strong democratic push from below, it might be possible to outlaw the highly insecure DREs ( touch-screen machines), provide adequate funding as well as training for election officials nationwide, and ensure an independent paper trail on optical scan machines. In fact, it might even be possible to go to a paper ballot backed up by an initial exit poll. In contrast to this November 8 — when, at best, only the large scale of the election makes likely a trustworthy result — such reforms would ensure that our elections are, both in appearance and in reality, fair. Share This Article...

Dakota Excess Pipeline? Standing Rock Protectors Strip-Searched, Jailed for Days on Minor Charges – Video, Links, and Commentary

Madeline

Select Page Dakota Excess Pipeline? Standing Rock Protectors Strip-Searched, Jailed for Days on Minor Charges – Video, Links, and Commentary Democracy Now! We discuss the crackdown on the resistance to the Dakota Access pipeline with Winona LaDuke, a Native American activist and executive director of the group Honor the Earth who lives and works on the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota, and Tara Houska, national campaigns director for Honor the Earth. Police have begun deploying military-grade equipment, including armored personnel carriers, surveillance helicopters, planes and drones. North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple activated the National Guard in late September. Roughly 140 people have been arrested. Some report being strip-searched in custody at the Morton County jail and being held for days without bond, even when they are facing minor misdemeanor charges. TRANSCRIPT This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . We’re broadcasting live from outside the courthouse and jail in Mandan, North Dakota. Water and land protectors, as they call themselves, report facing increasing repression amidst the ongoing resistance to the $3.8 billion Dakota Access pipeline. Police have begun deploying military-grade equipment, including armored personnel carriers, surveillance helicopters, planes and drones. North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple activated the National Guard in late September. Roughly 140 people have been arrested. Some report being strip-searched in custody at the Morton County jail, even when they’re facing minor misdemeanor charges. This is Dr. Sara Jumping Eagle, a pediatrician on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. DR. SARA JUMPING EAGLE : When I was taken to the jail, first I was taken by a corrections officer, transported from the protest site to the Morton County jail. And then, when they took me in there, you know, they had to take some basic information. And then, one of the things that they do is have you go into a small room, and there was a female officer there, and we had to—I had to take my clothes off, and then, I don’t know, basically— AMY GOODMAN : Cavity search? DR. SARA JUMPING EAGLE : No, not a cavity search, but I had to squat and cough. That’s what she said. I had to squat and cough and then put the orange suit on. AMY GOODMAN : So you were put in an orange jumpsuit? DR. SARA JUMPING EAGLE : Yeah, I was put in an orange jumpsuit. And then I was held there for several hours. And initially, you know, my family didn’t know where I was or didn’t—you know, they heard about it pretty quickly and were able to come and bond me out or bail me out. I don’t know what you call it. But I was in there for several hours. AMY GOODMAN : How did it make you feel? DR. SARA JUMPING EAGLE : It made me feel—you know, it made me think about my ancestors and what had they gone through. And this was in no way a comparison to what we’ve survived before, so just made me feel more determined about what I’m doing and why I’m here. AMY GOODMAN : That’s Dr. Sara Jumping Eagle, a pediatrician, member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. She was charged with disorderly conduct. LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, who founded the first resistance camp, the Sacred Stone Camp, on her own land April 1st, says her daughter was recently arrested, taken into custody at the Morton County jail, strip-searched in front of multiple male officers, then left for hours in her cell, naked and freezing, before the guards finally gave her clothes to wear. LaDonna Allard says her daughter was repeatedly asked by guards, “Who is your mother?” which Allard sees as an indication that her daughter was targeted because of who she is. Cody Hall from Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota says he was also strip-searched after he was arrested Friday, September 9th, held for three days without bail or bond, and then charged with two misdemeanors. CODY HALL : As I exited out of the vehicles and entered Morton County, I came up an elevator, and as the elevator opened up, I was met with state police. And then, you know, of course, Morton County people were there to book people, but—and then, from there, started the process of the booking, and then, again, you know, went into a private room, where they ask you to, you know, get naked. You know, they had my arms. They, you know, kind of like extend your arms out. And you’re fully naked. And they have you, you know, lift up your genitals and bend over, you know, cough. And so, it’s really one of those tactics that they try to break down your mentalness of everyday life, because not every day do you wake up and say, “Hey, I’m going to get, you know, naked and have somebody search me today,” you know? That’s a private—you know, that’s a private feeling for you, when you get naked, so… AMY GOODMAN : And four days later, when you were finally released—they hadn’t allowed you to go out on bail or bond for those four days—you came before a judge in the orange jumpsuit? CODY HALL : Yes, yes, I sat in the court office in my orange jumpsuit, locked, you know, still handcuffed, exited out of the courtroom. And as I left the courtroom, there were 20 or so state police all in their bullet-proof vests, everything just looking, you know, like—you know, like they’re going into action of some sort. And then they literally had a line from the courtroom to the door that connects you to the county jail. And my mother walked out with me. And as we got to the door, they were opening the door up. And as I looked behind me, my mother and I, all of the cops then proceeded to kind of swarm, you know, like make, you know, that big wall as I entered in, which was, again, an overkill, you know, but that, too, though, to show a dominant force. AMY GOODMAN : That was Cody Hall, who was arrested on two misdemeanors, held for four days, strip-searched here at the Morton County jail just behind us. Well, for more on the resistance to the Dakota Access pipeline and the police crackdown, we’re joined by two guests. Winona LaDuke, Native American activist, executive director of the group Honor the Earth, she lives and works on the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota. And we’re joined by Tara Houska, national campaigns director for Honor the Earth. She is Ojibwe from the Couchiching First Nation. We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Winona, let’s start with you. We have spoken to you intermittently through this resistance. Where does it stand now? WINONA LADUKE : Well, as far as we are in—I mean, I’m just looking at the big picture. Right now there is about 900,000 barrels per day of oil coming out of this state, and they project that into 2019. And so, what I’m trying to understand is, is that if that’s all they have and it’s already going out, why do they need another pipeline of 570,000 barrels of oil per day? In other words, they’re already meeting all their demand. For the next two years, that’s all the oil that’s in there. And this is really—what we call this is the Dakota Excess pipeline. AMY GOODMAN : The Dakota Excess. WINONA LADUKE : Dakota Excess pipeline. This is really about spites. It’s really about spite. AMY GOODMAN : What do you mean? WINONA LADUKE : It’s just really about hating. You know, it’s just really about trying to put something in across these tribes. It’s exactly what the chairman and you said before: If they wanted this pipeline so damn bad, they should have put it north of Bismarck, you know, and they should have—they should not have violated the law. The whole pipeline was approved through something called the Nationwide Permit number 12, which means they could it into a lot of little pieces and never do an EIS , and pretend like—you know, that’s intended for like if you have like a pipeline from a school to the water service center or something like that. It’s not intended for a 1,600-mile pipeline. Total misuse of the law, you know, and the president really needs to intervene and uphold the law…Read more and watch video at Democracy Now!

Russian paper of US errors in Syria shakes UN

Russian paper of US errors in Syria shakes UN 01.11.2016 Last Friday Russia started distributing a White Paper on Syria as an official document on behalf of the UN Security Council. The paper comprises all the events when the US-led coalition was making 'faults' as John Kerry said, which can be qualified as military crimes. The acts of so-called 'moderate opposition' are also present in the document. Beside that, there has been collected statistics on the successful operations of the Russian Aerospace Forces, delivery of humanitarian aid to the civilians, quantity of liberated cities, annihilated fighters, as well as the number of refugees that returned home. The Russian Defence and Foreign Ministries have been engaged in work on the White Paper, as well as experts from the Institute of Oriental Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences. The White Paper has been translated into English and distributed for further perusal. Pravda.Ru

Nestlé Folds to Consumer Demand, Will Offer Organic Food to Avoid Profit Loss

Michael

By Christina Sarich Nestlé, the food corporation known for illegally contributing more than $1.75 million to the Grocery Manufacturer’s Association slush fund meant to prevent labeling of food...

Robot Preacher Gives Automated Blessings and ’Beams Lights’ from Hands - Breitbart

Charlie Nash

A new robot preacher allows users to receive automated blessings in different languages before it beams light from its hands. [“ ” is currently on display in Wittenberg, Germany, a town which has close ties to Protestant figure Martin Luther, and was created by the Evangelical Church in Hesse and Nassau, according to the Mirror. “It consists of a metal box with a touch screen, two arms on the side, a head with eyes and a digital mouth at the top,” the Mirror explained. “After the robot wishes users a ‘warm welcome,’ it asks them if they want to be blessed by a male or female voice. It then asks the believer ‘what blessing do you want,’ which results in the robot making a mechanical sound as it raises its arms to the heavens and starts to smile. ” “Lights then start to flash in the robot’s arms as it says ‘God bless and protect you’ and recites a biblical verse,” the Mirror continued. “After the blessing, the user has the possibility to print the dictum,” similar to a fortune teller machine. The robot can communicate with users in five different languages, and the blessing can be printed out for them to take with them as well. Church spokesman Sebastian von Gehren claims that the new machine has attracted those who have very little in common with the church, but now routinely visit “every morning and evening” to receive an automated blessing. “It is an experiment that is supposed to inspire discussion,” he declared. “One half thinks it’s great … the other cannot imagine a blessing from a machine. ” Despite his praise of the robot, von Gehren added, “The machine should not replace the blessing of a pastor. ” “In the future, there will not be a blessing robot in every church,” he concluded. Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook.

Hillary Clinton: American Demagogue

Rixon Stewart

By Rixon Stewart on October 27, 2016 Rixon Stewart — Oct 26, 2016 Donald Trump warned on Tuesday that Hillary Clinton’s Syrian policy could ignite World War III. “She has no plan for Syria. And, look, with her you’ll end up in World War III. She doesn’t know what she’s doing, just like with Libya, just like with everything else she’s done. So, Syria now is no longer Syria. Syria is Russia and the new Iran, that we built through the Iran deal, which is the worst—one of the worst negotiated deals I’ve ever seen.” ( democracynow.org ) Trump isn’t alone in warning of the danger to world peace a Hillary Clinton presidency would bring. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has also sounded a similar warning, telling reporters recently: “Mrs Clinton has chosen to take up a very aggressive stance against our country, against Russia” Putin was quoted as saying. Unfortunately the elite want to see WWIII unfold as they see it as a solution to their most pressing problem: too many useless eaters. As a result they’ve set into motion plans for a large-scale military clash between the West and Russia and its allies. The end result, they hope, will be massive depopulation. Leaving themselves as overlords and those few who survive as little more than serfs on their global plantation. To this end U.S., British, Canadian, Italian and German forces are all preparing to deploy to eastern Europe early next year. Although ostensibly to deter “Russian aggression”, many of these combat ready units will be deployed within sight of Russia’s border. To those in Russia this will look less like a deterrent and more like a direct threat to their own sovereignty. Perfect Timing Assuming she wins, and there is good reason to believe that the polls will be rigged to ensure that she does, this will also coincide with Hillary Clinton assuming office. And as a mentor once remarked: there’s no such thing as coincidence. So the pieces are being put into place for an almighty clash between Russia and the West and the elite want Clinton to preside over it. She’s already voiced her readiness to impose a no-fly zone over Syria , a move that could easily provoke a military clash between Russia and the West. Moreover such a confrontation won’t merely involve Russia and the West; Syria and Iran would also be involved as would China. In other words a win for Hillary could easily set the stage for a world war. That’s what the elite want and that’s why we believe the U.S. presidential vote will be rigged in her favour. The warning signs are there to be seen. Tens of thousands of voting machines, which have been linked to George Soros and were used in a disputed election in Venezuela in 2004, are to be used in key states in the Nov 8 election. In addition surveys claiming Hillary a clear favourite have been called into question by the sheer numbers attending election rallies. While Donald Trump has been drawing capacity crowds Hillary Clinton’s campaign gatherings have been noticeably less well attended . There is moreover a wide disparity in pre-election opinion polls. Some are putting Trump ahead . While others are giving Clinton a double digit lead . Landing in Pennsylvania now. Great new poll this morning, thank you. Lets #DrainTheSwamp and #MakeAmericaGreatAgain ! TRUMP 42% — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 22, 2016 Call me a conspiracy theorist but such a wide discrepancy in campaign rally crowd numbers and survey findings suggests that the poll figures are being manipulated to create the illusion of support for Hillary. The elite have been trying to pull off a major global military clash for years. They tried it with Iran and its alleged nuclear weapons program. That failed after the Ayatollah proved himself to clever to fall into their trap. Now however, they’ve got Hillary Clinton to do their bidding as they prepare to position her as President of the United States. The warning signs are as clear as daylight. According to Secret Service agents charged with guarding Clinton, the woman is a nightmare to work for. Retired Secret Service agent Ronald Kessler writes: “When in public, Hillary smiles and acts graciously”. However, “As soon as the cameras are gone, her angry personality, nastiness, and imperiousness become evident.” He adds: “Hillary Clinton can make Richard Nixon look like Mahatma Gandhi.” I certainly hope that I’m wrong but we’ll know soon enough. Ed.

Homeless woman protecting Trump’s Hollywood Star gets attacked by big fat guy

Lexi Morgan

Homeless woman protecting Trump’s Hollywood Star gets attacked by big fat guy Fat man assaults homeless woman over politics By Lexi Morgan - October 29, 2016 HOLLYWOOD, Calif. ( INTELLIHUB ) — A local homeless woman was captured on video defending Donald Trump’s Hollywood Star , before being attacked by a big fat guy . The overweight man man could be seen on video pushing the woman while yelling, “Get out of here bitch.” A split second later the woman was pushed to the ground while clinging to a cart containing her belongings. Another bystander could be heard asking the victim, “Hey, where’s Donald Trump at?” “He still ain’t here,” the man said. This is disgraceful behavior for any American to engage in. Why would a big fat guy roughhouse a woman over politics? If this is what we are looking at now, what will we be looking at on Election Night or the days following?

Henningsen: ‘US Anti-Trump Protests Similar to Soros Color Revolutions Abroad’

Mike Rivero

21st Century Wire says… Organized efforts are underway by Democratic Party affiliated NGO’s to try and somehow delegitimize the results of this week’s US Presidential Election. On the eve of the US Election before voters went to the polls, 21WIRE political affairs analyst Patrick Henningsen accurately predicted this week’s unrest when he said : “If Trump wins, expect the likes of Soros and MoveOn.org to unleash wave after wave of flash mobs, who will protest, riot, smash and burn their way on to CNN’s 24 hour news rotation. Expect Occupy 2.0, and #BlackLivesMatter to rage.” On Friday, Henningsen talked to RT International about the post-elections protests that were coordinated in part by Democratic Party ‘community organizing’ online platform MoveOn.org . Watch: . Not surprisingly, MoveOn.org have also launched a national ‘activist’ campaign to “ Abolish the Electoral College ” after Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton came up short with 232 (including New Hampshire) to Donald Trump’s 306 (including Arizona and Michigan). Final totals are not yet in, but thus far 2016 would be the fifth time in U.S. history that a presidential candidate has won the White House while losing the total popular vote. SEE ALSO: (VIDEO) Female College Students Protesting Because ‘Trump is a Rapist’ 21WIRE Associate Editor Shawn Helton recently revealed more details about how the near exact same methods used in CIA and Soros-funded ‘color revolutions’ overseas – are now being deployed on US domestic shores by similar NGO front organizations: has been the driving force behind nationwide protests against the election of Donald Trump. “Overseas, Washington tends to use the same cast of NGO fronts to build-up pro-US political opposition groups, as well as plan and generate civil unrest. They include the Albert Einstein Institute (AEI), National Endowment for Democracy (NED), International Republican Institute (IRI), National Democratic Institute (NDI), Freedom House and later the International Center for Non-Violent Conflict (ICNC), and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the financial and contractor arm of the Department of State. Inside the US, deep state actors in Washington generally work through Democratic Party affiliated organizations like MoveOn.org, as well as through labor union organizations like AFL-CIO , and UNITE HERE . These, along with many other similar organizations have been involved in organizing this week’s protests,” says Helton. Helton also raised the question as to why President Obama has stayed silent in the face of street protests, opting instead to “lead from behind.” He explains: “Certainly, judging by President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s total silence over their own party’s role in fomenting this week’s unrest – one can only conclude that both party leaders approve of the protests and riots. The political motivation is undeniable – to help delegitimize a new Trump presidency.” Stay tuned for more updates here at 21WIRE. READ MORE ELECTION NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire 2016 Files SUPPORT 21WIRE – SUBSCRIBE & BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV

Foreigners Have Long Mined Indonesia, but Now There’s an Outcry - The New York Times

Jon Emont

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Crowned with spiky feathered headdresses and daubed with face paint, scores of protesters gathered outside the Jakarta offices of an American mining giant last week, chanting, waving signs and throwing uncertainty into global commodities markets. The traditional garb was meant to make it clear whom they represented: the people of West Papua, site of ’s Grasberg mine — one of the world’s largest sources of gold and copper. Their shouted slogans made it equally clear what they wanted. “Freeport must be shut down!” the crowd chanted. It was a refrain that, in recent months, has resonated throughout Indonesia. Less than a week earlier, dozens of students from a different organization — dressed in red and white, Indonesia’s national colors — gathered outside the same office, calling for the government to take a firm hand with the company. “Freeport hasn’t brought prosperity. It’s just destroyed the natural environment,” said Surya Anta, national coordinator for the Indonesian People’s Front for West Papua. His organization helped organize protests in 17 cities around the country. Billions of dollars’ worth of metal is produced at the mighty Grasberg mine, which provides jobs in a province with few other prospects. The problem? The mine is — to the frustration of Indonesians watching their country’s economic growth begin to sputter as commodity prices sag — American owned and operated. To address that, the government has in recent years passed regulations intended to exert greater control over mine operators. Freeport says those requirements violate the company’s 1991 contract, which lasts until 2021 and which it wants to renew. The dispute has put the brakes on production at the mine and slammed Freeport directly into Indonesian politics. The company, which counts as a major investor the billionaire Carl Icahn, a major backer of President Trump, has brought it to the attention of the United States government. “It is disingenuous and insulting that Indonesia would violate a contract by hiding behind politically motivated laws that were enacted after the contract was signed,” Mr. Icahn said. Jakarta is already in the midst of a tough race for governor that has engulfed the capital in demonstrations against Gov. Basuki Purnama, an ally of President Joko Widodo. Considered Mr. Joko faces pressure to push back against an unpopular company at a time of declining exports, relatively slow economic growth and high political tension. The contract fight exemplifies Indonesia’s often fraught transition from a country exploited by colonial powers to one with the political clout to control its own resources, which are worth billions of dollars. For many Indonesians, Freeport, the biggest mining operation here, puts a face on that struggle. “We are hoping that if Freeport is nationalized, the revenue from Freeport will be distributed to ordinary people, to subsidize basic needs and education,” said Ahmad Hedar, a student activist. Freeport has operated Grasberg since the early 1970s, the crown jewel in what a former chief executive called its global “trove of treasures. ” Indonesia, however, sees the mine as a national resource whose riches are being spirited away to foreign owners. “Freeport pays only 8 trillion rupiah in taxes,” but complains about unfair treatment, Ignasius Jonan, the minister of energy and natural resources, told the youth wing of a prominent Muslim organization in February. That figure, about $600 million, compares with about $3. 1 billion worth of gold and copper mined in 2015. But the company says that from 1992 to 2015, about 60 percent of its profit was returned to Indonesia in taxes, royalties, fees and stock dividends. Both sides have threatened to take the contract disagreement to international arbitration. Until the dispute is resolved, the Grasberg mine will run at about 40 percent capacity without a licensing deal, the Indonesian government will not allow Freeport to export unprocessed minerals. The price of copper has been stable since a sharp rise in November, but the company’s shares have dropped nearly 20 percent in the last two months. “It is in the best interests of all stakeholders to receive a resolution in these matters,” Richard Adkerson, the chief executive of Freeport, said in a written statement to The New York Times. The Indonesian government faces extraordinary pressure from its citizens and national media to be firm with Freeport. This is driven by a perception that the company has consistently taken advantage of the Indonesian government since it entered the country in 1967 as one of its first big foreign investors. That year, Indonesia’s strongman leader, Suharto, granted Freeport a tax holiday, as well as a reprieve from paying royalties, though Indonesia’s terms improved over the decades as the country’s economy developed. Some Indonesian media reports have called Freeport a “monument” to the Suharto era. “Indonesians have always been educated that they have resources that are the envy of the entire world, but that over the years Western colonial powers have hatched schemes to take over Indonesia to exploit those resources,” said Matthew Busch, a research fellow in the East Asia Program at the Lowy Institute for International Policy. Indonesia’s largest Muslim civic organizations have aggressively opposed foreign control over the country’s resources, including calling for a “constitutional jihad” to challenge Indonesian laws that allow foreign companies to control domestic resources. The resulting friction has made Indonesia one of the world’s least attractive mining investment environments, according to the Fraser Institute, a Canadian research organization, which ranked it the 99th most difficult out of 104 nations, states and regions in 2016. Eve Warburton, a researcher at Australian National University who studies Indonesian resource nationalism, said that over the last decade Indonesian politicians had consistently been more assertive toward foreign mining companies. “Now it seems many people in government believe that Indonesia can afford to stay the nationalist path in the resources sectors,” she said. The conditions may be scaring off business. Last year Newmont, an American miner, sold its stake in Indonesia’s Batu Hijau copper mine after struggling to adjust to Indonesian regulations. Rio Tinto, the company, has a deal to develop Grasberg with Freeport, but its chief executive suggested in February that the company might back out over the new rules. International analysts say Freeport’s contract might not be as as many Indonesian government officials make it out to be. And despite the uncompromising statements from both sides, they say, a deal remains in reach. “I see this as smoke and mirrors,” said Bill Sullivan, a lawyer and mining analyst in Jakarta. “The government has no incentive whatsoever to make things so difficult for metal mineral producers that they won’t reach an agreement. Because of the government’s need for deep political cover, however, it has to relax the export ban in a way that does not make it look as though the government is caving in to metal mineral producers. ” Papua Province, where the Grasberg mine is, is Indonesia’s most restive and least developed, with a small independence movement that clashes with the military. Freeport pays about $20 million annually to the Indonesian government for security, including payments to Indonesia’s military, which has been linked to human rights abuses in the province. The payments have periodically drawn the scrutiny of human rights organizations as well as pension funds that invest in the company. But with Vice President Mike Pence scheduled to visit Indonesia in April, politicians here are unconcerned about effects on international relations. “I’m someone who is very happy with Donald Trump’s brilliant ideas and was glad to see him elected president,” said Mukhtar Tompo, an Indonesian legislator who has called for Freeport to be expelled from Indonesia. “As long as Donald Trump looks at things from every perspective, he will agree with our side. ”

Syrian War Report – November 15, 2016: 500 Militants Were Killed in Clashes in Western Aleppo

The Saker

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Nuclear Reactor in Norway Leaks Radioactive Iodine

admin

Prison Planet.com October 26, 2016 One of Norway’s nuclear reactors was discovered to be leaking radioactive iodine Monday morning, according to the Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority (NRPA). [1] In a statement released today, the NRPA said: “The radioactive leak was due to a technical failure during treatment of the fuel in the reactor hall. Emissions are low.” Experts say contamination levels around the Institute for Energy Technology, in the southern town of Halden, were well within legal limits and posed no risk to the public. Said Per Strand, deputy director-general at the NRPA, a government regulator: “Of course it’s an unfortunate situation but there is a low environmental risk. This is not the sort of leak we want.” [2] The radioactive iodine was a byproduct of the uranium which powers the facility. Staff were evacuated from the institute, but later returned, donning protective gear, to assess the cause and extent of the leak, and halt it. A senior NRPA official said the incident would “maybe” be rated a 1 on the International Nuclear Event Scale, which rates nuclear incidents from 1 to 7. By comparison, the incidents at Fukishima and Chernobyl were ranked 7. [3] Source: The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Regulatory officials were frustrated that they were not notified about the leak until today . Atle Valseth, a research director at the Institute for Energy Technology, agreed. He said: “I don’t sit so close to those decisions but I think we should have informed the authority yesterday. We will have to go through why it wasn’t reported — it wasn’t good enough that we didn’t report it yesterday.” [2] Strand, the head of safety, preparedness and environment at the NRPA, expressed the regulator’s frustration. “We need to gather more information … But we are not happy with the situation, that we were not warned immediately. We will investigate further.” [3] The Swiss Radiation Safety Authority (SRSA) said i t has not detected any radiation emanating from the facility, which sits close to the Swiss border. Mark Foreman, a nuclear expert at the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, stressed that the vast majority of the radioactive iodine is trapped inside the fuel, which is contained within a ceramic material. The ceramic-wrapped material is stored inside a metal tube that is welded shut. The tube is inside the reactor. The iodine would have to leak out of the reactor to enter the reactor hall. Sources:

Earthquake Leaves a Trail of Destruction in Ecuador - The New York Times

Maggy Ayala and Kirk Semple

PORTOVIEJO, Ecuador — The rumbling had ended and the rubble had settled, and Manuel Zambrano, 21, took stock of his situation: Somehow, he was alive. Moments earlier, he had been at his job in a pharmacy on the ground floor of a building. Suddenly, the building began to shake and finally collapsed around him. He found himself trapped in a pocket within the debris. It was dark. He heard sirens, shouts, crying. “I thought it was the end,” he recalled, standing near a mound of concrete and plaster that had once been the building. “But I remembered the 33 trapped miners in the mine in Chile, and thought that if they could survive so many days, I could do it, too. ” At least 410 people were reported killed and more than 2, 000 were injured in the 7. earthquake that struck Ecuador this weekend, the biggest to hit the country in decades, leaving a stretch of ruin through provinces bordering the Pacific Coast. The tremors flattened buildings, fractured highways and knocked out electricity to much of the region. On Monday, residents were still digging through the rubble for survivors and victims, the government was scrambling to find shelter for thousands of people left homeless and rescue crews from around the world had begun arriving in this Andean nation to help. This city of nearly 300, 000, the provincial capital of Manabí Province, was hit particularly hard, with officials reporting more than 100 deaths and at least 370 buildings destroyed. Survivors described how the earthquake, from one moment to the next, turned a normal, placid Saturday night into a disaster zone. Mr. Zambrano said that when the earthquake began, he and a friend, Diana Suárez, pressed themselves against a pillar for safety. He described it as “a scene that I could only imagine but never ever saw. ” But two hours after the collapse, they heard knocks on the walls and people shouting. “A person I now consider my hero was searching for people to help and he found us,” Mr. Zambrano recalled. “He opened a hole and went to find help to get us out. ” Mr. Zambrano managed to escape with only scrapes on his arms, face and legs. “I am 21 years old, but beginning today I’m counting from 1 because I was reborn,” he said, tears in his eyes. “Believe me, I was reborn. ” Not everyone in the building was so fortunate. Four other occupants died in the collapse, including another pharmacy employee, Vicky Chávez, 31. Her father, Carlos Chávez, and a group of neighbors were still removing the rubble, piece by piece, on Monday morning to free her body. By early afternoon, they had taken her corpse away. The other three victims were a couple and their young son who had stopped by the pharmacy to buy some medicine, witnesses said. Rescuers who dug out their bodies from under the debris found the child and mother still holding each other. The office of President Rafael Correa reported that rescue crews were flying in from around Latin America as well as from Europe. Hundreds of aid workers from abroad were already in the disaster zone by Monday morning, with the largest contingents so far including 120 from Mexico, 80 from Spain and 49 from Chile, officials said. In some of the areas, like sections of Portoviejo, the Ecuadorean military set up cordons to restrict traffic and to allow rescue personnel to work more easily. The authorities were also concerned about further collapses in the event of aftershocks. Indeed, at 1:30 p. m. local time Monday, a 4. tremor registered here, sowing panic, including among the rescue workers, who feared that the vibrations might topple structures that had already been compromised by Saturday’s earthquake. On Monday evening, a Colombian rescue team pulled a man from the wreckage of the Hotel El Gato here. The man, Pablo Cordoba, 38, the administrator of the hotel, told the rescuers that there may be another person alive in the wreckage. Mr. Cordoba said that for more than half a day after the earthquake, he carried on a conversation with another person who was trapped elsewhere in the wreckage the two could hear but not see each other. The other victim had gone silent around noon on Monday, Mr. Cordoba said. The Colombian rescue team — using tools, hands and an excavator, and working in near total darkness — started pushing deeper into the debris hoping to find another survivor. Fabiola Carreño, 35, her clothes covered in dust and her face wrought with anxiety, spent Monday searching likely locations for her cousin Jenny Carreño, 24, and for Jenny’s daughter, Kiara Villafuerte. At one point on Monday afternoon, Ms. Carreño was unsuccessfully trying to convince soldiers at a blockade to let her pass so that she could search for her relatives in the wreckage of a collapsed building. She held a photo of her cousin in her hand. “We have to look for them,” she insisted. “We have to identify them, but they aren’t letting us. ” The soldiers were unmoved. “We know that we aren’t going to find them alive,” she said of her relatives. “But we want to bury their bodies. ” Meanwhile, the Ecuadorean military began distributing food rations around the affected region of the country, including water and cooking oil. Fausto Ortega, 58, rode for more than an hour on his bicycle around Portoviejo and into the city’s suburbs looking for some bread for his family’s breakfast on Monday. “The situation is very anxious because we have to look for ways to survive during these next few days,” he said. “My wife is scared to enter the house and prefers to sleep in the street because the house can fall. ” “We are poor and need help, but nobody has come to bring us even a glass of water or a grain of rice,” he continued. “We’ve been told to go to the shelter but we’re not going to leave the little that we have unguarded. ” The Spanish Red Cross, which is helping its counterpart in Ecuador, estimated that between 3, 000 and 5, 000 people were left homeless by the earthquake and would need temporary shelter, the group said in a statement. The United Nations refugee agency announced Monday that it was preparing an airlift to help those displaced by the earthquake. The first supply plane was being loaded in Copenhagen, the agency’s global logistics hub, with 900 tents, 15, 000 sleeping mats, kitchen sets and, mindful of the Zika virus threat, 18, 000 mosquito nets. “The aim is to rapidly provide essential shelter and other aid material over the next days for some 40, 000 people — refugees, asylum seekers and locals alike — in communities,” the agency said in a statement, adding that it had already sent emergency supplies by truck from its Ecuadorean warehouses to the worst affected areas. Ecuador has the largest refugee population of any country in Latin America, the agency said, having welcomed over 200, 000 Colombian migrants and others, many of whom live where the earthquake hit hardest. For one group of people living in Manabí Province, however, the earthquake turned out to be a fortuitous event. Amid the tremors on Saturday, a wall at the El Rodeo state prison fell down, giving prisoners an escape route. According to local news reports, about 180 inmates fled through the hole and into the night, though by Monday about 30 had been recaptured.

Refugees Discover 2 Americas: One That Hates, and One That Heals - The New York Times

Adeel Hassan

DUNDALK, Md. — Ra’ad and Hutham Lalqaraghuli are no longer sure which America they’re a part of. Is it the hateful country they confronted a few weeks before the presidential election, when someone left a note at their door that said, “Terrorist Leave no one wants you here”? Or is it the generous country of welcoming strangers who heard about their ordeal and showered them with gifts and cards with positive messages? The victory of Donald J. Trump has intensified their whiplash. After a year in the Maryland suburbs, having arrived with their four children as refugees from Iraq, they find themselves comparing the threats they fled with those that might still emerge. They did not sleep on election night after watching television coverage of the results. They are “very afraid and worried,” Mr. Lalqaraghuli said on Wednesday. “We don’t know what this will mean. ” Their confusion, and the divided response to the family’s presence here, mirrors the experience of many other refugee families and Muslim Americans. In the past week, even as advocates report a steep rise in attacks and acts of intimidation against blacks, Muslims and immigrants — and on women wearing hijabs — many of those episodes have been followed by public acts of support and solidarity. At Baylor University in Waco, Tex. hundreds of students and faculty members walked to class with Natasha Nkhama, a black student, after a friend posted a video of her describing an episode in which she was called a racial slur and forced off a sidewalk by someone who said, “I’m just trying to make America great again. ” In Georgia, Mairah Teli, a Muslim teacher at Dacula High School, posted a photograph of an anonymous note she received on Friday that said she should “tie” her head scarf around her neck and “hang yourself with it. ” A day later, she wrote in another Facebook post: “I am overwhelmed and deeply touched by all of the outcry and support that I have received in the past 24 hours. I can’t even begin to articulate how touched I am to be receiving messages from all over the country with your support. ” Acts of hate and intimidation, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, occurred across the country during the campaign, and have increased significantly since Mr. Trump was declared the . But the back and forth between acceptance and rejection can be particularly confusing for new arrivals like the Lalqaraghulis. Their new home of Dundalk is an suburb of Baltimore, one of the many communities where the nation’s battles over identity have become most intense. It was once a lively hub of workers filing into plants for Bethlehem Steel, General Motors and other manufacturing giants. Now it is dominated by strip malls. Ra’ad Lalqaraghuli said he was initially eager to call it home. “When I arrived in America, I was so happy,” Mr. Lalqaraghuli, 43, said. “It’s my dream country for my children. ” He’d had experiences with Americans before. A graduate of Mosul University, in 2004 he began working as a group engineer for American contractors and the United States Army Corps of Engineers to help rebuild his country after the American invasion. A promotion to project manager in 2009 led to his overseeing the construction of water treatment plants and several schools in Baghdad and two cities south of the capital, Nasiriya and Basra. But his work for the Americans also brought him unwanted attention from terrorist groups. He spent one winter sleeping outside in the forest, to keep himself hidden, while his wife and children stayed with her family. Militants from the Islamic State abducted two of his younger brothers and one older brother instead. “They said, ‘In exchange for you, we’ll give them back. ’” He and his father didn’t believe them, and the three brothers were killed. His work on behalf of the United States government made him and his family eligible for humanitarian protection under special immigrant visas. Lawyers in New York supported his application, and he received approval quickly. Then, last year, a militia bombed the family home. “I lost everything,” Mr. Lalqaraghuli said. At the Baghdad airport, heading to the United States, he still worried that he was being followed. All he had was his plane ticket, his passport, $100, and his wife and four children. Betsy Fisher, the deputy policy director of the New International Refugee Assistance Project, which resettled the family, said she was dismayed to learn of its newfound anxiety, especially after the many attempts on Mr. Lalqaraghuli’s life for several years by different groups in Iraq. “The people who enter this country as refugees are fleeing from terrorism,” she said. “They cannot live in a place with violence. ” She added of the message posted on the family’s door, “Not only is a note like this horrifying, it should be deeply embarrassing for every American that this family was threatened, because the reason they are in this country is because he was of service to our country. ” Advocates — like the Council on Relations, which is helping the family — say that many refugee families are reluctant to come forward when they become victims of hate crimes because they fear a greater backlash. But after the note appeared — with a crude drawing of a woman in a hijab — Mr. Lalqaraghuli notified the police, telling an officer in the neighborhood who happened to be on a foot patrol near his apartment. The police said that the note had been written by a neighbor, and that officers had talked to her and her parents but determined that no crime had been committed. The neighbor’s family did not respond to a message requesting comment. Criminal or not, the episode was enough to stir up a response — an effort to counter intolerance. Alta Haywood, a retired teacher who lives in Perry Hall, Md. sent the family a towering fruit basket and included a note that read in part, “I sincerely hope that other people in the area show you that they can be kind and accepting. ” Another Dr. Lindsay Fitch, said the news of what had happened to the family “just grabbed me more personally. ” While talking to her two children about it, she said, she decided to send the family the most American of welcomes: a apple pie and a pumpkin pie. Included in her card were a photograph of her family and an invitation to have their families get together. “I wanted to welcome you to the Baltimore area,” she wrote. “There are a lot of people here who want to welcome you with open arms. Hopefully, you’ll find that welcome. Remember us when you encounter ugliness. ” Mr. Lalqaraghuli, who works as a driver, said he greatly appreciated the outpouring of support. But after Mr. Trump’s victory, he said, it is hard to trust that acceptance will emerge as the country’s dominant force. He missed two weeks of work after the note was left, because, he said, his children felt safer when he was around. His youngest, Abdullah, 5, no longer sleeps in his own room. He joins his parents instead. “Because he sees when militias come to my home, they come with the weapons,” Mr. Lalqaraghuli said. He was referring to their life in Baghdad. But as soon as possible, he said, his family will be looking to move out of Dundalk and start fresh in another town or state.

Snapchat Shares Plummet After Grown-Ups Figure Out How to Use It

Guest

November 10, 2016 Snapchat, the final evolutionary stage before society gives up on sentences altogether and we start communicating in a series of emotive grunts, has seen a steep fall in share prices after proper adults figure out how to use the application successfully. Observers have described the phenomenon, ‘Abnormal’, ‘Chilling’ and ‘Like watching a dog doing the hoovering – not something that should be in a sane world.’ The photographic bants-platform first believed adult use of Snapchat was an anomaly caused by over-protective parents rooting through their teenager’s belongings in search for evidence of pre-marital sex and ‘The Reefer’. However, pattern analysis of messages suggests the missives were sent intentionally as part of a deliberate campaign to be seen as, ‘Not hurtling inexorably towards the grave’. Company bosses are reported to be, ‘Gutted’. ‘It’s a death knell’ said CEO Michaela Hodgkinson. ‘This will just about wipe out our user base. And we tried so hard. We made it so counter-intuitive to people who didn’t grow up with access to enough pixilated tits and ass to wrap multiple times round the Milky Way like an erotic flesh sausage. God, I wish it were the good old days, when adults treated innovation with the sort of suspicion usually reserved for men called ‘Mohammed’ walking into a small town Texan airport.’ ‘It is a well-known fact that adolescents instinctively recoil from in shame, disgust and loathing to anything enjoyed by the over 30’s,’ explained youth-guru Samuel Cook. ‘Look at Michael Bolton. Once upon a time, the mere Herbal-Essence-esque swoosh of his flowing easy-listening locks could obliterate juvenile knickers like the oncoming of a Biblical flood; now, I’ve seen a teenager to projectile vomit the words, ‘Cock-nugget’ just by hearing the opening bars to ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’. Experts suggest that teenagers’ influence over what is cool acts as compensation for a future without the possibility of jobs, savings, or affordable housing, at least until their parents pop their clogs and they can wrench a decent standard of living out of their elder’s hoary baby-boomer claws. Teenagers are expected to flee the social media site like rats aboard a sinking over-60s cruise ship and seek pastures even more disorientating and obtuse. Prospective new digital street-corners-outside-the-offie include, ‘Bluster’, ‘Waffle’ and a messaging service where users communicate entirely using quotes from the 1988 film Beetlejuice. S-Bahn

Police Drag Anti-Mass Migration Campaigner off Streets for Asking Anti-Islamophobia Protestors Questions

Jack Montgomery

immigration campaigner Tommy Robinson was verbally and physically abused by demonstrators on a march on Saturday, after approaching them and attempting to engage in conversation. Police detained him and ordered him off the streets, saying this was “easier” than “taking on” the aggressive protestors.[ activist Tommy Robinson was joined by Rebel Media reporter Caolan Robertson, approaching demonstrators to ask their views on issues such as female genital mutilation and sexual grooming. Within five minutes of arriving at the protest, according to Robertson, the pair were surrounded by people shouting “Nazi, white supremacist!” resulting in attending police officers detaining Robinson. Footage shows Robinson approaching a man screaming “Nazi scum!” and asking for him to explain why he is a Nazi. A policewoman quickly removes Robinson from the scene, asking him to “respect that these people don’t want to talk to you”. A subsequent attempt by Robinson to engage a student protestor about her views on Islam is terminated by an aggressive older male, who pushes him away shouting: “We don’t want a Nazi on this demo. Get off!” Robinson tries to mollify the man by explaining that he is just trying to have a “polite conversation” but the male begins screaming about losing family in the Holocaust and whips up unruly chants of “Nazi scum, off our streets!” It is at this point that Robinson is dragged away by the police, who attempt to separate him from Robertson and his camera. When Robinson asks why he is the one being manhandled when it is the demonstrators who are being aggressive, a female officer explains bluntly that “it’s easier to remove you” than to “take on” the angry crowd. She also claims Robinson is the one causing the violence “by his sheer presence”. Footage shot at another point on the march shows Robinson attempting to ask demonstrators their view on the oppression of women under Shariah, and being told “You’re a racist” repeatedly. “Is that all you’ve got?” Robinson finally asks. “Yes it is!” the demonstrator replies. Elsewhere, a protestor tells Robinson she is on the march because it feels as though years of leislation has been for nothing. “What if I told you that, statistically, white people are the biggest victims of racism in the UK?” Robinson asks. “White people can’t be victims of racism,” she scoffs. In fact, the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) found that most victims of racism in England and Wales were white as long ago as 1999, in a report titled “Racial Attacks and Harassment”. Scottish statistics published in 2015 show that “White Britons” are also the most common victims of race hate crimes north of the border. Scotland’s first ever murder victim was a white schoolboy named Kriss Donald, who was kidnapped, stabbed 13 times, and burned alive by a Pakistani gang in an unprovoked attack in 2004. Finally, a figure Robinson identified as Unite Against Fascism leader Raymond Bennett begins abusing Robinson and has the police remove him a second time. “They don’t want to debate their issues because they’re so blinkered, so fascist,” Robinson tells Robertson. “These people’s views have never been challenged … they’ve been indoctrinated. ”

Fox Settles With Gretchen Carlson Over Roger Ailes Sex Harassment Claims - The New York Times

Michael M. Grynbaum and John Koblin

Fox News’s parent company spent $20 million on Tuesday to settle a lawsuit brought by a former anchor, Gretchen Carlson, whose allegations of sexual harassment toppled the network’s powerful chairman, Roger Ailes, and engulfed the company in crisis. But if the settlement was meant to signal the close of a damaging chapter for the network, it fell short. Fox’s newsroom was hit minutes later by a new shock wave: Greta Van Susteren, one of the channel’s and hosts, was leaving, effective immediately. Network officials insisted that the timing was coincidental. But the settlement, combined with Ms. Van Susteren’s abrupt departure, underscored the continuing tumult inside Fox News, whose newsroom, once proudly defiant, has been besieged this summer by new allegations of harassment and persistent rumors about turnover in the and executive ranks. These days, it seems, the end of one Fox drama is only the start of another. Stars like Megyn Kelly and Bill O’Reilly have contracts that expire next year, and Ms. Van Susteren’s exit on Tuesday was taken as an unsettling sign of change. It is unclear whether Fox News, without Mr. Ailes at the helm, can maintain its political clout in a disruptive election season. The uproar is somewhat puzzling for Rupert Murdoch and his sons, James and Lachlan, who control Fox News’s owner, 21st Century Fox. They say they have taken extraordinary steps to address problems at the network, which is still the cable news network in the country, beginning with their swift removal of Mr. Ailes. Specialists in employment law described the $20 million payout to Ms. Carlson — a figure confirmed by a person briefed on the agreement — as among the settlements for a sexual harassment suit. (Mr. Ailes, who received $40 million from Fox as part of his exit agreement, is not paying any portion of the settlement.) Fox has also settled with at least two other women who came forward with complaints about Mr. Ailes, the person said. And the company issued a rare public apology to Ms. Carlson, “for the fact that Gretchen was not treated with the respect and dignity that she and all of our colleagues deserve. ” But tensions remain among the network . Mr. Murdoch, who now presides over Fox News as executive chairman, kept in place several of Mr. Ailes’s most loyal deputies and recently promoted them to leadership roles, troubling employees who had hoped for a clean slate. The reasons behind Ms. Van Susteren’s departure remained murky, but people on both sides of the negotiations pointed to an icy meeting in July between Ms. Van Susteren and Rupert Murdoch as a turning point in her tenure. Days after Mr. Ailes’s exit, Ms. Van Susteren met with Mr. Murdoch in his office inside Fox’s Manhattan headquarters. The anchor, accompanied by her husband and agent, John P. Coale, requested more favorable terms to her contract — which was not immediately up for renewal — and cited an exit clause that allowed her to leave the network in the event that Mr. Ailes was no longer chairman. Mr. Murdoch was not impressed, both sides say. “It was tense,” Mr. Coale recalled in a telephone interview on Tuesday. Late last week, Ms. Van Susteren informed Fox that she planned to invoke her exit clause. But she woke up on Tuesday fully expecting to tape her show, “On the Record,” that evening. Instead, Mr. Coale said, “someone came to our house and delivered two letters” from the network. The message: “She’s out. ” It was so abrupt that a poster of Ms. Van Susteren, who routinely beat the cable competition in her 7 p. m. time slot, was still displayed outside Fox’s Manhattan building when the announcement went out. (The poster was removed later on Tuesday.) Inside the channel’s Washington bureau, newspapers sat untouched outside Ms. Van Susteren’s office. Ms. Van Susteren had initially defended Mr. Ailes, calling Ms. Carlson “disgruntled” and saying that the timing of her lawsuit “is very suspicious. ” But on Tuesday, in a farewell post on Facebook, Ms. Van Susteren wrote: “Fox has not felt like home to me for a few years. ” Mr. Coale, in the interview, echoed that sentiment. “There’s so much chaos” at Fox, he said. “It’s very hard to work there. ” Asked why his wife had exercised the exit clause, Mr. Coale said, “There’s more than meets the eye,” adding that there “might be litigation in the future. ” But he provided no further details. Ms. Van Susteren, on Facebook, wrote that she had to leave the network now because of a time limit on her exit clause. Brit Hume, a veteran Fox political anchor, took over hosting duties for Ms. Van Susteren’s show on Tuesday and is expected to continue through the election. “I count Greta a friend and I’m sorry to see her go,” Mr. Hume said at the conclusion of Tuesday’s broadcast. Although she has been a Fox fixture since 2002, Ms. Van Susteren does not command the same star power as Ms. Kelly or Mr. O’Reilly. Fox News executives on Tuesday dismissed the notion that her departure signaled tough times ahead, noting that the channel has scored record ratings this year. “Fox News has never been stronger,” the network’s Jack Abernethy and Bill Shine, said in a statement. Ms. Van Susteren’s exit was viewed by Fox officials as a less consequential development than the company’s settlement with Ms. Carlson, whose suit initially faced a legal challenge from Mr. Ailes. The evidence that Ms. Carlson had against Mr. Ailes was damning, according to another person with knowledge of the settlement: For a year and a half, she had recorded her meetings with Mr. Ailes on her mobile phone. (In an interview with The New York Times in July, Ms. Carlson said she recalled “between six and 10” conversations with Mr. Ailes when the chairman made provocative comments.) Most of the remarks that she attributed to Mr. Ailes in her lawsuit — including lines like, “I think you and I should have had a sexual relationship a long time ago, and then you’d be good and better and I’d be good and better” — were taken straight from those recordings, the person said. Officials at 21st Century Fox became aware of the recordings about three weeks after Ms. Carlson filed her lawsuit, the person said, after Ms. Carlson’s lawyers spoke to investigators from Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton Garrison, the law firm hired to look into the accusations against Mr. Ailes. (About 20 women at Fox have come forward during the firm’s inquiry to describe inappropriate behavior by Mr. Ailes.) Settlement talks started shortly thereafter, and a deal was reached in the person said. Ms. Carlson sued Mr. Ailes alone, but 21st Century Fox, which acts as Mr. Ailes’s corporate indemnifier, will pay the settlement. As part of the arrangement, which was first reported on Tuesday by Vanity Fair, Ms. Carlson signed a confidentiality agreement. In a sign that Ms. Carlson is not going to shrink from the spotlight, she recently hired the power publicist Cindi Berger of PMK BNC to represent her. She issued a statement on Tuesday saying she was “ready to move on to the next chapter of my life, in which I will redouble my efforts to empower women in the workplace. ”

Obamacare Architect Says It’s Working As Designed!

Michael Ware

Print Many look at the new healthcare system with their higher premiums and wonder what has happened. Why are their coverages shrinking and their premiums growing? Some have come to the conclusion that the system itself is to blame. They believe that Obamacare is broken? What they fail to recognize is that this is not the case at all. What we see as failing to make insurance better has made it worse, but it is simply a problem of ignorance. We just are not smart enough to know the truth. Higher premiums and less coverage is the point, it seems. Breitbart reports : On Wednesday’s broadcast of “CNN Newsroom,” MIT Economics Professor and Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber argued that “The law is working as designed. However, it could work better. And I think probably the most important thing experts would agree on is that, we need a larger mandate penalty.” Gruber said, “Obamacare’s not imploding. The main goal of Obamacare was two-fold. One was to cover the uninsured, of which we’ve covered 20 million, the largest expansion in American history. The other was to fix broken insurance markets where insurers could deny people insurance just because they were sick or they had been sick. Those have been fixed, and for the vast majority of Americans, costs in those markets have come down, thanks to the subsidies made available under Obamacare.” So basically, everything that is being reported is not accurate. There is no reason to think that all of the insurers are bailing like rats on a sinking ship. It just appears that way. This is little more that fool’s hope so that there will not be a mass exit from the exchange. But, unfortunately, people no longer demand proof. They simply take a man like this at his word. So, he will get away with telling Chicken Little that the sky is not falling; even while it is coming down on his head. When you chase emptiness, God will let you catch it. Article reposted with permission from Constitution.com shares

Republican Convention, Baton Rouge, Turkey: Your Monday Evening Briefing - The New York Times

Andrea Kannapell and Sandra Stevenson

(Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the .) Good evening. Here’s the latest. 1. The official theme for the first day of the Republican National Convention was “Make America Safe Again,” but infighting and protests were undercurrents. Tonight’s speakers included Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor, and Donald Trump’s wife, Melania. Mr. Trump introduced her, walking on stage to Queen’s “We Are the Champions” and telling the crowd: “Oh we’re gonna win, we’re gonna win so big. ” Our live coverage is here. The New Yorker published an article in which Mr. Trump’s ghostwriter on “The Art of the Deal” confesses to “a deep sense of remorse” for portraying Mr. Trump positively. “Lying is second nature to him,” the author said. _____ 2. Louisiana officials detailed how an killed three police officers and wounded three more in Baton Rouge, saying he deliberately targeted them. In a range of digital postings, sometimes under another name, the gunman complained that “devils” ran the world and advocated a bloody response to recent fatal shootings by the police. “One hundred percent of revolutions, of victims fighting their oppressors,” he said in one clip, “have been successful through fighting back, through bloodshed. ” _____ 3. Hillary Clinton, speaking at an N. A. A. C. P. convention in Cincinnati, denounced the attacks on police officers in Baton Rouge and Dallas, as well as police shootings that killed two black men this month. “This madness has to stop,” she said. An analysis of dozens of recent state and national polls of voters shows that Mrs. Clinton holds a modest but clear lead over Mr. Trump. _____ 4. Leading antidoping officials urged that Russia be barred from the Summer Olympics in Rio after an independent inquiry confirmed a Russian ’s claims of doping. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said officials implicated in the report would be “temporarily suspended,” but criticized “a dangerous relapse of politics intruding into sports. ” The International Olympic Committee called an emergency meeting for Tuesday. _____ 5. One of our stories today is a meditation on clutter from a different perspective: someone who simply couldn’t afford much stuff. A woman remembers the years when poverty mandated a “minimalist” lifestyle so popular now among the middle class. “For people who are not so well off,” she notes, “the idea of opting to have even less is not really an option. ” _____ 6. Facing reports that Roger Ailes would soon be removed as chairman of Fox News, 21st Century Fox insisted that “this matter is not yet resolved. ” Mr. Ailes is being sued for sexual harassment by a former anchor, Gretchen Carlson. _____ 7. Turkey’s government fired nearly 9, 000 police officers, widening its vast purge of perceived opponents after a failed military coup. Above, a funeral for a police officer killed in clashes. Over the weekend, 6, 000 military personnel were arrested and 3, 000 judges suspended. Secretary of State John Kerry and the European Union’s top diplomat urged President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to show restraint, even suggesting Turkey’s membership in NATO and candidacy for the E. U. could be compromised. _____ 8. Political tensions in France are spiking, as opposition politicians assailed the Socialist government over Thursday’s terrorist attack in Nice. Jeers and calls for the French prime minister to resign fractured a moment of silence he attended in Nice, called to honor the 84 people killed there by a rampaging truck driver. Above, the gathering. New details emerged about the attacker: he was not an observant Muslim but had been recently searching for Islamist material and had collected images of Islamic State and other terrorist figures. _____ 9. A celebrity feud flared anew. Kanye West’s wife, Kim Kardashian West, posted clips of a phone conversation that appeared to counter Taylor Swift’s insistence that she was blindsided by lyrics in one of Mr. West’s songs. In the clips, Ms. Swift thanks him for running the line “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex” by her, and he responds, “Relationships are more important than punch lines. ” _____ 10. Finally, stocked up on tissues? Our medical expert wants you to know that the summer cold is no anomaly. We tend to think of colds as being more contagious in winter, he says, possibly because the rhinovirus is more prevalent then and spreads easily when people congregate indoors. But the science, he says, shows that cold temperatures by themselves don’t increase vulnerability. Above, a reminder of subfreezing temperatures. _____ Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p. m. Eastern. And don’t miss Your Morning Briefing, posted weekdays at 6 a. m. Eastern, and Your Weekend Briefing, posted at 6 a. m. Sundays. Want to look back? Here’s the Weekend Briefing. What did you like? What do you want to see here? Let us know at briefing@nytimes. com.

The Products that Make Men Grow Breasts, Linked to Cancers of the Prostate and Liver

REALdeal

Owned by Unilever, the Axe brand includes a range of men’s grooming products with many of the ingredients never even tested for safety according to the C.I.R. – Cosmetic Ingredient Review. Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals Axe products are loaded with endocrine disrupting chemicals. Endocrine disruptorsare exogenous, synthetic chemicals that have hormone-like effects on both humans and wild-life and interfere with the endocrine system by either mimicking or blocking our natural hormones and disrupting their respective body functions. Member scientists of the Endocrine Society issued a report in which they claim: “We present the evidence that endocrine disruptors have effects on male and female reproduction, breast development and cancer, prostrate cancer, neuroendocrinology, thyroid, metabolism and obesity, and cardiovascular endocrinology.” New studies are also revealing that these harmful chemicals may be causing physical feminization in males. A study published by the International Journal of Andrology found that feminization of boys can now be seen through their play habits. Medical experts are now wondering whether exposure to years of these toxic chemicals is part of the reason so many older men are low on testosterone and experiencing erectile dysfunction. So they take a little blue pill and get exposed to even more chemicals and the cycle continues. Aluminum Zirconium Tetrachlorohydrex Gly Aluminum zirconium tetrachlorohydrex gly is the active ingredient in Axe deodorant products. One or more animal studies show kidney or renal system effects at very low doses, mammalian cells show positive mutation results, animal studies show reproductive effects at moderate doses. Aluminum was first recognized as a human neurotoxin in 1886, before being used as an antiperspirant. A neurotoxin is a substance that causes damage to nerves or nerve tissue. COCAMIDOPROPYL BETAINE COCAMIDOPROPYL BETAINE is a very toxic ingredient which has been linked to cancer in animal tests. The biggest danger of using a product with cocamidopropyl betaine is its potential contamination with nitrosamines . Nitrosamines are created when nitrosating agents are combined with amines. Nitrosamines have been identified as one of the most potent classes of carcinogens, having caused cancer in more than 40 different animal species as well as in humans. PPG-14 Butyl Ether PPG stands for popypropylene glycol, which is made from a completely artificial petroleum product, methyl oxirane. Another name for that is propylene oxide (which is a probable human carcinogen). Propylene oxide is also an irritant and highly flammable. Butyl ethers are in the paraben family, and they are toluene derivatives (toxic petrochemical compounds). Toluene has proven to have a harmful affect on the reproductive system while parabens have been linked to cancer. PEG-8 Distearate According to a report in the International Journal of Toxicology by the Cosmetic Ingredient Review (CIR) committee, impurities found in various PEG compounds include ethylene oxide; 1,4-dioxane; polycyclic aromatic compounds; and heavy metals such as lead, iron, cobalt, nickel, cadmium, and arsenic. Many of these impurities are linked to cancer. BHT There have been many studies which demonstrate that BHT accumulates over time in the body, having a toxic impact on the lungs, liver and kidneys amongst other negative effects. A study by Gann in 1984 showed that BHT was capable of promoting chemically-induced forestomach and bladder cancer in male rats. A 1988 Swedish study by Thompson looked at both BHT and BHA. They found that both were toxic and tumour promoting. Both antioxidants were observed to be cytotoxic in a concentration-dependent manner at concentrations ranging from 100 to 750 microM. At equimolar concentrations BHT was more cytotoxic than BHA.

Police Report: Migrant Crime Drastically Increased in 2016

Chris Tomlinson

The German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) has released a new report which claims that crimes committed by migrants rapidly increased in 2016 compared to the previous year. [The new report from the BKA states that in 2016 there was a total of 295, 000 crimes that involved immigrants as suspects, up 90, 000 from 2015 when there were 205, 000. The police say that the crimes counted did not include migrant specific crimes like illegal entry into Germany or staying in the country illegally Die Welt reports. The three most cited crimes that involved immigrants were counterfeiting which accounted for 29 percent of all the crimes, theft at 26 percent, and violence including bodily harm at 24 percent. The BKA said there were 450 cases in which migrants had attempted to kill another person, with 66 murder suspects and a total of 82 victims. The twelve victims of the Berlin Christmas market terror attack in December committed by Tunisian asylum seeker Anis Amri were also counted in the statistics. In of the cases of attempted murder or homicide, the victims were immigrants themselves with 59 victims coming from migrant backgrounds while other victims included five EU citizens, two citizens and 16 German nationals. Breitbart London has reported on several cases, primarily in and around asylum homes, in which migrant men have beaten and sometimes even murdered family members such as their own wives. The BKA defines “immigrants” in the report as anyone who is either an asylum seeker, a person with refugee status, an illegal immigrant or failed asylum seekers who are allowed to stay in the country. A spokeswoman for the Federal Ministry of the Interior said that the government was working on a full report that will also include criminal statistics from the regional governments as well. Several regions in Germany have already released migrant crime statistics and all have shown a drastic rise in migrant crime. In Munich police have noted that almost half of the criminal suspects in the Bavarian city are “ . ” In the German capital of Berlin, the senate has launched a formal inquiry into why migrant crime rates are so high in the city. The Berlin crime statistics showed that 13 percent of the migrant population in the city were suspects in various crimes, compared to the German population in which only 6 percent were suspects in crimes. and Bavaria have both expressed concerns with the growing migrant crime trend. Last month State Criminal Police Office (LKA) president Ralf Michelfelder said, “we are very worried about the rise in violence by asylum seekers. ” Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson@breitbart. com,

Universe is a hologram/virtual reality - But why? Could it be this?

Biigs

link Okay, we are all familiar with the theory that our universe is some sort of simulation, math that works so specifically, so well, so many predictions from math and science that are proved right more and more often etc and so on. (not going to get into "proof" google it!) So you have to ask yourself WHY would a thing, being, God, whatever want to create such a virtual simulation? We know that we as humans have the right to live and have family's, often with as many kids as sustainable (at the time). This means that however well we create food, we WILL use up all resources on this planet weather we make the best plans or not. But we cant crack viable ways to leave this planet and populate others beyond our own slowly decaying star. So what about this. What if the answer was to create a sped up reality, using all our computing and programming powers to emulate the universe (or observable universe), wait for life to grow on a planet and then give them the same problem we have so that we can reap the answer for ourselves? LEAVING THE SOLAR SYSTEM TO COLONISE OTHER SYSTEMS, INDEFINITELY. Could it be as simple as that? Love to hear your thoughts, been thinking about this for some time now.

The Reverse-Gaslighting of Donald Trump - The New York Times

Susan Dominus

When I watch Donald Trump, I sometimes feel like Ingrid Bergman — not European and glamorous, but unnerved, as though I’m being gaslit, as in the famous plot of her old classic movie “Gaslight. ” The lights are flickering, but her character’s husband, who is secretly a seriously bad dude, is convincing her that no such thing is occurring. He is trying to get her to question her sense of reality, to think her mind is playing tricks on her — in short, to convince her that she is going slightly crazy, a tactic that can be scarily effective. Trump’s compulsive lies are a fact of the campaign at this point, but I still questioned my own reality for a moment on Monday night whenever he fudged the truth — as when he implied that by saying Hillary Clinton did not have the presidential look, he meant she did not have the “stamina” (this is a lot like his saying that when he insulted Carly Fiorina’s face, he really meant her “persona”). I’d already seen a clip of him in which he goes after Clinton’s lack of a presidential look, specifically — but even so, I had that normal human response, a bit of . Maybe it was taken out of context? I went back and looked — nope, there he is back in September, telling ABC’s David Muir, “I just don’t think she has a presidential look, and you need a presidential look. ” Trump tries to gaslight an entire country when he plays fast and loose with the truth or insists on connections — each of which is an apt tactic for someone who often questions the mental health of women who dare to criticize him. If they are women with big careers, like Maureen Dowd, Mika Brzezinski and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, they are “neurotic. ” He called the Rev. Faith Green Timmons, a pastor who calmly and boldly interrupted him at her church in Flint, Mich. “nervous,” which is apparently the black woman’s (or woman’s) version of neurotic. These women are not just wrong, to Trump they are suffering from a kind of mental or medical condition. “It’s organic, it’s biological,” the feminist writer Elaine Showalter, the author of “Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture,” says. “It’s something that comes out of their gender — like whatever was coming out of Megyn Kelly. ” Women, he clearly believes, or wants us to believe, are emotional, guided by feelings rather than reason, which presumably makes them unfit to lead (or unfit to give Trump a hard time). All of this is why it was particularly interesting — subversive, even, in a kind of way — to see Clinton say to Trump early in the debate, “Donald, I know you live in your own reality. ” She followed that up, not much later, with a laugh that led into: “Just join the debate by saying more crazy things. ” She seemed to hesitate before speaking that line it sounded about as spontaneous as her apparent new catchphrase “ . ” Planned or not, “crazy” was a clear provocation — it told us exactly how we were supposed to feel about the things Trump was saying. And it did something else. As anyone who has ever been gaslit knows, nothing drives a person more crazy than being told he — or usually she — is crazy. Trump performed as anticipated — you might even argue that the “crazy” line was a turning point in the debate. Soon after that, the lights started flickering. His already shaky syntax fell apart we had “a fed doing political things” labored digressions about how often he is audited, and how little he minds it mentions of a “big fat ugly bubble” and a “very judge. ” Trump was leaning into the lectern, his face coloring and contorting even his sniffing seemed to pick up, not so much flulike as ticlike. What I would have given for Clinton to offer him a tissue. “Trump did one great thing,” the humor writer Paul Rudnick tweeted on Monday night. “He proved that men are overemotional, petty and silly creatures. ” Clinton came on stage dressed in a red flag she baited Trump, and he charged. Who had the more presidential look? The matador — or the bull? They say the camera never lies.

The Dark Art of Political Intimidation

IWB

The Dark Art of Political Intimidation

Autofahrer entlarvt geheimen Zahlentrick, mit dem sich jeder Blitzer überlisten lässt

noreply@blogger.com (Der Postillon)

Samstag, 29. Oktober 2016 Autofahrer entlarvt geheimen Zahlentrick, mit dem sich jeder Blitzer überlisten lässt Berlin (Archiv) - Ein Berliner Autofahrer hat einen geheimen Trick entdeckt, mit dem sich Radarfallen und Blitzer auf Autobahnen zu 100 Prozent überlisten lassen. Erste Praxistests scheinen die Theorie des Hobbyphysikers zu bestätigen. Seine zahlenbasierte Methode soll für jeden Autofahrer innerhalb von Minuten erlernbar sein. Seit 1990 ist Jörg Haffke jeden Tag auf deutschen Autobahnen unterwegs, was den Berufspendler oft teuer zu stehen kommt: "Früher verging kaum eine Woche, ohne dass ich ein Knöllchen im Briefkasten hatte, nur weil ich mal wieder in eine Radarfalle geraten war", klagt der 43-Jährige. Die verschiedensten Gegenmittel habe er schon ausprobiert: "Reflektierende CDs am Innenspiegel, abgedecktes Kennzeichen oder Blitzwarner-Apps – nichts hatte auf Dauer wirklich Erfolg", berichtet der Familienvater. Er hat den Code geknackt: Jörg Haffke Haffke ist jedoch nicht nur ein cleverer Bastler, sondern auch ein guter Beobachter: "Irgendwann fiel mir auf, dass neben den Autobahnen immer wieder so merkwürdige Schilder mit Zahlen drauf versteckt sind." Zwei Jahre und 122 Excel-Tabellen später ist sich Haffke nun sicher, den geheimen Algorithmus hinter den kryptischen Blechtafeln endlich entlarvt zu haben: "Wenn man ein Tempo mit einem Tachowert fährt, der in etwa der Zahl auf dem letzten gesichteten Schild entspricht oder darunter liegt, verhindert man ein Auslösen des nächsten Blitzers! Man ist praktisch unsichtbar." Welche physikalische Kraft diese offensichtliche Fernwirkung herbeiführt, sei ihm zwar nicht ganz klar: "Vielleicht gibt es ja doch etwas, das größer ist als wir!" Das Ergebnis gebe ihm aber recht: "Keine Knöllchen in den letzten sechs Monaten", erklärt er stolz. Nun will Haffke seine Erfahrungen an andere Autofahrer weitergeben – und hat dazu die Standorte der knapp fünf Millionen bisher identifizierten "Zahlenschilder" in einem einzigartigen Nachschlagewerk verzeichnet. Jörg Haffke: "Zahlenschilder in Deutschland: Die geheimen Zeichen, mit denen sich Radarfallen überlisten lassen", 3480 S., Selbst-Verlag, Eigenheim 2015. bep ( Kojote ); Fotos: Shutterstock; Hinweis: Erstmals erschienen am 27.10.15 Artikel teilen:

The Chronicles of Carlos Danger

No Author

As the FBI assesses emails from former congressman’s devices, his sex scandal is once again making headlines. Joe Biden’s response: ‘Oh, God’ By Oliver Milman The Guardian October 31, 2016 As a fractious and often sordid presidential campaign reaches its denouement, Hillary Clinton may be reflecting upon the grim irony that it is Anthony Weiner who has provided what could be the final, miserable twist. Weiner’s predilection for sending sexually laden text messages derailed his career in Congress and his chances of becoming mayor of New York City , but his soap-opera-style re-emergence in the 11th hour of the presidential race may yet trigger the greatest political carnage of all. His appearance comes in an election already defined by allegations of inappropriate sexual behaviour by Clinton’s husband, former president Bill Clinton, and by the Republican nominee, Donald Trump . On Friday, Clinton called on the FBI to “immediately” explain its announcement that it was reviewing a new batch of emails relating to her, after a review of her use of a private email server was closed in July. Then, the FBI director, James Comey, said Clinton had been “ extremely careless ” in her use of a private server while secretary of state, but said there were no grounds for a criminal investigation. On Friday, he said in a letter to members of Congress that the bureau would analyze newly discovered emails that “appear to be pertinent to the investigation”. Republicans were quick to characterise the move as a “reopening” of the investigation into Clinton’s server, a description Democrats rejected. It was later reported that the new emails came from an iPad, cellphone and laptop seized by the FBI and previously shared by Weiner and his estranged wife Huma Abedin, a top Clinton aide. Clinton’s campaign and the Obama administration have been left bewildered by the latest FBI intervention, less than two weeks before the election, with Weiner’s involvement rubbing salt into the wound. John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, said: “Director Comey’s letter refers to emails that have come to light in an unrelated case, but we have no idea what those emails are and the director himself notes they may not even be significant. “It is extraordinary that we would see something like this just 11 days out from a presidential election.” Vice-president Joe Biden was more direct, telling CNN’s Michael Smerconish in an interview broadcast on Saturday: “Well, oh God, Anthony Weiner. I should not comment on Anthony Weiner . I’m not a big fan. I wasn’t before he got in trouble.” Weiner is being investigated by the FBI and police in North Carolina over text messages sent to a 15-year-old girl . In the wake of the latest allegations against him, Abedin, who has herself been a target for criticism from Republicans for some time, separated from Weiner . She has continued in her role as Clinton’s closest ally on the campaign trail. Once seen as a rising Democratic star, Weiner was forced to resign from Congress in 2011 after he sent a picture of his penis, clad in his boxer shorts, to a 21-year-old student via Twitter. After he initially denied involvement in the messages, further pictures sent by Weiner emerged and he stepped down, at the urging of Barack Obama .

Total Desperation Sets In as President Obama Plays the Woman Card

Michael Krieger

at 4:08 pm 1 Comment With the neither the racist nor the Putin-puppet label sticking to Trump, team Clinton and its lobotomized surrogates have regressed back to square one: playing the woman card . As I noted in a post earlier this week, a professor of linguistics at Berkeley just published an article at Time claiming (with zero evidence of course), that the Hillary Clinton email server scandal only exists because she is a woman. Here’s a brief snippet of what she said: ‘It’s not about emails; it’s about public communication by a woman’ I am mad. I am mad because I am scared. And if you are a woman, you should be, too. Emailgate is a bitch hunt, but the target is not Hillary Clinton. It’s us. The only reason the whole email flap has legs is because the candidate is female. Can you imagine this happening to a man? Clinton is guilty of SWF (Speaking While Female), and emailgate is just a reminder to us all that she has no business doing what she’s doing and must be punished, for the sake of all decent women everywhere. There is so much of that going around. It’s not about emails; it’s about public communication by a woman in general. Of course, in the year 2016, no one (probably not even The Donald) could make this argument explicitly. After all, he and his fellow Republicans are not waging a war on women. How do we know that? They have said so. And they’re men, so they must be telling the truth. I know. It’s really hard to believe the above is real, but it is. Moving along, President Obama himself is now getting in the mud. Here’s what he had to say today in Ohio, according to NBC : COLUMBUS, Ohio — President Barack Obama said Tuesday that sexism is to blame for the tight race for the White House, telling an Ohio crowd that “Hillary Clinton is consistently treated differently than just about any other candidate I see out there.” Obama went on: “There’s a reason we haven’t had a woman president.” Speaking specifically to “the guys out there,” Obama told them to “look inside yourself and ask yourself, if you’re having problems with this stuff how much of it is that we’re just not used to it?” Yep, because the American public handily elected a black man twice, but somehow we all draw the line at a woman. Perhaps, just perhaps, the problem is with Hillary. Moving along, all this reminded me of a very prescient comment made by Glenn Greenwald a couple of years ago, which I highlighted in the post, Glenn Greenwald on the 2016 Elections – “They’ll Probably Have a Gay Person After Hillary” : Hillary is banal, corrupted, drained of vibrancy and passion. I mean, she’s been around forever, the Clinton circle. She’s a fucking hawk and like a neocon, practically. She’s surrounded by all these sleazy money types who are just corrupting everything everywhere. But she’s going to be the first female president, and women in America are going to be completely invested in her candidacy. Opposition to her is going to be depicted as misogynistic, like opposition to Obama has been depicted as racist. It’s going to be this completely symbolic messaging that’s going to overshadow the fact that she’ll do nothing but continue everything in pursuit of her own power. They’ll probably have a gay person after Hillary who’s just going to do the same thing. Obama could’ve gone out on a high note, but he decided to go low. Sad!

Hacked emails reveal Hillary funded Trump campaign

K Balakumar

Hacked emails reveal Hillary funded Trump campaign Posted on Tweet “He is the only person who can help me win the presidential election” Washington, Nov 2 : Just as things were getting to the point where it cannot get any worse in the sleaziest American presidential campaign ever (unless otherwise it was revealed during the Halloween that Donald Trump is a real zombie), comes the potentially game-changing news that the Republican nominee Donald Trump’s campaign has been, for the most part, funded by his fierce Democrat rival Hillary Clinton. These details emerged in a series of hacked e-mails of Hillary that she had stored in her ‘pen drive’. In one of the emails, Hillary writes to her campaign adviser John Podesta, “It is now more than abundantly clear that the only person who can make me win in the election is Donald Trump.” She goes on to add, “But we cannot sit idly hoping that he would do the job for us on his own. We must actively encourage his campaign. In other words, we must fully bankroll him”. Podesta, in his reply to the e-mail, concurs with Hillary’s line of thinking, “yeah, you have put it way better than we can.” In fact, he goes one step ahead and lays it all brutally down: “It is only smart that we start funding his campaign before his camp gets all wise and starts funding our campaign. We don’t want a Face/Off kind of situation here where one is the front of the other and vice-versa. As it is, it is difficult telling the two campaigns apart”. And as part of the carefully constructed plan, Hillary’s team allowed Russian hackers to not only hack her e-mails but also bank accounts, knowing fully well that the hacked mails and money would eventually find their way from the Russians to the Trump camp. At one point, Podesta does raise the question what if the Russians pass on only the mails and keep the money themselves. “Do you want to trust the Russians with all the money? Looks like a dangerous gambit. I’m red-flagging it here itself”. But Hillary, who had worked out her strategy pretty smartly, replies Podesta: “When I say money, we are not going to put actual money that Russians would doubtless run away with.” She adds that the plan is to go the Sodexo coupon route. “We put humongous amount of Sodexo coupons. Russians wouldn’t know to use them and would pass it to Trump’s team. I am pretty sure they will lap it up, as I am even more pretty sure that Trump wouldn’t have given lunch and dinner allowance to his team”. Understandably, the latest e-mail reveals have caused further confusion in a campaign that has never been short of that. The Trump campaign managers lashed out Hillary and her team and accused them “of (metaphorically) sneaking into enemy’s room and poisoning his drink and food”. Trump’s spokesperson said “they have used our hands to poke our eyes, which anyway we ourselves were doing. This reveals their desperation. But we aren’t fazed. We will continue to do what we have been doing without anybody’s bidding.” Trump himself, in a speech to his supporters, thundered, “so you now get the real picture. All my gaffes, stupid remarks and silly antics have all been the fault of that woman. The ridiculous things that I say on a daily basis is all the work of Hillary.” He added: “The crazy things I come up with at all meetings, the media has been there always. I know. I have seen them. Why did they not find out that it was all Hillary’s fault”. Trump also said that those claiming that I have not paid my taxes have a clear answer now. “How can I pay taxes for Hillary’s money?” Trump’s parting words were: “Hillary and her conspiracies are a conspiracy of China. She could be the effect of global warming”. Meanwhile, the Hillary campaign team responded to the allegations by saying, “it is more than a real possibility that the Trump’s team might be using Hillary Clinton’s body double to create her emails and money accounts.” Hillary’s aide, in a non-hacked e-mail response, said, “Trump campaign team is financing Hillary’s body double and funding themselves. It doesn’t take much to figure this out. It is not rocket science. Just do your math.” The aide added: “We have also reasons to believe that the Trump campaign team is using a Trump body double to address his meetings so that they will have less embarrassment to manage later”. Elsewhere, in a totally understandable development, a latest media poll suggested that 100 per cent of Americans would prefer Hillary’s body double to Hillary and Trump’s body double to Trump. “The body doubles are assured of a landslide victory”, revealed the poll.

Manchester Suicide Bomber Salman Abedi: Son of Libyan Immigrants Who Chanted Arabic Prayers in The Street

Adam Shaw

Salman Abedi, the suicide bomber responsible for the Manchester Arena bombing Monday night which left 22 people dead and dozens injured, was reportedly the son of Libyan immigrants and was apparently radicalised while living in one of the country’s most heavily Muslim areas — an area that had problems before. [Greater Manchester Police Chief Constable Ian Hopkins identified Abedi Tuesday as the man who detonated a bomb at the end of an Ariana Grande concert as left the arena. Multiple outlets, including The New York Times and the Daily Telegraph, reported that Abedi was born in 1994 in Manchester and was of Libyan descent. The Telegraph reported that Abedi was the son of Libyan refugees who fled the regime of dictator Muammar Gadaffi. Gadaffi was killed by rebels in 2011 and the Telegraph cited reports that Abedi’s family had returned to Libya — but Abedi remained. Police raided Abedi’s house in Fallowfield, South Manchester Tuesday. Fallowfield is the home of a large student population, being a short bus ride away from the main Manchester University campus, and just three miles from Manchester’s city center. South Manchester as a whole has a large Muslim population, often gathered in very small areas and raising questions about the risks that a lack of assimilation can bring. According to 2011 census data, 20 percent of Fallowfield’s population was Muslim. But nearby areas are even more concentrated. Rusholme, a few minutes walk from Fallowfield, had a 37. 9 percent Muslim population in 2011, while nearby Longsight had a 53. 8 percent Muslim population. That data does not account for any increases in the Muslim population in the last six years. Nearby Rusholme is known for its famous “curry mile,” a series of South Asian and Middle Eastern restaurants populating one of the city’s main roads — a road annually brought to a standstill by traffic during the Muslim celebration of Eid. The Telegraph also noted that Abedi grew up in an area where two girls from a nearby school left their homes in 2015 to live in Syria. The Guardian reported that what it called “Manchester’s Libyan community” had problems before. Abdalraouf Abdallah, 24, was jailed for nine and a half years last year after being convicted of funding terrorism and preparing acts of terrorism. Abdallah had helped a number of men travel to Syria so they could fight in the civil war. He was unable to travel himself because he is paralysed from the waist down after being shot during the Libyan revolution. One of the people he helped to send to Syria was Stephen Gray, who had converted to Islam after leaving the air force in 2004. He was jailed for nine years after pleading guilty to terrorist offences. A family friend told the Guardian that Abedi and Abdallah knew each other. A neighbour told The New York Times that the family frequently flew a Libyan flag outside the window, while a school friend told the Daily Mail that Abedi had recently grown a beard, and was “acting strange. ” Abedi was also reported to have been praying loudly in Arabic in the street. “They were a Libyan family. A couple of months ago he was chanting the first kalma [Islamic prayer] really loudly in the street. He was chanting in Arabic. He was saying ‘There is only one God and the prophet Mohammed is his messenger’ a neighbor told the Mail. ‘They dressed very traditionally, in Islamic clothes. The mother used to wear a headscarf,” another said. The Washington Post reported that Abedi’s brother had been taken into custody. Details of Abedi’s background come amid reports that he was already known to security services, but authorities concluded that he did not mark an immediate threat. It seems that local authorities are unlikely to move quickly on any problems with assimilation. Labour Party candidate Afzal Khan, who is campaigning to be the Member of Parliament for the area in which Abedi lived, told reporters hours before the bombing: I don’t think immigration is a problem … It has transformed Manchester into a world class city. ” Afzal Khan says ”I don’t think immigration is a problem … It has transformed Manchester into a world class city” #gorton hustings, — Helen Pidd (@helenpidd) May 22, 2017, Greater Manchester Police Chief Constable Hopkins, in his remarks after the bombing, seemed less concerned with the threat of a lack of assimilation in communities and more concerned with a Islamophobic backlash. “We understand that feelings are very raw right now and people are bound to be looking for answers. However, now, more than ever, it is vital that our diverse communities in Greater Manchester stand together and do not tolerate hate,” he told reporters. Adam Shaw is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in New York. Follow Adam on Twitter: @AdamShawNY

Marcus Mumford after Bundy verdict.

Paula Walker

Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Security Question: What is 14 + 5 ? Please leave these two fields as-is: IMPORTANT! To be able to proceed, you need to solve the following simple math (so we know that you are a human) :-) Doom and Bloom

Son of Former Democratic VP Nominee Geraldine Ferraro Is Pardoned for 1988 Cocaine Conviction - Breitbart

Katherine Rodriguez

The governor of Vermont has pardoned the son of former Democratic vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro almost 30 years after he was convicted of selling cocaine to an undercover officer while in college, the Daily Mail reported. [John Zaccaro Jr. was a Middlebury College student when he was arrested in 1986 for selling $25 worth of cocaine to an undercover state police officer. He was convicted in 1988 and sentenced to four months in jail. Zaccaro was placed in a house arrest program where inmates paid for their living arrangements and served 90 days of his sentence “in a luxury $1, 500 a month Burlington apartment,” UPI reported in 1988. Zaccaro’s defense attorney argued that it was a case of entrapment because the officer claimed she was a student and lured him, People reported in 1988. Ferraro accused prosecutors of unfairly targeting her son because of her position as the 1984 Democratic vice presidential nominee. Outgoing Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin pardoned Zaccaro and nine others Saturday. “I believe in second chances, and I believe we as a society will continue to move towards a more sensible approach to drug addiction and criminal justice,” Shumlin said in a statement. “As governor, I am honored to be able help people move past their mistakes and help relieve what can essentially amount to a of burden and stigma. ” Zaccaro currently is Principal of P. Zaccaro Company Inc. a real estate investment and management firm, and lives in New York City with his wife and three children.

16th century portraits turned into photorealistic pictures

James

Next Swipe left/right 16th century portraits turned into photorealistic pictures Rembrandt, Raphael, the Mona Lisa and The Blue Boy have all been rendered as photorealistic ‘selfie’ style portraits in a new digital art project, which shows how some of the most famous painters and paintings in history would have looked had camera technology been invented in the 16th century. The photorealistic images of the Mona Lisa and The Blue Boy , and the self-portraits by grandmasters Rembrandt and Raphael used a complex combination of skilled photography and styling of models as well as digital manipulation, in a project commissioned by Yesterday to celebrate Raiders of the Lost Art , which tells the stories behind missing masterpieces including the Mona Lisa. The famous painting was stolen in 1911 in an Italian heist and not recovered for two years. Each of the portraits was first painstakingly photographed using a lookalike model with styling and makeup to match the original painting, before final touches were made by a digital artist to create the best recreation of the iconic compositions – each taking a total of 36 hours to complete.

nepali hercules

you should've been swallowed you inbred swine

Former Obama Spox: U.S. ’Absolutely’ Hurt Diplomatically by Obama Failing to Act on Syrian ’Red Line’ Promise - Breitbart

Penny Starr

Former Obama State Department appointee Marie Harf said on Tuesday that the former president’s decision not to order a military strike against Syria after dictator Bashar crossed his stated “red line” by using chemical weapons against his own people hurt the United States’ diplomatic efforts going forward. [“Now did not enforcing the red line hurt us diplomatically?” Harf said at a discussion at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D. C. “Absolutely. ” Harf, who was a spokesperson for Secretary of State John Kerry, said that decision also hurt Barack Obama politically. “Did it give some people the notion that they used politically that we were unwilling to use military action … absolutely,” Harf said, noting that Obama’s decision also was affected by the lack of support for such strikes by his fellow Democrats. Michael Pregent, adjunct fellow at Hudson, said that the strike on Assad’s military assets ordered by President Donald Trump after the April 4 chemical attack that killed scores of innocent people, including children, was Trump’s most significant foreign policy win since taking office. Assad denied — as he has repeatedly done over the course of the more than civil war — that he was responsible for the attack. But the U. S. has claimed it is certain Assad did carry out the attack. “Last week, Bashar ’s regime killed even more of its own people using chemical weapons,” Tillerson said in the days following the attack. “Our missile strike in response to his repeated use of banned weapons was necessary as a matter of U. S. national security interest. ” “We do not want the regime’s uncontrolled stockpile of chemical weapons to fall into the hands of ISIS or other terrorist groups who could, and want to, attack the United States or our allies,” Tillerson said. The latest development in Syria is a plan brokered by Russia, Turkey, and Iran that would establish four “safe zones” in Syria designed to protect innocent Syrians. But participants in the Hudson discussion said it is unclear whether those safe zones would not ultimately help the Assad regime.

Trump and Peña Nieto Agree to Not Publicly Discuss Wall Payment

Ildefonso Ortiz

Mexico’s government has announced that Presidents Enrique Peña Nieto and Donald J. Trump spent Friday morning on the phone and agreed to not discuss wall payments in public. [In a prepared statement issued by Mexico’s federal government, Peña Nieto’s team claimed that both heads of state understood their shared public differences and agreed to discuss the heated issue as part of an “integral discussion” in relation to their bilateral partnership. The telephone conversation dealt with the issues of trade deficit, international friendship, and both nations working together to stem the flow of drugs and weapons, the Mexican government revealed in their statement. Both presidents told their staff to continue discussing bilateral issues. The two had a productive and constructive call regarding the bilateral relationship between the two countries, the current trade deficit the United States has with Mexico, the importance of the friendship between the two nations, and the need for the two nations to work together to stop drug cartels, drug trafficking and illegal guns and arms sales. With respect to payment for the border wall, both presidents recognize their clear and very public differences of positions on this issue but have agreed to work these differences out as part of a comprehensive discussion on all aspects of the bilateral relationship. Both presidents have instructed their teams to continue the dialogue to strengthen this important strategic and economic relationship in a constructive way. Ildefonso Ortiz is an award winning journalist with Breitbart Texas. He the Cartel Chronicles project with Brandon Darby and Stephen K. Bannon. You can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook. Tony Aranda contributed to this report.

He’s ‘Little’ in the Film ‘Moonlight,’ but Big on the Dodgeball Court - The New York Times

Joanna Nikas

LOS ANGELES — Alex R. Hibbert eyed a group of six children whipping red and yellow balls at one another in a large, reverberant pit made with trampoline floors and walls. He wanted in. But one player needed to get nailed by a ball and knocked out of the game first. He stood in line, his feet fidgeting, before bailing. He ran over to a nearby trampoline, pulled up his hoodie, crouched down and launched himself first upward and then backward into a flip. “You bend your feet, keep your hands all the way and jump as high as you want,” he said. “You get maximum air. Once you hit the air then you flip. But you don’t want to do too much because you might do a double flip. ” Alex is the actor who plays Chiron (also knows as “Little”) in “Moonlight,” the film about growing up in a area of Miami as a character in the process of understanding his sexuality. The film has received eight Academy Award nominations, including best picture. In real life, he lives in Miami, where he is a student, but he was recently in Los Angeles for a busy weekend of award shows (he attended both the Producers Guild Awards and the Screen Actors Guild awards) and auditions. So he would have a proper tux to wear to the SAG awards, he also had to stand still for a suit fitting. That’s a lot for an energetic kid. A few hours at the Sky Zone trampoline park in the Van Nuys neighborhood was his play time. “I’m open,” he yelled, his arms spread wide. A ball came straight at his head and he ducked. Then he grabbed it and hurled it at the opposite side of the dodgeball pit, which now had him alone against three boys. He came to the tables, out of breath but happy. “It’s a battlefield out there,” he told his mother, Donna Wellington. “But I’m coming out on top. ” He grabbed for a cherry Icee she was holding for him and took a big gulp. Ms. Wellington snagged it. “Don’t drink all of that,” she said to her son. “You’ll get a stomachache. ” He made a face, then set the drink down. He has gotten a lot of attention because of his ability to make faces. “Moonlight” opens with a scene focused on Alex, but it’s not until about 10 minutes into it that he actually has a line. Critics and moviegoers have been taken by Alex’s performance, most of it delivered without any words, in which he communicates the adolescent angst of a young boy growing up in an environment where his sexuality is not understood. “Mahershala taught me a lot of tips about facials,” he said of his Mahershala Ali, whom he calls his second father. “He was all like, ‘Just think about the moment that is going on. ’” Alex didn’t grow up as an kid looking for a big break. He was living a typical life when stardom found him. He was born in New York City, and lived in Queens until 2011, when his mother decided to move with him to live closer to her own mother. (Alex has one sister, Robin, 22, from his father’s side, who lives in New York with their father.) He goes to a performing arts magnet middle school in Miami Gardens, Fla. loves science class (even though he said school was “mostly boring,” he knows it will help him succeed in his life’s ambition of curing cancer) and is expected to help out at home by doing the dishes and taking out the trash. But in March 2016, Alex’s drama teacher, Tanisha Cidel (she played the role of the principal in the film) suggested to him that he audition for “Moonlight. ” He assumed it was a school production. “I didn’t know it was going to be that big,” he said. “I thought it was going to be like a play or something. ” It was Alex’s grandmother, Hillary Frye, who took him to the “Moonlight” audition. She is now his unofficial publicist. “Every day since the film came she buys a New York Times paper at the and looks for Alex’s picture in it,” Ms. Wellington said. “She’s going crazy, she tells everyone at work, ‘That’s my grandson! ’” His mother is trying to adapt to the new normal of having a son who suddenly is invited to award shows and auditions. So long as the hoopla doesn’t interfere with school, Ms. Wellington is accommodating. On Monday, it was back to their normal routine. “Nothing changed,” said his mother, who works at a nursing facility. “When I travel back and forth, I go right back to work. And Alex goes back to school. ” But he had a few days of glamour before he returned to real life, and some time before the media crush to just be a little kid. After dominating the trampoline, the foam pit, air hockey and the dodgeball court, he had by now moved on to the basketball game. Before his mother could even make her way over, he had racked up 41 points. “I beat the record,” he hollered to her. He sidestepped to the adjacent machine where he tossed the ball some more, to the tune of 43 points. In celebration, he dabbed. He wasn’t done, though. He was ready for more dodgeball. It was 8 p. m. and his mother wasn’t. “Alex, I’m tired,” said Ms. Wellington, who had just accompanied her son to London, where Alex accepted an award on behalf of Mr. Ali. “Mom, one more game,” he pleaded. She gave him a — apparently a talent for nonverbal communication is a family trait. “O. K.,” he said, “I guess it is time to go. ” Anyway, he will need his sleep, given the magnitude of his dreams. There is the whole thing. He would also like to have an acting career like Denzel Washington, to do action movies like Andrew Garfield and get cast on a popular TV series. “I want to be on ‘The Walking Dead,’” he said. “I need to talk to my managers about that. ”

Trump Reverses Obama’s Last Days Drilling Ban - Breitbart

Michelle Moons

WASHINGTON, D. C. — President Donald Trump on Friday signed a new executive order on an Offshore Energy Strategy as he proclaimed, “It’s going to lead to a lot of great wealth for our country and a lot of great jobs for our country. ”[From the Roosevelt Room of the White House, President Trump thanked Secretaries Wilbur Ross and Ryan Zinke, lauded their job performance, then told those gathered: This is a great day for American workers and families, and today we’re unleashing American energy and clearing the way for thousands and thousands of American energy jobs. Our country is blessed with incredible natural resources, including abundant offshore oil and natural gas reserves. But the federal government has kept 94 percent of these offshore areas closed for exploration and production. And when they say closed, they mean closed. This deprives our country of potentially thousands and thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in wealth. I pledged to take action, and today I am keeping that promise. The President stated that the order initiates “opening offshore areas to energy exploration,” which reverses an Obama Administration Arctic leasing ban. “It reverses the previous administration’s Arctic leasing ban, and directs Secretary Zinke to allow responsible development of offshore areas that will bring revenue to our Treasury and jobs to our workers. ” Barack Obama seized this last days’ opportunity to shore up his environmental policy in December 2016. The Washington Post reported that he banned offshore oil and gas drilling in hundreds of millions of acres of federal land in the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans. The ban was coordinated with a related move by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The report cited a White House aide, who claimed regarding the Section of the 1953 act withdrawals, “There is no authority for subsequent presidents to … I can’t speak to what a future Congress will do. ” After the Arctic leasing ban was announced, Sen. Ted Cruz ( ) responded in a tweet the Post cited, “Yet another Obama abuse of power. Hopefully, on[e] that will be reversed … exactly one month from today. ” Trump added that the order, “will enable better scientific study of our offshore resources and research that has blocked everything from happening for far too long. ” The result, according to Trump, will be energy cost reduction and job creation, while making the country more secure and energy independent. “It’s going to lead to a lot of great wealth for our country and a lot of great jobs for our country,” said Trump. Ahead of the President’s speech, Vice President Mike Pence called the order “an important step toward American energy independence. ” The entire executive order can be found at WhiteHouse. gov. Follow Michelle Moons on Twitter @MichelleDiana

Was This An Alien Contact? Scientists Think So – NOT SATIRE (VIDEO)

Grownmangrumbles

It’s our go to response. When the lights are out and the floorboard creaks. When a branch taps a slow waltz against the window pane and our hackles dance a primordial shimmy, we ask the question. The oldest question. “Is there anyone there?” Turns out, the answer is yes. Not The Alien Contact We Expected It was a little thing really. Giant leap for mankind moments often are. There were no ships hovering over national landmarks, no grainy footage of aliens being dissected on steel-gray slabs. No ‘take me to your leader moments’ at all. No, our first potentially legitimate brush with alien intelligence came as one might expect; from the nocturnal laboring of two dedicated scientists. It was the kind of science you don’t get to see. The methodical pace, the slow transition from hypothesis to data that is the hallmark of good research. The pair painstakingly surveyed a patch of sky simply because it was in need of surveying. They examined some 2.5 million stars, and in doing so, E.F. Borra and E. Trottie of Quebec’s Laval University might have made the single most important discovery in human history. You see, while the vast majority of the stars they examined were acting in exactly the way they had expected, a tiny fraction of them – 234 in total – were not. They were exhibiting bizarre modulations that defied easy explanation; they could not be attributed to any known natural phenomena. Indeed, they didn’t look natural at all. They looked like someone, or rather something, was attempting to communicate with us. Like, for real. Because these were the kind of signals that one might expect an extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) to use if they were attempting to communicate with us. they were using the oldest known method of attracting attention in the dark They were shining a light at us. Great Expectations In a study published in 2012, Borra had proposed this very approach. He wrote : “Consider an extraterrestrial civilization that is more advanced than ours. Let us assume that they want to signal their existence to other civilizations. This is not an easy task considering how vast the universe is. The best chance of being seen is by being accidentally detected during astronomical observations. They know, on the basis of their own experience, that a scientifically advanced civilization observes the sky and takes spectra of astronomical objects. In particular, spectroscopic surveys are carried out.” These surveys would inevitably reveal the very same modulations that the two Canadian scientists just discovered. Utterly dissimilar to the usual background ‘noise’ of the universe, once detected, they would warrant further investigation. Like ships sailing on a pitch black sea, an alert lookout could easily differentiate between the naturally occurring light flashes of reflected moonbeams or distant lightning, from the frantic signalling of a nearby vessel. At least, that’s the theory. Still, there was yet more compelling evidence that this was indeed an attempt at communication. The 234 stars in Borra and Trottier’s study all had one thing in common. The modulations all came from stars very much like our own Sun, the only star that we know for certain harbors intelligent life. Phone Home? The most obvious answer is that we need to dig deeper; as Borra acknowledged: “ Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence .” The need for further research notwithstanding, a very real question needs to be explored. Could we, and indeed should we, attempt to communicate back? The practical considerations are not insignificant. The signal device, a powerful laser of some kind, could be based on Earth but would have to shine its beam to a space station that contained mirrors capable of redirecting the light to the targets. Such a station would have to be sent on a long lonely voyage of around 614 astronomical units or about 20 times further than Pluto, something Barros described as being : “Not an overwhelmingly large distance.” Indeed the distance the mirror would have to be placed would scale with he distance of the civilization we were trying to contact. Using an existing technology known as a solar sail we could : “Reach Pluto in 5 years. For an ETI at a 100 lt-yr distance from Earth, the (mirror’s) location would thus be reached within 10 years. An attempt to reach a civilization even further away would of course take longer, perhaps a century or more and whilst Barro admitted that: “This is a long time.” He remained adamant that it was not : “…Overwhelmingly so, considering that the ETI civilization may be thousands of years older than ours.” Humanity then, is on the cusp of being able to send similar signals ourselves. But should we? This Island Earth According the Professor Stephen Hawking, it might not be such a good idea. While he is convinced that we are not alone in the universe he cautioned that : “We should be wary of answering back.” In Hawking’s view, a meeting between two civilizations would resemble Christopher Columbus’ historic meeting of Native Americans. Something that he noted : “Didn’t turn out so well.” Still, whether we chose to respond or not remains peripheral to the sheer magnitude of the discovery. That intelligent alien life is not only out there but that they are trying to say hello. If true, it points to a universality of at least one pervasive human emotion. Curiosity. It’s still not definite; it’s still only a ‘probably,’ but we’ve never been closer to a possible answer. It would be nice to finally know for sure. After all, we’ve been wondering for so long. As the Epicurean philosopher and poet Lucretius once said : “Nothing in the universe is unique and alone and therefore in other regions there must be other earths inhabited by different tribes of men and breeds of beasts.” Yeah, there must be. Watch the teams proposal as to where the light pulses are coming from here: Featured Image By Beckie Via Flickr/ CC-2.0 About Grownmangrumbles I'm a full- time, somewhat unwilling resident of the planet Earth. I studied journalism at Murdoch University in West Australia and moved back to the UK where I taught politics and studied for a PhD. I've written a number of books on political philosophy that are mostly of interest to scholars. I'm also a seasoned travel writer so I get to stay in fancy hotels for free. I have a pet Lizard called Rousseau. We have only the most cursory of respect for one another. Connect

Andrzej Wajda, Towering Auteur of Polish Cinema, Dies at 90 - The New York Times

Michael T. Kaufman

Andrzej Wajda, who mined Polish history to create films that established him as one of the world’s great directors and won him an Academy Award for his life’s work, died on Sunday. He was 90. His death was confirmed by the Association of Polish Filmmakers, which did not specify where he died. The director Jacek Bromski, head of the association, said Mr. Wajda had recently been hospitalized. From his trilogy of Poland’s wartime resistance (“A Generation,” ”Kanal” and “Ashes and Diamonds”) to his twin portraits of workers under Communism (“Man of Marble” and “Man of Iron”) to his final film, “Afterimage,” released this year, Mr. Wajda unceasingly drew on Polish reality, sensibilities and memory, stressing elements that were at times mystifying to foreign viewers. His absorption in those sensibilities, and in quintessentially Polish subjects, like the romantic appeal of lost causes, extended beyond plot and subtext to the iconography with which he filled his movies, a tendency he lamented but could not escape. “I would gladly trade in this clutch of national symbols — sabers, white horses, red poppies — for a handful of sexual symbols from a Freudian textbook,” he once said. “The trouble is that I just wasn’t brought up on Freud. ” He was also aware that the tensions of the Cold War sometimes estranged Western audiences from his subjects and his style. “Films made in Eastern Europe seem of little or no interest to people in the West,” he wrote in “Double Vision: My Life in Film” (1989). Western audiences, he said, “find them as antediluvian as the battle for workers’ rights in England in the time of Marx. ” But the biggest problems he faced were the practical ones of government disapproval, and sometimes outright censorship, before Poland rid itself of Communist control. That he succeeded in overcoming so much to produce towering works of art earned him the enduring regard of his countrymen. And as opaque as his allusions may have seemed outside Poland, his international reputation grew steadily. Western film historians eventually mentioned him alongside Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa. He was given the Japanese Imperial Prize for his contribution to film in 1996 and an honorary Academy Award in 2000. He also received lifetime achievement awards from the film festivals in Venice in 1998 and Berlin in 2006. The images and textures that shaped the imaginative landscape of Mr. Wajda’s films were drawn from a life that reflected Poland’s tragic modern history, beginning with the outbreak of World War II, when the Nazis invaded and obliterated Poland in partnership with the Russians. The agony continued through nearly six years of German occupation, when the Nazis used Polish soil to establish the ghettos and killing fields of the Holocaust. Then, with liberation, came more decades of totalitarian oppression as successive regimes in Moscow sought to impose Communism on a devoutly Roman Catholic country, an effort that even Stalin once conceded was like “putting a saddle on a bull. ” Andrzej Wajda (pronounced ) was born on March 6, 1926, in Suwalki, a garrison town near Poland’s border with Lithuania. His father was a cavalry officer, and as young Andrzej moved with his parents from camp to camp, he and his brother would playfully choreograph their own battles while all around them real troops carried out training maneuvers. The German Army invaded when he was 13. Two weeks later, the Russians joined in the dismemberment of Poland. The country was quickly overrun by Nazi and Communist forces carrying out the collusion of the pact. As it did for many Poles, history turned personal for Mr. Wajda. His father was one of thousands of Polish officers taken prisoner and killed by the Russians in the Katyn Forest in western Russia and other locations. Though most Poles came to understand who was responsible for what was known simply as Katyn, the official version of events under Communist rule insisted that the Polish officers had been killed by the Germans. Only in 1991 could Mr. Wajda, by then an elected senator in Poland, make a documentary called “The Katyn Forest” in homage to his father and those murdered with him. His 2007 dramatization of the same story, called simply “Katyn,” was an Oscar nominee for best film. A. O. Scott, in The New York Times, praised it as “a powerful corrective to decades of distortion and forgetting. ” After his father disappeared, young Andrzej lived through the war with his mother, a teacher, working at odd jobs in the countryside. He also had what he later called “a posting of no significance” with the Home Army, a resistance group sponsored by the Polish government in exile in London. He enrolled in the Fine Arts Academy in Krakow after the war but transferred to the newly opened Film School in Lodz. He began making films soon after graduating. His first, “A Generation,” finished in 1955, was shot in settings of rubble and ruin, in a Warsaw that had not yet recovered from the devastation of the war. It centered on the wartime experiences of a tough Warsaw adolescent who joins a resistance group headed by a young woman with whom he has fallen in love. Some aspects of the film reflect the Communist Party line of the time the young Communist fighters are depicted as purer, braver and more committed than the members of the Home Army. But with its nuanced characters, “A Generation” transcends propaganda. In 1956, in the wake of worker upheavals that preceded the Hungarian uprising against Soviet Communist domination, Mr. Wajda made “Kanal,” the second film of his war trilogy. It deals with another uprising: the 1944 struggle of the citizens of Warsaw to free themselves from Nazi occupation. “Kanal” tells the story of a corps of resistance fighters who are cut off from the main insurgent force and try to escape through the city’s sewers. It follows three groups of men and women as they wander in the cold, dark water, fearful of German booby traps and electrical wires. Some break down some die in the sewers others sustain hopes and illusions, only to be captured by the Germans. The last of the trilogy that established Mr. Wajda’s international reputation was “Ashes and Diamonds” (1958) a dramatization of a novel by Jerzy Andrzejewski, set on the day Germany surrendered in 1945. The Communists have taken over the wheels of government, and membership in the resistance is suddenly suspect. Maciek, a young former soldier of the Home Army, is instructed to assassinate a Communist official who is arriving to take control of a provincial town. The official is a compassionate man who has suffered greatly in concentration camps. When Maciek encounters him on the street, he shoots him dead. He slips away but panics when he sees police officers checking the papers of he starts to run and is killed. As dawn rises, marking the end of the first 24 hours of peace, Maciek’s body is sprawled on a rubbish heap. Mr. Wajda went on to direct more than 40 theatrical and television films, among them narrowly focused psychological portraits like “Innocent Sorcerers” (1960) and expansive adaptations of historical novels and stories by celebrated Polish writers, like Stefan Zeromski’s “The Ashes” (1965) and Stanislaw Wyspianski’s “The Wedding” (1973). His largely improvised “Everything for Sale” (1968) was a tribute to Zbigniew Cybulski, the charismatic star of “Ashes and Diamonds,” who was killed while trying to leap aboard a train in 1967. Mr. Wajda returned several times to films set against the backdrop of World War II and focused on the tragedy of Poland’s Jews with films like “Samson” (1961) “Landscape After the Battle” (1970) “Korczak” (1991) and “Holy Week” (1995). Most of these films were shown in the West, although it was not until the late 1970s that Mr. Wajda’s work again received the worldwide critical attention that had welcomed his earliest work. This phase started with “Man of Marble,” which he completed in 1976 but which was kept from audiences abroad until a political thaw in Warsaw emboldened bureaucrats to issue it an export license in 1978. In that film, a student filmmaker, memorably played by Krystyna Janda, is trying to find out what became of a bricklayer who in the Stalinist ’50s had won national fame for his enthusiastic productivity. After tracing the worker’s rise as a hero, she uncovers his decline at the hands of the same government that once extolled him. Mr. Wajda tells his story like a thriller: The truth emerges through the shifting Communist propaganda of two decades as depicted in interview after interview, newsreel after newsreel. When “Man of Marble” was released in Poland, some three million people saw it in less than three months, and arguments about its content broke out all over the country. The Poles knew that the Communist government had censored the crucial final scene of the film and refused to allow its presentation at the Cannes Film Festival as an official entry. But it was shown there anyway, and it won the International Federation of Film Critics prize. Reviewing the movie in The Times, Vincent Canby called it “a political epic, compassionate and as bitterly funny as a cartoon. ” As the disintegration of Communist rule accelerated in Poland, more quickly than in the other Soviet satellite states, Mr. Wajda played an active role as both an artist and a patriot. In 1981, when the Solidarity movement was mushrooming, Mr. Wajda released “Man of Iron,” his sequel to “Man of Marble. ” In this film, the Communist government sends a reporter to Gdansk, ostensibly to cover the strike by shipyard workers there but really to smear one of its leaders. The leader turns out to be the son of the bricklayer of “Man of Marble,” who is married to the young documentary filmmaker who uncovered the truth about his father. Soon the reporter gets caught up in the passion of the event he has been assigned to discredit. “Man of Iron” was made as Solidarity was gaining momentum. Real members of Solidarity, including the movement’s leader, Lech Walesa, appear in the film alongside fictional characters. A late entry at Cannes, it was awarded the Golden Palm. Mr. Wajda was allowed to insert the censored last scene of “Man of Marble” into “Man of Iron. ” “That was the best sign,” he later recalled, “that in the years between the two movies the Communists really started losing ground. ” He organized and ran the Solidarity filmmakers’ union and became an active member of the Committee to Help Workers, a major dissident organization. But the last Polish Communist government struck back and Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, its leader, banned Solidarity and declared martial law. As censorship intensified, Mr. Wajda encouraged the clandestine distribution of banned films by his younger colleagues through underground cassettes. The government moved against him, and for the next four years disapproved his film projects he was not able to work in his homeland again until 1985. Leaving Poland, he directed two films that drew critical praise. In “Danton,” made in France in 1982, he drew parallels to the political situation in Poland with his portrayal of the conflict between the moderate, democratic Danton (played by Gérard Depardieu) and the Robespierre (played by the Polish actor Wojciech Pszoniak) during the Reign of Terror that followed the French Revolution. In “A Love in Germany” (1983) a he focused on a passionate and unconcealed love affair during World War II between a German woman (Hanna Schygulla) and a Polish prisoner of war working as a slave laborer (Piotr Lysak). After Communism finally collapsed in 1989, Mr. Wajda was one of the national luminaries asked to run for the Polish Senate by Mr. Walesa, who was about to become president. Mr. Wajda served a single term and then returned to films. But in a situation repeated in other former Eastern bloc countries, Hollywood blockbusters became more readily available on Polish screens, and the subsidies that had spawned and sustained a great national cinema dwindled. Many Polish directors who followed in Mr. Wajda’s footsteps and who had worked with him began making movies abroad. In contrast, Mr. Wajda stayed home. Though he continued to make the occasional film, he devoted much of his energy to theater he often staged works adapted from Russian literature at the Stary Theater in Krakow. Among his notable later works, in addition to “Katyn,” were “The Revenge” (2002) a period comedy with a cast that included Roman Polanski, and “Tatarak” (2009) the story of a woman obsessed with a much younger man. Mr. Wajda was married four times. Survivors include his wife, the actress and stage designer Krystyna Zachwatowicz, and a daughter, Karolina. One of Mr. Wajda’s last films was “Walesa: Man of Hope,” released in 2013 and considered by many to be the final part of a trilogy that began with “Man of Marble. ” Starring the Polish movie and television actor Robert Wieckiewicz — who spoke in an interview with The Times about the pressure of “playing a legend, directed by a legend” — it was the first Polish film to examine Lech Walesa and his work with Solidarity in depth. At a news conference announcing his plans to make “Walesa,” Mr. Wajda said that he viewed it as his greatest professional challenge to date. He quoted Mr. Walesa himself, when he ran for president of Poland, to describe his own feelings about making the film. “I don’t want to,” he said, “but I have to. ”

Watch: Trailer for Don Rickles’ Final Project ’Dinner with Don’

Daniel Nussbaum

Comedy legend Don Rickles passed away Thursday at the age of 90 — but his fans will get to see him one more time in a new series called Dinner with Don. [The series — which wrapped production in March — will follow the legendarily insult comic as he dines out with and interviews Hollywood celebrities at his favorite Los Angeles restaurants. Judging by the trailer, the season will include interviews with Sarah Silverman, Zach Galifianakis, Jimmy Kimmel, Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler. Rickles also reportedly interviewed Martin Scorsese, Billy Crystal, Vince Vaughn, Marisa Tomei and Robert De Niro. The trailer features classic Rickles including a great one on Poehler. After Poehler tells him how honored she is to be able to get to talk to him, Rickles replies: “That’s really sweet. When your name came up, I said ‘I don’t want her.’ And they said, ‘Be nice, she needs it. ’” Galifianakis also earned Rickles’ approval with a zinger of his own. Dinner with Don is the first project from AARP Studios. The series doesn’t currently have a release date. “All of us at AARP Studios are immensely saddened with the passing of Don Rickles,” AARP Studios vice president Jeffrey Eagle said in a statement. “We had the distinct pleasure of recently working with Don on our upcoming series Dinner with Don. Don was known for his biting, acerbic humor and we feel lucky enough to have experienced that . He was also a thoughtful, kind and generous colleague and friend. Don continued to make audiences laugh throughout his life and career and his legacy will live on. We send our condolences to his family and longtime industry colleagues. ” Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum

House Republicans in Close Races Worry Trump’s Problems May Hurt Them - The New York Times

Emmarie Huetteman

LANSDOWNE, Va. — Like many Republican candidates, Representative Barbara Comstock is trying to prevent Donald J. Trump’s problems from becoming hers. Early on, she supported Senator Marco Rubio’s presidential bid. In ensuing months, she remained resolutely reticent on Mr. Trump, simply never uttering his name in trying to avoid any political undertow that he might create. But after the release last week of a recording in which Mr. Trump boasted in vulgar terms about assaulting women, Ms. Comstock was among the first Republicans to call on him to step down. “This is disgusting, vile and disqualifying,” she said in a statement. “No woman should ever be subjected to this type of obscene behavior, and it is unbecoming of anybody seeking high office. ” Ms. Comstock is hoping her disavowal will be enough. The outcome here in Loudoun County, which in recent years has been seen as a bellwether in presidential politics, will provide a measure of any damage that Mr. Trump’s contentious candidacy may have caused. Ms. Comstock’s wealthy, highly educated district in the suburbs of Washington is a hub of government largess, where federal contractors commute past Buddhist temples, mosques and churches that offer services in Korean. “If the Democrats have any prayer of taking the House, and I think it’s just a long shot, they’ve got to win this seat,” said Thomas M. Davis III, a former Republican congressman who represented portions of Ms. Comstock’s district. So far, many analysts say, there is scant evidence that voters will penalize candidates because of Mr. Trump. “Believe it or not, it hasn’t changed matters all that much,” said David Wasserman, the House of Representatives editor for The Cook Political Report. He has forecast that Democrats could pick up as many as 20 seats, 10 short of the number needed to regain control of the House. Polls have shown that voters are willing to separate their support for certain House and Senate candidates from their feelings about the top of the ticket. In an effort to bolster Ms. Comstock and other vulnerable Republicans, the Congressional Leadership Fund, a “super PAC” aligned with Republicans, announced Friday that it would invest an additional $10 million into 15 targeted races, including hers. Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin also has tried to ensure his party holds its House majority, offering a policy agenda and promising appearances in dozens of cities to lend his power. His campaign said on Thursday that Mr. Ryan had raised $15. 4 million in the third quarter, collecting more than $48. 2 million in 2016. He has transferred more than $31 million of that to the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee. Mr. Ryan — having disinvited Mr. Trump from their first planned joint appearance in Wisconsin last weekend after news of the recording broke — effectively cut his members free on Monday, saying he would not defend nor campaign with Mr. Trump. He has instead shifted his focus to the argument that Republicans need to be to serve as a bulwark against a potential President Hillary Clinton. Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader, has proved once more to be a powerhouse, raising $34. 6 million for House Democrats in the third quarter and $127. 7 million this election cycle, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee said on Wednesday. Initial reactions to the 2005 recording of Mr. Trump have also given Democrats cause for optimism. A Wall Street News poll, conducted shortly after the recording was released by The Washington Post, showed 49 percent of voters preferred Democrats take control of Congress, compared with 42 percent who preferred Republicans — the largest advantage for Democrats since the government shutdown in 2013. But Democrats have a steep climb. With 247 seats, House Republicans hold their largest majority since 1931. Nathan L. Gonzales, the editor of the Rothenberg Gonzales Political Report, estimates that Republicans have already locked up 217 seats — and they only need 218 to keep their majority. But Republican strategists are haunted by the prospect that voters who would typically support Republicans might become so disillusioned that they choose to stay home. “This is a highly polarized environment,” Mr. Wasserman said. “And I think the only reason for Democrats to overperform on Election Day is that Republicans are so depressed that they don’t show up. ” At this point, that does not look very likely, he said. While more educated, conservative voters who may have been more likely to split their ticket are looking less enthusiastic, Mr. Trump’s base remains energized, he said. In the suburbs of Minneapolis, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has run ads trying to tie Representative Erik Paulsen, a Republican, to Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump is unpopular there, but the contest had been trending in favor of Mr. Paulsen — who last week joined Ms. Comstock in announcing he would not vote for him. Similarly, in northeastern Iowa, Democrats have been struggling to oust Representative Rod Blum, a Republican who is a member of the House Freedom Caucus. Mr. Blum’s district voted for Mr. Obama twice, but the pickup, originally thought to be likely, has been bedeviling Democrats. Mr. Blum has denounced Mr. Trump’s remarks but did not comment on whether he would continue to support him, according to The Des Moines Register. Districts that had been seeing a Trump effect appear to be the ones with higher concentrations of Latinos and Asians, Mr. Wasserman said. Also, white women — a group that may be especially motivated by animus toward Mr. Trump — are also showing strikingly strong support for Mrs. Clinton this year, said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. Though Ms. Comstock’s district trends slightly Republican, voters twice supported Mr. Obama. Mr. Trump is not popular here. Mr. Davis, who represented the area for seven terms, said most voter aversion to Mr. Trump stemmed from his propensity for insults. “This is a pretty dignified, educated group, and they’re just not into insulting people and all that,” he said. “Not particularly liberal, but dignified. ” Just one day before disavowing Mr. Trump, during a debate hosted by the local chamber of commerce here, Ms. Comstock cited a collaboration with Senator Tim Kaine, a fellow Virginian and the Democratic nominee. She twice invoked Bill Clinton, the president whose administration she built a reputation investigating in the 1990s as a House chief counsel. She steered clear of saying Mr. Trump’s name, saying she was “still watching” the race to decide who would get her vote. LuAnn Bennett, a real estate developer who is challenging Ms. Comstock, on Wednesday slammed her for waiting so long to reject Mr. Trump. “I’m afraid that what my opponent was clearly ‘watching’ for was how best to preserve her own political career,” she said.

Swedish Police Chief Shut Down By Interior Minister After Call to Deport Terror Suspects

Virginia Hale

Citing “freedom of speech” and the possibility that expelled migrants risk “persecution” if sent back to their homelands, Sweden’s Justice Minister rejected Erik Nord’s call to deport Islamic migrants and demanded the police chief “explain himself”. [“Not because it would have prevented Friday’s attack but surely we should be able to withdraw Swedish residency rights from people who support violent extremism,” wrote the Greater Gothenburg police chief on Sunday, two days after an alleged terror attack in Stockholm in which four people died and many were injured. But government minister Morgan Johansson slapped down Nord’s “problematic” suggestion, for which he said the police chief needs to “explain himself”. “We have freedom of speech in Sweden. This means people have the right to hold repulsive opinions here,” said Johansson. “But there are always limits … For example when it comes to hate speech,” he added. Asserting that migrants with residence permits are in Sweden because they are in need of protection, the Social Democratic party politician warned that “there is a risk [migrants who support violent extremism] could face persecution if they were sent back”. Nord told the Gothenburg Post on Sunday: “We should be able to tell who are going around proposing the nation become a totalitarian state, be it political or religious, that they have to go back home where they belong. ” Noting how currently Sweden can only deport individuals found guilty of committing or funding acts of terror, the police chief argued that it should also be possible for the nation to expel people who say they support groups which back violent extremism. “Sure there are going to be people who say ISIS is great and that religious extremism is fantastic. But then I don’t think these people should be allowed to stay in Sweden where they are bankrolled and have their lifestyles paid for by the government. ” “Islam itself is not extreme, but there are forms of Islamism and jihad which are causing problems,” he continued. “At this point in time, we know that there are many people going around and giving lectures in support of this sort of extremism. “I just don’t think it’s fair,” Nord added, telling the newspaper that police receive intelligence about Islamist preachers “all the time”. “It’s disgusting that we allow bad people to canvass here, waving ISIS flags,” said Nord. “It’s an insult to those who have fled from Islamic State. ” “I realise that the things I’m saying here could be read as political statements. But we’re living in a new reality now in which, sometimes, it’s important that we be allowed to talk about things we observe,” he told Expressen.

’Liberal Answer to Breitbart News’ Loses CEO Before It Even Launches - Breitbart

Warner Todd Huston

The much ballyhooed “Breitbart of the left” planned by Clinton apologist David Brock lost its CEO before the site even launched, as investigative reporter David Sirota announced he is bowing out of the project. [After the disastrous 2016 election revealed that his Hilary Clinton cheerleading efforts were woefully ineffective, David Brock went back to liberal donors with his hand out — asking for even more cash to start a new website that he promised would become the left’s “answer to Breitbart News. ” Not long after his initial announcement, Brock proudly reported that he had hired investigative reporter David Sirota as the CEO of the new effort named True Blue Media. Sirota was said to be preparing to quit his role as senior investigations editor at the International Business Times to lead Brock’s new Breitbart of the left. But now it appears those plans have fallen apart. This week Sirota sent out an email to supporters and friends to “pass on some personal news” explaining that “circumstances of the job changed” and he is now taking a pass on the role as chief of the left’s answer to Breitbart. “As you know, I was thrilled to initially accept the proposal to work with True Blue Media because I believe in nonpartisan accountability journalism,” Sirota said in his statement. “However, the circumstances of the job subsequently changed. True Blue Media does not right now have in hand the resources for the kind of independent, nonpartisan journalism I want to continue to do and that is needed to execute on the ambitious editorial strategy that we agreed on. Therefore, I have decided to turn down the job. I wish David Brock all the best. ” Sirota did not elaborate on exactly what had changed between the time he initially agreed to head up Brock’s news website and today’s decision to bail out of the project. But the statement hints to the possibility that Brock is not getting the funding he would need for the sort of fully staffed news organization Sirota had envisioned. Perhaps Sirota doesn’t want to be part of a mere propaganda effort and expected the resources to be able to sustain a serious news bureau. The news comes on the heels of reports that many top liberal donors are getting tired of David Brock’s many failed efforts to “help” the liberal cause. Early in January, for instance Clinton donor John Morgan complained, “Anybody who gives money to him is pissing down a rathole. ” Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail. com.

Trump Says He Likes Janet Yellen and Supports the Export-Import Bank - Breitbart

John Carney

President Donald Trump reversed himself Wednesday on the leadership of the Federal Reserve and the fate of the U. S. Bank. [In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump said that was open to the possibility of renominating Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen once her current term of office expires next year. During the campaign he was critical of Yellen, describing her as “political” for keeping rates low, and said that he “most likely” would replace her as Fed chief. “I like her, I respect her,” Trump said. He added that “it’s very early. ” When asked if Yellen was “toast,” the president said, “No. Not toast. ” This has caught many on Wall Street and Capitol Hill by surprise, overturning the near universal expectation that Trump would pick a new head for the central bank. The possibility that Trump may support the status quo at the Fed has some supporters scratching their heads. On Wall Street, this is widely viewed as the result of the influence of Gary Cohn and other financiers on the president. “I think we’re seeing the influence of guys like Gary Cohn, Steven Mnuchin and Steve Schwarzman. They probably explained that markets want him to show he’s about the Fed and favors a dovish stance,” said one investment banker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Dovish” is Wall Street lingo for leaning toward keeping interest rates lower. “I do like a rate policy, I must be honest with you,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal in response to questions about Yellen. Cohn is Trump’s chief economic adviser and holds the position of director of the National Economic Council. A lifelong Democrat, Cohn was the number 2 man in charge of Goldman Sachs until he left to join the Trump administration. Treasury Secretary Mnuchin is also a Goldman alum and has close ties to Wall Street. Schwarzman is a friend of Trump’s and the of the Blackstone Group, a Wall Street private equity firm. He reportedly speaks to Trump by phone several times a week and was recently seated beside Trump at a White House gathering of corporate chiefs. Trump also said he no longer opposes the bank, which he accused of “ ” and called unnecessary during the campaign. “It turns out that, first of all, lots of small companies are really helped, the vendor companies,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal. Around 40 percent of money is used to subsidize exports from Boeing. Less than 20 percent goes directly to small businesses. The language Trump used, referring to small businesses as ‘vendors’ indicates the influence of big businesses that benefit from subsidies. They have long argued that they pass along subsidies to smaller businesses that manufacture parts for their exports, a theory of subsidies. “ doesn’t help the economy. It doesn’t drain the swamp,” writes critic Tim Carney at the Washington Examiner. Jeff Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric, applauded Trump’s change of heart on . By supporting the Export Import Bank @POTUS is showing great leadership and focusing on creating jobs for American manufacturers. — Jeff Immelt (@JeffImmelt) April 13, 2017, Disclosure: Tim Carney is my brother.

Thousands Flee Parts of Aleppo, Syria, as Assad’s Forces Gain Ground - The New York Times

Hwaida Saad and Nick Cumming-Bruce

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The ferocious ground assault and aerial bombardment in eastern Aleppo has forced some 16, 000 people to flee for their lives in the last few days, according to Stephen O’Brien, the United Nations under secretary general for humanitarian affairs. “The parties to the conflict have shown time and again they are willing to take any action to secure military advantage even if it means killing, maiming or starving civilians into submission in the process,” Mr. O’Brien warned on Tuesday, calling the siege of the city a “deeply alarming and chilling situation. ” On Monday, forces loyal to President Bashar captured about a third of the territory in Aleppo that had been held by rebels. Planes have dropped leaflets over the areas in the eastern part of city. “If you don’t leave these areas quickly you will be annihilated,” the leaflets warn. “Save yourselves. You know that everyone has left you alone to face your doom and have offered you no help. ” Hisham a member of a council of rebels and civilians in eastern Aleppo, said by telephone on Tuesday that warplanes had hovered closely over the area, steadily dropping barrel bombs, as a delegation of civic activists explored the idea of using safe routes to leave the city, though many were not confident they could escape with their lives. “For the civilians, they have the choice whether they want to leave or stay, but for those of us who don’t trust the regime, we have no choice,” he said through tears, adding that he did not want to leave his home. “I can’t turn my back on my city. ” Rami Jarrah, a Syrian activist and citizen journalist who is based in Turkey but regularly travels to Aleppo, said via Facebook that he did not believe that there was such a thing as safe passage. Five years into the civil war, he said, many of those remaining in eastern Aleppo are on the Assad government’s “black list,” having participated in protests or openly defied it. “All have lost loved ones or have family members who are fighting to protect the city,” he said. “The Syrian regime does not tolerate any form of opposition to its narrative, and this means that leaving eastern Aleppo through ‘safe’ passageways that have been set up by Assad’s forces is not an option for the vast majority of the population. ” He added: “Syrians would prefer to live under chaotic bombardment than be apprehended by the Syrian regime and tortured to death. Five years of people staying put even when leaving was the easiest option is sheer proof of this. ” Around 10, 000 civilians have escaped from the city’s east into western Aleppo, Jens Laerke, a spokesman for the United Nations emergency relief coordination office, told reporters in Geneva. An additional 4, 000 to 6, 000 have managed to flee to the Sheikh Maqsoud neighborhood on the northern edge of the city, he said. Russian and Syrian television channels showed people who had crossed into government territory cheering and thanking the government and complaining of bad treatment by rebels inside. In the neighborhood of Bustan where bombs rained down, Dr. Salem Abdulnasser said the medical center where he worked had notified the staff that it would close on Thursday because it was too dangerous to keep operating. Russia said it would be sending mobile hospitals to Aleppo to assist in the crisis. Russian officials also said that 80, 000 people lived in the districts retaken by the Syrian government and that they were receiving humanitarian aid but there was no footage immediately available of such operations inside the areas until Monday held by rebels. Bassem Ayoub, an activist in eastern Aleppo, said that even those sympathetic to the rebels were on the brink of despair. “I’m ready to agree to the regime’s terms — whatever they are — for the sake of stopping the killing,” he said. “People are dying by the hundreds. Everybody is ready to leave. Stop the killing. ” The United Nations appealed repeatedly for access to deliver food and medical aid to eastern Aleppo and to evacuate the wounded. Jan Egeland, the United Nations special adviser on humanitarian affairs, said last week that Russian officials had agreed verbally, and armed opposition groups in writing, to a plan submitted this month, but the agency’s plan had not received backing from Damascus and no further action had followed. United Nations officials also said that indiscriminate shelling of western Aleppo had continued killing and injuring civilians, destroying civilian infrastructure, and had forced about 20, 000 people from their homes. The World Food Program said it was able to supply bread and other rations to community kitchens in western Aleppo, but residents in the eastern parts of the city have had no food distribution for two weeks. “It’s really dire,” said Bettina Luescher, a spokeswoman for the agency, citing accounts of residents sifting through garbage for something to eat. ”It’s a descent into hell,” she said. At the same time, about 700, 000 people are trapped in besieged areas in other parts of the country, Mr. O’Brien said. As in eastern Aleppo, “people in these besieged areas are trapped, terrified and running out of time,” he said.

New York Toymaker to Sell 1st Transgender Doll Based on Transgender Teen - Breitbart

Katherine Rodriguez

A New York toy maker is set to debut what it says is the first transgender doll available on the market. [Tonner Doll Company says it will debut a doll based on transgender teen Jazz Jennings from the TLC reality series I Am Jazz at the New York Toy Fair, CBS Los Angeles reported. The company has made dolls based on a variety of characters from books and television shows, including Spiderman, Harry Potter, Doctor Who, and Wonder Woman. The toy will have a genderless plastic mold typical of most dolls, is being tested for children eight years and older, and is expected to sell for $89. 99, ABC News reported. “Jazz stands for everything I respect from a human nature point of view — she’s incredibly brave, intelligent, and creative,” said company founder Robert Tonner, who called the doll “groundbreaking. ” Jennings appeared on a Barbara Walters special at age 6. The teen, whose biological sex is male, has identified as a female from a very young age. Jennings is the youngest honoree in The Advocate Magazine’s “Top Forty Under 40” annual list and was named as one of Time magazine’s Most Influential Teens for 2014 and 2015. In 2014, Jennings a children’s picture book called I Am Jazz and also wrote a memoir called, “Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen. ”

‘Jeopardy!’ Champion Dies Before She Could See Her Triumph on TV - The New York Times

Daniel Victor

There can’t be many “Jeopardy!” champions easier to root for than Cindy Stowell. Ms. Stowell has won six times in a row on taped episodes of the quiz show that began broadcasting last week. Ms. Stowell has developed a fan base like few other contestants. But she is unable to enjoy her performance on TV, or the outpouring of love from “Jeopardy!” watchers. That’s because she died on Dec. 5, just over a week before her episodes began showing. She was 41. When the science content developer from Austin, Tex. began recording her episodes on Aug. 31, she had Stage 4 colon cancer, a fact known by only a few of the show’s staff members and the host, Alex Trebek. Her competitors were unaware. The show has not announced how long Ms. Stowell’s streak of victories will continue. A “Jeopardy!” champion continues playing until unseated by a contestant. On Tuesday, she won again, bringing her total prize money to $103, 803. Her boyfriend, Jason Hess, and her relatives Greg Stowell and Carole Stowell said in a statement, “Cindy came on ‘Jeopardy!’ to play the game she loved, and in doing so, she was able to make a contribution to cancer research in the hopes that no one else would have to go through what she did. ” The money will go to the Cancer Research Institute, according to KXAN, a TV station in Austin. “She knew she wasn’t going to be around, and so she felt like the best thing she could do was try to help do what she could to help get us to a cure faster,” Mr. Hess told the station. After passing an online contestant test early this year, Ms. Stowell was invited to an audition in Oklahoma City. At that point, she reached out to a producer. “Do you have any idea how long it typically takes between an interview and the taping date? I ask because I just found out that I don’t have too much longer to live,” she wrote, according to the show’s website. “The doctor’s best guess is about six months,” she continued. “If there is the chance that I’d be able to still tape episodes of ‘Jeopardy!’ if I were selected, I’d like to do that and donate any winnings to … charities involved in cancer research. If it is unlikely that the turnaround time would be that quick, then I’d like to give up my tryout spot to someone else. ” A producer told her to go to Oklahoma City for the interview, and if she qualified she would be booked three weeks later, the fastest turnaround possible. She competed on painkillers while fighting a blood infection, according to Mr. Hess. “Competing on ‘Jeopardy!’ was a lifelong dream for Cindy, and we’re glad she was able to do so,” Mr. Trebek said in a statement. In her first performance, she won $22, 801, defeating an editor from Vermilion, Ohio, who had won $107, 499 over seven days. She won $8, 199 in her second episode, and on Thursday she came from behind, adding $8, 600 to her total. While it’s not unusual for the show to establish back stories for the contestants, the viewers’ knowledge of Ms. Stowell’s condition “is to share a sad secret with her,” Seth Rosenthal wrote at SB Nation. “I sit in awe of a brilliant woman earning every last dollar she can for the causes dearest to her building a sum of infinite potential in the face of her own finality,” he said. “I have never rooted harder for anyone to win anything. ”

Russia Delivers Another 400 Tons of Humanitarian Aid to Donbass

Russia Delivers Another 400 Tons of Humanitarian Aid to Donbass As you can see, Moscow is continuing its 'invasion' of Ukraine Originally appeared at Sputnik Russian Emergencies Ministry’s trucks have delivered some 400 tons of humanitarian aid to eastern Ukrainian Donetsk and Luhansk, ministry’s press service said Thursday. “Over 40 trucks have arrived in Donetsk and Luhansk, carrying over 400 tons of humanitarian aid, mostly food and medicine,” the press service said. Since 2014, when the internal Ukrainian conflict erupted, Russia delivered over 64,000 tons of humanitarian aid to local residents, helping to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe.

ICE Fights Back Against Fake News on Criminal Alien Arrests

Bob Price

U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials are fighting back against false reports of checkpoints and sweeps during the ongoing operation targeting criminal (ICE) aliens. [“Reports of ICE checkpoints and sweeps are false, dangerous and irresponsible,” ICE officials wrote in a statement obtained by Breitbart Texas. “These reports create mass panic and put communities and law enforcement personnel in unnecessary danger. Any groups falsely reporting such activities are doing a disservice to those they claim to support. ” Media outlets have been reporting statements by community activists that appear to be aimed at instilling fear and false information about the ICE’s Operation Crosscheck, a program targeting criminal aliens and those with immigration court removal orders. “Our community has seen an increase of ICE activity where we have heard ICE agents are going to people’s homes and detaining people,” Cristina Jimenez, executive director of United We Dream, said, according to NBCNews. While not speaking directly to the operation, ICE officials stated, “ICE regularly conducts targeted enforcement operations during which additional resources and personnel are dedicated to apprehending deportable foreign nationals. All enforcement activities are conducted with the same level of professionalism and respect that ICE officers exhibit every day. ” “The focus of these operations is no different than the routine, targeted arrests carried out by ICE’s Fugitive Operations Teams on a daily basis,” the ICE statement concluded. News reports indicate ICE agents have arrested hundreds of criminal aliens over the past few days under this operation. Breitbart Texas reported from Austin, Texas, that 44 criminal aliens had been taken into custody this week. A Texas Congressman, Joaquin Castro ( ) confirmed the arrests were part of Operation Cross Check but questioned the threat posed by those being arrested. “I am asking ICE to clarify whether these individuals are in fact dangerous, violent threats to our communities, and not people who are here peacefully raising families and contributing to our state,” Castro said in a written statement obtained by Breitbart Texas. “I will continue to monitor this situation. ” Austin City Councilman Greg Casar added to the fear and false information about the operation by claiming the enforcement action was retaliation for standing up against President Donald Trump’s immigration plans. “I believe ICE is out in public arresting people in order to retaliate against our community for standing up for our values against people like Abbott and Trump,” Councilman Casar posted on Facebook. “Trump and his allies will do everything they can to divide Americans, invoke fear in vulnerable neighborhoods, and demonize an entire community of people. ” Breitbart California’s Michelle Moons reported ICE officials had arrested 160 illegal aliens over the past several days. Department of Homeland Security Spokesperson Gillian Christensen confirmed the arrests as part of a “routine” immigration enforcement action. President pro Tempore of the California State Senate Kevin de Leon also challenged the motivation of the operation and those being targeted for arrest. “There are reports that ICE today executed raids across Southern California,” de Leon said via a written statement obtained by Breitbart California. “I have asked federal officials to disclose how many children, men, and women they have detained what the processing time will be what the rationale is for their detention and I asked that everyone be offered access to an attorney. ” These types of rhetoric comes despite statements from ICE and DHS that the operation is part of a routinely recurring operation targeting criminal aliens. “Our operations are targeted and lead driven, prioritizing individuals who pose a risk to our communities,” ICE Spokesperson Virginia Kice told the Los Angeles Times. “Examples would include known street gang members, child sex offenders, and deportable foreign nationals with significant drug trafficking convictions. ” The operation is in several states. In addition to California and Texas, ICE officials have arrested about 200 people in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, FOX 8 News reported. “These reports show the serious consequences of the president’s executive order, which allows all undocumented immigrants to be categorized as criminals and requires increased enforcement in communities, rather than prioritizing dangerous criminals,” California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said in a statement without supporting her claims. The statement was also reported by Fox 8 News. Democrat leaders like Feinstein and Castro do not appear to have made similar protestations following this same ICE operation in March 2015. During the operation carried out under the Obama Administration, more than 2, 000 criminal aliens were rounded up for deportation in the Operation Cross Check. “This nationwide operation led to the apprehension of more than 2, 000 convicted criminal aliens who pose the greatest risk to our public safety,” Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said in a press release obtained by Breitbart Texas. “Today, communities around the country are safer because of the great work of the men and women of U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ” A full report on the 2017 Operation Cross Check, planned and scheduled during the Obama Administration, is expected to be released by ICE officials on Monday. Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for Breitbart Texas. He is a founding member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX.

Strange sounds in the air, Florida

Strange sounds in the air, Florida # alf4805 0 #paranormal The other day when i want out side my house to check the mail and see if i got anything i herd this really strange sound outside so checked it out to see where it was coming from it sounded like it was coming from everywhere it was so weird if anyone else herd this noise in Florida please let me know:) Tags

We Will Not Go Gently Into the Night: The Silent Majority Speaks

Jeremiah Johnson

This article is dedicated to one of our readers, AArizonian…keep your powder dry, Brother! – JJ ReadyNutrition Readers, the title to this piece answers a question posed by the individual that you prevented from reaching the White House, none other than Hillary Rodham Clinton. When asked by Congress whether or not it was actually an anti-Islamic film that prompted the destruction of the American Embassy in Libya, she responded with “What difference does it make?” It made all the difference in the world. Her “indifferent” masquerade was a façade to cover her wrongdoing: the allowed destruction of an American embassy, and the death of the American Ambassador to Libya and three of his staff. Undoubtedly many of you who took to the polls remembered these events. It made a difference to you, and guess what? Then you made all of the difference. I stress (as I did with a piece I recently wrote for SHTFplan.com) that the battle was won: Hillary Clinton was prevented from taking the presidency. The war is far from over to restoring our nation to a Constitutional Republic where the governors derive their just powers from the consent of the governed…that’s you and I…and making things completely right. Nevertheless, we took the first step the other night. You made all of the difference. You, stalwart patriots and preppers from all walks of life. Think of the greatness of the moment, and the moment is yours. You earned it and you’re still here, still strong, with more hope than you had the day before. Continue the fight and the work. Obama has more than enough time to bring the country down through any sort of false flag or a war (provoked from our direction). For this reason, you must continue to study, to keep informed, to keep preparing for times of trouble. Even after the Revolutionary War, the country (and our countrymen) did not relax. That musket with the powder and lead balls was required to be in every home, that “Brown Bess” hanging over the fireplace. At any given moment we may be called upon to take the same stand that they took. We are called upon to maintain the posture they held with vigilance: to be ready at all times, to defend the home and our country. You voted and did that the other night…took the stand against the tyranny that almost overtook us. Keep in mind how close it came. Clinton won the popular vote and the electoral vote was far from a landslide. We still face another almost three months with Obama in office. So what’s the point of this piece? The point is to recognize you, our readers, and to tell you that you made a difference last night…just as you make a difference here, to us at ReadyNutrition. At any time can come an EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) attack, from a foreign country either provoked or allowed…or one carried out by Obama prior to his exit from office. At any time can come a natural disaster or a war. Do not be lulled into a false sense of security. Stay vigilant as our forefathers did. We are on the tail end of 8 years of absolute agony, of destruction to our country. Strong as it was, 8 years was not enough to take it down. I receive letters from many of you from all across the country. People from near where I live, now, in Montana. People from Ohio in the Mahoning Valley, from the Great Plains of Nebraska, from the Yukon in Alaska, and the Florida Panhandle. I receive letters from Seattle, from Dallas, from New York City, and from Baltimore, where I was born and still call home. All of these letters have one thing in common: they were written by men and women such as yourselves…men and women “who will not go gently into that good night…who will not give up without a fight.” More than just preppers: survivors, patriots, and Americans. The point to this letter is to salute all of you, our readers, and thank you for being part of the ReadyNutrition family. Thank you for your diligence and efforts as you plan, prepare, and pray. Especially that last part of it. Because we have to hold the mindset of our forefathers and take an active part to preserve ourselves, our families, and our nation. I salute you, my fellow countrymen! I thank you for your letters and readership, and I thank you for voting…casting a vote to give us…our country…another chance. Stay vigilant and determined, and take care of one another. These poor words of encouragement, I pray, will be with you that you may know how important you are to Miss Tess and I and all of us here at ReadyNutrition. For [to paraphrase Frost]: Two paths diverged upon a great nation…between tyranny and freedom…and you, the nation took the path of freedom….and that made all the difference. Because you are the difference, and I thank you. May God bless you and your families in all that you do. Sincerely, JJ Jeremiah Johnson is the Nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces (Airborne). Mr. Johnson was a Special Forces Medic, EMT and ACLS-certified, with comprehensive training in wilderness survival, rescue, and patient-extraction. He is a Certified Master Herbalist and a graduate of the Global College of Natural Medicine of Santa Ana, CA. A graduate of the U.S. Army’s survival course of SERE school (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape), Mr. Johnson also successfully completed the Montana Master Food Preserver Course for home-canning, smoking, and dehydrating foods. Mr. Johnson dries and tinctures a wide variety of medicinal herbs taken by wild crafting and cultivation, in addition to preserving and canning his own food. An expert in land navigation, survival, mountaineering, and parachuting as trained by the United States Army, Mr. Johnson is an ardent advocate for preparedness, self-sufficiency, and long-term disaster sustainability for families. He and his wife survived Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Cross-trained as a Special Forces Engineer, he is an expert in supply, logistics, transport, and long-term storage of perishable materials, having incorporated many of these techniques plus some unique innovations in his own homestead. Mr. Johnson brings practical, tested experience firmly rooted in formal education to his writings and to our team. He and his wife live in a cabin in the mountains of Western Montana with their three cats. This information has been made available by Ready Nutrition Originally published November 9th, 2016 How To Survive Occupied America How Martial Law Will Lead to the Creation of the… Have a Very Merry Revolutionary War-Remembering Christmas! Emergency Survival Food Sales Soar as We Get Closer to… Why Some People Will Always Bow to Tyrants

Bridgewater, World’s Biggest Hedge Fund, Is Said to Be Slowing Hiring - The New York Times

Alexandra Stevenson and Matthew Goldstein

After years of rapid internal growth, the world’s biggest hedge fund appears to be slowing down. The $154 billion hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, run by the billionaire Ray Dalio, is known for hiring hundreds of people every year. Yet it is now telling recruitment firms to cancel interviews with prospective employees, according to three people briefed on the matter. In recent weeks, dozens of interviews were canceled and advanced negotiations with prospective employees were cut short by the firm, those people said. And some of the firm’s external recruiters have been told Bridgewater will not use them for the time being, said the people, who were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. Bridgewater emphasizes secrecy in its communication with investors and the external recruiting firms, and the people requested anonymity because they did not want their relationship with the firm to be affected. It was unclear whether the suspension of recruiting in some areas was temporary or a reflection of a new push to gradually shrink the size of the firm. At the moment, there does not appear to be any talk of layoffs. The firm employs 1, 500 people, most of them at its sprawling headquarters in Westport, Conn. Still, the signs of a pullback in recruiting at Bridgewater are emerging at a time when a number of hedge funds, struggling with poor performance and unhappy investors, are starting to cut back. For example, William A. Ackman’s $12 billion Pershing Square Capital Management, whose main fund is down 19. 1 percent this year, recently fired a dozen employees. The average hedge fund is up 1. 6 percent this year through the end of June, according to the Hedge Fund Research Composite Index, the broadest gauge of hedge fund performance. By contrast, the Standard Poor’s index is up 5. 76 percent. Bridgewater is not immune to the industry’s pressures. It has had uneven performance in its two main portfolio funds, and at least one prominent investor has pulled out a significant sum of money over the last year. The firm’s flagship Pure Alpha fund, which makes broad bets on global economic trends, is down 8. 8 percent, while its All Weather fund, which the firm contends will “perform well across all environments,” is up 10. 4 percent. But last year, those performances were reversed: The All Weather fund lost investors 6. 9 percent, while Pure Alpha gained 4. 7 percent. Over the last two years, the University of California’s Board of Regents, the endowment for the state university system in California, has withdrawn the $550 million it had invested with Bridgewater. Jagdeep Singh Bachher, the chief investment officer for the University of California regents, said in an interview that Bridgewater made money for the endowment, but that a decision was made to focus on investment strategies that would do best. He also said there were some concerns about the future direction of Bridgewater’s leadership. It has been a tumultuous year for the firm. Bridgewater publicly prides itself on what it calls “radical transparency” in its dealing with employees, but is very private about discussing its operations. The firm is in the process of reorganizing its core management committee that reports directly to Mr. Dalio, who founded Bridgewater in 1975. This year, Greg Jensen, a investment officer who was seen as the heir apparent, was removed from his role as executive after reports of a schism between him and Mr. Dalio. Bridgewater hired Jon Rubinstein, a former Apple executive who had worked closely with Steven P. Jobs, to replace Mr. Jensen. Bridgewater has publicly denied there were any internal rifts. The firm is known for its unusual culture, where employees are encouraged to question and sometimes admonish one another. Mr. Dalio encourages all employees to read “Principles,” a little white book that each is given and that includes 210 motivational tips like, “Don’t worry about looking good — worry about achieving your goals. ” Publicly, the firm attributed the management to the need to “strike the right balance” for Mr. Jensen, who Bridgewater said was balancing too much as both executive and investment officer. Mr. Dalio, who is 66, has created a core committee of managers that share top executive positions as part of a transition plan for when he retires. The firm has communicated to investors that the arrangement is part of a “planful transition from a boutique to a professionally managed institution. ” Nevertheless, it has worried some investors. “The management transition, in my view, it just didn’t feel smooth,” Mr. Bachher, of the University of California regents, said. Despite the management transition and the apparent slowdown in hiring, Bridgewater continues to plan to expand its headquarters. Connecticut has given Bridgewater $22 million in financial aid in an effort to keep the firm from moving its headquarters out of the state. The money is expected to go toward the expansion of Bridgewater’s complex in Westport as well as its facilities in Wilton and Norwalk, according to the State Bond Commission. Bridgewater recently received tentative approval from Westport town officials for its expansion plan, according to public documents filed in Westport’s town hall. The plans would include the construction of an underground parking garage and another building at the Bridgewater campus at 1 Glendinning Place, the firm’s headquarters tucked away in the woods and surrounded by streams. Its main entrance is accessible by a nondescript road.

UC Berkeley SJWS Build Human Wall to BLock White Students from Campus

PraetorianAZ

originally posted by: PraetorianAZ SJWs blocked white students from passing but granted entry to students of color. White students had to bypass the bridge by crossing a rocky stream, hopping from one stone to the next. Anyone who tried to push past the human barrier was immediately met with violence and hostility. “This is bigger than you! This is about whiteness,” the protesters cried. UC Berkeley SJWS Build Human Wall to BLock White Students from Campus Nice Video in the link. They never actually say that whites were not allowed to cross the wall but you can clearly see in the video they let people of color through while making white students walk around. Pretty nuts. One more reason I don't believe in the education system. So many self entitled 20 year old toddlers who piss and moan when life gets rough. Then take it out on whitie and the police. What a joke. If they blocked me anybody who stood in my way would be eating blended meals through a straw for the next couple of months. The average human punch can generate 178 pounds of pressure or force. It takes 10 to 13 pounds to break a nose and 40 pounds to dislocate someones jaw. I have done both and im very good at it. Then to get to class, one may need to keep a rainbow kerchief or Cherokee flag handy and play a role. SJW racists are basically dolts and can be readily outwitted.

Sunderland: ’Justice for Chelsey’ March Protests Alleged Police Inaction After Woman Reports Migrant Rape

Jack Montgomery

A march has taken place in Sunderland to protest alleged police inaction after a young mother reported being drugged, raped, and assaulted by a group of migrant men. [The mainstream press initially reported the arrest and bail of six men from Iraq, Syria, and Bahrain after local woman Chelsey Wright, 26, reported a “serious assault”. However, it is alleged the men all escaped charges and local police failed to investigate the incident properly. Absolutely amazing support for Chelsey. Watching a town come together to bring justice. Amazing!! #justiceforchelsey #Sunderland pic. twitter. — Jade (@Jadeeeyyy) May 13, 2017, In an interview with The Rebel Media’s Tommy Robinson, Ms. Wright describes waking up in a locked room with a strange man of Turkish appearance who laughed at her and banged her head against the wall when she tried to escape. Ms. Wright says she managed to get out of the room when the first man unlocked the door to let another man in, but was kicked down the stairs when she attempted to flee. She says a number of men attempted to restrain her as she made for the front door, dragging her back into the house by her hair in the presence of a witness when she got outside. @AMDWaters and Chelsea at todays #JusticeforChelsea ralley in Sunderland! pic. twitter. — Lucy Brown (@LUCY____BROWN) May 13, 2017, She was able to escape the house a second time and reach safety, and was examined at a sexual assault clinic the same day. She claims forensics yielded two semen samples, only one of which could be properly tested, as well as traces of the date rape drug Rohypnol in her blood. Chief Inspector Paul Milner described Ms Wright as having woken up “in a strange address in Peel Street with cuts and bruises” near the time of the incident. She describes “horrible” bruises around her groin, “whip marks” across the back of her legs, and her arms being “black” where she had been grabbed by the men, as well as handprints on her neck and a footprint on her back. #justiceforchelsey pic. twitter. — Tommy Robinson (@TRobinsonNewEra) April 29, 2017, Robinson appeared to corroborate part of Ms. Wright’s story speaking to a witness over the phone. The witness said she had heard screaming before looking out the window and seeing the young woman being dragged back into the house by the accused migrants, before running out again and falling down in the street, barefoot. With facing charges for the alleged attack, the Justice for Chelsey group claims the police failed to take statements from witnesses or to secure key evidence such as items of clothing lost at the house. I met Chelsey today. She’s beyond brave, she’s standing for every girl and woman raped or abused by these monsters. #JUSTICEFORCHELSEY, — Anne Marie Waters (@AMDWaters) May 13, 2017, Ms. Wright and Robinson are reported to have a petition addressed to Police and Crime Commissioner Dame Vera Baird and signed by some 50, 000 people to Sunderland Police at the end of the march. Just heard @TRobinsonNewEra Chelsey Wright personally delivered the petition to Sunderland police. https: . pic. twitter. — Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) May 13, 2017, Robinson is best known as the founder and former leader of the controversial English Defence League street protest organisation — although he left the group in 2013, citing concerns that it had been infiltrated by extremists. Another Justice for Chelsey demonstration will be held on June 10th 2017, according to his Twitter account.

Rules For Rulers (Or How The World Really Works)

Tyler Durden

The following video is a must watch, particularly in light of my post on corruption published earlier today: Democratic Senate Candidate Evan Bayh Represents Everything Broken, Corrupt and Wrong With America . It’s called “Rules for Rulers” and it brings home the point that, if we want to make the world a better place, we better understand how the world works. Enjoy... In light of what you just learned, what are the implications of the world transitioning to a more robotic and automated workforce? What will the rulers do with all the worker bees when they are no longer needed?

Obama’s Last Battle: His Legacy - The New York Times

Michael Barbaro

In the waning days of his presidency, Barack Obama is waging a final battle — not over legislation or a Supreme Court seat, but over how he will be remembered. In the latest episode of The we explore what, exactly, the Obama legacy will be. The president is aggressively telling his version, through a major speech broadcast on TV, interviews and a forthcoming book. But Donald J. Trump is telling a very different version, through tweets, speeches and news conferences. Who’s will win out? I speak with David Leonhardt, an columnist at The New York Times who chronicled the Obama administration from the start, and Jodi Kantor, a reporter whose book, “The Obamas,” was just reissued with a new preface. Our conversation explores Mr. Obama’s impact on race, health care, economic inequality and America’s place in the world. And we seek to answer a question historians may puzzle over for decades: Just how consequential was this presidency compared with past White Houses? I speak as well to former Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts about whether Mr. Obama’s relationship with Republican lawmakers had to be so adversarial, polarizing and partisan. Who was to blame? Could Mr. Obama have done more to get things done using executive orders? Mr. Frank is blunt. “Absolutely not,” he says. “You had a Republican majority in both houses that (A) was determined to undercut him politically and (B) did not care if the government was dysfunctional because they don’t like government anyway. And to the extent, by the way, that a failure for the government to perform discredited government, that was a further benefit as far as they’re concerned. ” From a desktop or laptop, you can listen by pressing play on the button above. Or if you’re on a mobile device, the instructions below will help you find and subscribe to the series. On your iPhone or iPad: 1. Open your podcast app. It’s a app called “Podcasts” with a purple icon. (This link may help.) 2. Search for the series. Tap on the “search” magnifying glass icon at the bottom of the screen, type in “The ” and select it from the list of results. 3. Subscribe. Once on the series page, tap on the “subscribe” button to have new episodes sent to your phone free. You may want to adjust your notifications to be alerted when a new episode arrives. 4. Or just sample. If you would rather listen to an episode or two before deciding to subscribe, tap on the episode title from the list on the series page. If you have an internet connection, you’ll be able to stream the episode. On your Android phone or tablet: 1. Open your podcast app. It’s a app called “Play Music” with an icon. (This link may help.) 2. Search for the series. Click on the magnifying glass icon at the top of the screen, search for the name of the series and select it from the list of results. You may have to scroll down to find the “Podcasts” search results. 3. Subscribe. Once on the series page, click on the word “subscribe” to have new episodes sent to your phone free. 4. Or just sample. If you would rather listen to an episode or two before deciding to subscribe, click on the episode title from the list on the series page. If you have an internet connection, you’ll be able to stream the episode.

Critic of Najib Razak, Malaysian Leader, Gets Prison for 1MDB Disclosure - The New York Times

Richard C. Paddock

BANGKOK — An outspoken member of Malaysia’s Parliament was sentenced on Monday to 18 months in prison for publicly disclosing classified information from an official audit into a government investment fund. A lower court ruled that the lawmaker, Rafizi Ramli, was guilty of violating the Official Secrets Act by possessing and publicizing information from the document. Mr. Rafizi, who has served in Parliament since 2013, could also lose his seat and be barred from running for office for five years. Rights advocates said the prosecution and conviction of a sitting member of Parliament for speaking publicly was unprecedented and was aimed at silencing one of the government’s most vocal critics. “The 18 months’ imprisonment sentence can only be described as harsh and excessive, all the more so as Rafizi was merely performing his role as an elected representative,” Lawyers for Liberty, a Malaysian human rights organization, said in a statement. “The conviction and sentence will create a dangerous chill on free speech and result in a more repressive, opaque and unaccountable government. ” Mr. Rafizi, a member of the People’s Justice Party, has been a leading critic of Prime Minister Najib Razak, who is accused of receiving $1 billion from 1 Malaysia Development Berhad, or 1MDB, a government investment fund that Mr. Najib established and oversaw. Mr. Najib has said that he never received any money from the fund or took anything for personal gain. The United States Justice Department says that more than $3 billion is missing from the fund and that at least $731 million of it was deposited into the personal bank account of the prime minister, identified as “Malaysian Official 1. ” The Justice Department filed suit in federal court in California in July to recover more than $1 billion in assets that it said were acquired by Mr. Najib’s stepson and close associates in the United States with money stolen from the fund, including real estate and expensive artwork. The prime minister has held on to power by firing critics within his own party, blocking investigations and suppressing dissent. No one in Malaysia has been prosecuted over the missing money. The government conducted an audit of the investment fund, which it then classified as secret under the Official Secrets Act. Mr. Rafizi’s conviction was based on comments he made at a news conference in March in which he discussed a page of the audit that dealt with the fund’s failure to make payments. Around the time of his sentencing, Mr. Rafizi posted on Twitter: “I am not shocked, sad, angry, afraid or anything. No such feelings. Just another day. Been like this. What doesn’t kill u makes u stronger. ” He did not respond to requests for comment, but associates said they expected him to appeal. Cynthia Gabriel, director of the Center to Combat Corruption Cronyism, based in Malaysia, questioned the purpose of having an audit if the findings were to be kept secret. “The Official Secrets Act is being used to hide corruption,” she said. “We need freedom of information laws to help the public monitor and bring to account powerful politicians and businesses. ” The prime minister’s office defended the prosecution of Mr. Rafizi by saying that he broke the law to make a political point and wanted to become a “political martyr. ” “He tried a cheap stunt for personal political gain, but he knowingly committed a serious crime in doing so,” said Abdul Rahman Dahlan, a minister in the office. “It is right that he pays the price — and he has only himself to blame. ” Opponents of the prime minister plan to hold a rally on Saturday in Kuala Lumpur, the capital. A similar event last year drew as many as 100, 000 people, most wearing yellow with the slogan, “Bersih,” or “clean” in Malay, despite a government ban on the garments. A court later upheld the prohibition on the grounds that the shirts posed a threat to national security. Maria Chin Abdullah, a leader of the Bersih movement, said the Official Secrets Act gives the prime minister extraordinary power to suppress potentially damaging information. “The act vests vast powers in the hands of the executive to conceal key information from public access and to decide on what constitutes ‘official secrets,’ which cannot be challenged in court on any grounds,” she said. Phil Robertson, deputy director of the Asia division of Human Rights Watch, said the conviction went further than the government’s previous steps to block criticism. “This prosecution really is unprecedented because it involves a sitting MP, and the content is the Auditor General’s annual report, which prior to this year has regularly been released to the public after being introduced in Parliament,” he said.

Berlin Report: 92 Percent of Left-Wing Activists Live With Parents, One in Three Unemployed - Breitbart

Charlie Nash

92 percent of activists in Berlin, Germany, live with their parents, while one in three are unemployed, according to a report by Bild. [The data was based off of 873 political activists, who had been investigated by authorities between 2003 and 2013. 84% of those investigated were men, while 73% were between the ages of 18 and 29. In Germany, 77% of those who considered themselves very right wing also claimed to be satisfied in bed, while 71% of very left wing people claimed to have the same sexual satisfaction. In all five participating countries (Sweden, Germany, France, Denmark, and Britain) very right wing people had the highest level of sexual satisfaction, whilst very left wing people tended to have the lowest on average. Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook.

Bad News For Hillary After Camera Caught Why She Gave Strange Men $300

Amanda Shea

Bad News For Hillary After Camera Caught Why She Gave Strange Men $300 Posted on October 31, 2016 by Amanda Shea in Politics Share This Man from video (left), Hillary Clinton thinking she got away with it (right) Hillary Clinton can’t seem to escape the karma that’s coming her way as the days are dwindling down to the election, and with each one, something else comes out against her that she can’t escape. After the FBI dropped the ball on the first investigation, they’re redeeming themselves the second time around, and now it’s out what she paid strange men $300 to do. The hits just keep on coming at Hillary. If she gets off the hook again this investigation in addition to everything WikiLeaks has released about her, then we know that there is something seriously corrupt with our government. Worse yet would be if she’s elected as president, which will force Americans to pay an exceptionally detrimental price for the next four years that could bring lasting implications. The man in this video knows who may have helped in that destructive outcome, done for a small fee that Hillary’s campaign evidently handed out like candy for this cause at a halfway house in California. MicroSpookyLeaks came forward with the footage they obtained, when they posted it to social media on Saturday which shows the unnamed person in this video admitting what Democrats were giving halfway house patients $300 to do for them. While this man in the video may not have accepted the payment himself, he’s caught saying that Democrats are giving others in the house a $300 rebate check if they vote for Hillary in the state of California. DEMS caught paying patients from a halfway house $300 rebate to vote for HRC in CA! pic.twitter.com/qpxgNt6KgR — MicroSpookyLeaks™ (@WDFx2EU7) October 29, 2016 This is just one place where cash was probably offered for votes. We can only imagine that if her party is willing to do this there, they hit up other places and people in key states to do the same. What’s particular sick about it isn’t just that they are fraudulently obtaining votes for this woman who can’t get them on her own merit, it’s that they are targeting vulnerable people to get them as part of the dishonest plan. If Hillary is able to continue on with this campaign and take the White House, Americans have the duty to demand how it happened since there’s no way she could legitimately win. Had Donald Trump been caught bribing halfway house patients for votes or any of the other dishonest deeds leaked out about Hillary lately, the media would have exiled him from the election.

Another Black Swan Hits the U.S. Presidential Election

Michael Krieger

at 1:43 pm 3 Comments By now, everyone on planet earth has heard about the bombshell news just announced by the FBI that it was re-opening its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Here’s the text of FBI head James Comey’s letter to Congressional leaders. Obviously, lots of people are out there pontificating on what, if anything, this means. As such, I’m going to add my two cents to the conversation. I’ve prided myself on unemotionally calling this election how I see it the whole time, because I’m neither a Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump supporter. Being free of the tremendous baggage that comes with cheerleading a particular candidate in this contentious election, I had consistently predicted a Trump victory until the Access Hollywood tape emerged. At that point I penned a thought-piece titled, Donald Trump is in Trouble – Part 2 , in which I changed my forecast to a Hillary Clinton victory. Here’s some of what I wrote: After watching yesterday’s audio and reading through the Wikileaks revelations, my prediction has changed for the first time this election. All things equal from here on out (meaning no additional huge revelations against Hillary), I think Hillary Clinton will defeat Donald Trump. I don’t think it’s going to be a landslide, but I think she’s probably going to win. The audio was very harmful for Donald Trump, and now I’m going to explain why. First of all, if you want to accurately forecast the outcome of this election you need to get into the minds of the masses. Just like trading financial markets, what you think is right doesn’t matter. What matters is what everyone else collectively thinks, and whether or not they’re going to get off their asses and vote. A big part of why I thought Trump would win related to the fact that I believe many people were simply looking for an excuse to vote for him. Justified disgust with the status quo in general, and Hillary Clinton in particular, pushed millions of Americans into the camp of being willing to take a gamble on Trump despite disliking him personally and disagreeing with him on many issues. I felt strongly that there were millions upon millions of Americans you could place into this category — people who were “flirting with the idea of voting Trump.” I believe a significant amount of these people will not vote for him as a result of the audio. Will it be the majority of them? Probably not, but it will be a material number and arguably enough to swing the election. No, I don’t think these voters will shift to Hillary, and no, I don’t think committed Trump voters will change their minds. However, I do think enough of these willing to be convinced, leaning-Trump types will now stay home or vote third party. It’s these voters who I expected to swing the election in Trump’s favor, and they are now unreliable. Does Trump’s vulgarity excuse the incalculable crimes of Hillary Clinton and her husband, making them preferable in this election? No it doesn’t, but that’s not the point of this article. Most voters are too superficial, too busy trying to survive and too uninformed to weigh all the very important issues rationally. As an example, think about how most conversations are going to go down this weekend. Let’s say you’re out with a bunch of friends for drinks tonight. Someone says, “so have you seen the Trump audio?” If someone in the group hasn’t, someone will pull out their phone and it’ll be watched in 3 minutes. What if someone then says, “yeah, but have you seen the leaked Hillary emails?” What will your response be? You can’t adequately explain the importance of that to your friends in 3 minutes. Instead, you’ll have to send them a lengthy article that they’ll never read. So by the end of this weekend, pretty much everyone in America will have heard the Trump audio, while maybe 10% will take the time to analyze what came out of Wikileaks. There goes your election. Understanding the craziness of the election, I finished the piece with the following. Despite all of that, I still can’t say with certainty that Hillary will win. However, I do think the landscape has changed enough, that for the first time this entire election season, I am no longer confident of a Trump victory. Then again, I was absolutely convinced that Hillary was unelectable after she collapsed on 9/11 and mislead everyone about her health, and I was wrong about that. That’s how completely crazy this election is, and there’s still a month to go. Anything can happen, particularly with the debate coming up this Sunday. So while it’s certainly not out of the question, there will have to be some very material events over the next month to put Trump back in the driver’s seat. While the Wikileaks emails have been an important factor in keeping this race close, I didn’t think they were sufficient to alter my forecast of a Clinton victory. I think the reopening of the FBI investigation is enough of a black swan to materially change the course of this race. Clinton supporters will read this and think I’m insane. They will think this because they are anticipating a landslide victory for Hillary. I never expected a landslide, so I think this news tips the election into a total tossup situation. My reasoning for the change is the same that led me to switch my forecast to Hillary after the Access Hollywood video was released. The primary reason I initially thought Trump would win related to the fact I believed enough people would be willing to vote for a person they don’t really like in order to blow up the status quo. I felt that the video recording of Trump’s vulgar commentary was enough to put those people into the absentee or third party column, despite millions of Americans looking for an excuse to vote for Trump due to the well understood awfulness of Hillary. This has changed, and voters now have the excuse they needed to vote Trump. That reason is simple. The problems with Hillary Clinton will never go away. They will always resurface or new problems will emerge, and it has nothing to do with a “vast rightwing conspiracy” (or Putin). It has to do with her. It has to do with the fact that her and her husband are career crooks, warmongers, and shameless looters of the American public. This re-opening of the FBI investigation just hammers all of that home for everyone. We know what 4 years of Hillary will look like. It’ll be Obama cronyism on steroids, plus endless investigations with a side of World War 3. I don’t think people want that, and so more Americans than the pundits realize will take a gamble on Trump. As a caveat, the above forecast assumes this new FBI investigation is not closed before November 8th. If it is, I think she’ll win. If not, I think Trump has even odds to win, if not better. Of course, with 11 days left in this crazy election, many more black swans could emerge. Stay tuned. In Liberty,

University of Lethbridge Is an Indicator that Canada Is on a Downwards Spiral: Interview with Prof. Anthony Hall

Prof. Tony Hall

If academic freedom is not to be respected in institutions of supposedly higher learning then there can be no basis for freedom of speech in environments not subject to the protections of tenure. The first to suffer the crackdown in universities will be our students. 2 Shares 1 0 0 1 Dr. Anthony J.Hall is a Professor of Globalization Studies at the in Alberta Canada. Professor Hall is the editor-in-chief of the American Herald Tribune. He is author of several books, including a two-volume publishing project at McGill-Queen’s University Press entitled “The Bowl with One Spoon”; American Empire and the Fourth World: The Bowl with One Spoon, Part I (McGill-Queen’s Native and Northern) Earth into Property: Colonization, Decolonization, and Capitalism: The Bowl with One Spoon, Part II (Mcgill-Queen’s Native and Northern Series). The Part II edition was recently selected by The UK Independent as one of the best books of 2010. The Journal of the American Library Association called Earth into Property, “A scholarly tour de force.” The books aim to set the 9/11 catastrophe and post 9/11 Wars in the context of global history, since 1492. Dr. Hall has been suspended and harshly pulled from his classroom, in mid-term without any process of arbitration: namely, for having expressed his viewpoints on Israeli crimes, calling for an open debate on the Holocaust and 9/11, despite being promoted to a Full Professor rank through a process of peer review. In an exclusive interview with Khamenei.ir Professor Hall elaborates on how academic freedom is perceived and practiced in the West: Ayatollah Khamenei has stated that “genuine freedom of thought will help the country to progress. In the absence of a free intellectual atmosphere, there can be no opportunity for growth.” How do you– as a Professor– perceive it? I reflected very self-consciously on the prospects of contributing to the progress of my country Canada when I opted in the mid to late 1970s to go to graduate school at the University of Toronto. With the great Canadian historian, J.M.S. Careless, as my Ph.D. Supervisor I made a commitment to study the history of colonial relations with the First Nations of Canada. My course of study took me in 1982 to my first appointment in the Native Studies Department at the University of Sudbury. The University of Sudbury was in those years a Jesuit-run entity. It formed the institutional seed from which the secular Laurentian University would emerge in the decades prior to my appointment there. For the next two decades I was able to work from my academic bases in Sudbury and then in Lethbridge Alberta beginning in 1990. At the invitation of the Leroy Little Bear, the Chair of the Department of Native American Studies I thus moved to the resource-rich province of Alberta. Once again I was motivated to make the transition in my professional work with the hope my I could contribute constructively to the progress of our country from an academic base in Western Canada. In my years as a young professor I took an active part in four First Nations/First Ministers conferences that took place in Ottawa between 1983 and 1987. The purpose of these conferences was to negotiate a constitutional amendment to give greater definition to the phrase, “ the existing Aboriginal and treaty rights of the Aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed.” (Section 35, Constitution Act, 1982) . MORE... The B'nai Brith and the History of the Mounting Assault on Academic Freedom in Canadian Universities Creating an Anti-Muslim Bias at a Canadian University Suspension of Tenured Professor Lacks Due Diligence Toxic Mind Control Contaminates The Public Sphere Section 35 was part of the text of the instrument facilitating the movement of authority over Canada’s constitutional structure from the British imperial Mother Country to the domestic institutions of Canadian federalism. The culmination of my contributions to the formulation of a made-in-Canada version of the Canadian constitution involved my opposition between 1987 and 1990 to what became known as the Meech Lake accord. If this political deal between Canada’s First Ministers had become constitutional law, the First Nations of Canada would have been excluded from a very powerful legal definition of Canada’s “fundamental characteristic.” In academic essays, in the mainstream media and in presentations to various legislative committees, I contributed to public awareness of the negative implications of the Meech Lake accord for fair-minded Canadians supportive of existing Aboriginal and treaty rights. More specifically I contributed to the strength of the platform from which an Oji-Cree parliamentarian by the name of Elijah Harper used his veto power in the Manitoba Legislature to block the ratification of the Meech Lake accord. Because of Elijah Harper’s actions the Meech Lake accord did not become part of Canada’s “supreme law.” I was able to contribute to discourse crucial to the progress of Canada until about the year 2000. Between 2000 and 2002 I had to adjust my work away from the activities of the Department of Native American Studies towards a field of my own making, Globalization Studies. I prepared two academic volumes to lay the academic foundation and methodological framework for my transition to a new academic role. The core focus of my emphasis on “Globalization Studies” was Indigenous peoples in encounter with colonialism globally from 1492 until the present. It is in this context and with the encouragement of my very accomplished student, Joshua Blakeney, that I began to shift focus towards the treatment of Palestinian and other Arab peoples in the region of Greater Israel, Eretz Israel. It was Joshua who also led me to my first interactions with Iranian journalists resulting in my participation in the New Horizon conference of the autumn of 2014. As I have described in writing elsewhere this episode proved to make a major positive impact on me. Due to the intervention of my colleague, the Mohawk activist Splitting The Sky, I also began to see the events of 9/11 as a major factor in the shaping of the global geopolitics in the twenty-first century. My quest for new academic turf at the has sometimes been bumpy and contested. Certainly many major obstacles were put in the way of my promotion to full professor. Eventually my academic peers were allowed to make their input into the promotion process apart from the artificial blockages thrown up by my University administration. In 2008 after what I took to be my obtaining a position of intellectual and professional security as a senior faculty member, I resolved that henceforth I would pursue difficult lines of research and publication. I made this decision with an understanding that less secure younger colleagues might eschew such a course of action. I have made no secret of the fact that I see the recent surrender of the high ground of academic freedom by the members of the administration of the as an indicator that Canada is on a downwards spiral. It seems to me there is a move a foot to sabotage the intellectual freedom of our universities. If academic freedom is not to be respected in institutions of supposedly higher learning, then there can be no basis for freedom of speech in environments not subject to the protections of tenure. The first to suffer the crackdown in universities will be our students. They will have to deal with the fact that the treatment visited on me indicates it has become dangerous to ask pointed questions which might produce answers embarrassing to power. Our country, Canada, cannot progress to higher levels of discourse and achievement under these repressive conditions. Ayatollah Khamenei believes “exchanging viewpoints and opinions are in the nature of academic work”; How is this principle practiced at Lethbridge University? I agree that exchanging viewpoints and opinions is a central aspect of academic work within universities and between universities. I found that there was a good deal of openness to the exchange of information and ideas with colleagues, media and public officials in the years between 1982 and 2001 when the core of my academic work revolved around the history of Canada-First Nations relations. Unfortunately I would have to say that the obstacles to the exchange of information and ideas began to mount significantly after 2008 when I began to question the official narrative of what happened on 9/11. Who really did what to whom during the initiating events of what soon became known as the Global War on Terror? As I began to become skeptical of the official narrative I noticed more and more inclination on the part of colleagues to distance themselves from the subjects that captured my professional interest. To put it bluntly, I suppose it became clear to me that, for a number of reasons, it was not a good career move for younger colleagues to show interest in the subject of 9/11 specifically and false flag terrorism more generally. As I began to look more deeply into the existing research on 9/11 I was simultaneously drawn to the subject of war crimes and international law. My collaboration with Splitting The Sky became more intense when we went to work to organize in response to the decision of the former US President, George W. Bush, to give a talk in Calgary in 2009 as his first public engagement as (theoretically) a regular civilian citizen. Our collective action in Calgary in the spring of 2009 led to a trial that we dubbed Splitting The Sky versus George W. Bush . Although I had not yet associated the lies and crimes of 9/11 with Israel First protagonists, I ran into my first Zionist pushback for my 9/11 studies when I presented my essay, “Should George W. Bush Be Arrested in Calgary, Alberta, To Be Tried For International Crimes?” I originally presented the paper at an invited talk at the University of Winnipeg. My essay eventually ended up as an exhibit in the litigation that we referred to as Splitting The Sky versus George W. Bush . Our stance was that the former US President should have been arrested in Canada for being a credibly-accused war criminal. We were far from alone in bringing forward evidence that Bush had violated many international covenants and conventions against, for instance, prohibited torture. Not only had he arguably violated international law but it seemed the former US President had violated Canada’s own Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act . The legislation had passed through Parliament with the view that Canada should not become a haven for war criminals. In pursuing this line of analysis I faced my first allegations that somehow my academic inquiry was anti-Semitic. As I worked on this subject, one that I integrated into my pedagogy, it became clear to me that we have never seen anything but victor’s justice when it comes to the enforcement of international law against those that commit war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes against the peace and crimes against democracy. It seems that only those on the losing side of military conflicts are ever brought to justice. Those on the “winning” side, the stronger side, are invariably held to be above the law. This line of scholarly investigation did result in various channels of academic exchange opening up for me with colleagues in my own university and other universities. The most fruitful collaboration to develop, however, was that with Dr. Kevin Barrett who had lost his academic position at the University of Wisconsin for incorporating 9/11-related subjects into his research and pedagogy. For sure I should not be made to feel so alone in the academy when it comes to the study of 9/11, the most transformative event of the twenty-first century. In my view the academic institutions in North America and Europe have failed abysmally in the study of false flag terrorism starting with the events of 9/11. I am particularly appalled by how this failure on the part of our institutions of higher learning has contributed to the rise of Islamophobia as the necessary psychological condition giving license to those promoting the invasions of Muslim-majority countries. In a meeting with President Rouhani and his Cabinet, the Leader of the Islamic Revolution said: “When it comes to caricatures insulting the sanctities of Islam, the West suddenly becomes an advocates of freedom and the freedom of expression. However, when it comes to the Holocaust, there is no freedom of expression!” Why do you think we witness such double standards? A gross display of double standards plagues the ethnocentric way “freedom” is being defined in the so-called “West.” The psychological operations attending the “We Are Charlie Hebdo” ceremonies on Paris in early 2015 epitomized the hypocrisy. The whole essence of this strange event in the city of Lights seemed to signal that “freedom of speech and expression” in the West is virtually limitless when it comes to demeaning through cartoons of Prophet Mohammed as well as other sacred symbols of Islamic religion. The other side of the same coin are the many prohibitions imposed on, for instance, the French comedian M’bala M’bala Dieudonné. Dieudonné was barred from entering Canada for his efforts to make humor of the paranoid state of affairs attending any public references to Jews, Jewish institutions or the activities of Israel these days. One of my discoveries through this period of crisis is the fact that the thought police agents in the B’nai Brith equate my call for open debate on “the holocaust,” and indeed open debate on all subjects, as the equivalent of so-called “holocaust denial.” How many of my colleagues at the and in other universities have bent before the harsh intimidation? How many have made themselves proponents of shutting down open debate and allowing censorship from outside the academy to regulate our research, teaching and publication? There is a controversial Quote: from Ayatollah Khamenei in which he says’ “May God curse all those who put an end to political thoughts, work and endeavor in universities”. What’s your take on that? How essential do you think such a perspective is for the academia? I agree wholeheartedly with the Supreme Leader’s observation. One of the great gifts of the Creator to humans is the gift of reason and rationality. Our application of reason and rationality to our understanding of society will inevitably contribute to political thought, work and endeavor. This type of applied reason should be especially vital in the work of universities where the highest level of political conception should be able to find expression, elaboration, and receptiveness. Indeed we need to make ourselves expert in Universities at making safe places for the development of political discourse. God curse us in the universities if we cannot be the home for vibrant political discourse.

Passengers Escaping Burning American Airlines Jet

Passengers Escaping Burning American Airlines Jet # Grey 0 An American Airlines plane caught fire at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, forcing passengers to evacuate on the runway. American Airlines Flight 383 departed Chicago for Miami on Friday afternoon when it blew a tire and damaged an engine, according to Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Tony Molinaro. The pilot aborted takeoff around 2:35 pm and everyone evacuated, Molinaro said. There were no injuries. Tags

MEDIA SHAME - These 65 Journalists are Now Presstitutes. Their Madam is Hillary Clinton.

carewemust

originally posted by: carewemust October 27, 2016 It's a disgrace that such prominent media people, like Wolf Blitzer, George Stephanopoulos, John King, Et al., are willing to go before millions of viewers, and shamelessly report what Hillary's campaign tells them to report. Story w/List of 65 Corrupt Journalists: thefreethoughtproject.com... It's always been obvious that CNN-MSNBC-NBC-ABC in particular, go out of their way to HELP Hillary Clinton and HURT Donald Trump. Now, thanks to the Podesta e-mails provided by WikiLeaks, we can see "behind the curtain". If mentally imbalanced Hillary becomes President, imagine the leverage she will have, to bring groups, organizations, companies, and people to their knees, if she doesn't like them! -CareWeMust Those news channels have always been Democrat. Newspapers over 100 years have picked a side and given a slant. You just notice this now? edit on 27-10-2016 by reldra because: (no reason given)

’Impartial’ BBC Uses ’Nixon Impeachment’ Dog-Whistle After Trump Fires FBI Director

Jack Montgomery

The BBC, Britain’s “impartial” broadcaster, has labelled U. S. President Donald Trump’s dismissal of FBI Director James Comey as “highly suspicious” running several articles and bulletins drawing comparisons with the Watergate scandal which brought down President Richard Nixon in 1974. [In an article on the BBC News website, titled “Did President Trump fire James Comey as part of a ?” the corporation’s senior North America reporter Anthony Zurcher speculates that “the abruptness and timing of Mr Comey’s dismissal, to put it mildly, is highly suspicious”. “While the White House has said that the move is based on concerns over how Mr Comey handled last year’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server, not many people … are buying that line,” he writes, with little further elaboration. “If the dismissal was because of the email investigation, why act now?” he asks. Zurcher does, however, acknowledge that many of the Democrat politicians “howling” over Comey’s dismissal, such as Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, had previously called for the director to be axed when he announced an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s leaked emails was being reopened during the 2016 presidential election. Democrats were calling for Comey’s firing until Trump actually did it. pic. twitter. — Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) May 10, 2017, In another article from 6 March, with the provocative title, “Echoes of Watergate resurface as links probed” the BBC provided a space for a number of individuals to cast aspersions at President Trump and his Jeff Sessions. The article quotes former Nixon lawyer John Dean as a “prominent voice” who believes he has “been hearing echoes of Watergate ever since this presidency started” accusing the of “dissembling”. It also states that “Russia is believed to have wanted Mr Trump to win the election [and an] unverified report apparently compiled by a private intelligence firm claimed Russia had compromising information on Mr Trump and was in a position to blackmail him” providing little in the way of explanation. It immediately follows up by pointing out that “some commentators” such as George W. Bush’s ethics lawyer Richard Painter “now fear the Russian connection could make Watergate seem trivial”. FUN FACT: President Nixon never fired the Director of the FBI #FBIDirector #notNixonian pic. twitter. — RichardNixonLibrary (@NixonLibrary) May 9, 2017, The article offers nothing in the way of countervailing opinion until its conclusion, in which it briefly discusses a tweet from President Trump in which he accuses Barack Obama of having tapped his phones. However, in contrast to its coverage of individuals speculating negatively on the president’s motives for dismissing Comey, the BBC is quick to point out that the claims are only an “allegation” for which “Mr Trump has not provided evidence”.