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HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwean police arrested activist pastor Evan Mawarire of the #ThisFlag movement as he stepped down from his pulpit, accusing him of subversion for a series of social media posts that charged Robert Mugabe s government had wrecked the economy, his lawyer told Reuters on Sunday. Lawyer Harrison Nkomo said Mawarire was arrested and charged with subversion, which carries a maximum term of life imprisonment, for a Facebook video he posted on Saturday lambasting the government over its economic policies. Over the last few days, shortages of basic goods and fuel have emerged, resulting in panic buying by consumers. Prices of imported products are also going up, which businesses blame on shortages of foreign exchange. Mawarire has been at the heart of a protest movement against Mugabe s 37-year rule. In 2016, he led a stay-at-home demonstration that resulted in the first of his now three arrests for what the state says are attempts to overthrow the government. Mawarire was already due to face trial of subversion over the 2016 protests at a High Court trial on Monday. He is due to appear in court tomorrow on subversion charges emanating from last year. So we really don t know how the state will proceed, said Nkomo. Press and social media reports, including Mawarire s post, on shortages of basic goods and foreign exchange were meant to cause alarm in the country, said Ignatius Chombo, minister of home affairs, the ministry in charge of the police, said in a statement. Government is closely monitoring the press and social media reports in question with a view to taking decisive action to deal a telling blow to the perpetrators of the crime in terms of the laws of the country s justice system, Chombo said. A statement on the website of the United States embassy in Harare published on Friday said it would be monitoring the pastor s trial, and called for an end to arbitrary arrests and intimidation for political purposes. Mugabe, 93, has held power since independence from Britain in 1980. He is under mounting pressure from angry Zimbabweans, as well as his war veterans allies, who last year rebuked him as a manipulative dictator and called for him to step down. | 0 |
Americans watched in horror as live chopper video showed a massive group of Antifa thugs chasing down a lone Trump supporter like a pack of hungry wolves. Once they finally caught the Trump supporter, they surrounded him and began to beat him mercilessly. There were no police in sight.We had an exclusive conversation with a Bernie Sanders supporter who is also a Berkeley resident, who was beaten bloody after feeling compelled to step in help and defend the free speech rights of Trump supporters. The Sanders supporter was shocked to see that one of the Soros supported, Antifa thugs who attacked him was a woman. Although he didn t agree with everything they stood for, he still believed they had the right to free speech and that the Antifa thugs, Black Lives Matter and BAMN (By Any Means Necessary) had no business using violence or the threat of violence to silence them.Watch how the tough woman who was wearing a mask, responded to the Berkeley police officers who, according the Bernie Sanders supporter we talked to, had mostly moved to the perimeter of the violence and were allowing it to happen. For anyone who has a hard time believing that women are a part of this violent group, watch this disgusting thug cry like a baby while disrespecting the Berkeley police officers who arrested her.***LANGUAGE WARNING***A member of ANTIFA screams for her service animal. Probably shouldn't be out rioting if you need a service animal. pic.twitter.com/V3wuVn08lo Based Monitored (@BasedMonitored) August 28, 2017Here s another video showing a tough female Antifa thug flexing her muscles from behind a mask: https://twitter.com/LeighMartinezTV/status/901897070092574721Antifa thugs beat, and then poured urine on the small group of Trump supporters who came out to support a Trans woman in MLK Park who organized a rally for peace.#Antifa beat and pour urine on Trump supporter at #Berkeley. pic.twitter.com/OHYS6YN8L6 Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) August 27, 2017 | 1 |
Neil Cavuto faced off with Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee over her call for President Trump to resign after his tweets attacking Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough: Enough is ENOUGH! @realDonaldTrump you need to resign! This woman is just hateful! She claims to know Trump is unhappy GMAFB!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKPPzMPRrNYThis woman is a perfect example of the SWAMP in DC. She needs to go! She s mooched off of the American people for way too long and is a hateful racist!She says in the video above that she s gone through impeachments before, but said, We can t wait that long. It is time for you to resign. Enough is enough. I love America. I love these people. And we need a Commander-in-Chief. Cavuto confronted her about this and brought up the coarse language from presidents past. She argued that he is incompatible with the office, and in addition to issues like Russia and James Comey, his continuous assault on women only adds to it.She called Trump ill-suited for the office, and when Cavuto pressed her further by saying let the American people decide, the congresswoman responded by pointing to the President s low poll numbers.Jackson said she s going by his behavior in decrying his unfitness for office and Cavuto shot back by saying she just doesn t like him.They kept going back and forth, including on the question of the 25th amendment, and Cavuto asked her if she should be waiting for more evidence of something actionable.Jackson Lee said impeachment is a separate matter, telling Cavuto, I hope he does the right thing and resigns. And yes, she is completely standing by this: I will not back down. The President has lost the trust of the American people and needs to resign. WWE KNOW THIS WOMAN HAS A LONG HISTORY OF BULLYING PEOPLE. PLEASE WATCH THE VIDEO BELOW OF AN EXCHANGE WITH MICK MULVANEY HE GETS INTO IT WITH HER:Mick Mulvaney is one smart cookie. He s doing a fantastic job cutting where cuts need to be made. Congress will complain about ANY cut to their voter base s favorite item. Listen to the grandstanding from Jackson-Lee on cuts to medicaid: They are begging for their medicaid The Grandstanding is so sickening!It went downhill from there. Jackson-Lee wanted to try and make Mulvaney out to be an uncaring guy. She s a total bully!HE S ONE SMART COOKE! MULVANEY JUST GAVE DETAILS OF THE BUDGET CUTS IN A FANTASTIC PRESS CONFERENCE. WE HIGHLY RECOMMEND THE ENTIRE VIDEO BELOW: Office of Management and Budgets (OMB) Director Mick Mulvaney outlines the structure, intents and purposes of the Trump administration Fiscal Year 2018 Budget The Taxpayers Budget The best part of this great news conference is when a reporter asks about cuts to climate science programs : At the 17:00 mark Mick Mulvaney rips into the reporter and it s just awesome!We recommend the entire video because you ll see Trump hired one smart cookie! Mick Mulvaney knows the budget and handles the press beautifully! | 0 |
The Left s suppression of speech and viewpoints by conservatives has never been more dangerous. Let s hope this new administration is able to reverse this very scary trend. I prayed for the best leader that will turn this country that has become more violent and racist under the Obama administration than ever into the America I once knew , she wrote in a post that was later deleted. I hate to say it but the number of African Americans killing one another far outweighs the number of them being killed by whites , she said. | 0 |
They laughed at us when we said @realDonaldTrump would win This morning they're too devastated to get out of bed.#MAGA #TrumpTrain pic.twitter.com/A0xApdid7K Harlan Z. Hill (@Harlan) November 9, 2016 | 1 |
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (Reuters) - Alabama Governor Robert Bentley resigned on Monday after pleading guilty to two misdemeanors related to campaign finance violations and linked to his relationship with a former adviser, ending a year-long scandal that has enveloped the state’s government. The guilty pleas were part of an agreement with prosecutors that called for him to step down, said Ellen Brooks, special prosecutor appointed by the state Attorney General Steve Marshall to investigate Bentley. “I have decided it is time for me to step down as Alabama governor,” said Bentley at a news conference in the state capital of Montgomery, adding that his service “was a calling that God placed on my life.” He said he would work with his replacement, Lieutenant Governor Kay Ivey, who was sworn in as governor about an hour after his resignation. Ivey, a Republican, becomes the second woman to serve as Alabama’s governor after Lurleen Wallace, wife of George Wallace, who served from January 1967 until her death in May 1968. “The Ivey administration will be open, it will be transparent, and it will be honest,” Ivey said during a short speech after her swearing in by the minister at her Montgomery Baptist church. “What we have done today is to put an end to this administration,” Brooks told reporters. “It states to all of us that no one is above the law, even the governor.” The Alabama Ethics Commission last week found Bentley probably violated ethics and campaign finance laws after it completed an investigation into allegations that he used public funds to conceal his relationship with Rebekah Mason, a senior adviser who later resigned. It accused Bentley of ordering law enforcement officers to track down recordings that suggested he had had an affair with Mason and accused him of retaliating against an official who discovered the relationship. Bentley has denied having a physical relationship with Mason, who is married, and had repeatedly vowed not to resign, saying he had done nothing illegal. His marriage of 50 years also ended as the scandal unfolded. In his statement on Monday, Bentley apologized for his actions, but did not mention a relationship with Mason. He was charged with misuse of campaign funds and failure to file campaign financial reports on a timely basis. After his guilty pleas, an Alabama judge ordered Bentley to serve one year of unsupervised probation, make restitution and give up his retirement benefits from the state. He also agreed not to run for another political office, Brooks said. After Bentley agreed to the deal, the Alabama House Judiciary Committee suspended hearings which began on Monday that could have led to his impeachment. During the hearing, Bentley told several top aides “what happens in the governor’s office stays in the governor’s office,” Jack Sharman, the committee’s counsel, said regarding allegations regarding his relationship with Mason. | 1 |
Ohio Gov. John Kasich on Tuesday announced he will join the 2016 Republican primary race for the White House, telling voters he has the “skills and experience” to restore the American dream.
“I am here to ask you for your prayers, your support, your efforts because I have decided to run for president of the United States,” said Kasich, a two-term governor who also spent 18 years in Congress.
The 63-year-old Kasich became the 16th GOP candidate -- and perhaps not the last -- when he declared his candidacy at the Ohio State University.
“The American Dream is pivotal to the future of our country,” he said. “But I have to tell you, a lot of people are not sure that dream is still possible, not sure that dream is still alive. … I have the skills and experience” to restore that dream.
Kasich, known for his bluntness, was overwhelmingly re-elected last year to a second term as governor, winning bipartisan support for cutting taxes and improving the state economy.
Prior to becoming governor, Kasich served in the U.S. House from 1983 to 2001, where in 1995 he ascended to chairman of the chamber’s Budget committee. In 1997, he helped seal a federal balanced budget deal.
Kasich also made a White House bid in 2000, but dropped out before the Iowa Straw Poll.
"He's certainly going to be a viable candidate," Republican campaign strategist Ed Rollins told FoxNews.com on Monday. "No one's more qualified than he is. No one has more knowledge about the federal government. ... He was an extraordinary governor."
Kasich enters the race facing long odds. But he will likely use the situation to his advantage -- telling voters he understands tough challenges, considering he was the only Republican elected to Congress in 1982, and that he's eager to lead the fight for the middle class.
He was also the youngest person to be elected to the Ohio Senate, when he won a seat in 1979 as a 26-year-old.
On Monday, Kasich was ranked No. 12 among the top 15 GOP candidates with 1.5 percent of the vote, according to an averaging of polls by the nonpartisan website RealClearPolitics.com. Former New York Gov. George Pataki is not listed in the poll average. Former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore is also expected to enter the GOP race.
No Republican has won the White House without carrying Ohio.
Kasich, a former Fox News Channel commentator, is now one of four governors in the GOP field -- joining New Jersey’s Chris Christie, Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker.
One of his biggest challenges will be getting into the top tier of Republican candidates to qualify for some early debates. And he must convince primary voters who question his conservative credentials that his decision to expand ObamaCare in Ohio was a moral imperative to help the poor.
"John Kasich’s decision to expand Medicaid in Ohio in 2013 was a costly mistake,” said David McIntosh, president of Club for Growth. “Medicaid enrollment in Ohio has far outpaced Kasich’s projections and more than doubled in cost. The Club for Growth is concluding its research into Kasich’s broader record on issues of economic freedom. But, our presidential white paper on the Ohio governor will, no doubt, warn of the long-lasting consequences from his decision to burden Ohio with an ever-growing price tag for Medicaid expansion.”
Unions that turned back an effort by Kasich and fellow Republicans to limit public workers' collective bargaining rights say Kasich's successes have come at a cost to local governments and schools, and that new Ohio jobs lack the pay and benefits of the ones they replaced. They plan a protest outside Tuesday's launch.
Kasich’s parents were killed by a drunken driver in 1987, an event that purportedly strengthened his religious faith. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Ohio State in 1974.
As a freshman political science major in 1970, he audaciously wrote a letter that landed him a 20-minute audience with President Richard Nixon.
New Day for America, the group supporting Kasich's White House bid, recently said it has raised more than $11.5 million in just over eight weeks.
That's in line with several of the better known Republican presidential contenders, though former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush's team recently announced a fundraising haul exceeding $114 million.
The Associated Press contributed to this report. | 0 |
0 comments She arrived almost two hours late but still had time to act like this? Is she melting down before our eyes? Hillary Clinton was late to yet another rally. This time, in Arizona, she showed up one hour and forty five minutes late and eventually took the stage almost two hours late. Aside from her tardiness, a number of other bizarre observations are causing people to ask questions: She is finally on stage. Voice raspy. 8:15. That alone suggests serious issues with her campaign. 1 hour 45 minutes late. #HillaryInAZ
â Audit The Media đđ¸ (@AuditTheMedia) November 3, 2016
Raspy voice? Are there more health concerns or is the stress getting to her? Perhaps lack of sleep…
Again, people are asking questions about the mystery man who follows Hillary around: Hillary’s Handler? Brain washer? pic.twitter.com/5lsCTc8Vdk
â Mike Cernovich đşđ¸ (@Cernovich) August 7, 2016
Other reports says that she was yelling in a bizarre manner, but we are used to that.
Perhaps most telling is her pre-speech behavior.
She is clearly pacing and viewers are noticing a nervous smile, as if she cannot sit still and is trying to convince herself that everything is ok. If you watch closely, you will see her speaking, presumably to the people around her, then swatting one hand in the air in a strange way.
It looks as if she is using all of her self-control just to keep it together.
Watch and decide for yourself. Make sure to study her facial expressions and the swatting of her arm.
It is easy to understand why she is stressed. The long, controversial Presidential Campaign of 2016 is winding down, the FBI is mounting multiple investigations of her and her family, and her best friend and top assistant, Huma Abedin, is likely spilling the beans on everything she knows. It is likely that Abedin and her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner, are cutting some sort of deal with authorities.
All the while, the FBI is digging through 650,000 emails.
Stressful indeed. | 1 |
CNN Reports Three members of the legal team known to have been hired so far by special counsel Robert Mueller to handle the Russia investigation have given political donations almost exclusively to Democrats, according to a CNN analysis of Federal Election Commission records. | 1 |
According to The Independent, people who support the regime in Syria are sharing pictures of food on social media in an attempt to taunt starving civilians trapped in a town currently being bombed in Syria. The town of Madaya, a holdout for opposition forces, has been held under siege for six months by the Syrian government. The famine has become so bad that locals report that there are no more cats or dogs left in the area. The local population has even resorted to eating the leaves off from trees in an attempt to curb their hunger. As many as 400,000 people may be living in the same situation in 15 cities across Syria.So, some sick f**ks decided to taunt the locals with pictures of food.# _ _ _ pic.twitter.com/75Yoq8w5Xm Ivan Sidorenko (@IvanSidorenko1) January 8, 2016https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1554575578194629&set=a.1379661612352694.1073741829.100009266045668&type=3&theaterhttps://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1648692928716624&set=a.1378524129066840.1073741827.100007277976718&type=3&theaterThe number of people who have starved to death in Madaya is unknown, though some say the death toll could be as high as 41 people. Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) reports that 23 people have died of starvation since the siege began.The # _ _ _ (solidarity with the siege of Madaya) has garnered sharp criticism from people online.This hashtag # _ _ _ on Facebook is one of the lowest points on Social media.. pic.twitter.com/S7IPbhqCxk Omar Al Shirazi (@Abriel2twit) January 8, 2016people using # _ _ _ to share pics of their meals are fucking scum a// (@hzlhrst_) January 9, 2016On Thursday, it was announced that humanitarian agencies would be allowed to send in a convoy of supplies to help that are trapped, and facing starvation in the town of Madaya, and elsewhere throughout Syria.The famine in Syria has been largely ignored by the international media. Photos and videos of Syrians, including children, started popping up online causing more people to pay attention to the crisis. Below is a video that shows some of the children who have become emaciated because of the famine.The Guardian reports on the video saying: The man recording this video footage, who is reported to be a nurse, says he is at a hospital in the besieged Syrian town of Madaya on Wednesday 6 January. The footage, which shows two severely malnourished children Hana (seven months) and Mohamed (age unknown) was published by the non-profit Syrian American medical society on its Facebook page. Featured Image Credit: Screenshots via Facebook and Twitter | 1 |
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson suggested Sunday that Congress would be jeopardizing national security if it withholds his agency’s funding to undermine President Barack Obama’s executive action shielding millions of illegal immigrants from deportation. The administration is appealing a federal court’s ruling that blocked the executive order.
“There are some who want to defund our executive actions and do it in a way that holds up the entire budget of homeland security for this nation. That is unacceptable from a public safety, homeland security view,” Mr. Johnson said on Fox News Sunday. Without congressional action, DHS funding expires Friday at midnight. | 0 |
Before departing for Puerto Rico, Donald Trump hurled an insult at the island, then after landing in the U.S. territory, he continued to embarrass the rest of us. After telling Puerto Ricans whose lives have been devasted by two hurricanes that they are throwing the budget out of whack, Trump praised officials on the island with the exception of the Mayor of San Juan, in order to continue his war on Carmen Yul n Cruz.As Trump entered Calvary Chapel, cheers rang out from the crowd, according to The Hill. There were signs in the room which read Let s Make Puerto Rico Great Again and God bless You, Mr. President, according to a pool report. There are no signs like that visible from the video which captured the former reality show star throwing rolls of paper towels out to the desperate hurricane victims. It s possible, but I just haven t run across any yet online.It s as if Trump thought he was in a Mardi Gras parade, tossing out beads and doubloons to the crowd.While standing behind a table of supplies, Trump said, There s a lot of love in this room, a lot of love. At that point, Trump handed out a few packages of rice to the crowd, then picked up packaged rolls of paper towels and threw them into the crowd as if he was practicing shooting basketball hoops.A few of the rolls were caught by people in the crowd while another fell to the ground.Watch:.@realDonaldTrump entrega suministros durante su visita a la isla. #TrumpPuertoRico #hurac nMar a pic.twitter.com/aAsND3HRd6 El Nuevo D a (@ElNuevoDia) October 3, 2017It s as if Trump thought he was starring in a game show.Yes, he really did throw paper towels at the church crowd in PR. (Photos: AP & Reuters) pic.twitter.com/mr9dF5eVBk David Martosko (@dmartosko) October 3, 2017I suppose we should be thankful that Trump didn t hand out bags of rice to the victims, then jerked one back if the person didn t quickly grab it. Too slow! You can t have it now! But we don t want to give him any ideas. He would probably consider it to be a challenge.Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images. | 0 |
Kim Severson is filling in for Sam Sifton, who emails readers of Cooking five days a week to talk about food and suggest recipes. That email also appears here. To receive it in your inbox, register here. Hello, besties. I think this newsletter thing is going really well so far, don’t you? Since there is no one left in New York in August, except the people who stay because they can get a parking space, none of my bosses seem to care that I am just doing whatever I want in this space. Of course, you care. And I love you for it. This is the day we like to cook without a recipe. A day sans receta, as El Bloombito would say if he were a cook. A recent meal built from fresh field peas, marinated cucumbers and tomatoes, plus an impromptu snack of radishes that spent a couple of hours in red wine vinegar, cayenne and salt, got me thinking about why vinegar is really an unsung savior as summer produce plays out. You can combine it with olive oil and garlic to marinate a pork tenderloin or chicken breasts, which gets you into Sam Sifton’s spiedie territory. It can dress any number of leftover steamed vegetables (or try a technique J. Kenji discussed on “The Splendid Table”). Or you could do what Nina Bernstein, a New York Times investigative reporter, does when she is not unearthing the sad things that happen to cadavers in New York. She learned the technique from her mother, and she uses it almost daily for her salad. Mash garlic and kosher salt together in a wooden bowl, add a dollop of Dijon mustard and a splash or two of vinegar (she uses balsamic). Stirring steadily and rapidly, slowly pour in a thin stream of olive oil. Adjust the salt and acid. Pile some dry, sturdy lettuce into the bowl. You can keep it in the refrigerator until you are ready to serve. Then toss it all together. “Tossing well is crucial,” she said. “When you think it’s well tossed, toss some more. ” That salad would be great with a bowl of steamed mussels from David Tanis, or steamed clams à la Sifton, or a piece of fish from the steady hand of Martha Rose Shulman. Sometimes you just need a bowl of pasta. Mark Bittman has a good puttanesca, which you can probably make from the pantry. Or you could go deep in the vault and make Pierre Franey’s skirt steak with lentils. Throw in some roasted carrots with parsley and thyme, which went nuts on our Facebook page over the weekend, and you’re golden. Now, for something sweet. I was on a work road trip that took me deep into Alabama’s peach country last week, and I had some great homemade peach ice cream at Durbin Farms Market in Chilton County. It was the kind where the chunks of peach are frozen inside some deeply creamy vanilla ice cream. Don’t be jelly! (As women should never say.) Here’s a peach ice cream recipe from my Southern sister Julia Reed. And if you want to approximate the experience with ice cream, here’s a recipe for butterscotch peaches. I do want to remind you that soon we will be staring down the barrel of a turkey. Here at Recipe Central we are already planning for Thanksgiving. We want to hear stories from your table, with an eye toward the immigrant traditions that have crossed over to the most American of meals. Please take a moment to tell us. And if you’re feeling especially chatty or you’re in the weeds on something contact us at cookingcare@nytimes. com. You can find me at me on Twitter @kimseverson, on Instagram at kimseverson or NYT Cooking at Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest. On Friday we’ll share some of the best tips from the flood of help you sent to Erin C. our reader with a breakfast problem I mentioned on Monday. In the meantime, here’s something from my day job for your reading pleasure: a dispatch from Tucson, a robust food town. I’ll be back inside your head Friday. | 0 |
COX S BAZAR, Bangladesh (Reuters) - Myanmar security forces intensified operations against Rohingya insurgents on Monday, police and other sources said, following three days of clashes with militants in the worst violence involving Myanmar s Muslim minority in five years. The fighting - triggered by coordinated attacks on Friday by insurgents wielding sticks, knives and crude bombs on 30 police posts and an army base - has killed 104 people and led to the flight of large numbers of Muslim Rohingya and Buddhist civilians from the northern part of Rakhine state. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is deeply concerned by reports that civilians have been killed in Rakhine state and appealed for neighboring Bangladesh to allow fleeing Rohingya to seek safety, his spokesman said on Monday. Many of those fleeing are women and children, some of whom are wounded, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said in a statement. (The Secretary-General) calls for humanitarian agencies to be granted unfettered and free access to affected communities in need of assistance and protection. The United Nations stands ready to provide all necessary support to both Myanmar and Bangladesh in that regard, Dujarric said. The violence marks a dramatic escalation of a conflict that has simmered since October, when a similar but much smaller series of Rohingya attacks on security posts prompted a brutal military response dogged by allegations of rights abuses. The treatment of about 1.1 million Muslim Rohingya in mainly Buddhist Myanmar has emerged as the biggest challenge for national leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who has condemned the attacks and commended the security forces. The Nobel peace laureate has been accused by some Western critics of not speaking out on behalf of the long-persecuted minority, and of defending the army s sweep after the October attacks. The Rohingya are denied citizenship in Myanmar and classified as illegal immigrants, despite claiming roots there that go back centuries, with communities marginalized and occasionally subjected to communal violence. Now the situation is not good. Everything depends on them - if they re active, the situation will be tense, said police officer Tun Hlaing from Buthidaung township, referring to the Rohingya insurgents. Rohingya villagers make up the majority in the area. We split into two groups, one will provide security at police outposts and the other group is going out for clearance operation with the military, he said. A Buthidaung-based reporter, citing police sources directly involved in events, said three police posts in northern Buthidaung had been surrounded by Rohingya insurgents. Many houses had been burning since Sunday in parts of neighboring Maungdaw town, another journalist and a military source in Maungdaw told Reuters. A Rohingya villager in the area said the army attacked three hamlets in the Kyee Kan Pyin village group with shotguns and other weapons, before torching houses. Everything is on fire, he said by phone. Now I m in the fields with the people, we re running away. A military source in Rakhine state confirmed that houses were burned in the area but blamed the insurgents, who he said opened fire when soldiers came to find them and clear landmines. The insurgents fled, he said, adding there were no casualties. The Myanmar military reported clashes over the weekend involving hundreds of insurgents, taking the death toll to at least 104, the majority militants, plus 12 members of the security forces and several civilians. There were no official updates from the army or the government on Monday. The unrest has exposed the dark side of Myanmar s historic opening: an unleashing of ethnic hatred that was suppressed during 49 years of strict military rule that ended when the generals stepped back from direct rule in 2011. The following year, hundreds of people, most of them Rohingya, were killed in communal clashes in Rakhine state and about 140,000 people were displaced. In neighboring Bangladesh on Monday, border guards tried to push back refugees stranded in no man s land near the village of Gumdhum. Reuters reporters have heard gun fire from the Myanmar side in the last three days. A Bangladesh foreign ministry official told reporters Bangladesh was willing to work with Myanmar to crack down on the insurgents. The main purpose is to ensure Myanmar can t accuse us of harboring them to use against them, said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly to media. An Islamist group called the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, which Myanmar has declared a terrorist organization, claimed responsibility for the Friday attacks. It was also behind the violence in October. In a video posted online on Monday, ARSA leader Ata Ullah, flanked by two gun-toting men in masks, warned Myanmar against oppressing Rohingya and vowed to keep fighting to protect the rights of the community. Rohingya have been fleeing Myanmar since the early 1990s and there are now about 400,000 in Bangladesh, which has said no new refugees will be allowed in. Bangladeshi police threatened refugees already in the country with arrest if they help new arrivals, refugee sources said. How can we go back there? Just to get killed? asked Mujibur Rahman, standing on the border. Nevertheless, an estimated 5,000 people have crossed into Bangladesh in the past few days, with more than 1,000 coming early on Monday, according to Rohingya refugees in camps in the border district of Cox s Bazar. Myanmar has urged Rohingya civilians to cooperate with security forces, assuring those with without ties to the insurgents they would not be affected. The government has evacuated thousands of non-Muslim villagers from the north of Rakhine state to towns, monasteries and police stations. About 500 people arrived in the state capital, Sittwe, on Monday, the government said. A lot of Kalar were coming and we had to run away, said Nyo Nyo Win, 52, using a racial slur for Rohingya. They followed us and we ran and ran. (For a graphic on Myanmar's ethnic groups click tmsnrt.rs/2wY3MSQ) | 0 |
Caleb Keeter, a lifelong proponent of the Second Amendment, and guitarist for Texas country outfit the Josh Abbott Band has had a strong change of heart regarding gun control. What changed his stance was the events of last night in which a gunman opened fire killing 58 people and injuring 515 others, marking it as the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. While thoughts and prayers are offered by the masses after each deadly shooting, Keeter took it a step further, posting a lengthy message on Twitter to express his personal thoughts after the attack.Keeter, who survived the attack, wrote, I ve been a proponent of the 2nd amendment my entire life. Until the events of last night. I cannot express how wrong I was. We actually have members of our crew with [Concealed Handgun Licenses], and legal firearms on the bus, Keeter continued. They were useless. We couldn t touch them for fear police might think we were part of the massacre and shoot us. A small group (or one man) laid waste to a city with dedicated, fearless police officers desperately trying to help, because of access to an insane amount of fire power.Enough is enough.Writing my parents and the love of my life a goodbye last night and a living will because I felt like I wasn t going to live through the night was enough for me to realize that this is completely and totally out of hand. These rounds were just powerful enough that my crew guys just standing in close proximity of a victim shot by this f ing coward received shrapnel wounds.We need gun control RIGHT. NOW. My biggest regret is that I stubbornly didn t realize it until my brothers on the road and myself were threatened by it. We are unbelievably fortunate to not be among the number of victims killed or seriously wounded by this maniac.pic.twitter.com/0NFjHf3PW2 Caleb Keeter (@Calebkeeter) October 2, 2017Some Twitter users wondered about his change of heart. Why now instead of when a gunman opened fire in 2012, slaughtering twenty first-graders and six adults at the Sandy Hook elementary school.On Twitter user wrote, It s frustrating that some don t call the fire dept until the blaze is at their own front door. But we need more ppl on our side. Welcome. Caleb admitted that he s done nothing about gun violence which has rocked our country for years, but said he would like to do something now. You are all absolutely correct, he tweeted. I saw this happening for years and did nothing. But I d like to do what I can now. You are all absolutely correct. I saw this happening for years and did nothing. But I'd like to do what I can now. https://t.co/5mYA7D90X3 Caleb Keeter (@Calebkeeter) October 2, 2017In another tweet, he wrote, That being said, I ll not live in fear of anyone. We will regroup, we ll come back, and we ll rock your fu*king faces off. Bet on it. It s OK to be for the Second Amendment and for gun control. Keeter has a set of brass balls to come out publicly like that in support of gun control as the country music industry has close ties with the National Rifle Association.Image via YouTube screen capture. | 0 |
Fox News Senior Judicial Analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano discusses whether it s unlawful for the U.S. to pay Iran $400 million as ransom. | 1 |
ANKARA (Reuters) - Iran has banned the transportation of refined crude oil products by Iranian companies to and from Iraq s Kurdistan region, the semi-official Tasnim news agency said on Friday, after Tehran vowed to stand by Baghdad following the region s vote for independence. A directive by the Road and Transportation Organization has temporarily banned carrying oil products from Iran to Iraq s Kurdistan region and vice versa following the latest developments in that region, Tasnim reported. Iraq s Kurds overwhelmingly backed a call for independence in a referendum on Monday, defying neighboring countries which fear the vote could lead to renewed conflict in the region. A ban on international flights into Iraq s Kurdish region was being imposed on Friday after the Baghdad government retaliated against the vote. Almost all foreign airlines suspended flights to Erbil and Sulaimaniya, obeying a notice from the government in Baghdad, which controls Iraqi air space. Iran, which has its own Kurdish minority, had already halted flights to and from Kurdish regions on Sunday. | 1 |
In what is seriously turning into a bromance for the ages, Donald Trump is now apparently turning into New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie s sugar daddy. Instead of a regular old campaign appearance like he s been doing across the nation, at one rally stop in New Jersey at the Lawrenceville National Guard Armory Trump will be charging $200 per person to raise money for Christie s debt from his failed presidential campaign.If that sounds weird, it s because it is. Trump is now doing pretty substantial favors for Christie and it definitely makes one wonder what s up.Political science professor Brigid Harrison from Montclair State University said: This is really unique in its character. This is akin to Hillary Clinton holding a rally to pay off Bernie Sanders debt, or to Barack Obama holding a rally to pay off Hillary Clinton s debt in 2008. And while it wouldn t be unusual if Trump had thrown a fundraiser for the explicit purpose of helping out Christie, doing so with a rally is found to be very odd by experts.And according to NJ.com: Trump will also appear at a second, private fundraiser Thursday for New Jersey s Republican Party, which still has $525,000 in debt related to legal bills from the George Washington Bridge scandal that engulfed Christie s administration. Tickets for that event: $25,000. Looks as though Trump is really starting to embrace the Republican party and now realizes the need for donations and contributors. All this while he still claims to be an outsider, but looks to be squirming his way into the infamous establishment likely noting it s in his best benefit moving forward towards November. He s a businessman and likely sees all of this as some form of deal, because it is. It also makes one wonder what role Christie would have within a Trump administration, because it s becoming more and more obvious that may be the course of action.Who knows, really? And hopefully we ll never have to find out.Featured Photo by Sean Rayford/Getty Images | 1 |
Ted Nugent woke up on the wrong side of the bed Wednesday morning. Pretty soon the Secret Service will be knocking on his door. Not long after 7:00 a.m. central time, Nugent was already in the mood to call President Obama a chimp ass punk that needed to be tried for treason and hung, along with Secretary Clinton for their handling of, you guessed it, Benghazi. He must have made his coffee a little bit too strong, sending him into a caffeine-filled rage. That, or he s just the same Ted we ve all come to know over the years.We get that the right-wing is all rattled up about the new 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi movie that just hit theaters. Nugent must have stayed up all night watching it on repeat judging from his post. Immediately after threatening the life of President Obama, Nugent goes into a long rant detailing what he considers to be evidence that Clinton and Obama are just the worst two people on the face of the planet. What s funny is that even though he comes to the conclusion that they need to be hung, he resorts to lighter language in the very next paragraph saying instead, this raises dramatic new questions. There really is a difference. Either it s convincing, or it s not, Ted. Which one is it?Pic via Facebook.We won t even attempt to go into the subject of Benghazi, because it s been talked about too much already, and we re not trying to get into the business of entertaining this guy any more than he already is. The fact is, this guy s blinders are truly on. We don t recall Ted getting all huffy puffy at George W. Bush and Co. for his handling of the Iraq War. There were too many failures to mention. Nevermind that, though, right?Here s a video of Nugent from a few years back where he said, I m not going to call people names anymore. He actually repeated it TWICE, when the interviewer called him out on it, not thinking he would commit to it. So, he doubled down. At the time, he sounded serious, but as you can see, we all know how that ended up.Oh, and that Benghazi movie Ted was all worked up about? It tanked at the box office. It was a total, abject failure. So much for that bogus message gaining any steam.Featured image via Flickr | 1 |
Typical! The New York Times tries to blame conservatives for the violence TOTALLY caused by the Antifa thugs. Why does this not surprise us? Leave it to the left to twist and turn the truth to fit their narrative.The New York Times wrote: conservatives are eagerly putting themselves into volatile situations on campuses Watch this video and then tell us the Conservatives are to blame NO WAY, NO HOW!MORE PROOF THAT ANTIFA THUGS ARE TO BLAME FOR VIOLENCE: The irony in this entire cancellation of a tradition in Portland, Oregon is that now the Antifa (Anti Fascists) have pissed off the more moderate lefties. One group was going to speak at the parade event against white supremacy but now they won t get the chance. It s turning out that the Antifa group is more violent than any other radical group we ve known. They re even selling knives on their website! A threatening email has derailed one of the Portland Rose Festival s signature events, and spurred new debate about the ongoing political protests in Portland.Organizers of the 82nd Avenue of Roses Parade announced Tuesday that the event will be canceled, for fear that the east Portland parade could be disrupted by the type of riots which happen in downtown Portland. (see video below)Originally scheduled this Saturday, April 29, the parade is meant to highlight the local community and businesses along Southeast 82nd Avenue, aiming to turn around the negative perception many people have of the area. It started in 2007 and has since become a popular event on the Rose Festival calendar.This year s parade was once again set to feature the Multnomah County Republican Party as one of the many groups slated to march, but that inclusion drew ire from some of the city s left-leaning protest groups.At least two protests were planned for the day of the parade, one by Oregon Students Empowered and another by Direct Action Alliance. Both events were mentioned in an email sent to parade organizers on Saturday, threatening to shut down the event with hundreds of protesters in the street. You have seen how much power we have downtown and that the police cannot stop us from shutting down roads so please consider your decision wisely, the anonymous email said, telling organizers they could cancel the Republican group s registration or else face action from protesters. This is non-negotiable. The parade is organized by the 82nd Avenue of Roses Business Association, a part of the neighborhood business organization Venture Portland. Representatives from neither organization returned calls for comment.The cancelation isn t necessarily a win for the protest groups. Jacob Bureros, an organizer with the Direct Action Alliance, said the organization which intended to speak out against fascism and white supremacy during the parade is sad to hear the news. We are disappointed that the parade was canceled, he said. We re members of this community and this is an awesome parade. James Buchal, chairman of the Multnomah County Republican Party, said his group was ready to march despite the protesters. He said the party had no hand in cancelling the event, and was taken by surprise when they heard the news. After seeing the email last weekend, they had no plans to back out. We weren t willing to just walk away quietly, he said. The next thing we knew the whole thing was canceled. The problem is the police said they couldn t offer additional security for the parade so the organizers backed out. We know the Portland Police Department can move to stop this type of activity.Check out this recent shut down of protesters blocking a bus in downtown Portland:Portland protesters were doing the usual idiotic tactic of blocking the street and not letting traffic proceed What they didn t realize is that the police aren t taking this anymore Watch the takedown of these punks Awesome!Check out the lady with the thumbs up! Haha!Read more: Oregon Live | 1 |
Sheriff Clarke better beef up his security detail after Obama and his Democrat friends sees this truth bomb! Kid, I got everything ready for you, food stamps, failing pubic schools, inescapable poverty, unemployment, crime. pic.twitter.com/Le2KyibUvP David A. Clarke, Jr. (@SheriffClarke) August 6, 2016 | 0 |
A verdict in 2017 could have sweeping consequences for tech startups. | 1 |
(Reuters) - Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who serves as a member of U.S. President Donald Trump’s election fraud commission, said on Thursday he was running for governor of the state. Kobach, a Republican who has become a national leader in pushing for aggressive measures against undocumented immigrants and strengthening voter identification laws, touted his tough on immigration record at an announcement event for next year’s race. “Strong borders and respect for rule of law are essential to our country and to our state,” Kobach said. “Kansas is the sanctuary state of the Midwest. We are the only state in the five state area that has done nothing to discourage illegal immigration.” Measures would include ending sanctuary policies in Kansas counties, cutting public benefits and welfare to undocumented people, ending in-state tuition for undocumented students at state universities and insuring that state and local law enforcement cooperate with federal immigration authorities, he said. As secretary of state, Kobach was a strong proponent of tightening Kansas’ voter identification statutes since he was elected in 2010, making the state a symbol for mostly Republican Party supporters who said the rules were meant to prevent voter fraud. Opponents, mostly Democrats, said they discriminate against minorities and Kobach’s efforts faced numerous legal challenges. Trump created a commission last month to investigate voter fraud following his unsubstantiated claims that millions of people voted illegally for his Democratic rival in the 2016 U.S. election. Since July 2015, Kobach has secured nine convictions for voter fraud in Kansas, according to a May statement from his office. Kobach, an Ivy League and Oxford educated former Department of Justice official, said in addition to tackling illegal immigration, he would crackdown on lobbying in state capital Topeka as well as fight tax increases if elected. He was highly critical of a move by Republican lawmakers on Tuesday to override a veto by Republican Governor Sam Brownback of legislation that would raise taxes, saying there was no need to feed the “government monster.” The measure essentially rolls back income tax rate cuts the state enacted in 2012 that led to budget shortfalls. The higher rates are expected to raise $591 million in fiscal 2018, which begins July 1, and $633 million in fiscal 2019, according to a legislative analysis of the bill. | 1 |
(Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the .) Good evening. Here’s the latest. 1. Ryan Lochte, above, the American swimmer and Olympic gold medalist, lied about being robbed at gunpoint in Rio de Janeiro over the weekend, investigators in Brazil said. Instead, it appears that he and three other members of the U. S. swim team had a confrontation with a security guard, who brandished a weapon, about damage to a bathroom door at a gas station and left after the police were called. _____ 2. At the Olympics in Rio: The U. S. women’s 4 x relay team, which dropped the baton earlier on Thursday, reran the event and won the chance to advance. Ashton Eaton of the U. S. won his second consecutive Olympic gold medal in the decathlon. And the track star Usain Bolt of Jamaica earned his third straight gold at 200 meters. There’s one world champion who isn’t competing at the Olympics: Giovanna Petrucci, a slackliner. The sport, which involves performing on a thin strap of nylon or polyester tied to trees, isn’t part of the Games. Find Ms. Petrucci at the beach instead. _____ 3. Zika appears to have reached Miami Beach. A handful of cases most likely transmitted by local mosquitoes has been identified in the popular tourist destination, said a health official who insisted on anonymity. Authorities are trying to decide whether to designate a section of the city as an active Zika transmission zone. The first local cases were discovered in July in a area of the Wynwood neighborhood, also in Miami. _____ 4. Nearly two years after Laquan McDonald, 17, was shot and killed by a Chicago police officer, the department’s superintendent is calling for seven other officers to be fired. They’re accused of making false reports. Several officers who were on the scene corroborated the account of Jason Van Dyke, the white officer who is charged with murder in the death of the teenager, but video has contradicted those accounts. _____ 5. Gawker. com will shut down next week. Univision bought the news website and all of Gawker Media at auction on Tuesday for $135 million. The company filed for bankruptcy and put itself up for sale after it was hit with a $140 million judgment from a lawsuit by the former wrestler Hulk Hogan. The lawsuit was largely funded by Peter Thiel, a billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur who was the focus of a 2007 article published by Gawker’s Valleywag blog. The article was headlined, “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people. ” _____ 6. On the presidential campaign trail, Hillary Clinton met with law enforcement officials in New York just days after Donald J. Trump, at a rally in Wisconsin, accused her of being “against the police. ” Mr. Trump appeared at another rally tonight — this time, in Charlotte, N. C. It was his first public appearance since shuffling his campaign leadership (for a second time) and hiring Stephen Bannon, the Breitbart News executive, as his campaign chief. The Trump campaign, meanwhile, is showing surprising signs of weakness among white men and is causing some Republicans to worry that his struggling candidacy could cost them control of Congress, too. _____ 7. Newly released images from surveillance video show the conditions inside Border Patrol detention centers in Arizona where migrants who illegally entered the U. S. are held. The images were released as part of a lawsuit accusing the government of holding migrants in dirty and crowded cells. Some show people lying shoulder to shoulder, wrapped in thermal blankets or on bare concrete floors while neighboring cells are empty. _____ 8. The United Nations has acknowledged that its peacekeepers played a role in the initial outbreak of cholera in Haiti, but stopped short of saying the organization caused the epidemic. At least 10, 000 people have died and hundreds of thousands have been sickened since 2010, when the first victims were reported. They lived near a base where 454 U. N. peacekeepers had just arrived from Nepal, where a cholera outbreak was underway. _____ 9. An image of a dusty, bloodied and bewildered Syrian boy has grabbed the attention of people around the world. The boy, identified as Omran Daqneesh, was treated for a head wound after an airstrike in Aleppo this week. “Omran, as he is carried from a damaged building in the dark, could be Everychild,” wrote our Beirut bureau chief, who, a day earlier, reported that the Syrian government and Russia were being accused of using bombs in the area. _____ 10. In case you were wondering what it’s like to be stung by a ant, here is one man’s take: “The debilitating pain of a migraine contained in the tip of your finger. ” It is one of 83 haikulike descriptions of insect stings detailed in a new book by Justin Schmidt, above, the entomologist who has been an object of public fascination because he lets insects sting him. The Schmidt Pain Scale for Stinging Insects that he created rates stings from 0 to 4. The ant is a 2, as is a sting you may be more familiar with — the honeybee’s. _____ 11. The photo above is not of a human in a bear suit. It is of a bear, rather, who walks like a human. The American black bear, who has been nicknamed Pedals, was first spotted in northern New Jersey two summers ago. Injuries to his front legs appear to be the reason for his unusual and remarkably good posture. But in a state grappling with a large and growing bear population, his fans — and there are many he even has his own Facebook fan page — are divided on whether he should be put in a wildlife sanctuary or left alone to continue living his bipedal life. 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 last night’s briefing. What did you like? What do you want to see here? Let us know at briefing@nytimes. com. | 0 |
21st Century WireAre black budget projects illegally swallowing up your taxes?The military industrial complex has eaten up billions, if not trillions, of dollars from the American tax payer, and much of that has happened on a black budget that is entirely unacknowledged.The military industrial complex is one of the few industries in the world that actually profits from the misery of others, and is involved in numerous questionable projects like creating military cyborgs.In the following video, Dr. Steven Greer explains the significance of unacknowledged secret access projects and the consequences of their illegality: | 0 |
Home › GUNS › HILLARY PROMISES END TO VIOLENCE THROUGH CIVILIAN DISARMAMENT HILLARY PROMISES END TO VIOLENCE THROUGH CIVILIAN DISARMAMENT 3 SHARES
[10/31/16] With just days left before Americans will go to the polls to elect a new president, voters committed to continuing to live under the protections of personal liberty in the Constitution must examine positions taken by the candidates on key issues.
In this article, we’ll look at Hillary Clinton’s call for civilian disarmament and what Americans could do to prevent this policy from coming to pass, even if Clinton is sworn in as the 45th president of the United States.
On her campaign website, Clinton makes several unconstitutional promises that would have the effect of disarming millions of Americans and threatening the enjoyment of the right to keep and bear arms of millions more. Here’s a sample from her list of presidential promises:
As president, Hillary will:
Expand background checks to more gun sales — including by closing the gun show and internet sales loopholes — and strengthen the background check system by getting rid of the so-called “Charleston Loophole.”
Take on the gun lobby by removing the industry’s sweeping legal protection for illegal and irresponsible actions (which makes it almost impossible for people to hold them accountable), and revoking licenses from dealers who break the law.
Keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers, other violent criminals, and the severely mentally ill by supporting laws that stop domestic abusers from buying and owning guns, making it a federal crime for someone to intentionally buy a gun for a person prohibited from owning one, and closing the loopholes that allow people suffering from severe mental illness to purchase and own guns. She will also support work to keep military-style weapons off our streets.
There are so many constitutionally repugnant statements in these three paragraphs.
First, there is no such thing as a gun show loophole. Here’s the truth as explained by the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute:
If the voters learn the facts about gun shows, they will discover that there is no gun show loophole, no gun show crime problem and no reason to adopt federal legislation whose main effect would be to infringe on First and Second Amendment rights.
Despite what some media commentators have claimed, existing gun laws apply just as much to gun shows as they do to any other place where guns are sold. Since 1938, persons selling firearms have been required to obtain a federal firearms license. If a dealer sells a gun from a storefront, from a room in his home or from a table at a gun show, the rules are exactly the same: he can get authorization from the FBI for the sale only after the FBI runs its “instant” background check (which often takes days to complete). As a result, firearms are the most severely regulated consumer product in the United States — the only product for which FBI permission is required for every single sale.
Surely Clinton and her advisors are aware of this fact and that they are misrepresenting the situation to uninformed voters, thus their insistence on “closing the gun show loophole” becomes nothing less than another attempt to demand the surrender of natural rights in exchange for a “safer world.”
Next, with regard to the creation of “universal background checks,” here’s more from Cato:
Gun-control advocates often claim that 40 percent of annual firearms sales take place today without background checks. The Washington Post “fact-checker” has debunked that claim, giving it “Three Pinocchios.” The Post noted that the survey data used for the study on which the 40 percent claim is based are more than two decades old, which means they were collected prior to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System becoming operational in 1998. The survey only polled 251 people, and, upon asking whether their gun transfer involved a federally licensed dealer — that is, a federal firearms licensee (FFL) — gave respondents the choice of saying “probably” or “probably not” in addition to “yes” and “no.” Post navigation | 0 |
Too bad the media wasn t there to cover the event, there would have been enough hot air to keep everyone warm It s nice to see there are still gentlemen in this crazy world.When President Donald Trump tried to visit Korea s demilitarized zone on Wednesday during his 12-day trip through Asia, a U.S. Army Ranger made headlines by lending White House press secretary Sarah Sanders his camouflage jacket on a chilly morning. Now the Army has exclusively shared photos of the new face of American chivalry with DailyMail.com.Meet Chief Warrant Officer 2 Bobby Zizelman, a helicopter test pilot who stepped in to warm Sanders up on the tarmac at U.S. Army Garrison Yongsan.Zizelman hails from Roanoke, Virginia and is stationed in Korea on a two-year deployment along with his wife and their two daughters.They came to Yongsan just a month ago from Fort Riley, Kansas.Katelyn Radack, a public affairs officer with the 2nd Combat Aviation Brigade, said Friday that Zizelman has been in the Army for 11 years, beginning as an 11B infantryman in the 3rd Ranger Regiment and now serving as an aviator a role he s had since 2011. Lt. Colonel Junel Jeffrey, a spokeswoman for the 2nd Infantry Division, said Zizelman s job is to fly Chinook helicopters on maintenance test missions for the General Support Aviation Battalion, part of the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Aviation Regiment.Zizelman, who was on-hand to certify the safety of the choppers scheduled to ferry Trump and his team to the Korean DMZ, stepped in on Wednesday when he saw the jacketless Sanders shivering in tarmac winds with temperatures in the 40s. One of our brave soldiers was nice enough to loan me his flight jacket, Sanders told DailyMail.com, because I was freezing. The tough-girl Trump spokeswoman put the Army Combat Uniform coat on right over her dress and pearls.Trump s unscheduled attempt to visit the Korean DMZ was foiled by dense fog that forced the helicopter convoy to turn around when they were just 5 minutes from the landing zone.Military pilots couldn t see each other and decided to scrub the mission.Sanders said the president was disappointed, even as he waited gamely for nearly an hour in his limousine for the weather to clear. Instead, she said ruefully, it got worse Daily Mail | 1 |
Hillary s been using churches across America as a backdrop to promote the violent Black Lives Matter movement in an effort to pander for black votes. She proves every day how little respect she has for our religious institutions, the Christian community and more specifically, the Catholic church and it s backwards members. Will Catholics finally see the writing on the wall this election, or will they elect a woman who will unquestionably nominate Supreme Court Justices who are hell-bent on destroying our religious rights?Outraged by the anti-Catholic bigotry displayed in leaked Team Clinton emails this week, the powerful Philadelphia bishop blasted both President Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton for their efforts to undermine church teachings.In his weekly column for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, Archbishop Charles Chaput Thursday demanded that Clinton repudiate the emails then added that he doesn t expect her to.Mocking the theme in the emails that Catholics are backward thinking for views on abortion, marriage and other core issues, Chaput wrote, Of course it would be wonderful for the Clinton campaign to repudiate the content of these ugly WikiLeaks emails. All of us backward-thinking Catholics who actually believe what Scripture and the Church teach would be so very grateful. Via: Washington Examiner | 1 |
The following statements were posted to the verified Twitter accounts of U.S. President Donald Trump, @realDonaldTrump and @POTUS. The opinions expressed are his own. Reuters has not edited the statements or confirmed their accuracy. @realDonaldTrump : - So wonderful to be in Las Vegas yesterday and meet with people, from police to doctors to the victims themselves, who I will never forget! [0644 EDT] - Why Isn’t the Senate Intel Committee looking into the Fake News Networks in OUR country to see why so much of our news is just made up-FAKE! [0659 EDT] - Stock Market hits an ALL-TIME high! Unemployment lowest in 16 years! Business and manufacturing enthusiasm at highest level in decades! [0709 EDT] - Rex Tillerson never threatened to resign. This is Fake News put out by @NBCNews. Low news and reporting standards. No verification from me. [0750 EDT] - Ralph Northam,who is running for Governor of Virginia,is fighting for the violent MS-13 killer gangs & sanctuary cities. Vote Ed Gillespie! [2158 EDT] -- Source link: (bit.ly/2jBh4LU) (bit.ly/2jpEXYR) | 0 |
(Reuters) - On Friday, a cruise ship carrying around 3,000 passengers will dock at St. John s harbor in the Caribbean island of Antigua. It will not be where the passengers expected to land when they booked, however. The Carnival Plc ship was meant to dock in Saint Martin, 100 miles (160 km) to the northwest. However, Hurricane Irma devastated the island, wrecking its port and infrastructure, and leaving it out of bounds for tourists. Antiguan officials now expect the Carnival Fascination to visit every Friday, and have gotten about 25 calls from major cruise lines such as Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd and Norwegian Cruise Lines looking to make stops through the end of the year. For Asot Michael, Antigua and Barbuda s minister for tourism, the unexpected arrival of thousands of tourists is a bittersweet bonus. We are going to be benefiting. I don t want to benefit from others misfortune after such a disaster, Michael said. But because the port is so damaged in Saint Martin, so damaged in Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, we re getting some of those cancellations. Those cruise lines now are making ports of call into Antigua. Hurricane Irma left behind a stark divide in the Caribbean ahead of the winter tourism season that is the region s economic lifeblood. As travel to the region picks up again, cruise lines, hotels, airlines and other companies are directing customers to places that are able to host them, and away from the worst-hit areas. Popular winter vacation spots such as Saint Martin, the British Virgin Islands and Saint Barthelemy that were devastated by the storm could be sidelined for weeks or months. In 2016, 29.3 million tourists visited the Caribbean and spent $35.5 billion, both new records, according to the Caribbean Tourism Organization. For Saint Martin and Saint Bart, the holiday season looks very compromised, said Jean-Pierre Mas, chairman of French travel agency federation SNAV. My sentiment is that the winter season is lost. Decisions to book for the winter season are taken right now. Busy tourist destinations in the western Caribbean, such as Barbados and Trinidad, were well away from the path of the storm. Cozumel, on Mexico s Gulf Coast, got four additional visits this week as ships were rerouted to avoid the storm s impact, although Cozumel tourism officials said three cruises were canceled. Florida, which was anticipating another record year for its $100 billion a year tourism industry, is expected to rebound in time for the peak winter travel months, Moody s Analytics said earlier this week. Walt Disney Co reopened its Orlando Disney World theme park on Sept. 12. The Florida Keys, however, wrestled with more severe storm damage. [nL2N1LR0N1] [nF9N1L0029] [nL2N1LS1HW] Some travel companies said they are still assessing the situation and had not made firm decisions about rerouting ships. Tour operator Virgin Holidays said that it was beginning to return to regular operations in Antigua, despite damage to some properties on the island. Antigua wasn t as badly damaged as we feared, and we have reopened tourism there, although three resorts are currently not on sale because of the damage, a spokesman for Virgin Atlantic said. Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, St. Lucia are three big tourist examples that were not impacted. However, the small island of Saint Martin, which France shares with the Netherlands, could miss out on much of its tourism season. French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday vowed to swiftly rebuild the islands of the French Caribbean, including Saint Martin, and a French public reinsurance body estimated a cost of at least 1.2 billion euros ($1.4 billion) from the damage there and in Saint Barthelemy. [nL2N1LT1SF] [nL5N1LQ09G] Hurricane Irma badly damaged many hotels on the island, such as AccorHotels Mercure hotel. A spokeswoman for Accor said that while nobody had been hurt, the hotel would be closed until Jan. 8 at least. While 70 hotel rooms remain operational, they are being used to house military forces and other staff that are supporting the relief effort. AccorHotels is offering cancellation and reimbursement for those who had booked stays at the hotel. | 0 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan on Wednesday said lawmakers are examining whether there is any action they can take over Hillary Clinton’s email practices while secretary of state, saying it appeared she had received preferential treatment from the FBI. Ryan, a Republican, said the House of Representatives would not “foreclose any options” when asked whether a special prosecutor was necessary to get to the bottom of the Democratic presidential candidate’s use of a private email server while she ran the State Department. The Federal Bureau of Investigation said on Tuesday it would not recommend charges regarding Clinton’s email, although FBI Director James Comey rebuked the Democratic U.S. presidential candidate for “extremely careless” handling of classified information. The FBI decision, Ryan said, “looks like” preferential treatment for Clinton. Ryan, who was the Republican vice presidential candidate in 2012, said Director of National Intelligence James Clapper should deny Clinton access to classified information during the campaign, although presidential candidates normally get such access once they are formally nominated. Clinton’s campaign, responding to Ryan’s remarks, said House Republicans appeared to be trying to launch another “sham of an inquiry” against Clinton now that they had ended their two-year probe of the deaths of four Americans at a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi while Clinton was secretary of state. “For weeks Republicans have said they trusted FBI Director Comey to lead an independent review into Secretary Clinton’s emails, but now they are second-guessing his judgment because his findings do not align with their conspiracy theories,” campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said in an emailed statement. The campaign said on Tuesday it was pleased with the FBI’s decision, noting that the candidate has said repeatedly that it was a mistake to use her personal email while secretary of state. Ryan noted that two House committees are looking into the Clinton email matter — the Judiciary committee and the Oversight Committee, where Comey has been invited to testify on Thursday. “He (Comey) did say that short of prosecution, some kind of administrative action might be in order,” Ryan said, adding: “I think it’s the least we can do, given how she was so reckless in handling classified material and sending classified information on insecure servers.” “So look, I think that’s something that the administration should do on its own, but we’ll look into seeing if that’s something we can do as well,” Ryan said. Senate Republican leaders said they thought Clinton’s testimony to the FBI should be released to the public. But Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid dismissed as political the Republican calls for Clinton to stop getting classified information. “The Republicans are in such desperate shape because of (Republican presidential candidate Donald) Trump, they would seize upon anything,” Reid told reporters. He said the FBI investigation had been thorough. “It’s over and it’s time to move on.” | 1 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Ronald Vitiello has been appointed chief of the U.S. Border Patrol, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters on Tuesday, replacing Mark Morgan, who had been asked to step down as the agency moves toward tougher immigration enforcement under the Trump administration. Vitiello’s appointment was announced in a memo by Kevin McAleenan, acting commissioner of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the Border Patrol. | 1 |
21st Century Wire says Kellyanne Conway thrashed NBC s Chuck Todd around the set on Meet The Press when he tried to paint the Trump administration as releasing false information about their inauguration attendance numbers. Conway, like many viewers, immediately caught Todd in the fact that the topic was meaningless and was quick to point out a number of main stream media reports containing falsehoods that were pushed by establishment media. Conway hit her stride regarding the topic of inauguration attendance numbers when she told Chuck Todd, Presidents aren t judged by crowd sizes at their inaugurations, they are judged by their accomplishments. When Todd hit back with a double down on the accusations that the comments by Trump Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, were put out there to push a provable falsehood Conway fired back with some choice phrases that have commentators on the edge of their seats. We re going to have to rethink our relationship with the media. you ve got a 14% approval rating, that you ve earned. . Read More 2016 Election News at: 21st Century Wire 2016 FilesSUPPORT 21WIRE SUBSCRIBE & BECOME A MEMBER@ 21WIRE.TV | 0 |
NTEB Ads Privacy Policy WHEN LIBERALS ATTACK: Crazed Crooked Hillary Supporter Attacks Tea Party In Saint Augustine, FL This woman, obviously a Crooked Hillary supporter, was walking with 3 other friends, when they stopped to watch a meeting of the St. Augustine Tea Party on the street corner. They all stopped and she went back and forth with herself until she had the nerve to confront - the assault - this member of the Tea Party. by Geoffrey Grider October 29, 2016 Moments later, she flies into a rage, rips the sign out of his hand and throws it to the ground, then rips the Tea Party flag out of his hand and throws that to the ground.
Have you ever sat back and watched someone who was working up the nerve to do something nasty like shoplift from a store or slash someone’s tire? They go back and forth, reasoning amongst themselves, until they finally have worked up the courage to carry out the deed. That’s exactly what happened today on Saint George Street in St. Augustine, FL, as I stood there and watched the event unfold.
This woman , obviously a Crooked Hillary supporter , was walking with 3 other friends, when they stopped to watch a meeting of the St. Augustine Tea Party on the street corner. They all stopped and she went back and forth with herself until she had the nerve to confront – then assault – this member of the Tea Party.
The Tea Party member asked her: “Why do you kill babies?”
Her immediate response was: “Because it keeps the crime rate down”.
Flabbergasted at her answer , he asked her again and she again gave the same response. Moments later, she flies into a rage, rips the sign out of his hand and throws it to the ground, then rips the Tea Party flag out of his hand and throws that to the ground. Having finished her assault , she storms off in a huff.
Can you imagine the cry and faux Liberal outrage that would have resulted if a Donald Trump supporter had acted like this with a female Crooked Hillary supporter? It would be headlines on the nightly news for a week and jail time for the Trump supporter.
Now you have see with your own eyes what real Hillary Clinton supporters look like and act like. Please share!
Geoffrey Grider NTEB is run by end times author and editor-in-chief Geoffrey Grider. Geoffrey runs a successful web design company, and is a full-time minister of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. In addition to running NOW THE END BEGINS, he has a dynamic street preaching outreach and tract ministry team in Saint Augustine, FL. NTEB #TRENDING | 1 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said that a freeze handed down by President Donald Trump’s White House on new contracts and grants that has led to fears of delays in toxic pollution cleanups would be completely reversed on Friday or at latest on Monday. The freeze has led to widespread concerns in states and cities about potential delays in efforts to monitor and clean up toxic pollution, particularly lead pollution in drinking water, that would put the health of Americans at risk. The agency allocates nearly $4 billion annually on projects ranging from cleaning up polluted industrial sites to testing air and water for toxins. Doug Ericksen, a former Washington state senator who is the EPA’s new communications director, said in an email that $3.8 billion of the $3.9 billion in contracts and grants was cleared on Wednesday night. “The remainder should be cleared today. There might be a very small number left for Monday, but not likely.” The EPA has not issued any news releases about ending the freeze, which has led to uncertainty. On Thursday, a day after Ericksen said the vast majority of the contracts and grants were cleared, five Democratic senators, including Edward Markey and Tom Carper, wrote a letter to Trump “with alarm” urging him to “immediately reverse this troubling action.” Ericksen said they should rest assured. “No projects are delayed or cut. None. Not sure how much more clear I can be,” he said in the email. U.S. Representative Dan Kildee from Flint, Michigan, home to the lead poisoning crisis in drinking water, also wrote to Trump this week asking when the freeze would be lifted. An EPA spokeswoman told Kildee’s office that $100 million in congressional aid would not be affected by the freeze. But Kildee was uncertain whether contracts and grants centering on testing and expertise about the lead crisis would be delayed. A Kildee spokesman said on Friday that the congressman had still not gotten a written response to his letter from Trump or the EPA. The EPA sent employees an internal memo late on Friday, seen by Reuters that said it was making progress in lifting the freeze, which it called standard practice during a transition. “As of today, we have completed review of our grant programs,” the memo said. “The review of contracts is nearly complete, with very few contracts still under review,” the memo said, without elaborating. | 0 |
Donald Trump has once again taken to Twitter to issue a threat to a perceived rival, except this time he is launching the threats at the wife of Ted Cruz.We have been awaiting Trump s response to a hostile ad campaign designed to appeal to the religious right, which featured Melania Trump (Donald s wife and the prospective First Lady) in a naked photoshoot. The ad was put together by a pro-Cruz PAC. Anti-Trump group is running Facebook ads to drive up Mormon turnout in Utah and Arizona. https://t.co/v6ZZPKPMPp pic.twitter.com/Gps5KPbb2T McKay Coppins (@mckaycoppins) March 21, 2016It appears that Trump is now making his play back at Ted Cruz, by aiming the guns at the Texas Senator s wife Heidi.Lyin' Ted Cruz just used a picture of Melania from a G.Q. shoot in his ad. Be careful, Lyin' Ted, or I will spill the beans on your wife! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 23, 2016Whether Trump has some beans to spill on Heidi, or he just huffing and puffing like some sort of fairy tale wolf the spat marks a new low in an already desperately poisonous election season for the Republican party. Two potential candidates for the office of President of the United States trading Yo wife! insults it is an embarrassment to the election process.It also comes hot on the heels of the worrying news that US elections have just been ranked worst among the longstanding democracies of the world. America came flat last. As the Washington Post puts it:What do Argentina, Costa Rica and Brazil have in common?They all outranked the United States in a comparison of election standards and procedures conducted by the Electoral Integrity Project. The United States ranked 47th worldwide, out of 139 countries.So what is it that has driven America to the bottom of a league table of which we should be on top? The report states: experts expressed concern about the quality of the electoral laws, voter registration, the process of drawing district boundaries, as well as the regulation of campaign finance, In short, the game is rigged to a degree in the United States, which it is not elsewhere in the developed world. This issue should be front and center in this election campaign, with candidates doing everything they can to restore the integrity of American democracy. Instead, the Republican candidates are busy sl*t-shaming each other s wives.The electorate deserve better, and they should vote for better.Featured image via Screengrab/Flickr Creative Commons | 1 |
PARIS, Jan 16 (Reuters) - Police arrested a dozen people suspected of helping the Islamist militant gunmen in last week's Paris killings, the city prosecutor's office said on Friday as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived for talks.
The arrests came after Belgian police killed two men who fired on them during one of about a dozen raids on Thursday against an Islamist group and German police said they had arrested two people following a raid on 11 properties linked to radical Salafists.
Centered on southern Paris suburbs including the Montrouge area where a young policewoman was killed in the attacks, the arrests were for suspected "logistical support" for the shootings, an official said.
Seventeen victims and the three attackers died in three days of violence in Paris last week that began with an assault on the offices of satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.
Paris's Gare de l'Est train station was evacuated at 8:00 a.m. local time (0700 GMT) after an alert but reopened about an hour later, the SNCF state railway said, without giving further details.
Kerry had said on Thursday that his visit to France was to give a "big hug" to Paris. Senior U.S. officials were absent from a commemoration march held in Paris on Sunday attended by dozens of world leaders. President Barack Obama's administration conceded that was an omission.
"I think you know that you have the full and heartfelt condolences of the American people and I know you know that we share the pain and the horror of everything that you went through," Kerry told Hollande on Friday.
"Together we need to find the right responses and this is the purpose of our meeting here today, beyond the friendship," he said.
Investigators are still poring over the complex chain of events that led to three French nationals - two brothers with Algerian roots and a third of African extraction - perpetrating the worst attacks on French soil for decades.
Belgian investigators said they are trying to establish if a man detained in the city of Charleroi on suspicion of arms trafficking had any links with Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman who killed four Jews at a kosher supermarket in Paris last week.
His lawyer Michel Bouchat told French media the man was not an associate of Coulibaly and had merely sold him a car. The man in question already contacted police on Tuesday to say he had had contacts with Hayat Boumedienne, the partner of Coulibaly now believed to be in Syria. (Reporting by Arshad Mohammed, Nicolas Bertin and Chine Labbe; Writing by Andrew Callus; Editing by James Regan and Tom Heneghan) | 0 |
Donald Trump is clearly violating the free speech rights of NFL players, and his weaselly Treasury Secretary supports it.As we all know, Trump has been waging a war against the NFL since calling quarterback Colin Kaepernick a son of a bitch on Friday night and demanding that NFL team owners fire players who kneel during the national anthem. On Saturday night, and into Sunday morning, Trump lashed out at the NFL in a tirade that made it clear that Trump opposes free speech and the Constitution that protects it.If a player wants the privilege of making millions of dollars in the NFL,or other leagues, he or she should not be allowed to disrespect . Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 23, 2017 our Great American Flag (or Country) and should stand for the National Anthem. If not, YOU RE FIRED. Find something else to do! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 23, 2017Roger Goodell of NFL just put out a statement trying to justify the total disrespect certain players show to our country.Tell them to stand! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 23, 2017If NFL fans refuse to go to games until players stop disrespecting our Flag & Country, you will see change take place fast. Fire or suspend! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 24, 2017 NFL attendance and ratings are WAY DOWN. Boring games yes, but many stay away because they love our country. League should back U.S. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 24, 2017That s right. Trump accused an American business of being anti-American for not firing players who kneel during the anthem in protest of police brutality and racial injustice. In short, Trump ordered the NFL to fire players who exercise their freedom of speech and expression. That means the government is now actively trying to force private institutions to silence and punish free speech.And Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin agreed with what Trump is doing, and even went full hypocrite by defending Trump s vile language. The owners should have a rule that players should have to stand and have respect for the national anthem, Mnuchin told ABC host Martha Raddatz. This isn t about Democrats, this isn t about Republicans, it s not about race, it s not about free speech. They can do free speech on their own time. The Constitution protects freedom of speech. This is something that Mnuchin clearly does not understand, which should automatically disqualify him from being in government.When asked about Trump s language, Mnuchin argued that the president can use whatever language he wants to use. In other words, white racists like Trump have freedom of speech, but black NFL players do not.Mnuchin then butchered the First Amendment even further by claiming that NFL players only have the right to have the First Amendment off the field. And that s complete bullshit. Clearly, Mnuchin failed basic civics in school.Here s the video via YouTube.The government, including the president, can t order a business to violate the free speech rights of their employees. Donald Trump owes an apology to the players whom he offended with his outrageously divisive remarks. No one can be forced to stand for the national anthem, just as no child can be forced to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. It s unconstitutional.Featured image via video screen capture | 1 |
In a 2013 paid speech hosted by Goldman Sachs, Hillary Clinton said she had not yet decided whether she would run for president again. But she did offer some friendly advice to the bank’s chief executive, Lloyd Blankfein, when he asked what he would need to do to mount his own hypothetical bid. “I think you would leave Goldman Sachs and start running a soup kitchen somewhere,” Mrs. Clinton said. “Then you could be a legend in your own time, both when you were there and when you left. ” Mrs. Clinton’s campaign declined to release transcripts of her speeches to Wall Street firms during the Democratic primary contests, when her rival, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, intensely criticized her for accepting roughly $225, 000 per speech. But on Saturday, transcripts of three appearances at Goldman Sachs events were released by WikiLeaks, part of a trove of thousands of emails obtained by hackers who illegally breached the email account of one of Mrs. Clinton’s top aides. The genial relationship she appeared to have with Mr. Blankfein and other Wall Street executives at the events would not have served Mrs. Clinton well in the Democratic primary contests, when Mr. Sanders used the speeches to portray her as being too close to Wall Street. But for Mrs. Clinton, who is often criticized as overly scripted, her relaxed, exchanges at these private events also revealed a side that she has struggled to show voters under the intense glare of a presidential race. While the emails released last week showed Mrs. Clinton’s cadre of campaign aides agonizing over jokes she should tell in public and calculating political implications, the transcripts revealed Mrs. Clinton freely dispensing her own quick wit before a audience. In one session with Mr. Blankfein, Mrs. Clinton relayed an argument she had had as secretary of state, when she tried to persuade a Chinese diplomat that his country had no more right to claim the South China Sea than the United States had to the Pacific Ocean. “He says to me, ‘We’ll, you know, we’ll claim Hawaii,’” Mrs. Clinton told Mr. Blankfein. “And I said: ‘Yeah, but we have proof we bought it. Do you have proof you bought any of these places you’re claiming? ’” Mr. Blankfein interjected: “But they have to take New Jersey. ” “No, no, no,” Mrs. Clinton said. “We’re going to give them a red state. ” At these events, which took place in June and October of 2013, Mrs. Clinton repeatedly demurred when asked about her future plans, but it was also clear she was contemplating the political landscape if she were to run again. Mrs. Clinton said that if she mounted a presidential campaign, she would need to begin raising money in 2014 or “early the following year. ” And she expressed concerns about how the news media covered campaigns. “Our political press has just been captured by trivia,” Mrs. Clinton said at a C. E. O. conference in South Carolina at which Mr. Blankfein moderated a discussion. “And so you don’t want to give them any more time to trivialize the importance of the issues than you have to give them. You want to be able to wait as long as possible. ” Excerpts from some of her speeches had previously been released by WikiLeaks, shortly after a recording surfaced in which her opponent, Donald J. Trump, made crude remarks about women. The Clinton campaign has refused to verify the authenticity of the transcripts, which came from the hacked email account of John D. Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman. The campaign has blamed the Russian government for the hack and WikiLeaks — whose founder, Julian Assange, is a critic of Mrs. Clinton — for releasing the emails in a coordinated effort to help Mr. Trump, a view echoed by the Obama administration. The emails released Saturday included a fuller version of Mrs. Clinton’s previously leaked answer to a question posed by Timothy J. O’Neill, a senior Goldman executive, at a symposium hosted by the firm. Asked how Wall Street banks should approach efforts by Washington to impose tougher regulation and oversight, Mrs. Clinton made a show of empathy and spoke gently. She detailed her time working with Wall Street as a senator from New York and confided that the “conventional wisdom” of blaming Wall Street banks for the financial crisis was an “oversimplification. ” Mrs. Clinton described how banks were holding back on lending because they were “scared of regulations. ” She urged banks to allow greater transparency and help policy makers come up with solutions. “We’re all in this together,” Mrs. Clinton told the audience. Most strikingly, Mrs. Clinton did not defend the 2010 financial oversight legislation, a major achievement of President Obama and congressional Democrats in the wake of the crisis — and a target of Wall Street lobbying ever since. Instead, Mrs. Clinton suggested that it had been passed for “political reasons” by lawmakers panicked by their angry constituents. “I think the jury is still out on that because it was very difficult to sort of sort through it all,” Mrs. Clinton said of the overhaul. Mrs. Clinton took a far stronger line in public, particularly after she began her second bid for president. In a January 2016 speech in New York, amid her tough primary campaign with Mr. Sanders, Mrs. Clinton vowed to defend the Act and expand financial regulation to new territory, such as hedge funds and traders. But most of Mrs. Clinton’s insights involved foreign policy and her experiences as the nation’s top diplomat, including concerns about North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, the rise of sentiment in China and a strikingly prescient prediction about the spread of nationalism in Europe. Mrs. Clinton presented the Pentagon’s argument against establishing a zone in Syria, a policy that she has advocated in her 2016 campaign. Noting that American pilots would have to enforce the zone, she said, “We’re not putting our pilots at risk,” and added, “You’re going to kill a lot of Syrians. ” Other hacked emails suggest Mrs. Clinton’s campaign had deep concerns about the Wall Street transcripts being made public. In November 2015, as Mrs. Clinton’s campaign was refusing to release transcripts of her paid speeches, her speechwriter, Dan Schwerin, suggested anonymously leaking to a reporter excerpts from one particular speech he wrote for her: A 2014 address to Deutsche Bank. In that speech, he said in the email, “I wrote her a long riff about economic fairness and how the financial industry has lost its way, precisely for the purpose of having something we could show people if ever asked what she was saying behind closed doors for two years to all those fat cats. ” He also acknowledged that it was “definitely not as tough or pointed as we would write it now. ” Another adviser, Mandy Grunwald, disagreed with Mr. Schwerin about releasing the 2014 speech. Referring to Mrs. Clinton by her initials, Ms. Grunwald argued that the speech had not been hard enough on Wall Street. The remarks, Ms. Grunwald said, “make it sound like HRC DOESN’T think the game is rigged — only that she recognizes that the public thinks so. ” Ms. Grunwald added: “They are angry. She isn’t. ” | 0 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump unveiled a one-page plan on Wednesday proposing deep U.S. tax cuts, many for businesses, that would make the federal deficit balloon if enacted, drawing a cautious welcome from fiscal conservatives and financial markets. While the proposed tax cuts would please those helped by them, such as multinational corporations and wealthy taxpayers, Trump’s package fell far short of the kind of comprehensive tax reform that both parties in Washington have sought for years. As his milestone 100th day in office on Saturday nears, Trump has been scrambling to show progress on his agenda. The tax plan, though meager in detail, matched up closely with the promises he made during his victorious 2016 election campaign. Investors, who had been awaiting tax-plan details for months, largely shrugged off the news, with many saying it was still short on specifics and faced a long road to enactment. “Wake me up when something actually gets signed into law,” said Greg McBride, chief financial analyst at Bankrate.com in West Palm Beach, Florida. Only Congress can make major tax law changes, and Democrats immediately attacked the Republican president’s plan as fiscally irresponsible. “President Trump’s tax plan is short on details and long on giveaways to big corporations and billionaires,” said Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in the House of Representatives. House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the top Republicans on the congressional tax-writing committees welcomed the Trump proposals, while leaving space for details to change as legislation evolves. “The principles outlined by the Trump administration today will serve as critical guideposts” as Congress and the administration work on tax changes, they said in a statement. U.S. stocks pared gains on Wednesday after the plan was unveiled. While Wall Street has been optimistic about the prospect of corporate tax cuts since Trump’s election in November, the stocks rally has stalled lately because of a lack of clarity about Trump’s policies and concern over his failure to push through a healthcare bill. The benchmark Dow Jones industrial average of blue-chip stocks .DJI on Wednesday closed down one-tenth of 1 percent. Some analysts said investors were aware of the long road ahead before any tax bill is passed. “We have a pretty good idea that he (Trump) is targeting lower corporate taxes, lower individual taxes and a simplification of the process, but all that is in an ideal world,” said Andre Bakhos, managing director at Janlyn Capital in Bernardsville, New Jersey. In the plan, unveiled at the White House by Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Trump proposed cutting to 15 percent both the income tax rate paid by public corporations and that paid by “pass-through” businesses, including partnerships, S corporations and sole proprietorships. The top corporate rate is now 35 percent, though few multinational companies pay it, thanks to loopholes that allow them to lower their effective tax rates. Despite this, corporations have pushed for a tax rate cut for many years, and Trump has obliged. The top rate for pass-throughs, which account for most small businesses, is 39.6 percent, the same top rate paid by individuals. Unlike corporations, the profits of “pass-through” businesses flow directly onto their owners’ tax returns. In another concession to long-standing demands from corporate America, Trump called for bringing corporate profits being held offshore by multinationals into the country at a rate well below the current 35 percent rate now owed on “repatriated” earnings. He did not say what that rate would be, but said the administration was working with Congress on a low rate. About $2.6 trillion in profits are being held tax-exempt abroad by U.S. multinationals under a rule that says they are only taxable if brought into the United States. If enacted, the repatriation tax holiday would produce a one-time surge in government revenue. If it were dedicated to infrastructure spending, it could attract votes from Democrats. The plan also urged adoption of a “territorial” corporate tax system that would largely exempt foreign profits of U.S.-based corporations from federal taxation. Ryan expressed optimism about Trump’s plan, even though it excluded a “border adjustment” tax on imports he has promoted. That idea was part of initiatives floated by House Republicans as a way to offset revenue losses resulting from steep tax cuts. For average U.S. taxpayers, Trump proposed help by doubling the standard deductions for individuals who do not itemize; simplifying tax returns by reducing the number of tax brackets to three from seven; and providing unspecified tax relief for families with child and dependent care expenses. He also called for repealing inheritance taxes on estates and the alternative minimum tax, both measures that would help a handful of wealthy taxpayers. Trump’s laundry list of tax cuts would reduce revenues for the U.S. government, which is already running a deficit and deeply in debt. He offered few proposals to offset those losses. Democrats and fiscal-hawk Republicans will be concerned about how much Trump’s proposals would expand the deficit. To minimize that, Republicans will rely heavily on “dynamic scoring,” an economic modeling method that attempts to predict economic growth and new tax revenues resulting from tax cuts. Mnuchin said the revenue losses would also be offset by killing many tax loopholes. He said at a briefing that Trump’s plan would kill most tax deductions, except those for charitable giving, retirement savings and mortgage interest. Cohn said at the briefing that one deduction on Trump’s chopping block is for state and local tax payments, which is estimated to cost the U.S. Treasury $96 billion this year. Ending it would raise about that much in revenue. Such a move would hurt high-tax states, which tend to vote Democratic, such as New York and California, where the state and local tax deduction is a major item, said some tax analysts. Like all of Trump’s proposals, this one would face intense scrutiny in Congress. The No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, Dick Durbin, attacked the tax proposal and the fact Trump, a wealthy New York real estate developer, had declined to make public his personal tax returns. “President Trump should release his own tax returns if he wants to have any credibility in a debate about America’s tax code,” Durbin said. Mnuchin said on Wednesday that Trump did not intend to release his tax returns. | 0 |
NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s fight for a “millionaires’ tax” to help repair the country’s largest subway system got a boost as U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, one of the nation’s most popular politicians, endorsed the plan on Monday. “What the mayor is saying and what we should be doing in Washington is we say to the wealthiest people in this country: ‘You know what, you need to start paying your fair share of taxes,’” Sanders said at a news conference with de Blasio at a Manhattan subway station that began a little late after train delays. An independent senator from Vermont who espouses democratic socialism, Sanders lost the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential nomination to Hillary Clinton but remains an influential voice on the party’s left wing and repeatedly tops opinion polls of the country’s most well-liked politicians. De Blasio wants a state tax hike on people making more than $500,000 a year, saying it would generate hundreds of millions of dollars for repairs and upgrades to the century-old subway system. His plan, to increase the tax rate on an individual’s income above $500,000 to 4.41 percent from 3.876 percent, would also fund half-price bus and subway rides for up to 800,000 of the city’s poorest residents. But New York state, not the city, runs the subway through the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Governor Andrew Cuomo, a fellow Democrat, has dismissed de Blasio’s plan, saying a tax hike would not get through the Republican-controlled New York Senate. Cuomo has proposed charging drivers a toll to enter parts of Manhattan, but de Blasio has said that would put the burden on the city’s poorer outer boroughs. Sanders, a New York City native, was due to join de Blasio later on Monday at a campaign rally ahead of next week’s mayoral election. Polls show de Blasio comfortably winning a second term against Republican challenger Nicole Malliotakis and independent candidate Bo Dietl. | 0 |
EL-BIREH, West Bank (Reuters) - Reuters photographer Mohamad Torokman found himself staring down the barrel of a gun when he captured the moment an undercover Israeli military group shut down a Palestinian protest, in a rarely witnessed infiltration technique. Photo essay: reut.rs/2Ap07MI Torokman was on assignment near the Jewish settlement of Beit El, close to the Palestinian hub city of Ramallah, on Wednesday where protests were underway against U.S. President Donald Trump s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Hundreds turned out, as they had done for days following Trump s announcement. Some burnt tires, others hurled stones at Israeli troops, all oblivious to the surprise military move that awaited them. The undercover personnel were posing as Palestinian protesters and were standing behind the stone-throwers, said Torokman, who has covered clashes in the region for nearly two decades. All of a sudden, they started to fire their pistols into the air and throw sound grenades at the same time. The din of the grenades and guns caused panic among the protesters. Torokman saw eight Israeli personnel, wearing masks fashioned from Arab headdresses or the Palestinian flag, leap into action and detain protesters. He kept photographing, thereby capturing the moment as an undercover agent grappling with a protester swung round, briefly pointing his gun directly at Torokman. He shouted at me and told me to go away, said Torokman, who described the atmosphere as terrifying. I heeded his order for my own safety and I quickly moved away. The remaining protesters fled as uniformed Israeli troops moved in. Torokman took photographs from a safer location. The incident was over in less than five minutes. It was the third time Torokman saw at first hand the work of the undercover commandos, known in Hebrew as Mistaravim or in Arab disguise , but this was by far the most scary. The level of risk was the highest this time as the personnel were aiming their weapons at me, he said. | 0 |
BOSASO, Somalia (Reuters) - Islamist al Shabaab militants attacked a checkpoint in Somalia s semi-autonomous Puntland region, killing at least seven people in the early hours of Monday, police said. The fighters then ambushed officers rushing in to help colleagues on the outskirts of the city of Bosaso, an officer at the scene told Reuters. Al Shabaab said it took the checkpoint then left, though the police said they fought off the assault. Al Shabaab has launched a string of attacks on Somalia s capital Mogadishu and other areas controlled by the federal government in a bid to oust the Western-backed authorities and impose the group s interpretation of Islamic law. Attacks are relatively rare in Puntland, which has its own government and security forces patrolling its territory on the northeastern tip of the Horn of Africa, jutting out into the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea. At about 1 a.m., many well-armed al Shabaab fighters attacked us from all directions in an attempt to capture the checkpoint, police captain Abdifatah Mohamed said. Three police and four civilians died and at least 13 others were wounded in the clashes, he said over the phone from the checkpoint. Abdiasis Abu Musab, al Shabaab s military operation spokesman, said its fighters killed seven soldiers and wounded 11 others. We captured the Bosaso checkpoint and left this morning. We also ambushed a police reinforcement, he said. Puntland is also home to a splinter group of al Shabaab that has sworn allegiance to Islamic State. Security sources say a small contingent of foreign fighters is based there. | 1 |
It s been more than 18 years, but anyone who was alive at the time will remember when they first heard the news that Eric David Harris, 18, and Dylan Bennet Klebold, 17, two students from Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, had shot and killed 12 of their fellow students, plus one teacher and wounded 21 additional people, before turning their guns on themselves in the school s library on that fateful morning of April 20, 1999. The pair were also packing almost 100 explosives in what USA Today described as a suicidal attack [that was] planned as a grand if badly implemented terrorist bombing. At the time it was almost impossible to conceive a greater tragedy, two lonely teenage outcasts feeling the need to take so many innocent young lives on just a regular day at school. Sure, there had been other mass-shootings of a greater scale, but Columbine is still the worst US high school shooting on record, was the second-worst mass-shooting on any school campus at the time behind the 1966 University of Texas massacre, and the fifth-worst mass-shooting on US soil.Fast-forward less than two decades later and the murder spree at Columbine High School no longer even cracks the top-10 when it comes to the worst single-day mass-shootings in modern US history. What makes the statistics even more terrifying is that the five worst mass-shootings in the United States and six of the top-10, have all occurred in the last 10 years. To make matters worse, three of the top-5 were in the past 18 months.Here are the 10 worst single-day mass-shootings in modern US history, counting victims only. In each instance, the shooter s death has been omitted.Which brings us to Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, and the Columbine High School massacre. To many, that is one of the worst tragedies the human mind can conjure up Just a couple of misunderstood teenagers who sought the justice of who they saw as their transgressors by running riot on their school and shooting at anyone in their path, resulting in 13 deaths, before killing themselves. This incident is no longer one of the 10 worst mass-shootings in modern US history, but something needs to be done before it drops any lower.Featured image via screenshot | 1 |
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Hillary Clinton walked onto the ballroom stage Wednesday morning to do what many had considered unthinkable: thank her campaign staff after failing in her bid to become the first woman elected U.S. president, instead of the anticipated victory speech under a symbolic glass ceiling. Hundreds of staffers and supporters gathered at the New Yorker Hotel in midtown Manhattan to hear Clinton speak publicly for the first time after her bruising loss to New York real estate magnate Donald Trump in the early hours of the morning. Many wore the same clothes as the night before, having stayed up all night after leaving the glass-ceilinged Jacob J. Javits Convention Center, where Clinton’s final rally never materialized. Campaign Chairman John Podesta told the distraught crowd just after 2 a.m. to go home and expect to ultimately “bring this home.” Shortly after, news broke that Clinton had telephoned Trump to concede. As staffers and supporters filed into the ballroom, there were tears, hugs, and disbelief that Clinton, a former secretary of state, U.S senator and first lady, had again failed to shatter what she called the “highest and hardest glass ceiling” after her first attempt at the presidency in 2008, when she lost in her bid for the Democratic nomination. This time, Clinton won the Democratic primary race, becoming the first women to secure a major party’s nomination in her race against U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders. But in the final contest for the White House, she lost to Trump, the unorthodox Republican nominee. “We have seen that our nation is more deeply divided than we thought, but I still believe in America and I always will, and if you do then we must accept this result and then look to the future,” Clinton said, with her husband, former President Bill Clinton, daughter Chelsea Clinton and Chelsea’s husband, Marc Mezvinsky, at her side. Also on the stage were Clinton’s vice presidential pick, U.S. Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, and his wife, Anne Holton. Clinton wore a black suit with purple lapels - the color created by combining blue and red, the colors that symbolize the two major U.S. political parties - and not the suffragette white that many expected Tuesday night. Bill Clinton wore a matching tie. Clinton urged her backers to seek unity in the wake of defeat. “Donald Trump is going to be our president, we owe him an open mind and the chance to lead,” she said. Likely facing her last opportunity for a presidential run, Clinton, 69, acknowledged the bitter sting of an election defeat in which initial results show she won the popular vote but came up short in the Electoral College vote that ultimately decides the race. Clinton had been leading Trump in public opinion polls for months, and in the final week of her campaign, her staff celebrated a drawn-out campaign marked with vitriol at star-studded rallies with performers such as Jon Bon Jovi, Jay Z and Beyonce. But as election returns came in, Trump pulled off major upsets in key states including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida that Clinton’s campaign expected to win. Aides appeared visibly shaken as Tuesday night turned into Wednesday morning. “Hate trumps love, I guess,” a supporter in the ballroom on Wednesday said, flipping the phrase Clinton had used to close her rallies. Clinton thanked her supporters - women and young people in particular - and urged them to never give up. “I’ve had successes, and I’ve had setbacks, sometimes really painful ones. Many of you are at the beginning of your professional, public, political careers. You will have successes and setbacks too. This setback hurts, but please never stop believing that fighting for what is right is worth it,” she said. | 0 |
Iraq Civilians leave their homes as Iraqi troops fight against Daesh militants in the village of Tob Zawa. (Photo by AP)
Daesh terrorists have abducted tens of thousands of civilians from near Mosul to use them as human shields as government forces inch closer to the city proper in an operation to retake it, the UN says.
UN human rights spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said the terrorist group also killed at least 232 people on Wednesday, including 190 former Iraqi security forces and 40 civilians, who refused to obey its orders.
“Many of them who refused to comply were shot on the spot,” Shamdasani said in Geneva, citing reports corroborated by the UN that were “by no means comprehensive but indicative of violations.”
As the news emerged, Iraq’s Hashd al-Shaabi volunteers said they were set to launch an offensive against Daesh west of Mosul imminently.
Ahmad al-Assadi, a spokesman for the popular forces, confirmed that the fighters had completed preparations to move in the direction of Tal Afar, a Daesh-held city 63 kilometers west of Mosul.
He added that the fighters would move to capture Tal Afar from their positions in the Iraqi town of Qayyara, situated some 60 kilometers south of Mosul.
“A few days or hours separate us from the launch of operations there,” Asadi said.
Iraqi forces liberated three key areas from Daesh terrorists east of Mosul. Army officials said troops also seized a tank and artillery from the terrorists, and found a two-kilometer-long tunnel full of ammunition.
The army is edging closer to Mosul by liberating villages around the city. Nearly 80 Daesh-held towns and villages have been retaken by the army since the Iraqi forces began the battle to liberate Mosul last week. Loading ... | 1 |
VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Seattle and Vancouver are like fraternal twins separated at birth. Both are bustling Pacific Northwest coastal cities with populations that have accepted the bargain of dispiriting weather for much of the year in exchange for nearby ski slopes and kayaking and glorious summers. Yet 140 miles of roads and an international border divide the two cities, keeping them farther apart than their geographic and cultural identities would suggest. Now the political, academic and tech elite of both cities are looking for ways to bring them closer together, with the aim of continuing the growth of two of the most vibrant economies in North America. “Vancouver has a lot more in common with Seattle than we do with Calgary, Montreal, Toronto, anywhere else in our country,” Christy Clark, the premier of British Columbia, said in an interview. “We should make the most of those cultural commonalities. ” Whether their grand vision of a “Cascadia innovation corridor” — which borrows its name from the region’s Cascade mountain range — ever materializes, leaders on both sides of the border have motives for getting cozier immediately. American tech icons like Microsoft, with voracious needs for global engineering talent, are expanding their Vancouver offices, partly because of Canada’s smoother immigration process. For its part, Vancouver wants to bring more American technology companies to the city in hopes of spinning out future entrepreneurs who will expand its comparatively small base of technology companies. One serious obstacle to Vancouver’s tech ambitions is its housing costs. The median price for a detached home in the metropolitan area in August was 1. 4 million Canadian dollars (about $1. 06 million) a 27. 8 percent increase from a year earlier, according to the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver. In the San Francisco metropolitan area, the median single family home price was about $848, 000, according to Zillow. But while median pay for jobs is $112, 000 a year in the San Francisco Bay Area, it is just under $49, 000 in Vancouver, according to an analysis by PayScale, a compensation data firm. (Some of that discrepancy is due to a drop in the value of Canada’s currency relative to the United States dollar.) “We have San Francisco real estate prices with the incomes of somewhere between Reno and Nashville,” said Andy Yan, acting director of the city program at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. On the thrumming streets of downtown Vancouver, signs of the Seattle region’s growing economic ties to the city are hard to miss. A rectangular glass and steel office building with a large Microsoft sign occupies nearly an entire city block, sitting atop a large Nordstrom store (another Seattle brand). Microsoft says it invested $120 million in its new offices in Vancouver, which opened in June, and expects to spend $90 million more annually on wages and other operating costs. It plans to employ nearly 750 people in the city. Microsoft is hiring Canadians for the facility, but the country’s more open immigration policies were an important factor in its investment, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, said in an interview. Microsoft and other tech companies have long complained that the United States education system does not produce enough computer science graduates, forcing them to rely on immigrants from India, China and elsewhere. Foreign workers in the United States can wait about three times as long for a work visa as those in Canada do, the Boston Consulting Group estimates. And the prospect of Donald J. Trump winning the presidency has raised concerns among tech companies, because of the Republican candidate’s comments about further restricting immigration to the United States. “Right now, there’s just a lot of uncertainty about open immigration,” Mr. Smith said. Last month, officials and executives from both cities huddled in a Vancouver hotel to discuss how to enable people, ideas and capital to flow more freely between them, as heedless of the international border separating the cities as a pod of orcas swimming in the sea. At the Cascadia conference, Ms. Clark and Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington, signed an agreement to deepen the ties between Vancouver and Seattle, including more research collaboration between the University of British Columbia and the University of Washington. Bill Gates, of Microsoft, and Satya Nadella, its current chief executive, talked about globalization and education. One proposal to deal with traffic between Vancouver and Seattle was for a rail line that would whisk travelers at more than 200 miles an hour between the cities in 57 minutes (it can take four hours or more by car). The details on financing the project — which could cost an estimated $30 billion or more — have not been worked out. A group of Seattle techies proposed a cheaper alternative: a dedicated lane for autonomous vehicles on Interstate 5, the highway connecting Seattle to the Canadian border. The plan — which relies on autonomous vehicles that still need a lot of work — would not shave much time off the commute between the cities, but could make the ride less tedious by letting travelers work or watch a movie, said Tom Alberg, a managing director at Madrona Venture Group, a Seattle venture capital firm, and an author of the proposal. With roots in timber and shipping, Vancouver’s economy has diversified in recent decades with the growth of film and video game production. The city claims a tech “unicorn” — a valued at over $1 billion — in Hootsuite, which makes social media tools. But Vancouver remains a relative small fry in tech, with about $1. 78 billion in venture capital flowing into local tech in the last decade, compared with about $8. 9 billion in Seattle, the research firm Pitchbook estimates. Still, the city’s tech boom may hit a wall if it cannot address its issues, which are by some standards more acute than those plaguing other thriving cities. Vancouver was ranked the third most unaffordable city in the world, after Hong Kong and Sydney, in a study published this year by Demographia, a consulting firm. Mr. Yan has spent years analyzing his hometown’s soaring real estate values and concluded that a surge in foreign capital, primarily from mainland China, has decoupled Vancouver home prices from the local economy. British Columbia recently imposed a 15 percent tax on new home purchases in the Vancouver area by foreign buyers, a move now facing legal challenges. The housing market is showing signs of cooling off, though it is not yet clear how much of that is because of the tax. The total number of homes sold in the area in August dropped 26 percent from a year earlier and price growth has slowed, according to the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver. Dennis Pilarinos, chief executive of Buddybuild, a Vancouver maker of developer tools for mobile apps, says affordability has been less of a problem for young tech workers, who may be willing to rent smaller apartments and live with roommates. But when get bigger, many struggle to recruit senior executives with families, said Mr. Pilarinos, who previously worked for Microsoft and Amazon in Vancouver. “Companies tend to run into scaling issues,” he said. “You end up with fewer Microsofts or Amazons. ” | 0 |
BHUBANESWAR, India (Reuters) - Flames swept through an illegal firecracker workshop in the eastern Indian state of Odisha on Wednesday, killing at least six people, police said. The fire broke out as workers were making crackers for Thursday s celebrations of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, district police chief Niti Shekhar told Reuters. The blaze injured seven others, leaving some with serious burns, he said. They had stocked crackers in the cottage illegally. Some workers were making the crackers and some were present to purchase the crackers, he added. Local television channels showed fire and smoke billowing out of the workshop in a cottage in Bahabalpur village, about 200 km (120 miles) from state capital Bhubaneswar. | 0 |
21st Century Wire says Incredibly, Donald Trump may have just thrown an executive head fake to Bibi Netanyahu.Back in December 2015 during the GOP primary campaign,the Israeli Lobby started getting very interested in Trump after he appeared to blame Israel for not securing a lasting peace agreement with the Palestinians. You could hear a pin drop in the debate hall when Trump opined: I have a real question as to whether or not both sides want to make it, Trump said, before explaining that his concerns predominantly reside with one side in particular [Israel]. Months later, and only days before the Republican Party s National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, Trump abandoned any pretence of neutrality on the Israel-Palestine issue, insisting that he was now firmly committed to supporting Israeli settlement expansion in the illegal occupied territories, as well as not recognizing a Palestinian State.At the time this was music to Netanyahu s ears, and even better for the US-based Israel Lobby who spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year to buy-off US Congressmen and Senators in for for Israel to get everything it wants and desires.And then this happened this week By Abby Phillip and Karen DeYoung Washington PostThe White House on Thursday gently warned Israel that new or expanded settlements in the West Bank may not be helpful in achieving a Middle East peace, while insisting it has no official position on settlement activity. A statement issued by press secretary Sean Spicer said that although the administration does not believe settlements are an impediment to peace, the construction of new settlements or the expansion of existing settlements beyond their current borders may not be helpful in achieving that goal. The American desire for peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians has remained unchanged for 50 years, Spicer s statement said, a reference to President Trump s insistence that a return to the Middle East negotiating table is a goal he hopes to achieve.While the statement carefully parsed it words, it marked a step away from what some Trump officials and the president s designated new ambassador to Israel have said in favor of settlements. Trump s first foreign call as president was to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and he has been sharply critical of former president Barack Obama, whom he characterized as weak on Israel.The apparent genesis of the statement was a story in Thursday s Jerusalem Post, which quoted an unnamed senior administration official telling Netanyahu s government to stop a spree of housing construction approved since Trump s inauguration, lest it interfere with Trump s plans to work toward a peace plan Continue this story at the Washington PostSEE ALSO: The Genealogy of Trump s U-Turn on PalestineREAD MORE ISRAEL NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Israel FilesSUPPORT 21WIRE SUBSCRIBE & BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV | 0 |
Shawn Helton 21st Century Wire JFK FILES Conspiracy still shrouds the JFK assassination. (Photo Illustration Shawn Helton)The assassination of US President John F. Kennedy, is one of the most infamous crimes of the 20th century. Like the enigmatic attacks of 9/11, it was an act that will forever be shrouded in conspiracy, intrigue and mystery despite the lone gunman theory implicating Lee Harvey Oswald.New reports indicate that classified documents pertaining to the assassination of the 35th US President will be allowed to be released by US President Donald Trump.The NY Times reports: The release of the information being held in secret at the National Archives including several thousand never-before-seen documents was mandated to occur by Oct. 26 under a 1992 law that sought to quell conspiracy theories about the assassination.Mr. Trump has the power to block the release of the documents, and intelligence agencies have pressured him to do so for at least some of them. The agencies are concerned that information contained in some of the documents could damage national security interests.In a statement to reporters, the White House left open the possibility that Mr. Trump might halt the release of some documents. While word of a possible release of never-before-seen JFK files has spread like wildfire throughout mainstream media and alternative media alike, one should remain skeptical and cautious, as the likelihood of the military industrial complex, the CIA and other clandestine agencies releasing any conclusive inter-agency conspiracy related details about the JFK assassination is next to zero.The globalist Deep State machine that has ruled the US and the world since WWII would have too much to lose if anything larger came out of America s most infamous conspiracy. It would be like opening Pandora s box. (Image Source: circololettori.it)Here s one theory in the mystery surrounding JFK s assassination that includes some uncanny historical and Hollywood associations that we are not likely to hear about In 1980, after a six-hour suicidal standoff with police, a contract killer linked to organized crime named Charles Harrelson, admitted to killing US District Judge John H Wood, and in the process, while apparently high on cocaine also claimed to have been involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.The father of Hollywood star Woody Harrelson was convicted in the murder of a grain dealer named Sam Degelia Jr in 1968 and in 1981, Charles received two life sentences for the murder of John Wood.Throughout 1981, more questions materialized regarding the assassination of Judge Wood in a UPI article: Defense lawyers maintained [Charles] Harrelson was framed by police and the informant. Charles an ex-felon, said a friend, Hampton Robinson III, who failed to show up to testify, had driven the car. He suggested someone, possibly federal agents, had planted the guns so he could be arrested. He denied telling [Department of Public Safety agent] Pagel he carried a gun. THREE TRAMPS Charles Harrelson (ID d by forensic experts on the left) is believed to be one of three arrested in Dealey Plaza after JFK s assassination in 1963. (Image Source: jfkmurdersolved)When considering the Harrelson-Kennedy connection, the 1989 book Crossfire comes to mind.Crossfire, written by the recently deceased well-known researcher Jim Marrs, was also adapted for the highly controversial and successful Oliver Stone film JFK. Below is a passage from Crossfire, as it relates to the apparent Harrelson-Kennedy link: Aside from being twice convicted of murder for hire, Harrelson the father of actor Woody Harrelson had a long history of involvement with Dallas underworld characters linked directly to Jack Ruby. Continuing, the Crossfire also stated: The late Fort Worth graphics expert Jack White, who testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, already had noticed the resemblance of Harrelson to the youngest tramp. In a 1981 interview with Chuck Cook, Harrelson claimed to have the biggest story the reporter would ever have, when questioned about Kennedy s death. Additionally, Jo Ann Harrelson noted the similarities between the tramp photos and her husband. All this coupled with the fact Diane Lou Oswald (the mother of Woody Harrelson), who had also been married to Charles Harrelson in Midland, Texas, made for a strange background concerning the JFK saga.In a KDFW-TV interview in 1982 below, Charles Harrelson back tracks somewhat on his claims of killing Kennedy but does point directly to a larger conspiracy concerning the US government s involvement in the death of Kennedy as well as their alleged link to drug trade in America.The interview is a startling revelation, adding to the enigmatic JFK mystery and in the process provides another strange backdrop to a captivating case . 21st Century Wire says Today, President Donald Trump announced he plans to release the tens of thousands of classified documents on the assassination of President John F Kennedy held at the National Archives and Records Administration. The president believes that these documents should be made available in the interests of full transparency unless agencies provide a compelling and clear national security or law enforcement justification otherwise, a White House official told Reuters. Subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as President, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened, Trump tweeted on Saturday.Subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as President, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 21, 2017Days before Trump s announcement, The Washington Post claim that their National Security Council source told deep state media oracle that federal government agencies have warned the president not to release some of the documents for fear they could somehow comprise national security , although this rationale is hard to justify as the event took place nearly 55 years ago unless of course, some legacy parties still in power today were implicated in the remaining documents.It s difficult to know if Trump is referring to all of the remaining CIA and FBI documents, or just some of them, or whether or not these documents will be redacted (presumably to protect any important names involved in the JFK murder, or possible cover-up). However, Trump appears to have left open the possibility that if government agencies feel the documents should not to released, then he would heed their advice. Trump added that his decision was subject to the receipt of further information. According to Phil Shenon, a professional researcher and author on the Warren Commission: It s great news that the president is focused on this and that he s trying to demonstrate transparency. But the question remains whether he will open the library in full every word in every document, as the law requires, Shenon said. And my understanding is that he won t without infuriating people at the CIA and elsewhere who are determined to keep at least some of the information secret, especially in documents created in the 1990s. The scheduled date of the release is meant to be on October 26, 2017.STAY TUNED FOR MORE UPDATESREAD MORE JFK NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire JFK FilesSUPPORT 21WIRE SUBSCRIBE & BECOME A MEMBER @ 21WIRE.TV | 0 |
Let s get real with some awesome truth from Mark Levin.Is this guy not just the best ever truth teller! Why can t we have more of him! Patty and I can t get enough of Levin and his ability to cut through the bs of the left. | 0 |
Clearly riding the high off of his New Hampshire victory, Republican front runner Donald Trump announced that he would be releasing his tax returns in the next few months, foolishly admitting that he fights like hell to avoid paying his dues to the government like the rest of America.In an interview with NBC s Matt Lauer and Savannah Guthrie, Trump bragged that although they were being worked on , his tax returns were taking longer than usual because they are the biggest ever in the history of what we are doing. The real estate mogul also said that once his very big tax returns finally make their public debut, people will probably be shocked at how little he pays. He boasted: I fight like hell not to pay (taxes). I hate the way the government spends my money. Trump didn t seem to think this was much of a problem, and commended himself on being more crooked than other tax-paying politicians: I fight like hell not to pay a lot of tax, and you know what? Every politician probably does. I ve watched others where they say, Oh, I want to pay [tax]. In the same interview, Trump defended himself for calling Texas Senator Ted Cruz a p*ssy , explaining that it wasn t the worst thing in the world and that he was just having a good time. He also said that because he stood up against political correctness by being himself and just saying whatever batsh*t crazy thing came to mind, people went out and voted for me, and that s why we got, you know, the numbers we did when talking about his New Hampshire victory.This interview is hardly the first time Trump has confessed to not paying as much as others in taxes. Last year, Trump said in an interview with CBS Face The Nation: I fight like hell to pay as little as possible for two reasons. Number one, I m a businessman. And that s the way you re supposed to do it. The other reason is that I hate the way our government spends our taxes. I hate the way they waste our money. Trillions and trillions of dollars of waste and abuse. And I hate it. But building that racist $8 billion border wall isn t wasteful? | 1 |
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Real estate billionaire Donald Trump’s coarse rhetoric has won him some fans, but there’s at least one large group in America that is increasingly unimpressed: women. Half of U.S. women say they have a “very unfavorable” view of the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling, up from the 40 percent who felt that way in October. The survey was taken from March 1-15, and included 5,400 respondents. The rise in anti-Trump sentiment among women could pose a problem for the New York billionaire in his quest for the White House. Women form just over half of the U.S. population, and they have turned out at higher rates than men in every election since 1996, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. “If the presidential election were tomorrow, women would be a big problem for Trump,” Republican strategist David Carney said. “But he has time to fix it.” A Trump campaign official did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but Trump has said that he has had good relationships with women in his business career and is well-liked by women voters. Several women who oppose Trump, interviewed by Reuters this week, said their disapproval was based on a range of factors from his disparaging comments about women he dislikes - such as Fox News host Megyn Kelly - to his hard-line views on immigration and his ribald exchanges with rivals. “I think Trump is very scary,” said Mariah Dobias, a 25-year-old cook who was voting in Ohio’s primary on Tuesday. “He says he is going to make America great, but he doesn’t say how he is going to do it besides alienating whole groups of people.” Carolyn Hostetler, a conservative from Tennessee, told Reuters she disliked “the way he has belittled women.” Some of Trump’s female supporters, meanwhile, said they liked his straight talk, and believe he could strengthen America’s position on the world stage. “He’s a little unpredictable, as we’ve seen,” said Kathleen Douglas, a 65-year-old college professor from Winter Park, Florida who supports Trump. “He’s going to put other world leaders on edge.” Trump does not have a similar image problem with men. The Reuters/Ipsos polling results showed that just 36 percent of men said they have a “very unfavorable” opinion of Trump, a level that has held steady in recent months. Republican women are also much more likely to approve of Trump, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling. Among women who identify as Republican, he has been holding around 60 percent favorability since the start of the year. Trump’s relative appeal among men versus women was evident in the most recent round of nominating contests on Tuesday, when Trump extended a broad lead over rivals. In Florida, exit polls conducted by Edison Research showed that Trump’s support among Republican women voters was 40 percent, versus 52 percent among males. In Ohio, where Trump came in second to the state’s governor, John Kasich, 33 percent of women voters backed Trump, compared with 40 percent of men. If the GOP frontrunner were to run against Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton in the general election, likely women voters would support Clinton over Trump by nearly 14 percentage points, according to the March polling data. Among men, Clinton would win by about 5 percentage points. At a precinct in Florida’s Winter Park, Darlene Monzadeh, a 52-year-old stay-at-home mom who had been a supporter of Jeb Bush, said Trump lost her vote during a debate when he exchanged potshots with his rivals. “It changed my opinion. When they catfight all the time and act like little boys, pointing fingers, raising voices,” she said, adding she now supports Kasich. Trump has been accused by critics of misogyny since he launched his campaign. He complained last year that Fox News host Megyn Kelly had asked him tough questions in a debate and referred to “blood coming out of her wherever.” He more recently sent a Twitter post suggesting she was a “bimbo.” He has called television personality Rosie O’Donnell a “fat pig” and made fun of former presidential rival and ex-HP chief executive Carly Fiorina’s face, saying, “Would anyone vote for that?” An anti-Trump attack ad launched by the Our Principles Super PAC this week featured women repeating words that Trump has used to describe women, including “fat pig” and “dog.” Several of his female supporters defended Trump against the ad on social media. | 1 |
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday that Russia would do all it could to defend the rights of Russian businessman Suleiman Kerimov who has been accused of tax evasion in France. | 1 |
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The body of the Turkish policeman who shouted “Allahu Akbar” after shooting and killing the Russian ambassador to Turkey last month remains unclaimed. His family has refused to accept his remains, the Anadolu Agency has learned from judicial sources. [Anadolu Agency reports: The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Forensic Medicine Institute in Ankara completed an autopsy on the policeman’s body on Dec. 21. Since then no one has claimed the remains. According to the institute, the body of the assailant needed to be claimed within 15 days. Police findings show Altintas was linked to the Fethullah Terrorist Organization (FETO) the terrorist group behind Turkey’s failed July 15 coup attempt. The TASS news agency in Russia contradicts this claim, reporting instead that Jabhat Fateh (JFS) known as the Syrian branch Front before allegedly dropping its affiliation with international jihadist group, has claimed responsibility for the assassination. While JFS is no longer officially tied to “most Western analysts dismiss JFS’s break with as a feint, seeing it as a long game the jihadist group has been playing for some time across the Middle East and Africa,” according to Voice of America (VOA). Following the killing of the Russian diplomat, a group distributed the list of Russian embassies, calling for attacks on them. The list surfaced through SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadi activity online. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has nonetheless repeatedly accused Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, who is in exiled in the United States, of trying to overthrow his government and various other terrorist attacks in Turkey, as well as the failed coup against him in July 2016. Turkey considers the Gulen movement an official terrorist organization, known as FETO. Social media accounts affiliated with both Sunni rivals and the Islamic State seized the opportunity of Altintas shouting “Allahu Akbar” during the assassination to celebrate and capitalize on their message of jihad but did not take responsibility for the action. Footage of the attack, translated by Shaheryar Mirza, reveals the attacker also yelled, “Don’t forget Aleppo, don’t forget Syria! You will not taste the safety unless our fields are safe! Only death can get me out of here. Whoever has a share in this tyranny will pay for it one by one!” Both Presidents Erdogan and Vladimir Putin of Russia have said they will not allow the terrorist attack to interfere with their relationship, recently mended after a turbulent year. | 0 |
Bill and Hillary Clinton whored themselves out for over $25 million dollars from 2013 to 2015 the disturbing thing is that there is no video or transcript to be found of these speeches. The list of who they spoke to is a who s who of the banking and health industry. What on earth could they have said to garner such a huge fee? Hummmm Many things come to mind looking at this data: The median income for a family of 4 (two workers) is around $50,000 a year.Yet, we have a presidential candidate railing against the 1% and big businesses while fighting for the downtrodden who makes more in a 20-30 minute speech then a family can earn in 4 years??!!.An average 20 minute speech has 2500 words so she made about $100.00 a WORD for many of these speeches.What what so valuable in these short speeches to justify a quarter million dollars per pop??You notice we have not seen a single transcript or video of any of these??? Surprising in this day of technology where everything is recorded.How would Hillary s narrative of chastising the big banks actually hold up compared to what she actually said??? Especially, when participants only remember her talking to them in glowing terms??? Not that Hillary has ever stretched the truth before .How could all these companies justify these expenses to their board without showing some return in kind ??? The Clinton s paid speeches between 2013 and 2015Hillary Clinton s speeches:GE 1/6/2014 Boca Raton, Fl. $225,500 National Automobile Dealers Association 1/27/2014 New Orleans, La. $325,500 Premier Health Alliance 1/27/2014 Miami, Fl. $225,500 Salesforce.com 2/6/2014 Las Vegas, Nv. $225,500 Novo Nordisk A/S 2/17/2014 Mexico City, Mexico 125,000 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society 2/26/2014 Orlando, Fl. $225,500 A&E Television Networks 2/27/2014 New York, N.Y. 280,000 Association of Corporate Counsel Southern California 3/4/2014 Los Angeles, Ca. $225,500 The Vancouver Board of Trade 3/5/2014 Vancouver, Canada $275,500 tinePublic Inc. 3/6/2014 Calgary, Canada $225,500 Pharmaceutical Care Management Association 3/13/2014 Orlando, Fl. $225,500 Drug Chemical and Associated Technologies 3/13/2014 New York, N.Y. $250,000 Xerox Corporation 3/18/2014 New York, N.Y. $225,000 Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal 3/18/2014 Montreal, Canada $275,000 Academic Partnerships 3/24/2014 Dallas, Tx. $225,500 Marketo Inc. 4/8/2014 San Francisco, Ca. $225,500 World Affairs Council 4/8/2014 Portland, Or. $250,500 Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries Inc. 4/10/2014 Las Vegas, Nv. $225,500 Let s Talk Entertainment 4/10/2014 San Jose, Ca. $265,000 California Medical Association (via satellite) 4/11/2014 San Diego, Ca. $100,000 National Council for Behavioral Healthcare 5/6/2014 Washington D.C. $225,500 International Deli-Dairy-Bakery Association 6/2/2014 Denver, Co. $225,500 Let s Talk Entertainment 6/2/2014 Denver, Co. $265,000 United Fresh Produce Association 6/10/2014 Chicago, Il. $225,000 tinePublic Inc. 6/16/2014 Toronto, Canada $150,000 tinePublic Inc. 6/18/2014 Edmonton, Canada $100,000 Innovation Arts and Entertainment 6/20/2014 Austin, Tx. $150,000 Biotechnology Industry Organization 6/25/2014 San Diego, Ca. $335,000 Innovation Arts and Entertainment 6/25/2014 San Francisco, Ca. $150,000 GTCR 6/26/2014 Chicago, Il. $280,000 Knewton, Inc. 7/22/2014 San Francisco, Ca. $225,500 Ameriprise 7/26/2014 Boston, Ma. $225,500 Corning, Inc. 7/29/2014 Corning, N.Y. $225,500 Nexenta Systems, Inc. 8/28/2014 San Francisco, Ca. $300,000 Cisco 8/28/2014 Las Vegas, Nv. $325,000 Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP 9/4/2014 San Diego, Ca. $225,500 Caridovascular Research Foundation 9/15/2014 Washington D.C. $275,000 Commercial Real Estate Women Network 10/2/2014 Miami Beach, Fl. $225,500 Canada 2020 10/6/2014 Ottawa, Canada $215,500 Deutsche Bank AG 10/7/2014 New York, N.Y. $280,000 Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed) 10/8/2014 Chicago, Il. $265,000 Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers 10/13/2014 Colorado Springs, Co. $225,500 Salesforce.com 10/14/2014 San Francisco, Ca. $225,500 Qualcomm Incorporated 10/14/2014 San Diego, Ca. $335,000 Massachusetts Conference for Women 12/4/2014 Boston, Ma. $205,500 tinePublic Inc. 1/21/2015 Winnipeg, Canada $262,000 tinePublic Inc. 1/21/2015 Saskatoon, Canada $262,500 Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce 1/22/2015 Whistler, Canada $150,000 2/24/2015 Santa Clara, Ca. $225,500 eBay Inc. 3/11/2015 San Jose, Ca. $315,000 American Camping Association 3/19/2015 Atlantic City, N.J. $260,000 TOTAL $11,987,000 Bill Clinton s speeches:Patient Safety Movement Foundation 1/12/2014 Laguna Niguel, Ca. $315,000.00 National Multi Housing Council 1/23/2014 Boca Raton, Fl. $285,000 Thomas Lloyd Global Asset Management 1/24/2014 Frankfurt, Germany $200,000 The Fragrance Foundation 1/29/2014 New York, N.Y. $250,000 2/4/2014 Las Vegas, Nv. $290,000 Centurion Jewelry By Invitation Only, LLC 2/4/2014 Scottsdale, Az. $225,000 Young s Presidents Organization 2/27/2014 Los Angeles, Ca. $100,000 Bright Futures International 2/27/2014 Beverly Hills, Ca. $225,000 Microsoft Corporation 3/3/2014 Las Vegas, Nv. $225,000 Bank of America 3/6/2014 London, United Kingdom $500,000 Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check LLP 3/7/2014 The Netherlands $500,000 Telefonica (via satellite) 4/1/2014 Miami, Fl. $175,000 CSP LLC 4/1/2014 Scottsdale, Az. $225,000 Oracle Americas, Inc. 4/2/2014 Rancho Mirage, Ca. $300,000 Experian 5/5/2014 Dallas, Tx. $225,000 Jefferies LLC 5/6/2014 Miami, Fl. $225,000 Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies 5/12/2014 Toronto, Canada $275,000 Target Markets Program Administrators 5/13/2014 Baltimore, Md. $275,000 UBS Wealth Management Americas 5/19/2014 Washington D.C. $225,000 SCIP Capital Management, LLC 5/20/2014 New York, N.Y. $250,000 EAT The Stockholm Food Forum AB 5/26/2014 Stockholm, Sweeden $500,000 Entergy Corporation 6/5/2014 New York, N.Y. $250,000 Insurance Accounting and Systems Association 6/10/2014 Indianapolis, In. $225,000 Castlight Health 6/10/2014 New York, N.Y. $250,000 Hogan Lovelis US LLP 6/20/2014 Toronto, Canada $225,000 Skechers USA, Inc. 6/26/2014 Redondo Beach, Ca. $350,000 Deutsche Bank AG 8/27/2014 Boston, Ma. $270,000 Young s Presidents Organization 9/9/2014 New York, N.Y. $150,000 Association of Energy Engineers 10/1/2014 Washington D.C. $275,000 Affiliated Managers Group, Inc. 10/9/2014 Napa Valley, Ca. $225,000 Veritas Capital Fund Management LLC 10/14/2014 New York, N.Y. $250,000 UBS Wealth Management Americas 10/14/2014 Boston, Ma. $225,000 Citadel LLC 10/15/2014 New York, N.Y. $250,000 SAP America 10/23/2014 New York, N.Y. $250,000 Press Ganey Associates, Inc. 11/3/2014 Orlando, Fl. $225,000 World Affairs Council Los Angeles 11/10/2014 Los Angeles, Ca. $150,000 Centerview Partners LLC 11/13/2014 Carefree, Az. $225,000 AT&T Services, Inc. 11/20/2014 Tuscon, Az. $225,000 Williams Morris Endeavor 1/9/2015 Carlsbad, Ca. $225,000 MPSF, Inc. 2/2/2015 Marin, Ca. $181,250 MPSF, Inc. 2/3/2015 Oakland, Ca. $181,250 MPSF, Inc. 2/4/2015 San Mateo, Ca. $181,250 MPSF, Inc. 2/5/2015 Marin, Ca. $181,250 UBS Wealth Management Americas 2/19/2015 Nashville, Tn. $225,000 National Association of Manufacturers 3/2/2015 Scottsdale, Az. $325,000 HR.com Limited 3/31/2015 Irving, Tx. $275,000 Texas China Business Council, LLC 3/31/2015 Austin, Tx. $265,000 Wyndham Hotel Group 4/1/2015 Las Vegas, Nv. $225,000 ISN Software Inc. 4/9/2015 Grapevine, Tx. $275,000 Oracle Corporation 4/16/2015 Rancho Mirage, Ca. $360,000 Univision Management Company 5/12/2015 New York, N.Y. $250,000 Apollo Management Holdings, LP 5/12/2015 New York, N.Y. $250,000 American Institute of Architects 5/14/2015 Atlanta, Ga. $250,000 TOTAL $13,460,000.00 Read more: Politico | 0 |
The FBI thwarted an act of domestic terrorism on Friday when they arrested three white men for plotting to blow up an apartment complex in Kansas.Curtis Allen, Gavin Wright, and Patrick Stein were all taken into custody after an investigation that took eight months busted the trio for planning a massive terrorist attack in Garden City.Their target was an apartment complex and a mosque that serviced 120 Somali refugees.According to KWCH, United States Attorney Tom Beall said the men stockpiled a large cache of firearms, and ammunition. Beall said the men planned to park vehicles full of explosives at all four corners of the Garden City apartment complex. The men said they wanted to wake people up .Beall said the men wrote a manifesto, which they wanted published after the bombing.According to an affidavit, the were a part of a group called the Kansas Security Force and the Crusaders. These are militia groups whose members support and espouse sovereign citizen, anti-government, anti-Muslim, and anti-immigrant extremist beliefs, read the affidavit.The three men had planned to carry out the attack on November 9th, one day after Election Day.And as it turns out, Curtis Allen is a supporter of Donald Trump and his Facebook page is full of anti-Muslim rhetoric. I personally back Donald Trump, an unhinged Allen wrote in a post ranting about how Hillary Clinton is supposedly going to put Americans in FEMA camps and take all guns away.Allen was also particularly paranoid about Muslims. Here is just a sampling of his posts.Clearly, this guy hates Muslims, and his hate and paranoia was only perpetuated by Republican nominee Donald Trump.Trump has built his campaign on bashing Muslims, especially Muslim refugees. So Allen decided to join with two other guys in an effort to kill Muslims. Whether the other two are Trump supporters as well is not known, but this is how dangerous Donald Trump has become in our country. He is making right-wing nut jobs blood thirsty and paranoid enough to commit acts of domestic terrorism.Featured Image: Spencer Platt/Getty Images | 0 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican U.S. Representative Trey Gowdy, who was among 11 people being considered for director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said on Monday he is not interested in the job. Gowdy said in a statement that he told Attorney General Jeff Sessions he “would not be the right person” to lead the agency. President Donald Trump touched off a political firestorm last week by firing FBI Director James Comey, who was leading a probe of alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election and possible ties between Moscow and the Trump campaign. | 1 |
OXON HILL, Md. — Stephen K. Bannon brought the battle plan. President Trump brought the fight. A day after his secretive chief strategist laid out a new definition of conservatism animated by attacks on “the administrative state,” globalism and the “corporatist media,” Mr. Trump delivered a visceral gut punch of a speech that executed almost all of the tactics that define the philosophy of the West Wing. Speaking to the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday, Mr. Trump launched what was easily the most blistering attack on the media and corporate elites of his already bellicose and eventful presidency. His speech also included a promise to throw undocumented immigrants “the hell out of the country” and a recitation of his campaign promises. It represented a friendly takeover of CPAC, an establishment Republican group whose leadership once viewed the party’s surprise as a noisy interloper. Mr. Bannon, the former Breitbart chief executive who has a hand in nearly every scripted public Trump utterance, had expressed a similar sentiment at the conference the day before. “If you think they’re going to give you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken,” he said during an appearance with Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff. “Every day, it is going to be a fight. ” His onstage discussion, it turned out, was a preview of Mr. Trump’s populist broadsides, with an admonition to anyone who continues to underestimate the determination of the Trump White House to disrupt the Washington establishment. Mr. Trump’s less restrained approach energized CPAC attendees who had once viewed the as a celebrity curiosity — they serenaded him with chants of “Trump” and “U. S. A. ” And his message is resonating with Republican voters, over 80 percent of whom approve of his job performance, despite historically low levels of support among all voters. But Mr. Trump is intensifying his assault on his enemies on the eve of his first national address before a joint session of Congress, a time when most new presidents are moving in the opposite direction, pivoting from martial campaign rhetoric to the more positive, inclusive language of governance needed to build the coalition necessary to pass major legislation. On an operational level, Mr. Trump’s inexperienced but confident White House staff members — dominated by Mr. Bannon — are leaning on Hill Republicans to draft tax overhaul measures and a replacement bill for the Affordable Care Act. In the meantime, they have focused on enacting a series of executive orders, an approach often adopted by presidents at the end of their terms when their legislative leverage has been exhausted. As they did during the campaign, Mr. Trump and Mr. Bannon believe they are tapping into an American public less interested in the standard optimistic tropes of presidential politics and more interested in someone who speaks truth to their anxieties. Moreover, aides to Mr. Trump say he fares best when he’s able to target — and nickname — an opponent, whether it is “Little Marco” Rubio, “Crooked Hillary” Clinton or the “Fake News” media. Mr. Bannon, bookish and prone to surrounding himself with young acolytes, previewed Mr. Trump’s during the Thursday session. “They’re corporatist, globalist media that are adamantly opposed — adamantly opposed to an economic nationalist agenda like Donald Trump has,” he said. “I think if you look at the opposition party and how they portray the campaign, how they portrayed the transition and now they’re portraying the administration, it’s always wrong. ” The attacks on the news media come at a time when the press has been reporting on the Trump campaign’s apparent connections to Russia, the botched rollout of Mr. Trump’s executive order on immigration and the forced resignation of Michael T. Flynn, the national security adviser, after less than a month on the job. “They’re very smart, they’re very cunning and they’re very dishonest,” Mr. Trump said on a day when his press secretary scrapped his daily briefing for an gaggle for selected reporters. The move, people familiar with the situation said, was enthusiastically backed by Mr. Bannon. The symbiotic political and personal relationship between the two men — the rumpled and the compulsively public and president — is driving much of the momentum and dysfunction of the White House, aides say. For all his talk of creating a blueprint for a Trumpian conservatism that outlasts the president’s career, Mr. Bannon is not regarded as a manager, and he let slip during his CPAC appearance that things in the White House have gone well — but only “to the degree we were planning” them. There is not a lot of daylight between Mr. Trump and Mr. Bannon on the issues, although the president often jokes that Mr. Bannon’s economic populist agenda makes it hard to tell if the former Naval officer and Goldman Sachs executive is “ or ” according to a Trump associate friendly with both. The biggest difference between the president and his chief strategist is that Mr. Trump is far less constrained by the dictates of any single philosophy — even Mr. Bannon’s vision of Trumpism — than Mr. Bannon, who sees history as a succession of movements and power struggles. And while Mr. Bannon described the president as “maniacally focused” on fulfilling his campaign promises, Mr. Trump often loses focus, as he did during numerous digressions from his scripted remarks on Friday. He unleashed the latest in a succession of surprise rhetorical attacks on longstanding American allies, extemporizing about a friend named Jim who had told him to avoid the “City of Lights” because after several terrorist attacks, “Paris is no longer Paris. ” Clearly reveling in the adulation of a room that had once been hard to win, the president alternated between a theme of dark days — once again singling out violence on the streets of Chicago — and light comedy. Speaking of a meeting with business leaders this week that included food producers, he quipped, “I like Campbell’s soup. ” He also joked about his first appearance at this annual conservative conclave. “If you remember, it was my first major speech. They said he didn’t get a standing ovation — because everybody stood,” Mr. Trump said of the speech, in 2011. “I had very little notes and even less preparation,” he said. “And then you leave, and everybody is thrilled, and I say, ‘I like this business. ’” | 0 |
When people think of rape, they generally imagine some masked man grabbing a woman and dragging her into a dark alley or the woods and assaulting her. However, it generally doesn t happen that way. Most sexual assault occurs at the hands of someone the victim knows this is usually referred to as date rape, or acquaintance rape. That is what makes these cases so difficult to prosecute. That is also what makes things like the processing of rape kits and other physical evidence following an assault so vital. However, one Idaho sheriff has gotten the idea in his head that most rapes are consensual sex, and thanks to that, he doesn t think his state needs laws making sure rape kits get processed.However, following rightful public outrage, Bingham County Sheriff Craig Rowland is backpeddling. He took to the Sheriff Department s Facebook page to try to explain just why he made the outrageous and despicable assertion that most rapes are actually, to use his words, consensual sex. Here is this neanderthal s Facebook apology : I want to explain what I was trying to say in the interview. I misspoke when I said the majority of our rape cases are consensual sex. The meaning behind my statement that has been misunderstood is that when a case is called into the dispatch center each and every one is thoroughly investigated. A Deputy is sent to every one of these cases and that Deputy then in turn contacts the on-call detective to help with the investigation. In some of these cases through the investigation it may be determined that the sex was consensual, but not always. In these types of cases after the investigation is complete and it was determined that the sex was consensual. I don t believe that those kits should be sent to the lab. Then, as if that sorry excuse for an apology weren t enough, Rowland then went on to go down the old I m sorry if you were offended road, and then proceeded to paint HIMSELF as a victim here, talking about cyber-bullying : I know that it is hard for victims to come forward on sexual assault cases. I spoke to a rape victim today and told her that I knew it was hard for her to come forward. I want to apologize to anyone who I might have offended with my statement as my main responsibility is to the public s safety and well being and maintaining their trust., he wrote. I can also say with regret that I now know what it is like to be cyber bullied. Not only have I been threatened but so has my family. I hope that this will clear things up a bit. Sure, it clears things up, Sheriff Rowland, but not in the way you think. What you ve said here is no different from what you said before. You re victim-blaming. Nine times out of ten, if a woman says she was raped, she was. You say yourself that it s hard for victims to disclose. So, why the hell would anyone make something like that up? It s men like you, Sheriff Rowland, who keep rape culture alive and well.You have no business in law enforcement, and I sincerely feel for the rape victims for whom you are their only source of so-called help. Featured image via video screen capture | 0 |
A woman who accused Donald Trump of repeatedly raping her two decades ago when she was a 13-year-old aspiring teen model has again dropped a federal lawsuit over the alleged assaults.
The accuser, identified in the lawsuit by the pseudonym “Jane Doe,” was expected to appear at a news conference in Los Angeles Wednesday, but that appearance was abruptly canceled.
The lawyer who organized the event, Lisa Bloom, said Trump’s accuser had received threats and was too frightened to show up.
The accuser’s lead attorney, Thomas Meagher of New Jersey, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. He filed a one-page notice dismissing the case Friday evening in federal court in Manhattan. No explanation was given for the action.
Bloom did not immediately respond to requests for comment Friday.
Through his attorney, Trump had flatly denied the woman’s allegations.
There was plenty of speculation — and skepticism — from social media users about the validity of the charges.
Hillary Clinton’s niece came out for TRUMP because ‘selfish’ aunt wants to win for all the wrong reasons.
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Up until recently, we ve all been witnessing Donald Trump speak freely with nothing really prepared except for the usual crumpled sheet of paper he d pull out of his coat pocket to read the latest poll numbers to tell us how wonderful he is. However, with clinching the Republican nomination getting closer and closer, he s trying (and failing) to be more refined. Which includes using a teleprompter to read speeches that are prepared for him.During his foreign policy speech on Wednesday, it was painfully awkward to watch. You could hear him reading the speech, which did not come across naturally whatsoever. Watching his head swiftly move from side to side to give the illusion that he was speaking freely was more clumsy than a first date in the dark.Then came the moment when he was trying to be serious and speak about some foreign policy blunders, and he spoke about when some of our embassies overseas were compromised. However, his reading off the teleprompter proved this is probably the first time he has ever heard of the places of which he was speaking.For example, he read: Our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. But SAID: Our embassies in Kenya and Tan-ZANE-ia. Small blunder? Sure, but one that was surely noticed by all and just another example of Trump s clear ineptitude.Donald Trump has a pretty interesting way of pronouncing Tanzania. #tanzaynia https://t.co/2ygcnhCVKF DOPEITSTOM (@DOPEITSTOM) April 27, 2016Taking notice of this blunder was none other than, well, pretty much everyone- but also White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest. When questioned about the moment, Earnest quipped: Apparently phonetics are not included on the teleprompter. Watch here:"Apparently, the phonetics are not included on the teleprompter." @PressSec on Donald Trump foreign policy address.https://t.co/ORuNELmrne CSPAN (@cspan) April 27, 2016All in all, it shows how ill-prepared Trump is at not only addressing the nation, but also reading. Add this to the list of reasons not to vote for him, which is a very, very long list.If you want to torture yourself, you can watch the speech in full HERE.Featured Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images | 0 |
HARARE (Reuters) - When Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe sacked his vice-president in front of 12,000 baying party members in 2014, Emmerson Mnangagwa sat quietly in the crowd, a green baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. The man who stood to gain most from the dismissal betrayed nothing through his expression and gentle clapping - a survival tactic honed during five decades of service to the mercurial Mugabe. His cap, however, spoke volumes. Emblazoned across its front, next to a portrait of Mugabe, were four words: Indigenise, Empower, Develop, Employ - a slogan of the ruling ZANU-PF party. Speaking at the congress, Mnangagwa reinforced the message from his headgear, announcing revisions to the party s constitution that backed total ownership and control of Zimbabwe s natural resources. It was a key insight to the party s direction as it contemplated life beyond Mugabe. We will remain forever masters of our own destiny, Mnangagwa said, to cheers from the crowd. With Mugabe, 93, held following Wednesday s military takeover in Harare, questions have arisen about what the future holds for Mnangagwa, whose sacking from the post of vice president last week brought the political crisis to a head. There are no arguments around his credentials to provide strong leadership and stability, but there are questions over whether he can also be a democrat, said Eldred Masunungure, a political science lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe. The whereabouts of Mugabe s wife Grace, 52, whose prospects of succeeding the president appeared to have been helped by Mnangagwa s dismissal, are presently unknown. With his appointment in 2014 as official deputy to Mugabe, Mnangagwa had appeared well set as the eventual successor to Africa s oldest head of state. The 75-year-old was one of Mugabe s most trusted lieutenants, having been at his side in prison, during wartime and then in government. Along the way, he earned the nickname Ngwena , Shona for crocodile, an animal famed in Zimbabwean lore for its stealth and ruthlessness. Mnangagwa backed Mugabe s economic nationalism, especially a drive to force foreign firms to hand majority stakes to local blacks, suggesting he may not be the pro-market pragmatist many investors were hoping for. He has been in every administration since independence, holding posts as varied as minister of state security, defense and finance, as well as speaker of parliament. Most controversially, he was in charge of internal security in the mid-1980s when Mugabe deployed a crack North Korean-trained brigade against rebels loyal to his rival Joshua Nkomo. Rights groups say 20,000 civilians, mostly from the Ndebele tribe, were killed. Mugabe denies genocide or crimes against humanity but has admitted it was a moment of madness . Mnangagwa s role remains shrouded in mystery, typical of a political operator trained as a communist guerrilla in China in the 1960s and who always stayed in the shadows behind Mugabe. Secretive and insular, he prefers to operate under the radar, those in his inner circle say, and when pushed into a corner, resorts to jokes and trivia to avoid serious discussion. I wouldn t say he is deceptive but it s fair to say his default position is to crack jokes and deflect uncomfortable questions by asking endless questions, one member of parliament close to him said. He is very conscious that his public image is that of a hard man but he is a much more complex personality - pleasant and an amazing story-teller, the politician, also from Mnangagwa s Midlands Province, told Reuters. Mnangagwa s appointment as vice president appointment came a day after his predecessor Joice Mujuru was fired for allegedly planning to topple Mugabe. Asked whether the purge would weaken the party, a smiling Mnangagwa said: The revolution has a way of strengthening itself. It goes through cycles, this is another cycle where it rids itself of elements that had now become inconsistent with the correct line. Mnangagwa learnt his politics in prison in the 1960s after being sentenced to death for sabotage by British authorities following his capture while in one of the earliest guerrilla units fighting white colonial rule in what was then Rhodesia. He was 19 and only spared the noose by a law prohibiting the execution of convicts under 21. After a decade in prison, often sharing a cell with Mugabe, Mnangagwa became personal assistant to the leader of the liberation struggle, and went on to head the guerrilla movement s feared internal security bureau. In January, a photograph appeared in local media showing Mnangagwa enjoying drinks with a friend. In his hand was a large novelty mug emblazoned with the words: I M THE BOSS. To supporters of Mugabe, this bordered on treason. They suspected that Mnangagwa already saw himself in the leader s shoes. When Mugabe fired Mnangagwa as vice president last week for showing traits of disloyalty , he removed a possible successor who was also one of his last remaining liberation war comrades. But relations had already cooled between the two men after suggestions by Mnangagwa s allies in August that he had been poisoned by ice cream from a dairy owned by the Mugabes. | 1 |
GENEVA/SHAMLAPUR, Bangladesh (Reuters) - The United Nations top human rights official on Monday slammed Myanmar for conducting a cruel military operation against Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine state, branding it a textbook example of ethnic cleansing . Zeid Ra ad al-Hussein s comments to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva came as the official tally of Rohingya who have fled Myanmar and crossed into southern Bangladesh in just over two weeks soared through 300,000. The surge of refugees - many sick or wounded - has strained the resources of aid agencies already helping hundreds of thousands from previous spasms of bloodletting in Myanmar. We have received multiple reports and satellite imagery of security forces and local militia burning Rohingya villages, and consistent accounts of extrajudicial killings, including shooting fleeing civilians, Zeid said. I call on the government to end its current cruel military operation, with accountability for all violations that have occurred, and to reverse the pattern of severe and widespread discrimination against the Rohingya population, he added. The situation seems a textbook example of ethnic cleansing. Attacks by Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) militants on police posts and an army base in the northwestern state of Rakhine on Aug. 25 provoked a military counter-offensive. Myanmar says its security forces are carrying out clearance operations to defend against ARSA, which the government has declared a terrorist organization. Myanmar on Sunday rebuffed a ceasefire declared by ARSA to enable the delivery of aid to thousands of displaced and hungry people in the north of Rakhine state, declaring simply that it did not negotiate with terrorists. Human rights monitors and fleeing Rohingya accuse the army and Rakhine Buddhist vigilantes of mounting a campaign of arson aimed at driving out the Rohingya. The government of Myanmar, a majority Buddhist country where the roughly one million Muslim Rohingya are marginalized, has repeatedly rejected charges of ethnic cleansing . Officials have blamed insurgents and Rohingya themselves for burning villages to draw global attention to their cause. Zeid said Myanmar should stop pretending that Rohingya were torching their own houses and its complete denial of reality was damaging the government s international standing. Western critics have accused Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi of failing to speak out for the Rohingya, who are despised by many in the country as illegal migrants from Bangladesh. Some have called for the Nobel Peace Prize Suu Kyi won in 1991 as a champion of democracy to be revoked. Monday s estimate of new arrivals in the Cox s Bazar region of Bangladesh since Aug. 25 was 313,000, an increase of 19,000 in just 24 hours. Large numbers of people are still arriving every day in densely packed sites, looking for space, and there are clear signs that more will cross before the situation stabilises, the International Organization for Migration said in a statement. New arrivals in all locations are in urgent need of life-saving assistance, including food, water and sanitation, health and protection. Thousands of Rohingya refugees are still stranded on the Myanmar side of the River Naf, which separates the two countries, with the biggest gathering south of the town of Maungdaw, monitors and sources in the area told Reuters. About 500 houses south of the town were set on fire on Monday, a villager in the Maungdaw region, Aung Lin, told Reuters by telephone. We were all running way because the army was firing on our village, he said. A lot of people carrying bags are now in the rice fields. Reuters journalists in Cox s Bazar could see huge blazes and plumes of smokes on the other side. Those still waiting to cross into Bangladesh - many hungry and exhausted after a days-long march through the mountains and bushes in monsoon rain - have been stopped because of a crackdown on Bangladeshi boatmen charging 10,000 taka ($122) or more per person, sources said. Arshad Zamman, 60, said his family had only 80,000 Burmese kyat ($60) and so he had taken a boat to Cox s Bazar on his own and would return to pick up his wife and two sons when he had enough for their journey. I will try to find money here. I will beg and hopefully some people will help me, he said. Elsewhere in Myanmar, communal tension appeared to be rising after more than two weeks of violence in Rakhine state. A mob of about 70 people armed with sticks and swords threatened to attack a mosque in the central town of Taung Dwin Gyi on Sunday evening, shouting, This is our country, this is our land , according to the mosque s imam, Mufti Sunlaiman. We shut down the lights in the mosque and sneaked out, the mufti, who was in the mosque at the time, told Reuters by phone. The government said in a statement the mob dispersed after police with riot shields fired rubber bullets. Rumors have spread on social media that Muslims, who make up represent about 4.3 percent of a population of 51.4 million, would stage attacks on Sept. 11 to avenge violence against the Rohingya. Tensions between Buddhists and Muslims have simmered since scores were killed and tens of thousands displaced in communal clashes accompanying the onset of Myanmar s democratic transition in 2012 and 2013. | 1 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama, calling Afghanistan’s security situation precarious, said on Wednesday he will keep U.S. troop levels there at 8,400 through the end of his administration rather than reducing them to 5,500 by year’s end as previously planned. Obama, in a statement at the White House, said the role of U.S. forces in Afghanistan will remain unchanged: training and advising Afghan police and troops, and supporting counterterrorism missions against the Taliban and other groups. Obama’s presidency ends in January. Obama’s plan still calls for a reduction in U.S. troop levels from the current roughly 9,800, but not as much as previously planned. Obama, who took office in 2009 pledging to wind down the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, said he had ended America’s combat mission in Afghanistan. But he acknowledged that security concerns persist. “The security situation in Afghanistan remains precarious,” Obama said. “The Taliban remains a threat. They’ve gained ground in some places.” Taliban forces now hold more territory in Afghanistan than at any time since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion, according to recent United Nations estimates. The Islamic State group has also established a small presence in Afghanistan. Obama’s decision, which came after a review submitted last month by the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Army General John Nicholson, drew some criticism inside and outside his administration. Some Pentagon officials said that it does nothing to address the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan. “It’s disappointing that the administration thinks that troop numbers are a substitute for a more comprehensive strategy,” said a U.S. defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “This is neither the reduction that the White House seems to have wanted nor the current numbers that don’t seem to be sufficient to deal with the security problem.” Mac Thornberry, the Republican chairman of the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, criticized what he said was a new cap on U.S. troop levels. “It is time that the president level with the American people about what it will really take to achieve our goals in Afghanistan, and how much it will cost,” Thornberry said in a statement. Obama spoke in advance of a NATO summit on Friday and Saturday in Warsaw, Poland, where alliance members are expected to confirm their support for the Kabul government. In addition to the U.S. forces, there are about 3,000 other international troops in Afghanistan. U.S. troops have been in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion launched by Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, that toppled the Taliban leaders who harbored the al Qaeda organization responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States that killed about 3,000 people. It is America’s longest war. During his announcement at the White House, Obama was flanked by Defense Secretary Ash Carter and the top U.S. military officer, General Joe Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. | 0 |
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - A top European Commission official defended Malta s record on preventing money laundering in a parliamentary debate on Tuesday prompted by the murder of an investigative journalist, but a variety of EU lawmakers expressed scepticism. Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans told European Parliament lawmakers that the European Commission had carried out an analysis of Malta s compliance with anti-money laundering laws and concluded that there were no general concerns . He added however that improvements could be made on various levels, and said the commission was assessing new information provided by Malta on recent alleged cases of wrongdoing. Timmermans assessment was however not shared by most lawmakers. Many called for closer oversight of Malta s adherence to the rule of law, a process that could lead to heavy sanctions if wrongdoing was ascertained. Esteban Gonz lez Pons, Vice-Chairman of the conservative group, the largest of the EU assembly, denounced in Malta the harassment of journalists, the blackmailing of independent media by banks connected with money laundering, the involvement of government officials in tax evasion. He said that police in Malta remain silent in the face of such activities. Other lawmakers echoed Pons s comments and raised other questions about Malta s respect for the rule of law and money laundering rules. A smaller number of parliamentarians urged caution on accusations against Malta. A resolution set to be voted on Wednesday openly questions the independence of the police on the island and raises serious concerns about the rule of law, democracy and fundamental rights in Malta. The parliament s debate was triggered by the killing on Oct. 16 of Daphne Caruana Galizia, a Maltese journalist who had denounced high-profile corruption and accused Prime Minister Joseph Muscat of wrongdoing. The Parliament named the news room in its Strasbourg building after Caruana Galizia on Tuesday. Timmermans did not make any direct comment on the rule of law in Malta, but he called again on the Maltese authorities to bring to justice the perpetrators of Caruana Galizia s murder. He said the investigation should proceed unhampered and stressed that the Maltese authorities had committed to do all in their power to pursue the culprits. He also called on Malta to join the EU public prosecution office, a new body to prosecute crimes in the 28-country bloc, from which Malta has opted out. | 0 |
BERLIN (Reuters) - Frauke Petry, co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany, said on Tuesday she was leaving the party in a major blow to its credibility just two days after it surged to third place in a national election. The anti-immigrant AfD won 12.6 percent of the vote in Germany’s election on Sunday, becoming the third-largest group in parliament and the first from the far-right to win seats in the Bundestag since the 1950s. Petry, the highest-profile figure in the AfD’s more moderate wing, had shocked other senior members by saying on Monday she would not sit with the AfD in the Bundestag (lower house) but rather as an independent member of parliament. Her husband, another senior AfD figure, is also leaving the party. “We tried to change course but you have to realize when you reach a point when that is no longer possible,” Petry, a 42-year-old chemist, told reporters in the eastern city of Dresden. “I have five children for whom I am responsible and ultimately you have to be able to look yourself in the mirror.” Petry has clashed with other senior members, arguing for the party to take a more moderate course to make it possible for it to join a coalition government. Her husband, Marcus Pretzell - head of the AfD in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and also an MP in the European Parliament - is quitting the party and will become an independent MP, a spokesman for the AfD in NRW said. The spokesman said Pretzell and another AfD lawmaker in NRW’s regional assembly who is also leaving the party had made the decision for reasons of “personal integrity”. On Monday, four of the 17 AfD lawmakers in the assembly of the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern announced they were bolting because the party had become more radical. Europe’s far-right parties have a history of infighting among their various factions. Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s National Front, last week lost her deputy over policy differences. Alexander Gauland and Alice Weidel, the AfD’s top candidates during the election campaign, were elected as chairs of the party’s parliamentary group on Tuesday. Gauland is a supporter of Bjoern Hoecke, a senior AfD member who has courted controversy by denying that Adolf Hitler was “absolutely evil” and calling Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial a “monument of shame”. Weidel was originally an opponent of Hoecke but has not been so critical of him lately. Weidel said she did not expect other lawmakers to quit the party but added: “We’ll have to see. The step surprised us all, but there are not yet any trends recognizable in the future parliamentary group.” Senior AfD member Dirk Driesang, who in July founded a moderate group within the AfD called the “Alternative Centre”, with which Petry was said to sympathize, told news magazine Der Spiegel that the group could not understand Petry’s decision and would not be following in her footsteps. He said the group would continue to fight for the AfD to take a moderate course and added that “a spin-off from the AfD is a stillbirth”. Driesang pointed to the example of Bernd Lucke, who founded the AfD then left in 2015 due to what he saw as rising xenophobia and then formed a new, unsuccessful party. Petry was the most recognizable face in the AfD during its swift rise over the past two years. But she said on Monday she could not stand with an “anarchistic party” that lacked a credible plan to govern. For months, Petry has urged the AfD to soften its stance and prepare to join coalition governments, while others wanted the party to stick to opposition. Mainstream parties refuse to work with the AfD. She had also distanced herself from some of the AfD’s more radical senior members, saying their comments were putting voters off. Gauland caused a scandal during the election campaign by saying Germans should be proud of their World War Two soldiers. He also said the integration minister should be “disposed of” in Turkey, where her parents come from. As the AfD convened in Berlin on Tuesday for its first parliamentary group meeting, Gauland said discussions in the Bundestag would not echo those of the party’s campaign. “It’s clear that the talks during the campaign are different to those held in parliament,” he said. | 0 |
The main stream media is totally ignoring the horrific case of a Sudanese immigrant who stormed into a Tennessee church this morning and killed 1, injured several. Nashville Police have identified the suspect of a mass shooting at a church Sunday morning as 25-year-old Emanuel Kidega Samson.Samson is being charged with murder and multiple counts of attempted murder in the attack that killed one and left at least seven other people injured at the Burnette Chapel Church of Christ in Antioch, a town just south of Nashville, Tenn.IT COULD HAVE BEEN MUCH WORSE: One brave church member, 22-year-old Caleb Engle, confronted the Samson before being pistol whipped in the face. Engle then went to his car to retrieve a gun, which he has under a concealed carry license (CCL). Engle returned to the church to confront the gunman again. The gunman shot himself in the face when the man returned, possibly by accident. He s the hero here, Nashville police chief Steve Anderson said. He s the person who stopped this madness in its tracks. Later today, Engle released a statement: Samson is a bodybuilder who attended high school in Tennessee and is originally from Karthoum, Sudan, according screenshots of the suspect s Facebook page. Emanuel K. Samson came from Sudan in 1996. He was a legal US resident but not necessarily a US citizen.A Nashville Police Department spokesman said the shooter entered the church after 11 a.m. CST wearing a neoprene ski mask. One woman was shot in the parking lot before the shooter entered the church and opened fire on about 42 people still inside.That s when Caleb Engle became the hero that he is It could have been so much worse!SAMSON S BOOKING PHOTO:This is Emanuel Kidega Samson s booking photo. pic.twitter.com/z0Or6rJFAK Metro Nashville PD (@MNPDNashville) September 25, 2017 | 0 |
Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Security Question: What is 4 + 2 ? 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 | 1 |
Is the Democratic Party really the party of the oppressed and of blacks and minorities ? Critics have accused the Democrat Party has been accused of cynically cultivating a dependence class whose main function for the party is to bring home the minority vote every few years.Were African-Americans better, or worse off after eight years of a Democratic White House?US Senate candidate Derrick Grayson from the state of Georgia explains the actual racist roots of the Democratic Party in America, the tragic loss of Black American icons Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and how the liberal left have successfully managed to use and manipulate minorities in America since the the FDR era.Watch this incredible impromptu piece to camera by an passionate Grayson: READ MORE POLITICALLY CORRECT NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire PC FilesSUPPORT 21WIRE SUBSCRIBE & BECOME A MEMBER @ 21WIRE.TV | 1 |
Earlier today, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan dropped a truth bomb that absolutely humiliated Donald Trump and made him look like a moron.After he had a meeting with the undeserving Trump, Ryan was later asked about the calls for a prosecutor to look into Russia s interference in the U.S. election, which the intelligence community has reported extensively on.Trump has denied over and over again that Russia meddled in the U.S. election, and has repeatedly shot down and offended the CIA and other intelligence organizations in order to protect Russia and his favorite tyrant, Vladimir Putin. So when Ryan responded to the question with the exact opposite stance that Trump has taken, it made the former reality television star look even more foolish than before. Clearly, this is yet another thing that the Republican Party is divided on right now.Ryan stated very bluntly that Russia without a doubt DID mess with the U.S. election on Trump s behalf, further embarrassing Trump for his ridiculous defense of the country. Ryan said: We know Russia meddled in the election. No one is disputing that. And this last government gave us that information in the first place. No one is alleging that some American was in on it beforehand. And yet, there s still a little problem with Ryan s statement the part where he says no one is disputing that. Let s remind him that just yesterday, Trump tried to convince everyone that all this Russia talk is FAKE NEWS and blamed the Democratic Party and media for being petty and bitter over the election loss.Trump is seriously delusional, and Ryan s statement perfectly illustrates that the Republican Party is splitting from Trump in many ways, unable to agree with his insanity. Looks like Trump is alone in defending Russia, and the GOP doesn t care if they make him look like an idiot anymore. You can watch Ryan trash Trump below:Featured image via Mark Wilson and Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images | 0 |
(Reuters) - After firing up crowds with boisterous and sometimes divisive campaign rhetoric, Donald Trump has appeared to moderate some stances since he won the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 8. Such shifts have cheered critics concerned about his campaign positions while angering some supporters. But Trump also sometimes modified positions during the campaign, so the Republican president-elect could change stances again before or after he takes office on Jan. 20. The following are some of his changing positions: To chants from crowds of “Lock her up,” Trump said during the campaign that if he won the election, his administration would prosecute his Democratic rival over her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, and over what he said were abuses of her position with regard to her family’s charitable foundation. During the second presidential debate on Oct. 9, he said he would appoint a special prosecutor and seek to jail Clinton if he won. Asked during a New York Times interview on Nov. 22 about reports that he no longer wanted to prosecute Clinton, Trump said, “I want to move forward, I don’t want to move back. And I don’t want to hurt the Clintons. I really don’t.” However, he said “no” when asked if he was definitively taking the idea of investigating Clinton off the table. Trump has called global warming a hoax and during the campaign he said he wanted to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris Agreement among almost 200 nations, which came into effect on Nov. 4. Instead, he said he would push ahead and develop cheap coal, shale and oil. On Nov. 12, a source on his transition team said Trump’s advisers were considering ways to bypass a theoretical four-year procedure for leaving the climate accord. Asked in the Times interview on Nov. 22 if he was going to take America out of the world’s lead of confronting climate change, Trump said, “I have an open mind to it. We’re going to look very carefully.” Asked if he believed human activity causes climate change, he said, “I think there is some connectivity. There is some, something. It depends on how much.” During the campaign, Trump said he would repeal President Barack Obama’s signature Affordable Care Act. He called Obamacare a “disaster” and said he would replace it with a plan that would give states more control over the Medicaid health plan for the poor and allow insurers to sell plans nationally. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published on Nov. 11, Trump said he was considering keeping parts of the law, including provisions letting parents keep adult children up to age 26 on insurance policies and barring insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. “Either Obamacare will be amended, or repealed and replaced,” Trump told the Journal. On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly promised to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border to curb illegal immigration and that Mexico would pay for it. He also said he would deport millions of illegal immigrants and proposed a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country as a means of countering terrorism. He never retracted this but in the later stages of the campaign, rephrased it as a proposal to temporarily suspend immigration from regions deemed as exporting terrorism and where safe vetting cannot be ensured. In an interview with CBS program “60 Minutes” that aired on Nov. 13, Trump said he really planned to build a wall. However, asked if this could be a fence, he said it could be part wall, part fence. “For certain areas I would (have a fence) but certain areas, a wall is more appropriate. I’m very good at this - it’s called construction,” he said. Asked about deporting illegal immigrants, he told CBS that the initial focus would be on those immigrants who are “criminal and have criminal records,” who he said probably numbered 2 million and possibly even 3 million. During the campaign, Trump said the United States should revive use of waterboarding and “a lot more” when questioning terrorism suspects. Waterboarding, an interrogation tactic that simulates drowning, is widely regarded as torture and was banned under President Barack Obama. In the Nov. 22 Times interview, Trump said he had been impressed when he asked Marine General James Mattis, a potential pick for defense secretary, about waterboarding and Mattis replied, “I’ve always found, give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers and I do better with that than I do with torture.” While the response had not made him change his mind, Trump said, it had impressed him that the use of waterboarding was “not going to make the kind of a difference that maybe a lot of people think.” | 1 |
VIENTIANE (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama will likely hold talks with Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe during a leaders’ summit in Laos following a missile test by North Korea, the White House said on Tuesday. The firing of three ballistic missiles by North Korea on Monday highlighted the need for the United States to maintain a sense of urgency within the international community regarding sanctions on North Korea, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters. | 0 |
Though many expected WikiLeaks or a similar group to make the final weeks of the US presidential campaign hell for Hillary, few expected the FBI to take center stage in the movement against Hillary... | 1 |
(CNN) Hillary Clinton , Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley met for the second Democratic presidential primary debate on Saturday night, an event that finally saw a fight between the front-runner and her chief opponent, but also coming a day after a deadly terror attack that shocked the world.
From left, Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and Martin O'Malley prepare to debate at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, on Saturday, November 14. It was the party's second presidential debate.
From left, Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and Martin O'Malley prepare to debate at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, on Saturday, November 14. It was the party's second presidential debate.
Here are the six key takeaways from the debate:
Clinton distanced herself from President Barack Obama's now-controversial comment in an interview Thursday that the U.S. had "contained ISIS." During Saturday's debate, Clinton asserted that ISIS "cannot be contained" and must simply be "defeated."
As she has in the past, Clinton also suggested that she had argued "early on that we needed to find a way to train and equip moderates." Clinton reportedly argued for a more forceful administration plan to help the Syrian opposition early on in the civil war that has since exploded.
The Vermont senator in the first debate appeared unprepared or unwilling to go after Clinton with any real vigor.
But Saturday night, Sanders suggested Clinton is in the pocket of Wall Street and tied her vote to authorize the war in Iraq to the rise of ISIS. Clinton, meanwhile, knocked Sanders on his mixed record on guns and suggested his policy proposals are too simplistic.
In the most forceful exchange of the night, Sanders pointed to the millions of dollars in donations Wall Street has funneled to Clinton's campaigns over her political career.
"Why over her political career has Wall Street been a major, the major campaign contributor to Hillary Clinton? Maybe they're dumb and they don't know what they're going to get, but I don't think so," Sanders said. "I have never heard a candidate, never, who has received huge amounts of money from oil, from coal, from Wall Street from the military industrial complex, not one candidate -- 'Oh these, these campaign contributions will not influence me.' But why do they make millions of dollars of campaign contributions? They expect to get something, everybody knows that."
As she did in the first debate, Clinton hit Sanders on guns, calling the Vermont senator's vote to shield gun makers from some lawsuits a "terrible mistake" and urging Sanders to admit as much, as she has done regarding her Iraq vote.
Sanders responded by suggesting there's little daylight between himself and Clinton and O'Malley on guns.
3. ...but he still holds back
Sanders didn't take the gloves off completely during Saturday night's debate in Iowa.
Instead, he took a pass on one of the biggest points of contention of the 2016 cycle: Clinton's record as secretary of state.
Given a chance to slam Clinton's tenure, Sanders demurred, instead pivoting to his "disagreement" with Clinton over her vote in favor of the Iraq War in 2002, more than six years before she became secretary of state.
Republicans are already picking apart Clinton's track record as secretary of state, but Sanders' simply wouldn't take the bait.
4. The moments that could come back to haunt Clinton
However, Clinton's response to Sanders -- when she beat back the suggestion that she is influenced by Wall Street donors -- could really come back to bite her.
Clinton explained her connection to Wall Street by tying her relationship to her role in helping to rebuild New York's financial district after the 9/11 attacks.
Twitter was ablaze Saturday night over the response, and the Republican National Committee was quick to blast out a best-of compilation of political observers' reactions.
Clinton at one point said she is "from the '60s" -- a moment in the debate that could be replayed in political ads down the line suggesting she is part of the past, not the future, of American leadership.
The debate Saturday night began with the candidates pausing on stage, taking a moment of silence to remember the victims of the terrorist attacks that ripped Paris apart just a day earlier.
Clinton said while "our prayers are with the people of France tonight...that is not enough" and called for better coordinated efforts to root out ISIS, the radical group that claimed responsibility.
She said Americans should see the terrorist attack as a reminder that the election "is not only about electing a president, it's also about choosing our next commander in chief."
Sanders made brief note of the terrorist attacks at the top of his opening statement, but quickly pivoted to the core message of the campaign: "a rigged economy" that benefits billionaires.
Still, Sanders made a bold claim in his reference to Paris: "Together, leading the world, this country will rid our planet of this barbarist (sic) organization called ISIS."
And O'Malley, after saying his heart goes out "to the people of France in this moment of loss," quickly called for "fresh thinking" and "new approaches" -- a definitive nod to his youth and the generational contrast the 52-year-old offers to Clinton's 68 years and Sanders' 74.
All three candidates refused to say the fight was with radical Islam, instead focusing on using the word "jihadist" to describe the threats spotlighted in the Paris attacks.
6. O'Malley gets a zinger, then shrinks away
But O'Malley also missed a couple of key moments where he could have shined.
His central contention is that it's time for a new generation of leadership -- meaning no more baby boomers like Clinton. But he lacked a strong, convincing response to one of the debate's final questions: When have you been most tested in your life, and how did it prepare you for the presidency?
O'Malley's response conceded that he is untested -- that nothing he's been through as mayor of Baltimore or governor of Maryland comes close to the crises he would face as President.
Trump later responded to O'Malley's insult on Twitter by calling him a "clown." | 0 |
PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen threatened on Monday that the main opposition party, the Cambodia National Rescue Party, would be dissolved if it continues to back detained leader Kem Sokha, who has been charged with treason. Kem Sokha was arrested on Sept. 3 and accused of plotting against the government with the help of the United States. If the political party continues to blockade and defend this traitor, it means the party is also a traitor so there is no time to let this party operate in Cambodia s democratic process anymore, Hun Sen told a graduation ceremony in Phnom Penh. He said that, if the act of treason involved the whole party, it would be disciplined by law, which means the dissolution of the party . | 1 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson canceled public events on Tuesday after a van carrying three volunteers and a campaign staffer slid on ice in Iowa, flipped on its side and was hit by another vehicle, his campaign said. One of the volunteers, Braden Joplin, 25, died after being taken to a trauma center at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, the hospital said in a statement released by the Carson campaign. The other three people were treated and released from a hospital in Atlantic, Iowa, the statement said. Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, was traveling from South Carolina to Omaha where he planned to meet with Joplin’s family members and offer his condolences, the hospital statement said. Carson is among a dozen Republican presidential candidates crisscrossing Iowa before the state’s Feb. 1 caucuses, the nation’s first contest to determine the party’s nominee in November’s presidential election. (Reporting by Doina Chiacu and Eric Walsh; Editing by Alistair Bell and Peter Cooney) SAP is the sponsor of this coverage which is independently produced by the staff of Reuters News Agency. | 1 |
In a stunning example of just how morally bankrupt right-wing media has become in the Age of Trump, Breitbart the conservative website often described as Trump s de facto propaganda wing wrote a lavish piece praising Melania Trump for her high fashion outfits while accompanying her husband on his first overseas trip.Who cares, right? Why would anyone have a problem with what the first lady is wearing on a trip?Well, Breitbart, the very same website, seems to albeit only when it s the African-American wife of America s first African-American president. Here s the sneering way they covered Michelle Obama s decision to wear a $3,200 dress on the former president s visit with the pope.Politico reports that First Lady Michelle Obama, looking lovely and classy, greeted Pope Francis Tuesday while wearing a $2,290 dress. While the Obamas are not Catholics, this is still a finger-in-the-eye to a White House guest who frequently speaks out to wild Democrat applause about the evils of excessive capitalism.And adding to the absurd critique:According to WorldVision, you can feed a child for just $35 a month. Michelle Obama s dress would feed over 80 children for that month. This choice obviously is contrary to the values of Pope Francis. But the Obamas religious values come from elsewhere, a divisive and disturbing place, not a charitable or unifying one.Almost beyond parody.Flash forward to this weekend. Melania was treated to a photo spread, with Brietbart praising her outfits, including an expensive custom-made creation from fashion designer Dolce & Gabbana.In a visit to meet Pope Francis, Melania worked with Dolce & Gabbana, again, on a stunning custom-made, black coat-dress that showed off a beautiful round collar, framing the First Lady s face. The look was paired with a black lace Mantilla and black Manolo Blahnik stilettos, sticking to the Vatican dress code.The next day, Melania would don a dress that cost $51,000. Conservatives didn t bat an eye.Let s crunch those numbers through Breitbart s bullshit calculator:According to WorldVision, you can feed a child for just $35 a month. Melania Trump s dress would feed over 1400 children for a month. But then the Trump s religious values come from elsewhere, a divisive and disturbing place, not a charitable one. (This comparison, however tongue-in-cheek, is actually unfair in more ways than one, the Obamas actually do have a history of charitable giving. Trump is famous for not donating to charity. A truly divisive and disturbing worldview, if there ever was one.)As the above passages exemplify, Breitbart loved to apply ridiculous, nonsense standards to the Obamas that they would never dream of holding the Trump family up to. The website once run by anti-Semite Steve Bannon and which has a section devoted to black crime has some pretty obvious, bigoted reasons for hating the Obamas. It s egregious but not particularly surprising then that they would find the white first lady s opulence charming while finding the black first lady s show of class distressing.Featured image via Franco Origlia/Getty Images / h/t Mikel Jollett | 0 |
Margaret Kimberly Global ResearchThe U.S. public loves fascists; they elect them, constantly. Donald Trump, who says he would raise the minimum wage and stop the endless efforts at regime change, is called a fascist by some. But Hillary Clinton is happy to bomb Libya or Syria or any other country, and played a major role in mass Black incarceration. Barack Obama is the war-maker and deporter-in-chief. All of the major party candidates fit the F word description in some way. Donald Trump is the ill spoken, boorish, graceless version of every American president in modern history. He differs from them only in his unconcealed appeals to white nationalism. But Democrats aren t much better. They pretend to work on behalf of human, civil and economic rights but those claims are lies. They are meant to hide their partnerships with corporate America, very wealthy individuals and the worldwide imperialist project.If Trump is a fascist then he will fit in nicely with the pantheon of horrific men we are told to respect and venerate. Barack Obama charges and convicts whistle blowers with the little used espionage act from the era of Woodrow Wilson. He claims and has exercised an invented right to kill Americans. His predecessor invaded and occupied Iraq but he continues the dirty deed there and in Afghanistan. He tries to fool the public by assassinating al Qaeda number two, over and over again. Al Qaeda certainly doesn t lack for plan B staffers.Bush the younger cut tax rates for rich people but Obama didn t change that. Under the guise of compromising with intransigent Republicans he did the same thing. When he and the Democrats controlled Congress in 2009 and 2010 they raised the minimum wage a paltry 70 cents.Conversely, Donald Trump says he would raise the minimum wage and says he would stop the endless efforts at regime change. Neither Hillary Clinton nor Bernie Sanders have questioned that fundamental premise of American foreign policy. Hillary Clinton has already proven herself to be particularly blood thirsty. She is happy to bomb Libya or Syria or any other country. Her so-called expertise amounts to nothing more than an expansion of state sponsored terror committed by the United States.Trump says he wouldn t cut Social Security while Barack Obama famously declared that he and his 2012 Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, agreed on the need to cut this program that was once called the third rail of politics.Every president since the 1980s has grown the horrific mass incarceration industry. Using wars on drugs as a pretext they have locked up 2 million people, half of whom are black. No one comes into office with any intention of undoing America s leadership as the world s worst jailer.American history teaches black people to be, at the very least, wary of public officials who are beloved by red necks as much as Trump is. When Trump speaks of preventing Muslim immigration or deporting all of the estimated 11 million undocumented people in this country he is making inherently racist appeals.That is why he is protested and rightly so. But the protesters have already missed the mark by giving a pass to equally questionable policy actions and statements coming from Democrats.It is a Democratic president who brought back a cold war against Russia and recklessly brought troops to the edge of that country s borders.This scenario was unheard of during the worst days of the cold war and now risks nuclear confrontation. That is because George W. Bush unilaterally abrogated the missile defense treaty with Russia. Perhaps he can be called a fascist also.The trade deals passed by American presidents with congressional connivance grow worse. There is no longer any pretense that their goal is to help corporations maximize profits and minimize everyone else s rights. Not even members of Congress were allowed access to the text of the Trans Pacific Partnership legislation.If Trump is protested, Obama ought to be as well. He is spending his last year in office on an imperialism tour. He goes to Hiroshima for photo opportunities with atomic bomb survivors while building more nuclear warheads than any other president. He tells endless lies about Russian aggression but he is the provocative head of state.Trump should be disliked by Latinos and everyone else when he says that Mexican immigrants are rapists and murderers. But Obama is the deporter in chief, sending a record number of Latino immigrants out of the country with dubious rationales, devastating them and their families.Apparently all of the major party candidates fit the F word description in some way. Trump s bombast and ignorance make him the easiest to pick out of the crowd but appearances are deceiving. It seems that if a politician has the right establishment credentials and knows how to give prepared speeches he or she can get away with committing any outrage.In just the last 40 years American presidents or their allied partners in crime have killed people in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Congo, Somalia, Haiti, Grenada, Gaza, Kosovo, Serbia, Sudan, Syria, Libya and Yemen. What do they have to do to be called fascists? Showing bad manners seems to be the only thing that sets off expressions of outrage among Americans.There is already fascism in the White House, the Justice Department, the State Department and Congress. The only question is who will be the next person to keep that sick machinery running.This article originally appeared on Global ResearchGet 10% off a 21WIRE TV membership package today using promo code: STU21WIRETVEVERYTHING ON ELECTION 2016: 21st Century Wire Election Files | 1 |
USA Today published an article today that was so egregiously misleading that every hotel that leaves this joke of a publication outside the doors for their guests to read, should be ashamed to be peddling such trash. (Even if it is free..and we all know what they say: If it s free It s free for a reason .) USA Today is one of the most virulently anti-Trump publications you will find anywhere. Much like the morning shows, whose morning talk hosts greet their viewers with cheerful dispositions and big white smiles, while sticking daggers into our president and his family, USA Today can be found as in almost every hotel in America as a complimentary source of news for their guests.USA Today comes across to the everyday American as a friendly publication that gives Americans a snapshot into the latest national news without any bias. Unfortunately, nothing could be further than the truth. USA Today s stories are so anti-Trump, they should almost come with a warning label for anyone who s looking for honest journalism and unbiased news.An article that appeared today, in the USA Today talked about the dire financial situation that President Trump and his family have caused with their with an unprecedented number of White House protectees. Shortly after the article was published, Secret Service Director Randolph Tex Alles released a statement refuting what USA Today claimed he said. The quotes in red in the USA Today article below are from the Secret Service Director s statement.USA Today The Secret Service can no longer pay hundreds of agents it needs to carry out an expanded protective mission in large part due to the sheer size of President Trump s family and efforts necessary to secure their multiple residences up and down the East Coast.Here s what Secret Service Director Randolph Tex Alles said about the Secret Service running out of money: The Secret Service has the funding it needs to meet all current mission requirements for the remainder of the fiscal year and compensate employees for overtime within statutory pay caps. Secret Service Director Randolph Tex Alles, in an interview with USA TODAY, said more than 1,000 agents have already hit the federally mandated caps for salary and overtime allowances that were meant to last the entire year.OOPS! It looks like the same thing happened in 2016 while Barack Obama was President: The Secret Service estimates that roughly 1,100 employees will work overtime hours in excess of statutory pay caps during calendar year 2017. Our agency experienced a similar situation in calendar year 2016 that resulted in legislation that allowed Secret Service employees to exceed statutory caps on pay.The agency has faced a crushing workload since the height of the contentious election season, and it has not relented in the first seven months of the administration. Agents must protect Trump who has traveled almost every weekend to his properties in Florida, New Jersey and Virginia and his adult children whose business trips and vacations have taken them across the country and overseas.To remedy this ongoing and serious problem, the agency has worked closely with the Department of Homeland Security, the Administration, and the Congress over the past several months to find a legislative solution. As we work to ensure that employees are compensated for the hours they work, the Secret Service continues its rigorous hiring of special agents, Uniformed Division officers, and critical support staff to meet future mission requirements. The president has a large family, and our responsibility is required in law, Alles said. I can t change that. I have no flexibility. The law, Title 18 US Code 3056, details protection requirements for the President, Vice President and their immediate family members.Alles said the service is grappling with an unprecedented number of White House protectees. Under Trump, 42 people have protection, a number that includes 18 members of his family. That s up from 31 during the Obama administration.Does USA Today really believe the average American is so stupid that they ve already forgotten about the several separate vacations that the former first lady took while her husband golfed almost every weekend that he was in office? What about her notorious trip to Spain where she brought most of her entire friends and family list courtesy of the American taxpayers?The people you see surrounding former First Lady Michele Obama on her luxury African Safari are Michelle s family members. Yes, the American taxpayer paid for her luxury African Safari with her brother, cousins and of course, her mother, who lived in the White House for Barack s entire 8-year term, and traveled to all of their overseas destinations courtesy of, you guessed it, the American taxpayer.Surely USA Today doesn t believe we ve already forgotten about Barack Obama s obsession with golf, that more than one time, took him and his lovely wife to opposite sides of the country to satisfy their individual 5-star travel needs:Overwork and constant travel have also been driving a recent exodus from the Secret Service ranks, yet without congressional intervention to provide additional funding, Alles will not even be able to pay agents for the work they have already done.The compensation crunch is so serious that the director has begun discussions with key lawmakers to raise the combined salary and overtime cap for agents, from $160,000 per year to $187,000 for at least the duration of Trump s first term.But even if such a proposal was approved, about 130 veteran agents would not be fully compensated for hundreds of hours already amassed, according to the agency. And finally, the same Secret Service Director Randolph Tex Alles who allegedly gave USA Today the exclusive scoop about how the Trump family were draining the Secret Service funds dry, concluded his statement with this:This issue is not one that can be attributed to the current Administration s protection requirements alone, but rather has been an ongoing issue for nearly a decade due to an overall increase in operational tempo.This isn t the first time USA Today was caught fabricating a story to make President Trump look bad to their readers. In April of 2017, USA TODAY was caught fabricating a story about an innocent Dreamer being deported. Click HERE to read the story. | 1 |
Jeb Bush is desperate for people to support him and his fledgling campaign for the presidency, but he probably wishes the latest supporter of his campaign had kept his endorsement to himself.As you may recall, Jeb s brother George nearly destroyed the economy back in 2008 all while giving ridiculous tax breaks to the wealthy pricks who helped him crash it.Jeb Bush hasn t exactly been touting W s economic record, but one hedge-funder who has since become one of the most hated corporate tools in America is touting his support for Jeb s campaign.Last year, Jeb s biggest fan hiked the price of a crucial AIDS medication known as Daraprim to $750 a pill, a 5,000 percent increase from its original price, thereby guaranteeing that only rich patients would be able to afford the drug without fearing bankruptcy.Ferret face then went on television to defend the price hike in the most dickish way possible as if he s helping people by raising the price.And most recently, the greedy douchebag has been arrested by federal authorities for securities fraud and repeatedly dodged questions by lawmakers after being subpoenaed by Congress.As you have probably figured out, the Jeb endorser described is none other than professional asshole Martin Shkreli.Shkreli took to Twitter on Friday and posted a brief message announcing his support of the former Florida Governor who had to beg people to clap during a recent rally.@JebBush i m an avid supporter Martin Shkreli (@MartinShkreli) February 6, 2016Perhaps even more embarrassing if the fact that Shkreli rescinded his endorsement less than 24 hours later by blaming his alleged date for posting the tweet as a joke. My date made the tweet about Jeb Bush as a joke. I don t follow politics except for having a profound hatred for all politicians. Martin Shkreli (@MartinShkreli) February 7, 2016This creates a couple questions. First, who in this world would date a total asshole who screws around with people s healthcare? And second, how pathetic must Jeb Bush be if the only endorsement he can get is a fake one by the most hated man in America? | 0 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has postponed a trip planned for Sunday to Charlotte, North Carolina, which has seen sometimes violent protests after a black man was killed by police earlier this week. “Hillary is grateful for, and intends to honor, the invitation from faith leaders to visit with the Charlotte community,” her campaign said in a statement on Friday. “After further discussion with community leaders, we have decided to postpone Sunday’s trip as to not impact the city’s resources,” it said, adding that Clinton will visit the city on the following Sunday. | 0 |
NAYPYITAW (Reuters) - Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Tuesday gave her first address to the nation since attacks by Rohingya Muslim insurgents on Aug. 25 sparked a military response that has forced more than 410,000 Rohingya into neighboring Bangladesh. Suu Kyi condemned human rights violations and said anyone responsible would face the law but she did not address U.N. accusations that the military campaign in Rakhine state was textbook ethnic cleansing. Here are some reactions to her speech from diplomats, aid agency officials, human rights groups and others: JAMES GOMEZ, Amnesty International regional director for Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Aung San Suu Kyi today demonstrated that she and her government are still burying their heads in the sand over the horrors unfolding in Rakhine State. PHIL ROBERTSON, Human Rights Watch deputy director, Asia Division. In response to Suu Kyi s statement that army clearance operations have ceased since Sept. 5 - If that is true, then who is burning all the villages we ve seen in the past two weeks? TIN MAUNG SWE, secretary of the Rakhine State government He praised Suu Kyi for her transparency but was not optimistic about her pledge to promote harmony between Muslims and the largely Buddhist ethnic Rakhine communities in the state. The situation is ready to explode. It just needs a single spark. SEIN WIN, Myanmar defense minister We will protect the ones who are in line with the law ... There are still many Muslim villages. We are taking good care of them, he said, as he arrived for Suu Kyi s speech. PAUL EDWARDS, UNICEF deputy representative in Myanmar We have to take at face value what she said about there being no further military operation since Sept 5. But of course none of us really know what s happening there if we re not there. MARZUKI DARUSMAN, chair of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar Two main issues emerge ... the categorical readiness of the government of Myanmar to receive back returnees at any time on the basis of a procedure that will have to be discussed at some point. And secondly, the readiness of the government to undertake to be globally scrutinized by the international community. These two points bode well. HONG LIANG, Chinese ambassador to Myanmar China s position is very clear. We support the Myanmar government s effort to restore the peace and stability in Rakhine. NIKOLAY A. LISTOPADOV, Russian ambassador to Myanmar There are not reliable proofs, evidence to make such a condemnation, genocide and ethnic cleansing, no evidence. ANDREW KIRKWOOD, United Nations Office for Project Services director and representative in Myanmar He welcomed Suu Kyi s announcement that diplomats could travel to Rakhine state to see the situation for themselves. I think that that is a positive statement and we wait to see what follow-up there is. NI LAR THEIN, Yangon resident attending an open-air broadcast of Suu Kyi s speech, which was in English. Mother Suu gave a speech today so that the whole world can know what s actually happening in our country. We come here to show our support for her, no matter if we understand the speech or not. | 0 |
Turkish Objections Won't Stop YPG's Involvement by Jason Ditz, October 26, 2016 Share This
US Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, the leader of the US military forces in Iraq and Syria , today announced that Kurdish YPG forces will participate in the invasion of the ISIS capital city of Raqqa, despite Turkish government demands that the Kurds not be allowed to take part.
Townsend was a bit vague on the details of Kurdish involvement, saying the US are “going to take this in steps,” and that Turkey has to realize the only way that the US is going to have enough force to take over Raqqa any time soon is with a significant portion of the YPG involved.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu reiterated that his government wants only “local forces” involved in the Raqqa battle, and that the YPG, who Turkey considers a terrorist organization, must not be allowed to take part in any way.
Turkey’s military has been attacking the YPG in several locations around Syria over the past week, including heavy airstrikes which killed an estimated 200 YPG fighters who were engaged in an offensive against ISIS around Afrin. The Turkish government has repeatedly complained the YPG is gaining too much territory in Syria, and that they must abandon much of it. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz | 1 |
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Britain, France and Australia urged Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Monday to push for an end to military violence against Rohingya Muslims, while her national security adviser said those who had fled could return but the process had to be discussed. The military response to insurgent attacks last month in the western region of Myanmar sent more than 410,000 Rohingya Muslims fleeing to neighboring Bangladesh, escaping what the United Nations has branded as ethnic cleansing. The government says about 400 people have been killed in the fighting. We will make sure that everybody who left their home can return to their home but this is a process we have to discuss, Myanmar national security adviser Thaung Tun told Reuters on Monday after a ministerial meeting on the crisis hosted by Britain on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. We want to make sure that everybody who needs humanitarian assistance gets it, without discrimination. That is one of the things we agreed on, he said. Nobel laureate Suu Kyi has faced a barrage of international criticism for not stopping the violence. She is due to speak to the nation on Tuesday about the crisis, which the United States has described as a defining moment for Myanmar. We expect from Mrs Aung Sang Suu Kyi tomorrow a strong statement in this direction, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves le Drian told reporters in New York. British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson hosted a ministerial meeting to discuss ways to resolve the Rohingya crisis, which included ministers from Canada, Denmark, Turkey, Australia, Indonesia, Sweden, Bangladesh, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and a representative of the European Union. What we are trying to get everyone to agree is that, number one, the killings have got to stop, and the violence has got to stop. And we look not just to the military but also to Daw Suu to show a lead on that, Johnson told Reuters before the meeting. In a statement afterwards, Johnson said that while Myanmar had made encouraging progress towards democracy in the last few years, the situation in Rakhine, the terrible human rights abuses and violence are a stain on the country s reputation. It is vital that Aung San Suu Kyi and the civilian government make clear these abuses must stop, he said. Johnson said he was encouraged by our discussion and by the participation of the senior Burmese representatives, but we now need to see action to stop the violence and open up immediate humanitarian access. China, which, like the United States has worked to forge closer ties with Myanmar, a strategically important country in Southeast Asia, will not attend, a Chinese spokesman said, citing a really packed calendar for Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told Reuters ahead of the British meeting that a lasting political solution needed to be found for the Rohingya in Myanmar. About a million Rohingya lived in Rakhine State until the recent violence. Most face draconian travel restrictions and are denied citizenship in a country where many Buddhists regard them as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop told Reuters she wanted to hear Suu Kyi offer a solution to what is a tragedy of enormous proportions. She said that during the ministerial meeting in New York there was unanimity in the view that the violence must end and that there be a ceasefire. And we emphasized the need for humanitarian support to get through and also that the Rohingya must be able to return home, Bishop said. The United States urged the Myanmar government to end military operations in Rakhine state, grant humanitarian access, and commit to aiding the safe return of civilians to their homes, Haley said in a statement after the meeting. People are still at risk of being attacked or killed, humanitarian aid is not reaching the people who need it, and innocent civilians are still fleeing across the border to Bangladesh, Haley said. Washington has also called for an end to the violence and a restoration of humanitarian aid, and a deputy assistant secretary of state, Patrick Murphy, is due in Myanmar this week. We urge the (Myanmar) government to act quickly to restore the rule of law, investigate alleged human rights abuses and violations, and to hold security forces and others responsible for abuses and violations fully accountable for their actions, a spokeswoman for the U.S. State Department said. U.S.-Myanmar ties improved after the military began withdrawing from government in 2011, and paved the way for a 2015 election won by Suu Kyi s party. But the military retains a strong hand in government and remains responsible for security. A Trump administration official told Reuters last week the violence made it harder to build warmer ties with Myanmar, and there would likely be some easing in the short term, but he did not expect a return to sanctions. For years, the United States and Western allies imposed sanctions on Myanmar in support of Suu Kyi s campaign for democracy. Myanmar s response was to forge closer ties with China. Human Rights Watch U.N. director Louis Charbonneau called for strong U.N. action to compel Myanmar security services to end their ethnic cleansing campaign. With so many influential leaders gathered in New York, the next step should be work on a U.N. General Assembly resolution condemning the abuses and a Security Council resolution to impose targeted sanctions and an arms embargo on the commanders leading this brutal campaign he said. However, Myanmar earlier this month said it was negotiating with China and Russia, both permanent veto wielding members of the Security Council, to block any bid to censure the country over the violence. | 1 |
Atlético Nacional, the Colombian team that was to play Chapecoense of Brazil in the finals of the Copa Sudamericana soccer tournament this week, has asked the organization in charge of South American soccer to award the trophy to Chapecoense, which had nearly all of its players and coaches killed in a plane crash on Monday night. Nacional said in a statement on its website and its Twitter feed that it had requested that the South American confederation, Conmebol, cancel the finals and declare Chapecoense the champion of the tournament, South America’s prestigious club competition. “Atlético Nacional calls on Conmebol to award the title of the Copa Sudamericana to Chapecoense for its huge loss, and in posthumous homage to the victims killed in the accident,” the team said in a statement. The competition’s organizers acknowledged that the request had been made after the “unanimous agreement” of Nacional’s players. On Monday, Chapecoense was flying to Medellín, Colombia, for the first leg of the finals when its chartered plane crashed on the outskirts of the city, killing nearly everyone on board. The plane was carrying 77 people, and Colombia’s civilian aviation authority said that six people had survived the crash: three of the 22 players, two of the nine crew members and one of the 21 journalists accompanying the team. The teams in Brazil’s first division released a “statement of solidarity” with Chapecoense, volunteering to lend it players for the 2017 season. The teams also said they had issued a “formal request” to the Brazilian soccer federation that “Chapecoense not be subjected to relegation” for the next three years. “It is a minimum gesture of solidarity that is at our disposal,” the statement read. “But it is endowed with the sincere objective of reconstruction of this institution that Brazilian football has lost. ” Brazilian soccer officials ordered all games in the country canceled for a mourning period beginning Tuesday, and around the world, other teams and leagues offered moments of silence before matches and practice sessions. Teams and players used social media to offer their condolences to Chapecoense, a minor regional club whose rise to the country’s top division had led it to be described as the Cinderella of Brazilian soccer. As recently as 2009, the club was playing in Brazil’s fourth tier. Two years ago, it won promotion to the country’s top flight, and its berth in the Copa Sudamericana finals brought the promise of the biggest games in the club’s history. Juliano Belletti, a former defender for Barcelona, Chelsea and the Brazilian national team, said the club’s rise through the ranks had “brought joy and hope” to the entire country. The Italian club Torino and the English powerhouse Manchester United also posted poignant condolences on Twitter. Each club’s history includes its own air disaster: Torino’s team was decimated in 1949 when a plane carrying 22 players crashed into a mountain, and Manchester United met with a similar catastrophe in 1958 when 23 people died in a crash in Germany as the club returned from a European Cup game. One of the members of the Chapecoense squad on board the chartered flight was Danilo, a goalkeeper who was reported to have died at a hospital after being rescued from the wreckage. | 0 |
IT S TIME TO DRAIN OBAMA S SWAMP! Rep. Jason Chaffetz, the head of the House Oversight Committee, criticized the director of the federal Office of Government Ethics on Thursday over his criticism of Donald Trump s plan to address conflicts of interest. And he threatened to subpoena the official, Walter Shaub, if he refuses to participate in an official interview. He seems to be acting prematurely at best, without doing investigations or thorough looks, Chaffetz said in an interview. He s rendering opinions publicly that really cause you to scratch your head. We need the Office of Government Ethics to act ethically. Ironically, that s not what they re doing. Shaub, an appointee of President Barack Obama, has been a frequent critics of the incoming administration s ethics plans, peaking Wednesday when he called Trump s newly unveiled conflicts of interest policy meaningless. The public rebuke of Trump s business arrangements came during a press conference at the Brookings Institution that included the outspoken former White House ethics lawyers for Obama and former President George W. Bush. In his remarks, Shaub said the president-elect stepping back from running his positions is meaningless from a conflict of interest perspective. The plan does not comport with the tradition of our presidents over the last 40 years, he added.Chaffetz said Shaub has refused since the election to agree to a meeting to discuss matters related to OGE s public remarks about Trump, as well as the Republican-led panel s plans to pass language reauthorizing the office. If Shaub continues to resist, Chaffetz said he d issue a subpoena if we have to. He is coming in. This is not going to be an optional exercise, Chaffetz said, adding that he expected a meeting within a few weeks.Shaub s 5-year term expires in January 2018. We need a fair person behind the plate that s going to call balls and strikes, Chaffetz said. What they re supposed to do is help work with somebody to comply with the ethics requirements. But when you talk publicly about private conversations, that s not ethical. And when you refuse to come in and talk to the committee when you re doing reauthorization, when you start tweeting and issuing press statements on things you never looked at, that shouldn t be the case at all. This isn t Chaffetz s first time challenging Shaub. In late 2015, the Republican accused the Obama appointee of giving Hillary Clinton a pass on conflict-of-interest laws over speaking fees she and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, were supposed to disclose. But Chaffetz said he s grown more frustrated with Shaub since the November election and also singled out the OGE s use of its official Twitter account to issue a bizarre series of posts in Trump s own staccato style congratulating the president-elect for making major changes to his business arrangements.For entire story: POLITICO | 1 |
When a disgusting ad appeared on TV showing a white man in a pick-up truck with a confederate flag in the back, and an Ed Gillespie for Governor bumper sticker on the gate, that was chasing down a group of minority kids in their neighborhood, Americans from every political party were disgusted. Many were asking who in the world was behind the Latino Victory Fund that sponsored the disgusting ad? Well, Washington Free Beacon did some digging, and as it turns out, the same person who funds violent riots, Antifa anti-free speech uprisings, or violent anti-Trump protests is also behind the funding of this horrible and divisive group whose co-founder is a well-known leftist actress. Liberal billionaire George Soros is a major funder of a Latino activist group that produced an ad in Virginia depicting a supporter of Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie running down minority children in a truck, which was pulled following the New York City terror attack that left eight people dead.The group was part of Soros-backed efforts against Trump and Republicans during the 2016 election cycle, and its leadership includes individuals who previously worked directly with Soros at his foundation.The Latino Victory Fund, a group that carries a mission of growing Latino political power by increasing Latino representation at every level of government, released the advertisement showing a man driving a pickup truck with a Gillespie campaign bumper sticker chasing minority children down streets and alleyways. Is this what Donald Trump and Ed Gillespie mean by the American dream?' the voiceover says in the ad.Crist bal J. Alex, the president of the Latino Victory, said the ad was produced to show how Gillespie has eagerly embraced racism and xenophobia during the campaign. The group pulled the ad following the terror attack in New York City on Tuesday and issued a non-apology when announcing the move. We knew our ad would ruffle feathers, Alex said in a statement late Tuesday night. We held a mirror up to the Republican Party, and they don t like what they see. We have decided to pull our ad at this time. Given recent events, we will be placing other powerful ads into rotation that highlight the reasons we need to elect progressive leaders in Virginia. Here s the disgusting ad:Latino Victory was co-founded by actress Eva Longoria and San Antonio-based businessman Henry R. Mu oz III, who has chaired the DNC s finance committee since 2013. Longoria and Mu oz previously operated the Futuro Fund, which raised $32 million for Barack Obama s reelection efforts.Soros is the top individual donor to the Latino Victory Fund this year and has given $150,000 to the group, Federal Election Commission filings show. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) BOLD PAC, the fundraising arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, also gave $150,000 to the Latino Victory Fund.Soros produced funding for a campaign last year that involved the group.Numerous immigration activist groups, including Latino Victory, the Center for Community Change, and America s Voice, launched Families Fight Back during the 2016 election cycle.The Washington Free Beacon recently obtained unredacted tax documents revealing donors for the Center for Community Change, which does not disclose their contributors. Soros gave millions in funding to the group. It also received funding from the likes of the Ford Foundation, which was first created by members of the Ford Motor Company, but is no longer connected to the company.Three others who work at Latino Victory came from the failed presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton. WFB | 0 |
After coming under fire from her fans and celebrity colleagues, RB and soul Chrisette Michele is defending her decision to perform at an undisclosed event during Donald Trump’s inauguration. [“We can’t be present if we’re silent,” Michele wrote in an open letter she posted to Twitter Friday. The says she is willing to take the heat if it means she can “be a bridge” to bring people together. “I am willing to be a bridge. I don’t mind These Stones, if they allow me to be a voice for the voiceless,” the singer wrote. https: . | An Open Letter pic. twitter. — chrisette michele (@ChrisetteM) January 19, 2017, Though Michele has worked with the likes of Jay Z, John Legend and will. I. am, the star has faced backlash for agreeing to perform for Trump. Film director Spike Lee said he’s no longer using Michele’s song “Black Girl Magic” in his new Netflix series after he learned of her inauguration event. “I Wuz Thinkin’ ’bout Using Chrisette’s BLACK GIRL MAGIC In My Netflix Series SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT … . NOT ANYMORE,” Lee wrote in an Instagram post. Good Morning Folks. I Wuz Sorry To Read That ”Sistuh Girl” Is Singin’ At DT’s Inauguration (And To Use His Fav ). I Wuz Thinkin’ ’bout Using Chrisette’s BLACK GIRL MAGIC In My Netflix Series SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT … . NOT ANYMORE. And Dat’s Da Truth, Ruth. A photo posted by Spike Lee (@officialspikelee) on Jan 19, 2017 at 4:10am PST, Questlove, drummer for The Roots, the longtime band for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, tweeted on Wednesday that he would pay Michele not to perform at Trump’s inauguration. I’d pay Chrisette to NOT perform 😔 — Questlove Gomez (@questlove) January 18, 2017, Michele joins a growing lineup of inaugural performers many of them, including Toby Keith, and rock band Three Doors Down, are expected to perform Friday for the “Make America Great Again! Welcome Celebration. ” Soul singer and civil rights activist Sam Moore, who also recently defended his decision to perform at the inauguration, is also expected to tale the stage on Friday. Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter @jeromeehudson | 0 |
Vanessa Luna arrived in New York as a from Peru, and grew up as an undocumented immigrant. While her parents worked at cleaning jobs, she hid her status in high school until a guidance counselor helped her get into the State University of New York at Binghamton to study American history. She was a junior there when, in 2012, President Obama gave Ms. Luna — and hundreds of thousands of other young people like her — temporary permission to stay and work in the United States. She could become a teacher. “For the first time, I felt like this country accepted me,” said Ms. Luna, 25, who now teaches social studies at a middle school on the Lower East Side. But now, she does not know what to think. During the presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump promised he would cancel the program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, that Mr. Obama initiated. But in comments he made to Time Magazine last week, the seemed to soften his stance. “We’re going to work something out that’s going to make people happy and proud,” Mr. Trump said, without offering specifics, though a Senate bill with bipartisan sponsorship introduced last week would continue DACA’s protections for three years. In the interview, Mr. Trump said of the young immigrants: “They’ve worked here, they’ve gone to school here. Some were good students. Some have wonderful jobs. And they’re in land because they don’t know what’s going to happen. ” On that, Ms. Luna agreed. “For someone like me, that uncertainty still looms,” she said. Across the country, more than 740, 000 young immigrants, often called Dreamers, are wondering what will happen to the work permits granted through DACA. They work in fields like education, law, medicine, finance and government. About 30, 000 live and work in New York City, officials say. At the age of 5, Chandrapaul Latchman was brought by strangers on an airplane from Guyana to reunite with his parents on Long Island. He became student body president of Valley Stream Central High School, an honors student at Baruch College and an intern at BlackRock, the investment firm, before going to work at JPMorgan Chase. Today, at 23, he is one of the bank’s 100 credit risk analysts, assessing loans to real estate developers and entertainment companies. He knows what he would feel were Mr. Trump to cancel the program, known as DACA. “It’s a feeling of rejection,” Mr. Latchman said. “Even though you tried so hard, and outworked so many people to get here, still at the end, you’re not good enough and they don’t want you,” he said. Because Mr. Obama initiated the program by executive action, Mr. Trump could still revoke it with the stroke of a pen. It does not need congressional approval. Without the right to work legally in the United States, the Dreamers could see the accouterments of life — a studio apartment in Brooklyn, a driver’s license, a biweekly paycheck with deductions for retirement, a coveted desk in a financial firm — disappear. Some viewed Mr. Trump’s latest comments as polarizing, continuing a narrative from his campaign. “We don’t want to differentiate between the good immigrants and the bad immigrants — however he chooses to qualify them,” said Hina Naveed, 26, a registered nurse on Staten Island and a of the activist group, Dream Action Coalition. “Instead of just working it out with the Dreamers, what I’d rather see is some clear policy in what he’s hoping to work out with immigrants in general. ” Otherwise, she said, the alternative is frightening: “We’ll save DACA and all their parents will be deported — who will want to stay here?” Mr. Latchman said that even before Mr. Trump was elected, his manager suggested exploring other offices around the world, like the one in Toronto. His work permit expires in the summer of 2018, about the time his contract with the bank ends. A JPMorgan Chase spokesman, Andrew Gray, said that it was too early to discuss what was still a hypothetical situation. He emphasized that Mr. Latchman was speaking personally, and not on behalf of the company. In many cases, employers, whether they are private or government entities, may not know if an employee has a work permit through DACA unless that person discloses it. And there is little any employer can do if an employee’s work authorization is canceled. But Teach for America, the national organization that trains and recruits young teachers to work in schools in communities has, since 2013, made a point of hiring and supporting teachers who are covered by the program, helping with application fees and moving. Now it has pledged to offer legal and financial support to the 146 corps teachers who could lose their work permits. Ms. Luna, who works at the Great Oaks Charter School, said she would apply for a transition grant that Teach for America offers for resettlement. In her case, she might need the money to break her lease on her $ studio and move back in with her parents, who live in Port Chester, N. Y. Antonio Vance, the executive director in New York for Great Oaks Charter School, said he had already consulted lawyers to help Ms. Luna. “She’s only been here a year, and she’s already a model teacher,” Mr. Vance said. “It would be difficult to replace her and the relationships she has formed with her students. ” Ms. Luna said that if were she to lose her work permit, she would consider going back to school for a degree in administration in hopes of one day opening her own school if the law changes. She already has a master’s in urban education and policy. “I wouldn’t lie to say it won’t devastate me. But it would ignite more of a fire inside me,” she said, referring to her ambition to remain a teacher in the United States. Others said their fallback plan might mean retreating to the underground economy. Juan Carlos Pérez, 31, a math teacher at the International High School at Union Square, said he might have to return to teaching English as a second language in Queens for a small stipend or even return to Mexico, which he left at age 11. Joe Luft, the executive director of the Internationals Network for Public Schools, which operates 15 high schools in New York City that specialize in teaching new immigrants, said losing people like Mr. Pérez could adversely affect the students who had come to confide in him. “I really fear what that does to their sense of hope, which can be tenuous to students anyway,” Mr. Luft said. According to an immigration lawyer, Stephen Mr. Trump could still cancel the program immediately, or let the existing work permits simply expire. Ms. Naveed, whose family is from Pakistan, came to New York when she was 11 because her older sister needed medical treatment they came legally, but overstayed their visas. In May, Ms. Naveed was able to get a nursing license because the New York State Board of Regents allowed people covered by DACA to be eligible for 57 professional licenses. As a private home nurse, she now changes and maintains the tubes that allow a baby to breathe and eat. Ms. Naveed said it would be “a significant loss” of independence to no longer be able to work and take part in her community openly. Still, she said, “Before DACA people survived, and after DACA people will survive. ” | 0 |
(Reuters) - The largest labor federation in the United States, the AFL-CIO, endorsed Hillary Clinton for president on Thursday, vowing to throw the full weight of more than 50 unions representing 12.5 million members behind the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. “Hillary Clinton is a proven leader who shares our values,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a statement. “We will run a sophisticated, targeted ground campaign. And with the dire consequences Donald Trump poses for America’s working families, it has to be.” While the federation generally does not endorse a Democratic candidate until there is an official nominee, Trumka has warned for months that he believes Republican presumptive nominee Donald Trump would be disastrous for working people if elected. After the endorsement, Clinton pledged to spend more on public infrastructure and to fight to improve schools. She vowed to increase the federal minimum wage, offer paid family leave and ensure that women receive equal pay. “As president, I will stand proudly with the AFL-CIO and fight to protect the rights and values that helped build the mighty American middle class. Workers will always have a seat at the table and a champion in the White House,” Clinton said in a statement. The AFL-CIO has already run digital ads criticizing Trump’s candidacy and will now work to boost Clinton’s campaign on the ground. Working America, one AFL-CIO affiliate that deals with nonunion workers, already has teams in crucial so-called battleground states. In response to the federation’s endorsement of Clinton, Trump’s campaign said the AFL-CIO no longer represents the interests of American workers. “I will fight harder for American workers than anyone ever has,” Trump said in a statement. Trump attacked Clinton for supporting free trade agreements and said he would win a majority of votes from U.S. union families. | 0 |
After November 8, America may need legalized pot By Frank Scott Posted on November 7, 2016 by Frank Scott
“If we cast a vote for establishment politicians we are legitimizing establishment control of politics. It’s that simple.”—Michael K. Smith
As millions prepare to do just what Smith warns against, including hundreds of thousands who think themselves dedicated to ending such control, it’s time we understand American mind management’s great success at reducing voters to herds of human cattle whether from a conservative right, a liberal left, or trapped in the middle of the political desert called the two party system under one class control.
Reducing otherwise thoughtful Americans to sinking intellectually lower than those they are taught to disrespect as uneducated and worse, we find an allegedly liberal population that might make Germans during the Nazi era seem civil libertarians by comparison. The all consuming state of the mind managed and consciousness controlled—the greater the conflict, the tighter the control—finds supposedly educated groups reacting with all the critical thoughtfulness of a dog leaving its droppings on the pavement. And a likeness to excrement might be raising the level of debate, given the atrocities of persuasion used to reduce America’s political arena to a giant national toilet. Consider only a few of the glaring contradictions hardly given a thought by innocents who exercise more choice while shopping for clothes, pet food, weapons or drugs than in the political marketplace where they, instead of the products, are branded. And let’s remember the origin of this ugly overused term which originally meant burning into the flesh of an animal or human slave the “brand” of its owner. Whose “brand” are you?
People taught that freedom of speech and thought are cherished ideals are programmed into vilifying those who dare to speak or think differently than they. While the all too easy examples of religious fundamentalists suppressing the freedom of one or another minority or the right to openly speak about beliefs that contradict the accepted code are cited by a purportedly secular liberal sector as narrow minded bigotry, it is as guilty, often proudly so, of the same behavior.
For example, when a rich, silicon valley techmeister dared to contradict the hypothetically free thinking libertarian mindset of the market fundamentalist community who make up the majority of the rich IT class, the reaction was swift and as tolerant as any Nazi embargo on thought. Previously lauded by a gay liberal publication for being rich and homosexual as well, he became a villain and un-gay for being a supporter of Donald Trump. And liberals too young to remember or too ignorant to know about the anti-Soviet frenzy of the Cold War are aroused to react to Putin and Russia the way the people they treat with utter contempt might react to an abortion being performed at the altar during their church service. A supposed community of gay rights advocates doesn’t accept gays who don’t toe the party line of such supporters, while alleged anti-war oriented people operate in a controlled mental state lusting for war as the country moves closer to a military confrontation with Russia, provoked by sources of propaganda they formerly opposed moving them to think—if at all—from their lower anatomy, in the fashion of the candidate they are programmed to hate.
A rapidly diminishing economic system that still rewards a substantial minority with comfort and privilege while giving the class above them that brands their professions measures of wealth beyond belief, is made to feel superior to the majority who carry the burden of social costs to finance their personal benefits. This results in great numbers of people looking down on those below them in the economic stratification of 21 st century capitalism, approaching that of its centuries old origins in comfort for some and squalor for most. Thus, those able to afford education, a shrinking minority and ”diverse” in the divide and conquer modes of identitarian affirmation, are taught to disrespect those with less ability to pay the educational premiums or qualify for the massive debt required. The majority of Americans, without college degrees and forced to accept even more limited work than those who make it through the paper mills and become lawyers, teachers or as often, baristas, are seen as less able to think or perform in the capitalist marketplace and become subjects of blame for all the worst aspects of the game.
Inequality, racism, sexism, problems of immigration, gentrification and many other aspects of what passes for normal political economics are seen as the fault or responsibility of “others.” And the majority group, carefully splintered into as many ethnic, religious and ugliest and most ignorant of all, racial minorities—thus with less chance to perform as the majority we truly are—are driven to reactionary minority political organization which seems the only answer to other reactionary minority opposition given that action of a majority is treated as a work of fiction or desire of folly. Meanwhile, imperial warfare, Wall Street, Corporate America, the richest 1%, its well paid servants and Israeli interests continue to take up the lion’s share of the nation’s wealth as alleged market competition becomes the anti-social reality of the most while a perverted form of wealthy socialism exists with benefits for only the least.
With established billionaires, through their banks and lobbies like NRAIPAC, maintaining control whichever of the deadly duo is elected by well meaning lesser evilites, the need for a radical politics of truly revolutionary and not simply social democratic change will become more pressing. The identity group of those with enough money to matter no matter what their skin tone, religion or ethnicity, needs to join with masses whose lives matter much less because they haven’t enough money to matter, no matter what their skin tone, ethnicity or religion. The most democratic, humane and efficient system will not happen until it’s created by people who understand that with all the horrid treatment of people of different caste and color, the primary division and barrier among all of humanity is that of economic class. With all the nonsense about an alleged problem of growing population, no one goes without food, shelter, education or healthcare because there isn’t enough of those things, but only because they haven’t enough money to pay for them and return a profit to the marketeers who sell them.
We now have capital’s representatives from all supposed minorities in Congress, on Wall street, in the military, as CEOs of major corporations and just about everything else. Whether the private profits accrue to heterosexuals, homosexuals, people of light skin tone, dark skin tone, or with accents that identify them as from Mexico, Brooklyn or Serbo-Croatia, they come at public expense. Instead of seeking other mind management created minorities to blame or see as enemies, we need to direct our focus at the rigged system of human inequality which allows some to thrive only at others’ failure. The only minority to deal with on a confrontational basis is the billionaire gang formerly confronted by some dedicated followers of the Bernie Sanders campaign, before they became sheep led to a voting booth to make sure that billionaire minority retains its domination. If only 5% of them vote for Jill Stein, the Greens will receive millions of public dollars to continue building a real alternative of hope for the future. When slavish obedience to mind managed lesser evil ends, we will begin building a better nation and world, but not until then. On the eighth, vote, inhale deeply and try to relax, if you can. And on the ninth, begin working for that change, if you haven’t already.
Frank Scott‘s political commentary and satire is online at legalienate.blogspot.com . Email: | 1 |
Note to conservatives who want to pretend to be journalists: be sure that where you get your information is not a satirical site, or you ll be humiliated like this idiot.This is especially true if you decide to attack a professional scientist, because if you haven t done your research properly you can rest assured they will discover that fact when they research your claims.In this case, that s exactly what popular scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson did to right-wing radio host Neal Larson this week after the conservative mouthpiece repeated the charge that Tyson mocked a little girl for wanting to live on Jupiter, a planet where no human could survive.The alleged mocking supposedly took place in front of a crowd and on Twitter, Larson crowed in the vicious hit job on Tyson and his character in an op-ed criticizing Tyson for simply inserting math into the Olympic medal count. The scientist pointed out that while America earned more medals than Hungary, Hungary is actually beating us when we adjust to account for total population. Then the victory for medals to population ratio goes to Hungary.Larson believes this is Tyson attacking America when in reality he was only stating a mathematical fact that also happenes to be interesting.Larson went on to whine about Tyson because he constantly calls out conservatives for getting science wrong. He also attempted to assassinate Tyson s character by using the following tale as an example. I ve listened to Neil deGrasse Tyson before. And what I observe is a smart guy who consistently enjoys asserting his intellectual supremacy over others more than he actually likes educating. In one of his worse moments, Tyson mocked a 12-year-old girl who suggested she d like to live on Jupiter. He ridiculed her in the midst of a crowd, then later, several times, on Twitter. That told me everything I needed to know about Neil deGrasse Tyson.For that moment he was just a horse s astrophysicist. The only problem is that the story never actually happened, and Tyson schooled Larson for it. The incident with a 9yr old girl never happened, Tyson responded.And he s right. As it turns out, the story relayed by Larson is complete satire. It looks to be a hoax, Tyson continued. No such tweets ever existed on November 29th, 2015, or on any other day. So you abrogated your journalistic integrity by not verifying what you read in somebody else s article, before using it as a foundational pillar in yours. In short, Larson just got lit up by Tyson and those pesky things called facts that conservatives are allergic to for some reason.Featured image via screen capture | 0 |
(Reuters) - A federal judge on Tuesday blocked an Obama administration rule to extend mandatory overtime pay to more than 4 million salaried workers from taking effect, imperiling one of the outgoing president’s signature achievements for boosting wages. U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant, in Sherman, Texas, agreed with 21 states and a coalition of business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, that the rule is unlawful and granted their motion for a nationwide injunction. The rule, issued by the Labor Department, was to take effect Dec. 1 and would have doubled to $47,500 the maximum salary a worker can earn and still be eligible for mandatory overtime pay. The new threshold would have been the first significant change in four decades. It was expected to touch nearly every sector of the U.S. economy and have the greatest impact on nonprofit groups, retail companies, hotels and restaurants, which have many management workers whose salaries are below the new threshold. The states and business groups claimed in lawsuits filed in September, which were later consolidated, that the drastic increase in the salary threshold was arbitrary. On Tuesday, Mazzant, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, ruled that the federal law governing overtime does not allow the Labor Department to decide which workers are eligible based on salary levels alone. The Fair Labor Standards Act says that employees can be exempt from overtime if they perform executive, administrative or professional duties, but the rule “creates essentially a de facto salary-only test,” Mazzant wrote in the 20-page ruling. The states and business groups that challenged the rule applauded the decision. Nevada Attorney General Adam Paul Laxalt said in a statement that the ruling “reinforces the importance of the rule of law and constitutional government.” The Labor Department said it strongly disagrees with the decision. It remains confident that the entire rule is legal, and it is currently considering its options, department spokesman Jason Surbey said. The Labor Department can appeal to the New Orleans, Louisiana-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, but that court has stymied the Obama administration before, blocking Obama’s executive actions on immigration in 2015. In any case, the Labor Department could drop the appeal after Republican President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January. In August, Trump told the website Circa that the overtime rule was an example of the type of burdensome business regulations he would seek to roll back as president, perhaps by exempting small businesses or delaying implementation. Even if the rule survived the legal challenge, it could be upended by legislation passed by Congress or withdrawn by Trump’s Department of Labor. U.S. Chamber of Commerce official Randy Johnson said in a statement that the rule would have been costly and disruptive to businesses. But Ross Eisenbrey of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, which supported the rule, called the decision “extreme and unsupportable.” “It is also a disappointment to millions of workers who are forced to work long hours with no extra compensation, and is a blow to those Americans who care deeply about raising wages and lessening inequality,” Eisenbrey said in a statement. The case is Nevada v. U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, No. 16-cv-731. | 0 |
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said on Wednesday that Moscow has never supported the imposition of a complete embargo on North Korea, RIA news agency reported. Ryabkov added that attempts by the United States to resolve all problems with sanctions were extremely alarming and that the crisis around North Korea would be addressed in President Vladimir Putin’s meeting with U.S. counterpart Donald Trump. Ryabkov said there was no clarity when the meeting will take place, RIA reported. Russian officials have said Putin and Trump would meet at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Vietnam this week. | 0 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Republican head of the tax-writing panel in the U.S. House of Representatives said on Friday progress was being made in efforts to allay concerns among some Republicans about the potential elimination of a federal deduction for state and local income taxes as part of a tax-reform push. Some lawmakers from states where state and local taxes are high and people benefit most from the federal income tax deduction are reluctant to contemplate such an elimination. It would be one of several measures aimed at offsetting lost revenue under sweeping tax cuts planned by President Donald Trump and the Republican leadership in Congress. “We’re working with these lawmakers. We are making progress, but we aren’t there yet,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady told Fox News Channel. “I’m hopeful at the end of the day we can find a good solution for them.” A budget blueprint central to Republican efforts to enact the tax cut package - because it will enable easier passage of the package through the Senate - barely squeaked through the House on Thursday, with Democrats solidly opposed and a number of Republicans voting no in an effort to protect the deduction. Republican leaders had sketched out a tax cut plan that would eliminate the tax break, although detailed legislation will not be unveiled until next Wednesday. Brady also said lawmakers were exchanging ideas with Trump over how to handle 401(k) retirement savings plans. In another measure to offset lost revenue, House Republicans have considered eliminating or capping the ability to contribute to the plans on a pre-tax basis, but Trump has said he wants to protect the popular tax-deferred savings program. “We want to increase the amount that you can give to your 401(k) or IRA (individual retirement account), for 401(k)s up to $20,000 or more,” Brady told Fox, without specifying whether that would be on a pre-tax or after-tax basis. “We’re actually exchanging ideas with the president on how we help people save more and save sooner in their lives.” The current cap on pre-tax 401(k) contributions is $18,000 a year, and that is set to rise to $18,500 next year. | 0 |
Watch some fake news from a swamp creature who should be in jail:Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper referred to President Donald Trump on Monday as an intelligence asset for Russian President Vladimir Putin. The term asset refers to people with countries or organizations being spied upon who serve as resources for outside spies.Clapper appeared on CNN to discuss Trump s national security strategy speech given Monday, where he referred to Russia as a rival but also said he wanted to form a partnership.The two leaders have also expressed recent gratitude to each other, with Putin calling and thanking Trump for sharing intelligence that helped foil a terror plot and Trump thanking Putin for his recent praise of the American economy.IS THIS GUY KIDDING:This is on the same day that we learn the following about the Obama administration:The Obama administration intentionally derailed investigations into the terrorist group Hezbollah s drug trafficking operation to secure the Iran nuclear deal, according to a new bombshell report.Politico spoke with several members of Project Cassandra, a joint effort between the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Pentagon that was founded in 2008 under the Bush administration to identify and prosecute a drug trafficking, money laundering, and smuggling operation run by the Iranian-backed militants.Over the next eight years, agents working out of a top-secret DEA facility in Chantilly, Virginia, used wiretaps, undercover operations, and informants to map Hezbollah s illicit networks, with the help of 30 U.S. and foreign security agencies.They followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States. They tracked the river of dirty cash as it was laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and shipping them to Africa. And with the help of some key cooperating witnesses, the agents traced the conspiracy, they believed, to the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.Read more: WFB | 0 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As Republican leaders desperately seek ways to derail the presidential campaign of billionaire Donald Trump, many of the party’s 31 state governors are staying out of the fray. New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez endorsed Marco Rubio on Friday, making her only the 10th governor to back one of the four Republican presidential rivals left in the race. Much more typical is Governor Rick Scott of Florida, who said on Thursday he would not endorse a candidate before his state’s hotly contested March 15 primary. Such reluctance to commit contrasts sharply with previous elections, when governors lined up solidly behind eventual nominees, helping to winnow the field of candidates early on. The 2016 election differs because a chaotic race has divided Republicans, convincing many to keep a low profile in hopes of avoiding a possible backlash from voters who are increasingly contemptuous of party leaders, Republican officials say. “It’s a lose-lose political situation,” said Fergus Cullen, a former New Hampshire Republican Party chairman. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie last week took a risk, after dropping out of the presidential contest himself, and endorsed Trump, the billionaire businessman. That decision has done little for either of them, according to a new poll. Almost two-thirds of 1,372 adults polled, both Republicans and Democrats, said Christie’s endorsement made no difference in their feelings toward Trump, the Republican front-runner. The nationwide Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted Feb 29-March 4. Christie has faced relentless criticism since he announced his support for Trump last week. Six newspapers in his home state have called on him to resign. In past elections, a governor’s endorsement could produce a burst of positive news coverage and the support of well-connected local leaders for a presidential contender. That would encourage other elected officials to endorse the candidate as well, creating an impression that the candidate was a favorite of those who knew best and encouraging others to drop out of the race, said David Karol, a University of Maryland political science professor who has found that endorsements were a strong predictor of electoral success between 1980 and 2004. “The absence of most of the governors this late in the process really indicates the paralysis and division in Republican elite circles,” Karol said. Ahead of Election Day on Nov. 8, many governors did not want to talk about Trump, who has unnerved his party’s establishment with his abrasive tone and policy positions, including plans to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border, deport 11 million illegal immigrants and temporarily bar Muslims from entering the country. Eighteen undecided Republican governors, contacted by Reuters, declined to be interviewed on their views of the race. National Republican leaders are struggling for a strategy to stop Trump from becoming the nominee, as Democrats revel in the chaos they hope will boost their chances of keeping the White House. George W. Bush, elected president in 2000, had the support of 26 of the party’s 30 Republican governors before primary voting even started, according to figures compiled by James Madison University political science professor Martin Cohen, who with Karol is a co-author of “The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform.” In 2012, 10 of 29 Republican governors had endorsed Mitt Romney by the time he clinched the presidential nomination. This year, governors are not sending a clear signal to voters. Five have endorsed Rubio, a senator from Florida who has won one nominating contest so far. Two have endorsed John Kasich of Ohio, the only governor left in the race, who has won no contests. Two have Trump. One has backed Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. Three others endorsed candidates who have since dropped out of the race. The governors who have made endorsements so far have had little impact. Rubio lost in Tennessee, South Carolina and Arkansas, despite the backing of governors in those states. Kasich got only 4 percent of the vote in Alabama on Tuesday after that state’s Governor Robert Bentley endorsed him. Iowa Governor Terry Branstad called on voters in his state to reject Cruz before the state’s February caucuses. Cruz won. So far, only Texas Governor Greg Abbott has picked a winner. He endorsed Cruz, who won Texas on Tuesday. Trump has put many governors in a difficult position. The real estate developer is expected to easily win Mississippi’s Republican primary next Tuesday, for example, but his support for Planned Parenthood and government-backed health insurance, among other policies, put him at odds with the conservative positions backed by Governor Phil Bryant. Bryant will support Trump should he end up being the party’s nominee, but he has not decided whether to endorse a candidate before the primary, an aide told Reuters. In theory, governors should be in a position to shape the outcome of this year’s nominating contests. Republicans at the state level have delivered tax cuts, abortion restrictions and other conservative victories from Maine to Arizona, while their counterparts in charge of Congress have been locked in a stalemate with Democratic President Barack Obama. But the plethora of establishment-minded candidates this year has made it more difficult for governors and other senior officials to decide who to back, let alone try to shape the outcome with an endorsement. Republican governors in Maryland, Florida, Wyoming, Indiana, Wisconsin, North Dakota, South Dakota, Arizona, Nebraska and Michigan declined to say whether they would back Trump if he were the party’s nominee. Governors in Utah, Oklahoma, North Carolina and Georgia have yet to endorse a candidate but would back Trump if he won the nomination, aides said. Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker told reporters this week he would not vote for Trump in November. (Additional reporting by Nick Carey, Sharon Bernstein, Ian Simpson, Alex Dobuzinskis and Scott Malone; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh, Howard Goller and Alistair Bell) This article was funded in part by SAP. It was independently created by the Reuters editorial staff. SAP had no editorial involvement in its creation or production. | 1 |
It certainly feels like Bernie Sanders is winning. Judging from his soaring rhetoric, celebrity endorsements, and huge rallies, the Vermont senator lately seems like he could ride his political revolution all the way to the Democratic nomination without breaking a sweat. Of the last eight primary contests, Sanders has won seven. On Sunday, more than 28,000 people turned up to hear him speak in Brooklyn, and on Monday, a new national poll showed him virtually tied with Hillary Clinton, 48 to 50 percent—a 4-point increase that puts him within the margin of error.
And yet, Sanders is well on his way to a resounding defeat. On Tuesday, he is expected to lose New York, where state law prevents independents, some of his strongest supporters, from voting in the Democratic primary. (“Nothing much I can do. It’s bad New York state election law,” he groused on Monday.) A series of recent polls indicates that Clinton, despite a spate of bad press, is still solidly on track to secure the presidential nomination based on her commanding delegate lead.
To be fair, Sanders has beaten the odds before. In Iowa, he overcame a double-digit deficit to virtually tie with Clinton, and in Michigan, he shocked pundits by leapfrogging her 20-point lead to win the entire state. But even if he pulls off similar victories in every single state left in the race, Sanders would still trail Clinton among delegates, who are awarded proportionally, and super-delegates—party leaders who can side with either candidate, irrespective of their state’s vote, and who have largely sided with Clinton. “Bernie Sanders would have to win landslide after landslide starting in New York to change that math,” David Axelrod, President Obama’s former campaign strategist, said on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday. “He’s run a splendid campaign . . . but at this point, it just looks like time is running out.”
At the moment, Sanders lags Clinton by double digits in all the major upcoming states, New York included, making those landslides highly unlikely. While pointing to the Michigan model as their pathway to victory, the Sanders campaign has quietly begun dialing back expectations for Tuesday. “Here’s the truth: we don’t have to win New York on Tuesday, but we have to pick up a lot of delegates,” Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver said in an e-mail Sunday pointing to polling showing the candidate within 6 points of Clinton. “This poll shows that if we keep fighting, we may actually have a chance to do both.”
The other major reality check facing the Sanders campaign is his lack of super-delegates, the majority of whom have backed Clinton, extending her delegate lead from 244 to 682. Even if Sanders manages to win a series of landslide victories—rather than a more likely scenario in which he merely prevents her campaign from surging ahead—he’ll be hard-pressed to swing those uncommitted delegates over to his side. Much like Ted Cruz with Donald Trump, Sanders’s only realistic shot at fighting on to the general election involves blocking Clinton from securing the number of delegates needed to clinch the nomination (2,382, for the Democrats) and then persuading them to vote for him at a contested convention.
Should it get to that point, Sanders may have a viable argument that he is the more electable candidate. Nationwide, he’s virtually tied with Clinton in the polls, and several (albeit unreliable) surveys show him soundly beating the presumptive G.O.P. nominee, Trump, in a general-election matchup. But if Sanders stays too long in the primary and loses, his moral victory will be a pyrrhic one. The surge of Democratic passions surrounding the self-styled socialist, fueled by rising anger against wealthy interests, has exacerbated a widening rift in the party, decreasing Clinton’s favorability rating and damaging her reputation before the general election even begins. One in four Sanders voters say they won’t vote for Clinton if she is the nominee. Soon, that conviction may be tested: with less than a day to go before the New York primary, voters will decide whether the dream of Sanders’s political revolution will live another day, or die. | 1 |
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