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<p>PITTSBURGH — Ahead of this city’s Labor Day Parade Monday, Vice President Joe Biden sought to rally organized labor behind the campaign of Hillary Clinton, appearing alongside the man looking to take his place in Washington, Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine.</p>
<p>“This guy understands, he knows how to pronounce the word 'union,'” a loud, booming Biden said of Kaine. “Remember for a while there, we had Democrats that talked about organized labor. Union, union, union. Not a joke. Unions have built this country.”</p>
<p>The forceful message on behalf of America’s labor force was clear from both men as they spoke at a public, outdoor event in the middle of downtown Pittsburgh in front of more than 700 people, including a number of volunteers, union employees, and steelworkers.</p>
<p>Both the vice president and the senator charged hard against Donald Trump for what they see as actions unfriendly to labor, trying to paint the Republican nominee as a business mogul without regard for the kind of smaller businesses that they grew up around.</p>
<p>Biden, a native of Scranton, Pennsylvania, talked about “people who understand what it's like to look across a table in a bargaining room and know that the guy on the other side really doesn't respect you; know that there's so many people like Trump who look at us like we're not their equal. I'm sick of it. I've had it up to here.”</p>
<p>“Labor day is personal to me,” Kaine told the crowd. “It's personal to me. I grew up in a family where my dad ran an ironworker organized welding shop in the stockyards of Kansas City, Missouri. … It was about a partnership. It was about shared prosperity. It wasn't about a CEO disconnected from the workers.”</p>
<p>Kaine again blasted Trump for not releasing his tax returns, noting that it has been a custom for presidential candidates of the last few decades and likening Trump’s actions to a job interview candidate not fulfilling the questionnaire. Trump has said he will not release his tax returns while he is under audit.</p>
<p>“You wouldn’t hire somebody for a summer job who wouldn't answer your questions in a job interview, and he wants you to hire him to be President of the United States?” Kaine asked. “He thinks we're chumps. Donald Trump thinks he can blow this by us, that we're gullible. But I'll tell you: Pennsylvanians are not gullible. Virginians are not gullible. Americans aren't gullible.”</p>
<p>Since the vice president was the headliner, Sen. Kaine was speaking behind a podium with the vice presidential seal upon it, a symbol of the office he is working to take.</p>
<p>Back in 2008, Kaine, then the governor of Virginia, was actually a runner up to be President Barack Obama’s running mate but was passed over on behalf of Biden, then a senator from Delaware with more experience in foreign policy.</p>
<p>Kaine had glowing words for the vice president on Monday, telling the crowd that he feels like the two have a number of similarities -- both coming from working-class Irish Catholic families with faith as a vital part of their life.</p>
<p>Monday was their first appearance together since speaking on the same night of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July, and the vice president showed up with a few jokes on hand.</p>
<p>“By the way, I sleep with a teacher every night, ” he quipped, while talking about unions and referring to his wife, Dr. Jill Biden. “Same one. Same one. Matter of fact, matter of fact she's in class again tomorrow.”</p>
<p>Biden also introduced himself by proclaiming, “My name is Joe Biden, and I work for Hillary Clinton, and whatever the hell this guy’s name is.”</p>
<p>But he soon turned to Kaine’s background and argued the senator is the right man to succeed him in his office in January.</p>
<p>“Two things you gotta know about Tim,” Biden said. “One is he has more experience in every branch of government than anybody's ever stepped into this job as Vice President, and two, two, Hillary is gonna really need him—not because she's not the smartest person to seek that office, she is, but because the plate is so full.”</p> | Biden and Kaine Push Union Message in Pittsburgh | false | http://nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/biden-kaine-push-union-message-pittsburgh-n642976 | 2016-09-05 | 3 |
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<p>But it won’t be in Santa Fe — or New Mexico.</p>
<p>Santa Fe’ s David Cohen and his partner George Castro of Mucho Gusto are exploring the creation of a chain of fast-casual Mexican restaurants.</p>
<p>Cohen owned and ran the popular Cerrillos Road grill for 17 years before selling it. He and Castro are seeking investors to launch a chain of taquerias or taco shops across the West. The pair are looking at money-rich Flagstaff and San Diego as launching pads.</p>
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<p>“They’ll be kind of like Chipotle, but with our food, which is regional Mexican,” Cohen explained.</p>
<p>The owners have already nixed Santa Fe as a potential model site for a litany of reasons: Tourism is down, real estate is still too expensive, most locals prefer New Mexican food, and a liquor license can cost in excess of $300,000.</p>
<p>“It just doesn’t make sense to open a prototype in Santa Fe,” Cohen said.</p>
<p>The menu will concentrate on Mexican “peasant food” — tacos, burritos, tortas, chalupas, four fresh and four cooked salsas, stews, grilled and marinated dishes, soup and salad, he said. The concept is based on Cohen’s original plan for the Old Mexico Grill. “It started out as a taqueria and ended up as a full-blown restaurant.”</p>
<p>An enduring trend in the field, fast-casual encompasses eateries such as Chipotle, Boston Market, Panda Grill and Panera.</p>
<p>“It means an increased percentage of customers want something upscale, but are willing to add a little more time than a quick stop at a taco stand,” Cohen said. “It’s not fast food.”</p>
<p>The average tab will be $11.</p>
<p>The Old Mexico Grill, which closed in 2003, gained national attention through glowing reviews in the New York Times, Gourmet, Food &amp; Wine and Zagat’s.</p>
<p>“It was casual, but it was complex,” Cohen said. “The idea (with the new venture) is to keep it simple. We’re seeing if there are any people interested in getting involved.”</p>
<p>Cohen figures he’ll need a minimum of $875,000 for the first restaurant. He hopes to see construction start within four to six months. He says he has already gotten calls from three or four interested investors. He’s also meeting with large restaurant chains.</p> | Chain of Old Mexico Taquerias Planned | false | https://abqjournal.com/123799/chain-of-old-mexico-taquerias-planned.html | 2012-08-12 | 2 |
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<p>MAYS LANDING, N.J. (AP) — New Jersey state police say two people have been charged with stuffing material into toll baskets on the Atlantic City Expressway to prevent coins from going in and then returning to steal the money.</p>
<p>Troopers said Monday that 54-year-old Angela Freeman-Poles and 57-year-old Aljah Reaves were arrested and charged with theft in the scheme.</p>
<p>The South Jersey Transportation Authority over the summer had alerted investigators about several toll basket failures and toll shortages at the Exit 5 entrance and exit ramps.</p>
<p>Police say the Atlantic City residents were captured on surveillance footage tampering with the baskets and stealing coins off the ground at the toll plaza.</p>
<p>Both suspects are jailed on $35,000 bail. It's not clear if they have attorneys.</p>
<p><a href="#ca0751d3-7ab3-48ea-81c3-73f7165da9f3" type="external">© 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.</a> Learn more about our <a href="http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/privacy" type="external">Privacy Policy</a> and <a href="http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/terms" type="external">Terms of Use</a>.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> | Cops: Pair charged with stuffing toll baskets to steal coins | false | https://abqjournal.com/884296/cops-pair-charged-with-stuffing-toll-baskets-to-steal-coins.html | 2 |
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<p>INOLA, Okla. (AP) - Authorities in Rogers County say a 31-year-old man suffered extensive burns after he allegedly set fire to his estranged wife's house.</p>
<p>Rogers County Sheriff Scott Walton says the incident occurred about 2 p.m. Saturday after the woman returned home and found a man under her porch with a machete. Sgt. Logan Eller says the couple is in the process of getting a divorce and she had a protective order against the man. The names of the man and woman were not made public.</p>
<p>Deputies who were called to the scene instructed the man to leave the home and smoke began billowing from inside the house. Walton says authorities believe the man started the fire.</p>
<p>Walton says deputies managed to rescue the man, who was hospitalized with burns and smoke inhalation.</p>
<p>INOLA, Okla. (AP) - Authorities in Rogers County say a 31-year-old man suffered extensive burns after he allegedly set fire to his estranged wife's house.</p>
<p>Rogers County Sheriff Scott Walton says the incident occurred about 2 p.m. Saturday after the woman returned home and found a man under her porch with a machete. Sgt. Logan Eller says the couple is in the process of getting a divorce and she had a protective order against the man. The names of the man and woman were not made public.</p>
<p>Deputies who were called to the scene instructed the man to leave the home and smoke began billowing from inside the house. Walton says authorities believe the man started the fire.</p>
<p>Walton says deputies managed to rescue the man, who was hospitalized with burns and smoke inhalation.</p> | Oklahoma man burned in fire set at estranged wife's house | false | https://apnews.com/amp/cd6ed65cfb2747aabb98e3f287cf7249 | 2018-01-07 | 2 |
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<p>With the internet reaching new and innovative ways to impact peoples lives a relatively recent phenomenon has begun called crowd sourcing. &#160;Basically the idea that if you have an idea, a dream, a need, a cause or a desire that you would like to have funded you go through a site and have an online money drive.</p>
<p>The idea is that the charity of the masses will help you by donating to you cause if they find it worthy.</p>
<p>Well, one site, GoFundMe.com has decided that only liberal causes are worth supporting and instead of letting the people who actually give money decide, the big wigs at GoFundMe have decided that they will undermine those who might find like minded people to help them.</p>
<p>Apparently, instead of letting the market decide what is worthy these potentates can’t run the risk of some non liberal notions gain any traction.</p>
<p>Here are just a few recent examples of GoFundMe playing politics to undermine the very nature of crowd sourcing.</p>
<p>The Klein Family in Oregon stood up for their rights as Christians not to make a wedding cake for a pair of homosexuals who explicitly went to their bakery in order for the Kleins to be forced to go against their Christian values.</p>
<p>The Kleins had their First Amendment Rights violated in a miscarriage of justice and were fined to the tune of $135,000 for exercising their freedom of religion.</p>
<p>A GoFundMe page was set up. &#160;GoFundMe deleted the account and the fundraiser was cancelled.</p>
<p>So much for the First Amendment at GoFundMe.</p>
<p>GoFundMe was also in prime form when they callously passed a guilty verdict on 6 cops from Baltimore. &#160;The officers in question were placed on unpaid suspension while an investigation took place in the death of Freddie Gray, convicted drug peddler, while in police custody.</p>
<p>The fundraising drive was to help the officers and their families with living expenses while they are on unpaid suspension. &#160;GoFundMe also deleted their fundraiser. &#160;The know it all’s at GoFundMe have already passed Guilty verdicts on the officers.</p>
<p>Apparently the 5th and 6th Amendment hold little weight for the puppet masters at GoFundMe.</p>
<p>And finally, with a story that hits close to home, Liberty Alliances gun shop in Georgia, Liberty Arms was broken into and robbed by some thug&#160;earlier this month.</p>
<p>From <a href="http://keepandbear.com/gofundme-com-takes-public-stand-against-the-constitution/" type="external">Keepandbear.com</a>:</p>
<p>GoFundMe.com&#160;is a website that facilitates online donations for a variety of causes. In fact, they claim to be the #1 personal fundraising website in the world. They also publicly state, “There’s no easier way to share your story and attract support.”This promise is true for everyone…. unless you are a small family-owned gun store in Acworth, Georgia who dares to uphold the United States Constitution.</p>
<p>On April 3rd at 3:58 am, a faceless thug broke into Liberty Guns. He carved through 3 firewalls, overcame a robust security system, and stole 36 handguns worth more than $25,000.</p>
<p>After learning that the insurance company would not cover this heist, the Liberty Guns team decided to start a fundraising campaign onGoFundMe.com. Little did they know that GoFundMe.com&#160;would cancel the campaign within a few days of launching.</p>
<p>I guess the 2nd Amendment isn’t too welcome at GoFundMe either.</p>
<p>So basically, what GoFundMe is, is a liberal money making scheme whose mission statement is a lie as they only allow people with their own socio-political views to profit from. &#160;Yet, all the while allowing ANYONE to GIVE money.</p>
<p>You just have to walk their jackbooted line if you ever want to GET any money.</p>
<p>There are better and more honest places to crowdsource than GoFundMe and I urge you, if you ever have the need or conversely have the charity to give, to seek out their competitors.</p>
<p>Don’t let this two faced organization prosper.</p>
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<p>We have no tolerance for comments containing violence, racism, vulgarity, profanity, all caps, or discourteous behavior. Thank you for partnering with us to maintain a courteous and useful public environment where we can engage in reasonable discourse.</p> | GoFundMe: Unless you support God, Guns or Cops | true | http://bulletsfirst.net/2015/05/06/gofundme-unless-you-support-god-guns-or-cops/ | 0 |
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<p>A more broad-based economy in Eastern Kentucky and Central Appalachia is needed following news that coal production in the eastern portion of the state has dropped to its lowest level since 1965 and 4,000 regional jobs in the industry disappeared last year, a group said last month.&#160; <a href="" type="internal" /></p>
<p>Citing state of Kentucky and federal statistics, the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development (MACED) is strengthening its call for coordinated public policy and bold leadership to help provide jobs and more opportunities. MACED called the coal production decline “staggering.” Since 2000, its production in Eastern Kentucky has plummeted by more than 50 percent.</p>
<p>“We recognize the serious hardship that these layoffs mean for many workers and communities in the region,” Justin Maxson, MACED president, said in an April 2 statement.</p>
<p>The region, he has said, needs elected leaders who are willing to listen to constituents, as well as participation from community members, ranging from entrepreneurs to artists, and a clear vision.</p>
<p>“Piecemeal investments and disjointed policies are not real solutions,” he said. “Eastern Kentucky has many of the building blocks for a stronger, homegrown economy, through strategies like entrepreneurship, and more support for sectors like forestry, agriculture, tourism, health care and energy efficiency to name a few. But they require real investments and forward-looking leadership.”</p>
<p>Thermal coal production in Central Appalachia, which includes Eastern Kentucky, is expected to decline by more than 70 percent between 2011 and 2020, MACED said, citing information from the federal Energy Information Administration. In Eastern Kentucky’s Harlan County, 1,350 coal jobs alone were lost in 2012.</p>
<p>“With even some in the coal industry acknowledging that this decline is potentially permanent, our elected officials must commit to the hard and vital work of growing a stronger economy that works for more people in the region,” Maxson said.</p>
<p>The cost to mine coal in Central Appalachia is rising because reserves are diminishing, MACED reported. In comparison, the group said, coal production in Western Kentucky grew by 2.5 percent in 2012 with employment remaining relatively stable.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.maced.org/" type="external">Mountain Association for Community Economic Development</a> (MACED) works with residents in Eastern Kentucky and Central Appalachia on economic alternatives and sustainable development. MACED, which focuses on the 54 Appalachian counties of Kentucky,&#160;works on community investment, research, policy analysis and demonstration initiatives.&#160;</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Contact author</a></p>
<p>&#160;&#160; <a href="" type="internal">Central Appalachia</a>, <a href="" type="internal">Employment</a>, <a href="" type="internal">Kentucky</a>, <a href="" type="internal">Kentucky coal</a>, <a href="" type="internal">Mountain Association for Community Economic Development</a></p> | E. Kentucky Group: Diverse Economy can Replace Coal | true | http://equalvoiceforfamilies.org/e-kentucky-group-diverse-economy-can-replace-coal/ | 4 |
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<p>The prepared food and meal planning services company announced the closure in a statement Tuesday on its website.</p>
<p>My Fit Foods last fall reported having more than 50 locations in five states, plus grocery retailers and corporate and college campuses. Austin-based My Fit Foods didn’t immediately provide additional information on the locations, offering what the company called nutritionally balanced, ready-to-eat meals and snacks.</p>
<p>The online statement says My Fit Foods, since 2006, was on a mission to make healthy eating easy and accessible for everyone and it was with “a heavy heart” that the stores were closed.</p>
<p>A message left with My Fit Foods wasn’t immediately returned Tuesday.</p>
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<p>___</p>
<p>Online:</p>
<p>https://www.myfitfoods.com/</p> | Austin-based My Fit Foods announces closure of all stores | false | https://abqjournal.com/949841/austin-based-my-fit-foods-announces-closure-of-all-stores.html | 2 |
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<p>Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) was downgraded to “hold” from “buy” on Monday by Deutsche Bank (NYSE:DB) as the brokerage expressed concern over the software maker's $7.2 billion device deal with Nokia (NYSE:NOK).</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>The closing of the Nokia deal may be a “net negative” due to a slide in Nokia handset sales, Deutsche Bank told clients in a note, adding that Microsoft has its “work cut out for it” to reach Nokia device sales targets.</p>
<p>It instead encouraged investors to consider Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), saying the gap between the two rivals has widened on a non-GAAP basis and that Oracle shares are now “more compelling.”</p>
<p>Other downside risks cited by the brokerage are slower adoption of Windows and the threats from open source vendors. As for Microsoft’s upside, it cited more innovative moves under new CEO Satya Nadella as well as improved margin control.</p>
<p>Shares of Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft fell 0.43% to $39.04 in recent trade.</p> | Microsoft Downgraded to 'Hold' as Nokia Device Sales Slide | true | http://foxbusiness.com/features/2014/04/14/microsoft-downgraded-to-hold-as-nokia-device-sales-slide.html | 2016-03-06 | 0 |
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<p>Conventional wisdom says that physical retail is slowly dying as online stores take more market share. That logic appeared to be proven true by the string of negative earnings reports in which various chains said their Q4 and holiday sales were either down, or at least disappointing.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>But just because many people believe something and some evidence suggests it's true does not mean it actually is. Deloitte Consulting Chief Retail Innovation Officer Kasey M. Lobaugh, speaking at the ShopTalk conference in Las Vegas last month, said that conventional wisdom is wrong. He showed data that makes a strong case for his company's contention that brick-and-mortar sales are actually growing, just not at many of the traditional market leaders.</p>
<p>Sales at physical stores were actually up this holiday season. Image source: Getty Images.</p>
<p>"Heading into the holidays there was optimism," Lobaugh said. "We had income levels that were strong. Really, we had all the signs that were pointing to a very strong holiday."</p>
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<p>Deloitte, he said, expected total retail sales to rise 4% during the holiday period and that was what actually happened. He also said that online sales (which are roughly 18% of the total) were up about 12% while brick-and-mortar sales rose 2.3%. The perception that physical retail was down overall, he said, was fueled by so many big players reporting disappointing Q4 results.</p>
<p>"The idea that brick-and-mortar sales were up 2.3% should cause you to scratch your head and ask what's really going on?" Lobaugh said. "Let's take on this idea of conventional wisdom. If you follow the simplistic view of the industry, there's this idea that says 'sales are shifting from brick-and-mortar to online.' "</p>
<p>In reality, he said, during the holiday season both channels -- physical and digital retail -- grew by about $12 billion each in sales. The reason the big-box stores got hurt -- specifically companies like Sears Holdings and Macy's, but also many others -- is that they are losing share, not just to digital players, but to smaller, more nimble physical ones.</p>
<p>Without naming names, Lobaugh said that discounters, and even some big-box stores, are growing. Retailers reporting growth in those categories in the last year include Five Below, which saw a 20% increase in 2016 sales; theTJX Companies (Marshalls, T.J. Maxx, HomeGoods), which increased sales 7% in 2016; Home Depot, which posted a 6.9% full-year jump;and Dollar General, which had a nearly 8% net sales gain in 2016.</p>
<p>In an email interview with <a href="https://www.fool.com/?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">The Motley Fool Opens a New Window.</a>, conducted after his ShopTalk presentation, Lobaugh reiterated the fact that U.S. brick-and-mortar retail grew roughly on par with online retail in absolute dollars.</p>
<p>"So, what has changed? Since 2009, volatility of sales in the retail industry has increased 250%," Lobaugh wrote. "At the same time, the industry has fragmented, with the top 25 traditional retailers losing 0.9% of their combined market share, or over $40 billion in concentrated market share."</p>
<p>It's a phenomenon Lobaugh called "death by a thousand paper cuts," in both his email and his presentation. Consumers, he wrote, have shifted their shopping habits, and online is growing, but brick-and-mortar is not shrinking, although many retailers are.</p>
<p>"While some may position the issue in retail as one of online vs. brick-and-mortar, our data shows that the issue is a more complicated blend of volatility and fragmentation of market share from a market where the barriers to entry have dropped and new competitors have flooded the market and stolen share," he wrote.</p>
<p>Large retailers like Sears, Kmart, and Macy's may have lost sight of what evolving customers actually want. That could also be true of the other big-box stores and mall retailers that struggled over the holiday season. A top-notch digital experience is part of what shoppers want, as evidenced by the quick growth of that category, but there is still a place in the market for real-world stores.</p>
<p>One example Lobaugh shared during his presentation is that many physical retailers have shifted focus to luring in millennials, roughly those age 20 to age 35. That group, he acknowledged, will someday be dominant in terms of buying power but currently has $600 billion in buying power while baby boomers have $2.3 trillion. Focusing on the younger group may pay off in the long run, but for now it has opened doors for smaller physical and digital players to take share, he said.</p>
<p>Lobaugh closed his talk by showing that the retailers growing the most had highly differentiated products and user experiences. He explained that to succeed, retailers -- both digital and physical ones -- need to create a brand rapport. That means delivering a highly personalized experience that's different for each customer.</p>
<p>"If I think about a customer or a segment, I should be able to present to them within their context an experience that matters most," he said. "My selection of products and services that I present to you may be very different than what I present to another customer."</p>
<p>In many ways, Lobaugh's talk, and the research backing it up, show that many retailers are fighting the wrong battle. They are trying to take on e-commerce players when they should be trying to build better relationships across digital and physical channels with their customers.</p>
<p>10 stocks we like better thanWal-MartWhen investing geniuses David and TomGardner have a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, the newsletter theyhave run for over a decade, the Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has tripled the market.*</p>
<p>David and Tomjust revealed what they believe are the <a href="http://www.fool.com/mms/mark/e-sa-bbn-eg?aid=8867&amp;source=isaeditxt0000476&amp;ftm_cam=sa-bbn-evergreen&amp;ftm_pit=6627&amp;ftm_veh=article_pitch&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">ten best stocks Opens a New Window.</a>for investors to buy right now and Wal-Mart wasn't one of them! That's right -- theythink these 10 stocks are even better buys.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.fool.com/mms/mark/e-sa-bbn-eg?aid=8867&amp;source=isaeditxt0000476&amp;ftm_cam=sa-bbn-evergreen&amp;ftm_pit=6627&amp;ftm_veh=article_pitch&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">Click here Opens a New Window.</a>to learn about these picks!</p>
<p>*StockAdvisor returns as of March 6, 2017The author(s) may have a position in any stocks mentioned.</p>
<p><a href="http://my.fool.com/profile/Dankline/info.aspx" type="external">Daniel Kline Opens a New Window.</a> has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends Five Below and Home Depot. The Motley Fool has a <a href="http://www.fool.com/Legal/fool-disclosure-policy.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">disclosure policy Opens a New Window.</a>.</p> | Everything You Know About the Internet Killing Retail May Be Wrong | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/04/03/everything-know-about-internet-killing-retail-may-be-wrong.html | 2017-04-03 | 0 |
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<p>Sen. Tom Udall</p>
<p>“I believe that health care is a human right, and that all New Mexicans – and all Americans – should be able to see a doctor when they’re sick,” said Sen. Tom Udall, a New Mexico Democrat who has supported similar proposals in the past. “A hardworking single mother in New Mexico deserves the same quality health care for herself and her family as a multimillionaire CEO.”</p>
<p>Udall, vice chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, said he worked with Sanders on provisions in the bill related to Indian health to ensure the Indian Health Service would be a participating provider and that it would be allowed to continue serving only tribal communities.</p>
<p>Sen. Martin Heinrich</p>
<p>Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., also signed on to the bill, the Medicare for All Act.</p>
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<p>“It is time to recognize that health care is a human right, and I believe that the best way to make that a reality in our nation is to build on what we all know works,” Heinrich said. “Americans across the political spectrum recognize just how well the Medicare program delivers quality health care results at a reasonable cost. That is why I am joining in solidarity with others that share this vision by cosponsoring the Medicare For All Act.”</p>
<p>Sen. Bernie Sanders</p>
<p>To say President Donald Trump opposes the bill would be an understatement. “Bernie Sanders is pushing hard for a single payer healthcare plan – a curse on the U.S. &amp; its people,” Trump tweeted Thursday.</p>
<p>Abortion: Rep. Steve Pearce, R-N.M., has asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions to investigate an Albuquerque abortion provider’s relationship with the University of New Mexico.</p>
<p>Southwestern Women’s Options in Albuquerque trained UNM medical students in providing abortions, but the medical school canceled that arrangement in late 2015. The late-term abortion provider has also provided fetal tissue from the center’s abortion procedures to the UNM Health Sciences Center for medical research. The Albuquerque clinic and Health Sciences Center officials contend the fetal tissue transfer is legal and integral to the study of diseases.</p>
<p>Pearce and a congressional panel investigating fetal tissue research contend that the clinic violated the Spradling Act, which establishes New Mexico law on donation of body parts for medical purposes. The clinic denies any wrongdoing.</p>
<p>The congressional Select Panel on Infant Lives asked New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas to investigate more than a year ago, and a spokesman says the investigation is ongoing.</p>
<p>“I believe the Department of Justice has a legal responsibility to look into these violations if the New Mexico attorney general refuses to take action,” Pearce said in a statement.</p>
<p>Southwestern Women’s Options spokeswoman Heather Brewer said, “When a woman makes the decision to have an abortion, she may also decide to donate fetal tissue for lifesaving research.</p>
<p>“Southwestern Women’s Options has cooperated fully with the New Mexico attorney general’s ongoing investigation and will continue to do so.”</p>
<p />
<p /> | Washington Notebook: Heinrich, Udall sign on to universal health care bill | false | https://abqjournal.com/1063993/washington-notebook-heinrich-udall-sign-on-to-universal-health-care-bill-excerpt-pearce-asks-sessions-to-probe-unm-ties-to-abortion-provider.html | 2 |
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<p>The Standing Rock tribe has filed a <a href="" type="internal">lawsuit</a> against the U.S Army Corps of Engineers for using the controversial Nationwide Permit 12 to fast-track authorization of the hotly contested Dakota Access&#160;pipeline.</p>
<p>Slated to carry oil obtained via <a href="http://www.desmogblog.com/fracking-the-future/" type="external">hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”)</a> from North Dakota’s <a href="http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/7174" type="external">Bakken Shale</a> basin to Patoka, Illinois, the plaintiffs say not only was the Army Corps’ permitting of the Energy Transfer Partners and Enbridge Corporation <a href="" type="internal">jointly&#160;owned pipeline</a> a violation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Clean Water Act, but also a violation of the <a href="" type="internal">National Historic Preservation Act’s (NHPA) Section 106</a>.</p>
<p>A&#160;review of court documents for the case currently unfolding in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. has revealed that the <a href="" type="internal">tribal liaison</a> for Energy Transfer Partners tasked with abiding by Section 106&#160;passed through the revolving door and formerly worked for the Army Corps. The finding also raises key ethical questions in the field of&#160;archaeology.</p>
<p>That&#160;liaison — <a href="" type="internal">Michelle Dippel</a> — technically works for a Dakota Access LLC contractor named&#160;HDR, a company which <a href="http://www.hdrinc.com/markets/oil-gas/pipelines" type="external">helps pipeline companies</a> and <a href="http://www.hdrinc.com/markets/oil-gas" type="external">other</a> oil and gas industry infrastructure companies secure permits for their projects. Dippel, the South Central Region Environmental Services Lead for HDR, began her career as a project manager for the Army Corps’ Fort Worth District and also formerly worked for the natural gas pipeline company Spectra&#160;Energy.</p>
<p>An <a href="" type="internal">archaeologist by academic training</a> and a <a href="http://rpanet.org/members/?id=28576164&amp;hhSearchTerms=%22%22dippel%22%22" type="external">member</a> of the Register of Professional Archaeologists, a biographical sketch for Dippel tracked down on the Florida Department of Transportation’s website lists her job sub-title as “ <a href="" type="internal">Project Streamlining</a>” on behalf of the DOT.</p>
<p>Section&#160;106</p>
<p>Dippel lists&#160;Section 106 consultation as an area of expertise on her LinkedIn&#160;page.</p>
<p>Section 106, in turn, serves as a major part of the focus of the lawsuit, the recently completed <a href="" type="internal">occupation</a> of a Dakota Access Pipeline construction site in Cannon Ball, North Dakota, and the push by the Standing Rock Indian Reservation&#160;for a court-ordered <a href="" type="internal">injunction</a> to halt pipeline&#160;instruction.</p>
<p>“Although federal law requires the Corps of Engineers to consult with the tribe about its sovereign interests, permits for the project were approved and construction began without meaningful consultation,” reads an August 24 op-ed in <a href="" type="internal">&#160;The New York Times&#160;by Standing Rock chairman David Archambault II</a>.</p>
<p>“The Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior and the National Advisory Council on Historic Preservation supported more protection of the tribe’s cultural heritage, but the Corps of Engineers and Energy Transfer Partners turned a blind eye to our rights. The first draft of the company’s assessment of the planned route through our treaty and ancestral lands did not even mention our&#160;tribe.”</p>
<p>Indeed, the court documents demonstrate that&#160;Standing Rock officers’ <a href="" type="internal">letters to the Army Corps often went unanswered</a>.</p>
<p />
<p>Image Credit: <a href="" type="internal">U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p />
<p>An <a href="" type="internal">intervenor in the case</a>, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, also&#160;testified in court documents about the sanctity of the land as it relates to tribal traditions and history. One of those <a href="" type="internal">testimonies</a> came from&#160;Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe member Joye Braun, an organizer for the <a href="http://www.ienearth.org/" type="external">Indigenous Environmental Network</a>.</p>
<p>The NHPA‘s Citizen Guide to&#160;Section 106 Review explains that Section 106&#160; <a href="http://www.achp.gov/docs/CitizenGuide.pdf" type="external">mandates</a> that government agencies, such as the Army Corps, “consider the effects of projects they carry out, approve, or fund on historic properties” though it also “does not mandate&#160;preservation” because “sometimes there is no way for a needed project to proceed without harming historic&#160;properties.”</p>
<p>At issue here in Standing Rock Sioux Tribe v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, then, is the alleged lack of thoroughness of the Section 106 review and not the absence of one altogether. Even the&#160; <a href="http://www.achp.gov/" type="external">Advisory Council on Historic Preservation</a> (ACHP) itself penned a&#160; <a href="" type="internal">letter</a> in May 2016 to the Corps expressing concern about the lack of rigor in&#160;its Section 106&#160;Review.</p>
<p>Like the <a href="" type="internal">southern leg</a> of TransCanada’s <a href="http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/5857" type="external">Keystone XL</a> pipeline and Enbridge’s <a href="" type="internal">Flanagan South</a> pipelines, the Army Corps and Dakota Access LLC by extension utilized Nationwide Permit 12 as an end-run around a more vigorous and NEPA-oriented environmental&#160;review.</p>
<p>Code of&#160;Conduct</p>
<p>The Register of Professional&#160;Archaeologists (RPA), of which Dippel is a member, <a href="http://rpanet.org/?page=About" type="external">describes itself</a> as a “listing of archaeologists who have agreed to abide by an explicit code of conduct and standards of research performance, who hold a graduate degree in archaeology, anthropology, art history, classics, history, or another germane discipline.” RPA also notes that “Registration is a voluntary act that recognizes an individual’s personal responsibility to be held accountable for his or her professional&#160;behavior.”</p>
<p>RPA also maintains a <a href="" type="internal">Code of Conduct</a>, calling for those in the profession to veer away from archaeology in service to the powerful and to the detriment of the&#160;vulnerable.</p>
<p>“An archaeologist shall&#160;actively support conservation of the archaeological resource base [and]&#160;be sensitive to, and respect the legitimate concerns of, groups whose culture histories are the subjects of archaeological investigations,” it reads. “An archaeologist shall not engage in any illegal or unethical conduct involving archaeological matters or knowingly permit the use of his/her name in support of any illegal or unethical activity involving archaeological&#160;matters.”</p>
<p>The Code, paying homage to&#160;ethics and the integrity of the profession, calls for archaeologists to disobey orders from their employers if they run contrary to the Code’s&#160;dictates.</p>
<p>“An archaeologist shall refuse to comply with any request or demand of an employer or client which conflicts with the Code and Standards,” it&#160;continues.</p>
<p>Dippel did not respond to a request for comment from&#160;DeSmog.</p>
<p>Terry Klein, President of RPA, said that the organization “only responds to a violation of our Code of Conduct or Standards of Research Performance when someone has <a href="http://rpanet.org/?GrievanceProcess" type="external">submitted a formal grievance</a> about the violation to the Register’s Grievance&#160;Coordinator.”</p>
<p>Though Dippel does not maintain a membership in the&#160;American Cultural Resources Association (ACRA), its <a href="http://acra-crm.org/code-of-ethics" type="external">Code of Ethics</a>also has fairly strict guidelines for work one could or should do on behalf of a&#160;client.</p>
<p>“While the definition of the public interest changes through ongoing debate, an ACRA member owes allegiance to a responsibly derived concept of the public interest,” it reads. “An ACRA member shall strive to respect the concerns of people whose histories and/or resources are the subject of cultural resources&#160;investigation.”</p>
<p>Archaeology as “Disaster&#160;Capitalism”</p>
<p>Critics of the modern-practiced academic discipline of archaeology, such as <a href="http://viu.academia.edu/RichHutchings" type="external">Richard Hutchings</a>&#160;— co-director of the <a href="https://criticalheritagetourism.com/about/" type="external">Institute for Critical Heritage and Tourism</a> and a Research Associate at Vancouver Island University — assail it as akin to what author&#160;Naomi Klein has referred to as “disaster capitalism.” Hutchings named it as such in a paper titled, “ <a href="http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/Archaeology_as_Disaster_Capitalism.pdf" type="external">Archaeology as Disaster Capitalism</a>,” co-authored with&#160;Vancouver Island University archaeologist and Professor <a href="https://viu.academia.edu/MarinaLaSalle" type="external">Mariana La Salle</a>.</p>
<p>The authors dub Dippel and those in similar positions in the orbit of commercial archaeology as&#160;“archaeobureaucrats,” or people who deploy&#160;their professional techniques in service to multinational corporations. Pipeline archaeology and clearing space for pipelines, in particular, has become a <a href="https://www.voiceamerica.com/episode/67438/the-growth-and-influence-of-the-oil-and-gas-industry-on-contemporary-archaeology" type="external">major player</a> in the <a href="https://www.mixcloud.com/indianajonesmythrealityand21st/in-the-pipeline-archaeology-and-the-oil-and-gas-industry/" type="external">private sector</a>.</p>
<p>“That most archaeologists are employed by and answer directly to transnational development corporations is only the tip of the iceberg,” Hutchings said via email. “More troubling is that while most archaeologists are white (like their employers and their employer’s stockholders), the majority of heritage sites archaeologists permit to be destroyed are Native American, raising the specter of not just environmental racism but a coordinated and systematic human rights&#160;violation.”</p>
<p>Thomas King*, the former&#160;Director of the Office of Cultural Resource Preservation for ACHP, has also critiqued cultural resources management work done by U.S. government agencies and corporations&#160;as a de facto whistleblower, calling the process a form of “whitewashing” in his 2009 book titled, <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Our-Unprotected-Heritage-Whitewashing-the-Destruction-of-our-Cultural/King/p/book/9781598743814" type="external">Our Unprotected Heritage: Whitewashing the Destruction of our Cultural and Natural Environment</a>.</p>
<p>U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg will <a href="" type="internal">issue a ruling</a> on the Standing Rock tribe’s request for an injunction on September 9, with a hearing on the issue set for the day before on September 8. Meanwhile, four miles north of Cannon Ball, an encampment of tribal protesters&#160;continues at the&#160; <a href="http://sacredstonecamp.org/" type="external">Sacred Stone Camp</a>.</p> | Dakota Access Pipeline Tribal Liaison Formerly Worked For Agency Issuing Permit | true | https://counterpunch.org/2016/08/31/dakota-access-pipeline-tribal-liaison-formerly-worked-for-agency-issuing-permit/ | 2016-08-31 | 4 |
<p>After NewLink Genetics Corporation (NASDAQ: NLNK)&#160;updated data from its ongoing phase 2 trial of IDO inhibitor indoximod in advanced melanoma, shares in the immuno-oncology specialist shot higher yesterday. The news prompted a wave of positive comments from industry watchers, and as a result, on Friday shares are up an additional 37.5% at noon EDT.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>NewLink Genetics' rally over the past two days has made up all the ground shares had lost earlier this summer when indoximod&#160;failed in a mid-stage breast cancer trial and former collaborator Roche Holdings&#160; <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2017/06/08/why-is-newlink-genetics-losing-one-third-of-its-va.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=64866e50-94ab-11e7-97bc-0050569d32b9&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">jumped ship Opens a New Window.</a> on GDC-0919, a second-generation IDO inhibitor that put up lackluster efficacy in trials.</p>
<p>The rally in NewLink Genetics shares was sparked by updated data from a trial evaluating indoximod&#160;plus the popular PD-1 inhibitor Keytruda in patients with advanced melanoma.</p>
<p>The new data shows an improvement in the percentage of patients receiving the two-drug combination who had a complete response versus what was reported in April. Specifically, the&#160;complete response rate increased to 20% from 12% previously. The overall response rate also improved to&#160;61% from 59%.</p>
<p>The news, and the upgrades following it, appears to have caught short-sellers flat-footed. The number of shares sold short had increased from fewer than than 2 million in March to over 5.5 million recently.</p>
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<p>The data reassures investors that while indoximod&#160;may not work as well in other cancers, it appears to be quite effective in tough-to-treat melanoma. In 2017, roughly 87,000 new cases of invasive melanoma will be diagnosed in the U.S., and sadly, over 9,700 people will die from the disease.</p>
<p>The news may also be increasing investors' confidence that data expected in Q4 2017 or Q1 2018 from a trial evaluating indoximod in pancreatic cancer will be good.</p>
<p>Undeniably, the need for new treatment approaches in these indications is big, but there's still more work to do before we know for sure indoximod is effective and safe. A phase 3 confirmatory trial in advanced melanoma patients is planned, and management hopes it will be fully enrolled by the end of 2018.</p>
<p>That timeline, however, could give NewLink Genetics' competitor Incyte Corp. a head start. Incyte is also developing an IDO-inhibitor for use in advanced melanoma, and results from its pivotal trial -- Echo 301 -- are expected in the first half of 2018.</p>
<p>10 stocks we like better than NewLink GeneticsWhen investing geniuses David and Tom Gardner have a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, the newsletter they have run for over a decade, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has tripled the market.*</p>
<p>David and Tom just revealed what they believe are the <a href="http://infotron.fool.com/infotrack/click?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.fool.com%2Fmms%2Fmark%2Fe-foolcom-sa-bbn-static%3Faid%3D8867%26source%3Disaeditxt0010449%26ftm_cam%3Dsa-bbn-evergreen%26ftm_pit%3D6312%26ftm_veh%3Dbbn_article_pitch&amp;impression=a450bfba-6f94-40bc-9523-b5e5abb9dd81&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=64866e50-94ab-11e7-97bc-0050569d32b9&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">10 best stocks Opens a New Window.</a> for investors to buy right now... and NewLink Genetics wasn't one of them! That's right -- they think these 10 stocks are even better buys.</p>
<p><a href="http://infotron.fool.com/infotrack/click?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.fool.com%2Fmms%2Fmark%2Fe-foolcom-sa-bbn-static%3Faid%3D8867%26source%3Disaeditxt0010449%26ftm_cam%3Dsa-bbn-evergreen%26ftm_pit%3D6312%26ftm_veh%3Dbbn_article_pitch&amp;impression=a450bfba-6f94-40bc-9523-b5e5abb9dd81&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=64866e50-94ab-11e7-97bc-0050569d32b9&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">Click here Opens a New Window.</a> to learn about these picks!</p>
<p>*Stock Advisor returns as of September 5, 2017</p>
<p><a href="http://my.fool.com/profile/TMFEBCapital/info.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=64866e50-94ab-11e7-97bc-0050569d32b9&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">Todd Campbell Opens a New Window.</a> has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. His clients may have positions in the companies mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a <a href="http://www.fool.com/Legal/fool-disclosure-policy.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=64866e50-94ab-11e7-97bc-0050569d32b9&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">disclosure policy Opens a New Window.</a>.</p> | Why NewLink Genetics Is Soaring 37.5% Higher Today | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/09/08/why-newlink-genetics-is-soaring-37-5-higher-today.html | 2017-09-08 | 0 |
<p>July 17 (UPI) — A Florida man — out on bail for a manslaughter charge — went to Las Vegas and won more than $100,000 laying in a poker tournament.</p>
<p>Paul Senat, 37, placed 70th at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, which was good enough to be in the top 1 percent of players — and to collect $100,444, reported the <a href="https://www.reviewjournal.com/crime/shootings/man-on-bail-on-florida-manslaughter-charge-wins-100k-at-wsop/" type="external">Las Vegas Review-Journal</a>.</p>
<p>Tournament officials described Senat as a <a href="http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/crime-ampampamp-law/new-man-charged-death-fsu-star-dad-plays-poker-world-series/E7rFq5Ju9pX3udKhcauUvM/" type="external">“relatively unknown player”</a>.</p>
<p>While Senat might not be well-known among the Las Vegas poker crowd, he is accused of serious charges in Palm Beach County, Fla.</p>
<p>On April 25, he was arrested there for manslaughter after allegedly firing an AK-47 assault rifle while in the back room of a strip club he partly owned. The bullet killed the club’s handyman, 55-year-old Darryl Rudolph, who was in the adjacent office changing an air conditioner filter.</p>
<p>Senat told authorities he didn’t know the gun fired or that anyone had been shot until he saw the man bleeding from his neck. Rudolph was taken to the hospital, where he died the next day.</p>
<p>Senat was arrested and posted his $35,000 bail the next day.</p>
<p>He was restricted form having contact with the Rudolph family or possessing a firearm, but it’s not clear if he had travel restrictions prior to traveling to Las Vegas.</p>
<p>Rudolph was the father of Florida State University college football player, Travis Rudolph. Just days after his father was killed, Travis <a href="https://www.tomahawknation.com/florida-state-football-fsu-noles/2017/4/29/15451550/florida-state-travis-rudolph-undrafted-free-agent-new-york-giants-2017-nfl-draft" type="external">signed as an undrafted free agent</a> with the <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/New_York_Giants/" type="external">New York Giants</a>.</p> | Florida man on bail wins $100K in Las Vegas poker tournament | false | https://newsline.com/florida-man-on-bail-wins-100k-in-las-vegas-poker-tournament/ | 2017-07-18 | 1 |
<p>Imagine a store where you can pay as you go with no credit and get brand-name furniture, appliances and electronics for as little as $19.99 a week.</p>
<p>That’s the marketing pitch for rent-to-own companies, which tout low prices, no hassles and instant gratification to cash-strapped consumers.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>If you’re considering a rent-to-own deal or are already in a contract, here’s what you need to know.</p>
<p>You may rent from a well-known national chain, but the contract you sign is usually with a third-party leasing company, not the store itself. That means payments, repairs, returns and other services are handled by that company, not the store.</p>
<p>You usually make payments for a fixed introductory period, which can be a few months. After that, you have three options: you can choose to buy the item outright; continue making payments until you own it; or return the item at any time to end your lease.</p>
<p>If you stop making payments or fall behind, the leasing company can repossess the object and you don’t have the right to get your money back.</p>
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<p>You don’t need good credit to rent an item. Most rent-to-own companies typically require only a source of income, a place of residence, and references from people who know you. The leasing company may pull your credit report to verify who you are, and it may or may not report payments to the credit bureaus. If it does, the information could show up on your credit report.</p>
<p>Rent-to-own may seem cheap, but in practice it costs as much as payday loans, car title loans and other expensive forms of lending, with effective annual percentage rates typically north of 200%.</p>
<p>Even if you have a troubled credit history or can’t pay the full purchase price for something you want, there can be cheaper options than renting to own. Store layaway, <a href="https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/top-credit-cards/nerdwallets-best-credit-cards-for-bad-credit/?utm_campaign=ct_prod&amp;utm_source=syndication&amp;utm_medium=rss&amp;utm_term=fox-business&amp;utm_content=456605" type="external">subprime credit cards Opens a New Window.</a> and <a href="https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/loans/cheap-personal-loans/?utm_campaign=ct_prod&amp;utm_source=syndication&amp;utm_medium=rss&amp;utm_term=fox-business&amp;utm_content=456605" type="external">bad-credit personal loans Opens a New Window.</a> all give you time to pay off the purchase at APRs below 36%.</p>
<p>» MORE: <a href="https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/finance/rent-a-center-prices/?utm_campaign=ct_prod&amp;utm_source=syndication&amp;utm_medium=rss&amp;utm_term=fox-business&amp;utm_content=456605" type="external">How one rent-to-own company marks up prices Opens a New Window.</a></p>
<p>The Federal Trade Commission suggests you ask these questions before choosing rent-to-own:</p>
<p>There are several ways you can protect yourself if you’ve signed a rent-to-own contract.</p>
<p>Keep your payment records. Some major rental companies have had issues with crediting payments properly.</p>
<p>» MORE: <a href="https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/finance/rent-a-center-complaints-lawsuits/?utm_campaign=ct_prod&amp;utm_source=syndication&amp;utm_medium=rss&amp;utm_term=fox-business&amp;utm_content=456605" type="external">How this rent-to-own company torments customers&#160; Opens a New Window.</a></p>
<p>Pay on time. Missing a payment, even by a single day, can trigger a deluge of calls from rental companies. The further behind you get, the more aggressive the companies become.</p>
<p>Know your rights if your account is sold to a debt collector. The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act prohibits debt collectors from using abusive, unfair or deceptive practices to collect on debt, including calling customers continuously with an intent to harass.</p>
<p>If you’ve been harassed over unpaid bills, you can file a complaint with your state’s attorney general. Or if you feel threatened, you can contact your local law enforcement.</p>
<p>Consider negotiating a lower payoff. Debt collectors that acquire unpaid debt from rental companies will typically ask you to pay the “early purchase option” on your contract. But savvy consumers can talk them down to half of that amount paid over multiple months.</p>
<p>The article Rent-to-Own: Be Informed Before You Sign originally appeared on NerdWallet.</p> | Rent-to-Own: Be Informed Before You Sign | true | http://foxbusiness.com/features/2017/10/27/rent-to-own-be-informed-before-sign.html | 2017-10-27 | 0 |
<p>Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist on states and cities running into financial trouble.</p>
<p>More and more states and cities across the country, from Connecticut to Illinois and Seattle, are looking to tax hikes as the solution to mounting financial problems.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>But when the FOX Business Network’s Stuart Varney asked if that way of funding spending had “run its course yet,” Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist responded: “They got themselves in these troubles, some of these states, with runaway spending, with pension plans that they can’t afford, that they made promises to the public sector unions that bankrupt their city or their state.”</p>
<p>According to Norquist, a lot of these financial woes are driven by pensions.</p>
<p>“Twenty and 30 years ago politicians said ‘I don’t have any money to give to special interests now, but I’ll tell you what, let me promise you pension money that will be coming in 20, 30 years from now.&#160;When I’m dead, someone else will be there when the city collapses or the state has these problems.’”</p>
<p>Norquist’s solution is to let these cities become insolvent.</p>
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<p>“Cities can go bankrupt and cities that have overspent should go bankrupt and start again and people should vote out the leadership that got you there.”</p> | Cash strapped cities, states should go bankrupt and start over: Grover Norquist | true | http://foxbusiness.com/politics/2017/07/25/cash-strapped-cities-states-should-go-bankrupt-and-start-over-grover-norquist.html | 2017-07-25 | 0 |
<p>Many Republicans who originally planned to spend Monday in St. Paul with other Republican National Convention-goers were compelled to change their plans, thanks to Hurricane Gustav — including the GOP’s own presumptive presidential nominee, John McCain, who was busy over the weekend playing the anti-Bush when it came to disaster preparedness.</p>
<p>“The Caucus” in The New York Times:</p>
<p>On CBS, Mrs. Bush was asked about criticisms Mr. McCain has made about her husband’s management of the Katrina disaster. She said: “Well, there were lots of mistakes and they were on every level. They were local, they were statewide and there were certainly federal mistakes. But we learned from those and I hope that we’ll see and I think we will see, for one thing, many, many people have evacuated. Many more people have left than before in the other hurricane. But I think we’ll see that the coordination between the federal government, the state government and the local government will be much, much better.”</p>
<p>“It was a very important lesson,” she said.</p>
<p />
<p>Those lessons weren’t lost on the McCain campaign, which switched into emergency preparedness mode by turning some parts of the convention into relief and assistance efforts for any storm victims, alhough some parties went on last night as planned. The campaign sent about a dozen members of the Louisiana delegation home in a chartered jet and put together a Gulf States panel of Republicans from that region.</p>
<p><a href="http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/01/the-early-word-monday/?hp" type="external">Read more</a></p> | The RNC and the Storm | true | https://truthdig.com/articles/the-rnc-and-the-storm/ | 2008-09-01 | 4 |
<p>Tension filled the air on the night of August 22, 1927. Italian immigrant anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were to be executed at midnight.</p>
<p>Nearly eight hundred police formed a “ <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/specials/insiders/2012/09/05/sacco-and-vanzetti/kTW9FAG9IkO8tmnWXyA4eM/picture.html" type="external">cordon of steel</a>” to guard the state prison in Charlestown, Massachusetts, where the two men were held. Machine guns and searchlights lined the south and west walls of the death house. Authorities had gas and tear bombs at the ready. In nearby Boston, searchlights shone down from the State House roof. Police armed with guns positioned themselves at intervals between the lights. “It was,” <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0823.html?mcubz=1" type="external">according to</a> the New York Times, “the first time in Massachusetts’s history that such a scene had been enacted.”</p>
<p>As midnight approached, thousands gathered on the Boston Common and Beacon Street. Police arrested 156 people among the crowd amassed for the “death watch” in front of the State House.</p>
<p>A similar vigil took place in New York. Composer Anton Coppola, who was just ten years old at the time, recalled standing in a packed Union Square and being told to watch the lights dim as power was diverted to Massachusetts for the electrocutions. Sacco, the first of the two to be killed, was declared dead at 12:19. Vanzetti followed at 12:26.</p>
<p>As anticipated, riots erupted in response. But demonstrations and protests were not limited to the United States. Sacco and Vanzetti supporters called <a href="http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1927/08/07/page/3/article/vanzetti-sister-to-lead-french-radical-rally" type="external">general strikes</a> in Mexico and Uruguay. Ten thousand protesters took to the streets in Sydney. Riots broke out in Berlin, London, Paris, and other European cities. As historian Lisa McGirr <a href="https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/93/4/1085/702421/The-Passion-of-Sacco-and-Vanzetti-A-Global-History" type="external">has noted</a>, the Sacco-Vanzetti case ignited “an international worker-led protest.”</p>
<p>It didn’t start out that way. In 1920 when the two men were arrested, they were virtually unknown and indistinguishable from the more than 4 million Italians who had immigrated to the United States.</p>
<p>Both Sacco and Vanzetti left their home country in 1908. Sacco hailed from the town of Torremaggiore in the Puglia region of southeast Italy. Upon arriving in the US at age seventeen he went to Milford, Massachusetts. He became a skilled shoe worker, married, and started a family. Twenty-year-old Vanzetti came from Villafalletto, in the northwestern region of Piedmont. After a brief stint in New York he settled in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where he boarded with a family and worked as an itinerant fish seller.</p>
<p>Neither of the two men were anarchists when they left Italy. They were radicalized in the US, where instead of the “land of the free,” they found masses of people living in desperate poverty and a political system that all too often turned a blind eye to the suffering. Vanzetti expressed his disillusionment in a letter to his sister Luigia, who was still back in Italy.</p>
<p>In America things are going very badly. There is a great deal of unemployment and enough misery to soften the heart of a tiger. Those responsible could not care less. You are not aware of the present condition of this nation. This is no longer the America that excited your imagination. America, dear sister, is called the land of liberty, but in no other country on earth does a man tremble before his fellow man like here.</p>
<p>To Sacco and Vanzetti, the capitalist state was beyond redemption. In their search for an alternative they found anarchism and became dedicated followers of <a href="https://libcom.org/tags/luigi-galleani" type="external">Luigi Galleani</a>, a charismatic, anti-organizational, militant anarchist who preached the overthrow of capitalism and government by any means. In 1917 the pair went to Mexico along with several other Galleanisti to plan for the revolution they believed would sweep Italy. When it didn’t materialize, they returned to the US and continued their war against the state. Their militancy helped precipitate the first red scare.</p>
<p>On the evening of June 2, 1919, the Galleanisti set off bombs at the homes of various business leaders and government officials, including Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. While attempting to place the explosive on Palmer’s doorstep the bomber tripped and blew himself to bits. He left enough forensic evidence, including a portion of his scalp, and a leaflet titled “Plain Words,” for law enforcement to identify him as Carlo Valdinoci, an Italian anarchist and Galleani supporter.</p>
<p>In retaliation, Palmer directed agents from the Bureau of Investigation, the forerunner to the FBI, to conduct <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Palmer-Raids" type="external">warrantless raids</a> of public and private meeting places, seize literature and other items without permission, and arrest anyone they deemed suspicious. Agents traced the “Plain Words” flyer to a printer and typesetter, Roberto Elia and Andrea Salsedo, and arrested the men, holding them secretly and without charge in an office on the fourteenth floor of New York’s Park Row Building and subjecting them to harsh interrogation. On May 3, after nearly three months of captivity, Salsedo jumped out a window and to his death on the Manhattan sidewalk.</p>
<p>Just two days after Salsedo’s death, police arrested Sacco and Vanzetti on a streetcar near Brockton, Massachusetts. The police had been looking for suspects in a recent robbery and murder at the Slater and Morrill Shoe Factory in nearby South Braintree. The previous month, two armed men had detained paymaster Frederick Parmenter and his guard, Alessandro Berardelli, as they were transporting money from the payroll office. The men shot Parmenter and Berardelli, then fled in a Buick, along with three accomplices.</p>
<p>Sacco and Vanzetti had no idea why they were under arrest (police claimed that they were “suspicious characters” without mentioning the Braintree crimes), but they did know that radicals were being rounded up for deportation. Both men were armed, and Sacco had in his possession a leaflet advertising a meeting to protest the federal government’s brutal treatment of Salsedo and the deportation of Elia. Vanzetti was slated to speak at the meeting.</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, when asked about their politics, the two men denied being anarchists. The flyer, however, outed them as “Reds.” In addition to charging the pair with the Braintree crimes, police pinned a bungled robbery in nearby Bridgewater on Vanzetti.</p>
<p>Vanzetti went on trial for the Bridgewater burglary in the summer of 1920. Although he had an alibi (he was selling eels to his Italian customers for Christmas Eve dinner), the Italian witnesses who testified on his behalf failed to convince the jury. They found him guilty, and the judge issued a draconian sentence of twelve to fifteen years in prison. When he stood trial for the Braintree crimes, Vanzetti would face the jury as a convicted criminal.</p>
<p>Initially, support for Sacco and Vanzetti in the US was confined to anarchist circles. Led by Aldino Felicani, a printer and publisher and a friend of Vanzetti (although not one of the Galleanisti), Boston-based anarchists formed the Sacco Vanzetti Defense Committee to increase awareness of the case and raise funds for legal expenses. The circle of supporters widened exponentially when <a href="" type="internal">Elizabeth Gurley Flynn</a>, the former <a href="" type="internal">Industrial Workers of the World</a> organizer and then-secretary of the Workers Defense Union in New York City, met with Felicani and the two prisoners.</p>
<p>For the next six years Flynn made Sacco and Vanzetti’s cause her own. She oversaw the publication of pamphlets and press releases, travelled around the country giving speeches on behalf of “the boys,” as she called them, and secured endorsements and donations to the defense fund from prominent liberals and mainstream and radical labor organizations. Along with labor journalist Mary Heaton Vorse, Flynn made a presentation to members of the ACLU’s national board, who voted to endorse the case, and she convinced the Massachusetts branch to follow suit.</p>
<p>The first Sacco and Vanzetti meetings with English speakers, in the summer of 1920, attracted just twenty-five people in New York and an only somewhat larger audience in Boston. But by the following April, Flynn reported that requests for speaking dates had dramatically increased. The Workers Defense Union was sending out weekly publicity releases to over five hundred newspapers. The Defense Committee was printing “hundreds of thousands of leaflets and pamphlets in English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German.” And workers were covering the cost of most of these expenses. As Flynn later recounted, “the agitation among New England and New York workers for Sacco and Vanzetti began as a small spark at first. But it eventually spread around the world.”</p>
<p>At the behest of the Defense Committee, Flynn and New York anarchist Carlo Tresca recruited California attorney Fred Moore to join the legal team. It was Moore who turned the case into a referendum on political and ethnic intolerance in the Bay State — writing, at one point, that “an Italian accused of a murder in Massachusetts stands about as much a chance of getting a fair trial as a Black man accused of rape in the south.”</p>
<p>The trial for the Braintree crimes opened in Dedham, Massachusetts, on May 31, 1921. It lasted a little over six weeks. Superior Court Judge Webster Thayer, who had previously lambasted a jury that returned a “not guilty” verdict for a man accused of inciting anarchy, presided. He requested the assignment after ruling in Vanzetti’s Bridgewater trial. Thayer’s disdain for the defendants was evident. He was reported to have commented to a friend, “Did you see what I did to those 2 anarchist bastards the other day? That ought to hold them for a while.”</p>
<p>Both Sacco and Vanzetti had alibis for their whereabouts the day of the crime. Prosecution relied on eyewitness testimony (much of which was contradictory), a “consciousness of guilt” argument based on the men’s supposedly strange behavior at the time of their arrest, and inconclusive ballistics evidence. Despite the flimsy case, the jury reached a unanimous “guilty” verdict after only a few hours of deliberation.</p>
<p>Undeterred by the verdict, the defense prepared and put forward five supplementary motions for a new trial. As the appeals process wore on, demonstrations on behalf of the two anarchists grew in size, frequency, and militancy. The cry “Save Sacco and Vanzetti!” resounded around the globe.</p>
<p>But although Moore’s strategy was beginning to pay off in the court of public opinion, it was far less effective in the court of law and with his clients. In the summer of 1924, Moore resigned. Soon after, Judge Thayer denied all five motions for a new trial.</p>
<p>Following Moore’s departure, the Defense Committee reorganized and hired establishment attorney William Thompson. But the former Boston district attorney was no more successful in obtaining a new trial. While a glimmer of hope flashed when a prison mate of Sacco’s confessed to the robbery-murder, Thayer ultimately rejected Thompson’s appeal.</p>
<p>On April 9, 1927, amid continued protests, he <a href="http://www.mass.gov/courts/court-info/sjc/edu-res-center/saco-vanz/the-supreme-judicial-court-affirms-the-convictions-16-gen.html" type="external">handed down his decision</a>. Sacco and Vanzetti would die in the electric chair.</p>
<p>Just before Thayer’s ruling, Felix Frankfurter — then a professor at Harvard Law School — published a now-famous <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1927/03/the-case-of-sacco-and-vanzetti/306625/" type="external">analysis of the case</a> in the Atlantic Monthly. He focused not on Sacco and Vanzetti’s guilt or innocence, but on the flawed procedure of the trial. Frankfurter’s essay is often credited with bringing widespread public attention to the case. And to be sure, his gravitas conferred respectability on Sacco and Vanzetti’s cause.</p>
<p>But it was radicals like Flynn and Felicani who kept the case alive for seven years. The campaign they devised was extraordinary in its appeal across lines of gender, race and ethnicity, and even political ideology and class. By 1927 the list of Sacco and Vanzetti supporters in the US included novelist Upton Sinclair, poet Katherine Anne Porter, Boston socialite Elizabeth Glendower Evans, New York congressman Fiorello LaGuardia, anarchist Lucy Parsons, socialist A. Philip Randolph, Smith College students, immigrant coal miners in Northeastern Pennsylvania, the American Federation of Labor, and the Communist Party USA.</p>
<p>But nothing could stop the judicial juggernaut. Soon after the judge’s death sentence, Massachusetts Governor Alvan Fuller bowed to pressure and convened a committee to review the evidence and conduct of the trial. That panel — known as the Lowell Committee, after its chair, A. Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard University and a founder of the Immigration Restriction League — concluded that the trial was a fair one and Sacco and Vanzetti had been proven guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt.</p>
<p>Governor Fuller denied an appeal for clemency, and further appeals to the Massachusetts Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court also failed. Sacco and Vanzetti were killed by the state just after midnight on August 23, 1927.</p>
<p>Disheartening as it was for so many of their supporters, the Sacco-Vanzetti case is one episode in a history of lethal judicial violence against radicals, sandwiched on a timeline between Haymarket and the Rosenbergs. Countless other radicals have felt the repressive force of the state on their backs in other ways, but most of their names are forgotten, if they were ever known.</p>
<p>Efforts to ferret out “ <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/us/politics/travel-ban-muslim-trump.html" type="external">foreigners</a>” and quash dissent continue in the Trump era. The president gives quarter to white supremacists and accuses antifascist counter demonstrators of violence, and the Department of Justice <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/14/donald-trump-inauguration-protest-website-search-warrant-dreamhost" type="external">seeks a warrant</a> for the IP addresses of everyone who visited the website of DisruptJ20, a loosely organized collective of activists who protested during the inauguration.</p>
<p>But the Left’s long history of being targeted for repression is accompanied by a history of fighting back in defense of civil liberties and against state violence. In the 1920s Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Fred Moore, and others reached across a variety of dividing lines to fill the streets in support of Sacco and Vanzetti. In the age of Trump, we pick up their mantle.</p> | The Killing of Sacco and Vanzetti | true | https://jacobinmag.com/2017/08/sacco-vanzetti-palmer-raids-anarchism-repression | 2018-10-03 | 4 |
<p>Does the new Canadian Prime Minister support democracy in the Americas or U.S. orchestrated coups?</p>
<p>In his first major foreign policy move Paul Martin’s government faithfully followed the U.S. (and French) lead in removing the legally elected president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, from power. Contrast this with the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) whose chairperson, Jamaican Prime Minister P.J. Patterson, said in a statement that CARICOM deplored “the removal of [Haitian] President Aristide ” from office, as setting “a dangerous precedent for democratically-elected governments anywhere and everywhere.” In other words, Canada has sided with the two “colonial” powers with a centuries-old tradition of meddling (to put it mildly) in Haitian affairs, instead of with the Caribbean nations which have endured a shared history of slavery and other forms of exploitation.</p>
<p>Three weeks into an armed insurrection that left the country in turmoil and Aristide gone Martin said that he hoped “all parties …respect constitutional order and the rule of law.” Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham did no better with his comment that a “constitutional transition ” was underway.</p>
<p>The constitutional transition Mr. Graham refers to was a “coup” backed by the revival of Haiti’s military force that has always served the country’s tiny elite _ less than two percent of the population holding at least half the nation’s wealth _ and the most reactionary faction of the U.S. political establishment. Whether President Aristide was actually kidnapped by U.S. forces, as U.S. Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters alleged, or was just presented with “an offer he couldn’t refuse,” there is no question that the Bush administration played the decisive role in this regime change.</p>
<p>Let us connect the dots.</p>
<p>In 1990 Aristide overwhelmingly won Haiti’s first democratic election. Since he was a voice of the poor and oppressed, alarm bells went off among right-wing U.S. politicians and the corporations they represent. Bush the First immediately moved to undermine the new Haitian government by withholding aid and supporting opposition groups. Nine months into his mandate Aristide was ousted by General Raoul Cedras _ backed by the CIA _ who instituted a military reign of terror that led to the death of more than three thousand people, mostly supporters of Aristide.</p>
<p>The Organization of American States announced an embargo against the illegal Haitian regime, which the U.S. promptly ignored. Not until the new Clinton presidency did the U.S. restore Aristide to power _ on condition that he adopt the harsh neoliberal policies of the International Monetary Fund. One of the IMF policies _ the elimination of tariffs on rice _ led to a massive increase in subsidized U.S. rice exports that devastated Haitian rice growers.</p>
<p>Still, in 2000 Aristide again won the presidency and his Lavalas party took more than 80% of the local and parliamentary seats in legislative elections. In several multi-candidate contests where Lavalas gained a plurality rather than a majority of votes they should have faced a second round election. Instead a few candidates simply took their seats. (Imagine an MP with a plurality instead of an absolute majority!) In response the new Bush administration (and others) froze foreign aid until new elections could be agreed upon. This effectively gave the opposition a veto over international aid. Even after the senators in question stepped aside, the opposition continued to reject new elections because they knew they couldn’t win at the ballot box. And with the country cut off from bilateral and multilateral financing Haiti’s economy went into a tailspin, spurring political discontent.</p>
<p>The International Republican Institute, a Republican-Party backed arm of the National Endowment for Democracy, gave the Haitian opposition political parties three million dollars a year. A month ago “rebels” armed with American-made weapons marched into the country from the Dominican Republic. This unsavory lot of wanted murderers, former coup plotters and narco-traffickers includes Emmanuel Constant who has already gone on record saying that in the mid 1990s he was on the CIA payroll. Rebel leader Guy Philippe was trained by the U.S. military as an army officer in Ecuador, according to a report published Friday by Human Rights Watch. Already it’s been reported that Philippe has met with high-ranking members of the political coalition that opposed Aristide and he’s been seen around U.S. marines.</p>
<p>Last week the Bush administration stepped up its pressure by undermining Aristide’s personal security when it blocked him from increasing his bodyguard staff hired from the U.S.-based security firm, the Steele Foundation.</p>
<p>Was there a coup and did Canada support it?</p>
<p>We do know Canadian troops were present at the airport when Aristide left the country.</p>
<p>We do know Canada stood by and did nothing to support the legally elected president of the country as he faced armed opposition. We do know right wing American politicians are already touting Canada’s complicity as justification for U.S. policy in Haiti.</p>
<p>Unfortunately the evidence suggests Paul Martin has turned his back on millions of Canadians who want this country to support and build real democracy around the world. Instead, he has joined with right wing extremist elements in the U.S. who tell the world ‘it’s our way or the highway.”</p>
<p>YVES ENGLER recently finnished his first book, Playing Left Wing from Hockey to Politics: The making of a student activist, studied Haitian history at Concordia University. He can be reached at <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | A Pawn in Their Coup? | true | https://counterpunch.org/2004/03/05/a-pawn-in-their-coup/ | 2004-03-05 | 4 |
<p>Sept. 21 (UPI) — Sending oil north through Turkey, trade relations for the Kurdish north of Iraq could be hurt through a vote for independence, the U.S. State Department said.</p>
<p>A referendum of independence for the Kurdish region of northern Iraq is set for Sept. 25. The vote follows several decades of acrimony between Kurdish administrators and the federal government in Baghdad, acrimony that predates the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://cabinet.gov.krd/a/d.aspx?s=010000&amp;l=12&amp;a=55771" type="external">an August speech</a> before legislators, Kurdish Prime Minister <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Nechirvan_Barzani/" type="external">Nechirvan Barzani</a> said patience with Baghdad was wearing thin. The war with the terrorist group calling itself the <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Islamic-State/" type="external">Islamic State</a>, the decline in global crude oil prices and an “unjust decision” by Baghdad to cut its share of the budget left it with a “heavy financial strain.”</p>
<p>Heather Nauert, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, said the referendum is strongly opposed by the U.S. government. Among other things, the referendum could jeopardize Kurdish trade relations in the region.</p>
<p>“This is simply the reality of this very serious situation,” she said in <a href="https://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2017/09/274324.htm" type="external">a statement</a>.</p>
<p>Kurdish oil is exported north to Turkish ports and at times was the target of attacks from the group calling itself the Islamic State. In meetings with U.S. defense officials last month, Barzani said the referendum wouldn’t interfere with ongoing operations against the Islamic state.</p>
<p>Gulf Keystone Petroleum, a British company with a portfolio based in Iraq, said it had enough cash on hand <a href="https://www.upi.com/More-Kurdish-oil-possible-Gulf-Keystone-says/5471505812416/" type="external">to invest</a> in more crude oil production from the Kurdish north. Total average gross production from its Shaikan oil field last year was at the upper range of its guidance.</p>
<p>Russian oil company Rosneft <a href="https://www.upi.com/Russias-Rosneft-to-fast-track-gas-export-option-in-Kurdish-Iraq/1231505731260/" type="external">said Monday</a> it was now ready to consider working with the Kurdistan Regional Government on new gas pipeline infrastructure. Agreements on development could materialize by the end of the year.</p> | Kurdish vote hurts trade, U.S. says | false | https://newsline.com/kurdish-vote-hurts-trade-u-s-says/ | 2017-09-21 | 1 |
<p>Jan. 25 (UPI) -- Team USA gymnastics star <a href="" type="internal">Simone Biles</a> is calling the judge who sentenced <a href="" type="internal">Larry Nassar</a> her "hero."</p>
<p>Michigan judge Rosemarie Aquilina sentenced the former Team USA and Michigan State University doctor to 40 to 175 years in prison Wednesday at Ingram County Circuit Court in Lansing, Mich.</p>
<p />
<p>Biles, Aly Raisman, McKayla Maroney and Jordyn Weber were among the athletes who have said they were molested by Nassar. A total of 168 women and girls testified or had statements read at the seven-day sentencing hearing.</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Nassar was convicted</a> on all seven counts of criminal sexual conduct.</p>
<p>"To Judge Aquilina: THANK YOU, YOU ARE MY HERO," <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BeWEyMvnI1m/?hl=en&amp;taken-by=simonebiles" type="external">Biles wrote on social media</a> Wednesday. "Although there is not a scripted path to healing. I know it makes me feel relieved that he can no longer hurt any more beautiful souls."</p>
<p>"I just wanted to shout out all of the other survivors for being so brave and speaking like the queens that you are while looking at that monster and not letting him destroy you any more. He will no longer have the power to steal our happiness or joy. I stand with every one of you."</p>
<p>Raisman also thanked Aquilina, prosecutors, law enforcement officials, family, friends, the gymnastics community and members of the media Wednesday on social media.</p>
<p>"To judge Aquilina, <a href="https://twitter.com/Aly_Raisman/status/956350358225375233" type="external">thank you from the bottom</a> of my heart," Raisman wrote. "Your leadership, your professionalism, your compassion, and you commitment to allow each and every one of us survivors the opportunity to share our impact statements in open court was extremely important and meaningful. As I shared in court, I wasn't planning to speak, but thanks to the army of survivors and you, I am forever grateful that all of our voices are finally heard. Thank you for listening to us all."</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Nassar was sentenced</a> to 60 years in prison in December on federal child pornography charges. He also awaits sentencing on three criminal sexual conduct charges in a separate case out of nearby Eaton County, Mich.</p>
<p>Michigan State president Lou Ann Simon resigned <a href="" type="internal">on Thursday, citing the Nassar</a> scandal. The move came after <a href="https://www.thepetitionsite.com/898/517/757/usa-gymnast-forced-to-pay-bill-for-her-rape/" type="external">more than 16,000 people signed</a> a petition calling for Simon's resignation.</p>
<p>Several high-ranking USA Gymnastics board of directors members opted to resign on Monday.</p> | Simone Biles to Larry Nassar judge: 'You are my hero' | false | https://upi.com/Sports_News/2018/01/25/Simone-Biles-to-Larry-Nassar-judge-You-are-my-hero/7711516894240/ | 2 |
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<p />
<p>Image source: Apple.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) is expected to announce its financial results for the fourth quarter of its fiscal year 2016 and, more importantly, provide a forecast for how it expects its business to perform in the first quarter of its fiscal year 2017.</p>
<p>The first quarter in every Apple fiscal year represents the company's peak quarter, as it's the first full quarter that incorporates sales of the company's newest iPhone models, and iPhone sales comprise the <a href="http://www.fool.com/investing/2016/10/13/apple-incs-iphone-business-3-things-investors-need.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">majority of the company's revenue Opens a New Window.</a>. Apple's performance in this quarter tends to set the pace for the remainder of the fiscal year, as it typically only does one flagship iPhone release in a given year.</p>
<p>With that in mind, here are three things that Apple management needs to address on its upcoming earnings call, after market close on Oct. 25.</p>
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<p>It is going to be absolutely critical for Apple to let investors in on how the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are selling, in aggregate, relative to last year's iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus. Apple has insight into both its build plans and the number of iPhones it's shipping to its distribution partners (known as "sell-in"), and it is very likely that the company has gotten enough feedback from said distribution partners to know how quickly those units are being sold to end customers (known as "sell-through").</p>
<p>Early on in the iPhone lifecycle, Apple's sell-in is pretty much limited to its ability to crank out the new phones (as demand tends to exceed supply). However, after a while Apple's production capabilities improve and the initial surge of demand usually moderates, leading to a situation in which supply and demand are in sync (or "balanced").</p>
<p>Is end demand for the iPhone 7 series of smartphones faring better than that for the iPhone 6s series of phones? If the answer is "yes," then that might indicate that iPhone demand bottomed with the iPhone 6s series, alleviating some of the fears that the iPhone 6 (which outsold the iPhone 6s series) represented "peak iPhone."</p>
<p>If not, then I suspect investors will watch the next iPhone cycle very closely, as Apple is expected to bring a substantially redesigned set of smartphones then. If those devices fail to stimulate demand growth (assuming the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus don't do the trick), the iPhone 6 may truly have been "peak iPhone."</p>
<p>Although much of the focus is going to be on how the flagship iPhones are doing, Apple still sells a reasonable quantity of mid-range smartphones (Apple now serves this market with the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus) and low-end smartphones (Apple uses the iPhone SE here).</p>
<p>It would be interesting to hear how demand for the iPhone SE, which Apple released back in March to tackle the $399 to $499 smartphone market, is holding up. Has this device been able to help push Apple's share in these price points meaningfully upwards?</p>
<p>Perhaps more important, though, would be commentary on how the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus sales are progressing, now that they have seen both price cuts and storage-capacity increases. In particular, how are sales of these phones progressing, relative to how the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus sold when they were Apple's mid-range offerings?</p>
<p>Insight into sales of these products may make it easier for investors to make educated guesses on how many iPhones the company will sell throughout fiscal year 2017.</p>
<p>The iPhone 7 cycle is unique in that the iPhone 7 Plus is far and away the superior phone to the vanilla iPhone 7. The camera is obviously superior on the iPhone 7 Plus (likely the biggest selling point for the larger phone over the smaller, for most people), and the display is sharper (while being just as color-accurate, according to several third-party tests).</p>
<p>Additionally, while the iPhone 7 seems to be in reasonable supply, many iPhone 7 Plus models are still quite hard to get hold of in a reasonable time frame.</p>
<p>Though it may simply be the case that the iPhone 7 Plus is much more difficult to manufacture than the iPhone 7, it may instead be that demand for the 7 Plus relative to the vanilla 7 this year is significantly higher than it has been for prior Plus models relative to their non-Plus counterparts.</p>
<p>That's something that I'd like to see Apple shine more light on.</p>
<p>If higher demand ultimately proves to be the cause, Apple could be looking at a boost in iPhone average selling prices, as iPhone 7 Plus models are $120 more expensive than their iPhone 7 counterparts. Such an average selling-price improvement from a mix shift would be amplified by the fact that this year's iPhone 7 Plus models sell for $20 more than their iPhone 6s Plus counterparts did, when they were Apple's flagships.</p>
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<p><a href="http://my.fool.com/profile/aeassa/info.aspx" type="external">Ashraf Eassa Opens a New Window.</a> has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Apple. The Motley Fool has the following options: long January 2018 $90 calls on Apple and short January 2018 $95 calls on Apple.</p>
<p>Try any of our Foolish newsletter services <a href="http://www.fool.com/shop/newsletters/index.aspx?source=isiedilnk018048&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">free for 30 days Opens a New Window.</a>. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that <a href="http://www.fool.com/knowledge-center/motley.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">considering a diverse range of insights Opens a New Window.</a> makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a <a href="http://www.fool.com/Legal/fool-disclosure-policy.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">disclosure policy Opens a New Window.</a>.</p> | 3 Things Apple Inc. Needs to Address on October 25 | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2016/10/18/3-things-apple-inc-needs-to-address-on-october-25.html | 2016-10-18 | 0 |
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<p>After Donald Trump’s inaugural committee announced its chosen clergy on Wednesday, the dissent was quieter – and it was not about political issues, but theological ones.</p>
<p>What little criticism emerged on Wednesday mostly focused on one of the six clergy members who will pray at Trump’s inauguration: Paula White, a Florida-based televangelist who has long been close to Trump.</p>
<p>White is known for embracing the prosperity gospel – the theology that God will bless true believers not just with eternal salvation but with material wealth here on Earth. To many believers, the prosperity gospel offers hope and promise. But to other Christians, it’s heretical; and to some, prosperity gospel preachers’ motives are suspect, especially when they seem to be enriching themselves by asking for money from their followers.</p>
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<p>Sen. Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, launched an investigation in 2007 into spending by White and several other televangelists, but ended it three years later without reaching any conclusions.</p>
<p>When White’s role in the swearing-in ceremony was reported Wednesday, the Daily Beast said in a headline, “Shady Pastor to Pray With Trump at Inauguration.” Erick Erickson, an influential Christian writer who strongly opposed Trump during his campaign, fumed on his website: “An Actual Trinity-Denying Heretic Will Pray at Trump’s Inauguration.”</p>
<p>To explain the theology that he took issue with, Erickson posted a video of a televised conversation in which White listened to a man say, “Jesus is not the only begotten son of God. He is not. I’m a son of God.” White agreed: “He’s the first fruit.”</p>
<p>Erickson wrote on Wednesday: “The President of the United States putting a heretic on stage who claims to believe in Jesus, but does not really believe in Jesus, risks leading others astray. . .. I’d rather a Hindu pray on Inauguration Day and not risk the souls of men, than one whose heresy lures in souls with promises of comfort only to damn them in eternity. At least no one would mistake a Hindu, a Buddhist, or an atheist with being a representative of Christ’s kingdom.”</p>
<p>Trump picked a more diverse set of clergy to deliver biblical readings and prayers than most recent presidents, who have picked just one or two people to pray at their inaugurations. He will have six clergy members on stage, including a rabbi, a Catholic cardinal and black and Hispanic Protestant leaders.</p>
<p>White is the second woman ever chosen to pray at an inauguration, and the first female clergy member to participate: Obama tapped the first female prayer leader in 2013 when he asked Myrlie Evers-Williams, a lay person and the widow of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, to pray at his second swearing-in.</p>
<p>White has long been close to Trump. She helped orchestrate his meeting with hundreds of evangelical leaders in June and is now chair of his evangelical advisory board. In a statement on Wednesday, she said she will ask God to “richly bless our extraordinary home, the United States of America” when she prays at the inauguration.</p>
<p>And Trump’s association with the prosperity gospel dates back far longer than his friendship with White. His parents joined Marble Collegiate Church in New York, where Trump was strongly impressed by Norman Vincent Peale, one of America’s earliest and most prominent prosperity gospel thinkers. Peale officiated at Trump’s first wedding, and Trump co-hosted a 90th birthday party for Peale, who died in 1993.</p>
<p>The Associated Press said that Trump’s inauguration will be the first time a prosperity gospel preacher takes the national stage at an inauguration.</p>
<p>“You’ve got millions of people who will see them perform,” Rice University religion professor Anthony Pinn said to the AP. “There’s a tremendous amount of benefit that goes along with that.”</p> | Paula White, prosperity preacher once investigated by Senate, is a controversial pick for inauguration | false | https://abqjournal.com/917759/paula-white-prosperity-preacher-once-investigated-by-senate-is-a-controversial-pick-for-inauguration.html | 2 |
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<p>“The day of working an 80-hour week must come to an end. The church does not own us.” Dean Coridan The president of the Iowa-Missouri conference of the Seventh-day Adventist Church described what he tells ministers at workshops in encouraging them to trim workweeks to 45 to 55 hours. He was quoted by Adventist News Network (RNS)</p>
<p>“Service to one another in community, more than saving an American flag, defines the spirit of our soul.” John DeStefano The mayor of New Haven, Conn., explaining his city's decision to issue ID cards to all residents, including illegal immingrants. The cards are meant to help anyone without state or federal-issued ID to open bank accounts or use other services. He was quoted by the Associated Press (Richmond Times-Dispatch)</p>
<p>“The witchcraft described in the Potter books is no worse than the magical elements of classic books like The Wizard of Oz, Cinderella and the Chronicles of Narnia … I led a guy to Christ using Harry Potter.” Connie Neal An author who writes on Christian themes, she was quoted by Associated Baptist Press.</p> | OUT LOUD | false | https://baptistnews.com/article/outloud-131/ | 3 |
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<p>The brunt of the storm hit the San Francisco Bay Area, flooding freeways, toppling trees and keeping thousands of people home from work and school.</p>
<p>“It’s a big storm, as we expected, and it’s headed south with very powerful winds and heavy rainfall,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Will Pi.</p>
<p>In Oregon, strong winds felled a tree, killing a homeless man who was sleeping on a trail, and a teenage boy died after a large tree fell on the vehicle in which he was riding, causing it to swerve and hit another tree.</p>
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<p>A huge gust blew down an 80-foot fir at a Santa Cruz elementary school, pinning a sixth-grader by the arm for 15 minutes until chain saws cut him free.</p>
<p>“Unexpected, very unexpected,” said the head of Gateway Elementary, Zachary Roberts, who closed the school as the boy was treated and released from a hospital.</p>
<p>This “Pineapple Express” storm carried warm air and vast amounts of water in a powerful current stretching from Hawaii to the mainland and up into the mountains, where gusts up to 140 mph blew through passes, damaging homes in the Lake Tahoe area.</p>
<p>The current left San Francisco drenched but balmy, with 60-degree temperatures, about 5 degrees above average for this time of year.</p>
<p>Waves slammed onto waterfronts around the Bay Area, ferries were bound to their docks, airplanes were grounded and many schools and businesses told people to stay home.</p>
<p>The gusts made motorists tightly grip their steering wheels on the Golden Gate Bridge, where managers created a buffer zone to prevent head-on collisions by swerving cars.</p>
<p>The iconic suspension bridge is engineered to swing in cross winds, so “the concern we have right now is more about vehicles,” spokeswoman Priya David Clemens said.</p>
<p>Sonoma County authorities recommended that hundreds of people evacuate at least 300 homes in the lowest lying areas near the Russian River, which was expected to start overflowing overnight. Peak flooding in the towns of Guerneville and Monte Rio was anticipated by 10 a.m. today, forecasters said.</p>
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<p>Authorities warned of minor flooding along the Sacramento River in Tehama County and Cache Creek in Yolo County.</p>
<p>Pacific Gas &amp; Electric Co. crews worked to restore power to 110,000 people, down from 166,000 earlier Thursday, with the largest concentration of 7,400 customers in San Francisco, the utility said. The utility’s online map showed lights out over thousands of square miles, from Humboldt near the Oregon border to Big Sur on the Central Coast.</p>
<p>In San Jose, the roof of a grocery store partially collapsed, exposing a 50-square-foot hole above the produce section. One person suffered a minor injury but details were not immediately available, the San Jose Mercury News reported.</p>
<p>There were multiple accidents on flooded roads, and several trees crunched cars. Interstate 5, California’s critical north-south thruway, was closed by flooding in the northern town of Weed. In Marin County, heavy rains washed out a portion of state Route 1, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.</p>
<p>“A lot of people took the day off,” CalTrans spokesman Bob Haus said. “That’s a good thing.”</p>
<p>Disembarking from a ferry in San Francisco, Malcolm Oubre said some people were overreacting.</p>
<p>“I know it’s a big storm supposedly, but they’re treating it like it’s a hurricane,” he said.</p>
<p>Teenagers drove trucks through a flooded Safeway parking lot to make waves for kayakers in Healdsburg as grocery shoppers trudged through several feet of water to get supplies.</p>
<p>East Coast kids revel in snow days, but closures are rare on the West Coast, so Thursday’s canceled classes were a novelty in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Sonoma and Santa Cruz County.</p>
<p>Ski resorts in the northern Sierra Nevada – where schools and roads were closed by whiteout conditions and power outages – were hoping for 3 feet of snow once it all settles.</p>
<p>While rains were expected to continue through this evening across much of California, California’s farmers would need more storms this size to even begin to recover from a record drought.</p>
<p>The storm was spreading into Southern California, areas that have suffered wildfires were preparing for mudslides.</p>
<p /> | ‘Pineapple Express’ storm whacks Calif. | false | https://abqjournal.com/510625/pineapple-express-storm-whacks-calif.html | 2 |
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<p>A chorus of voices these days advise Americans against making New Year’s resolutions. It seems fewer and fewer experts favor them because so few people actually keep them through the end of the year.</p>
<p>Fast Company, a business media company that focuses on technology and leadership, went a step further by urging the adoption of “anti-resolution” lists to lose negative habits like making excuses, procrastinating and overcommitting.</p>
<p>Some ministers advise that new goals, especially spiritual ones, be undertaken at a calm, steady pace and in the context of faith.</p>
<p>But research consistently shows that despite the warnings and even repeated experience that resolutions don’t work, a lot of people will be knuckling down in hopes of achieving physical, professional and religious improvement.</p>
<p>Statistic Brain reported that the top resolutions range from losing weight and healthier eating, smoking cessation and exercise to self-improvement, more quality time with family and doing more to help others.</p>
<p>Just over 40 percent of Americans make resolutions, Statistic Brain said, while only around 9 percent have any success with them.</p>
<p>Kenneth Meyers</p>
<p>Rather than fall into that cycle, Baptist minister Kenneth Meyers said he identifies key areas of his life and ministry that need constant reflection.</p>
<p>“Being a workaholic, New Year’s resolutions are not for me,” said Meyers, faith formation specialist for the Alliance of Baptists. “Rather, I focus on assessment.”</p>
<p>That means examining his exercise routine to determine if it remains helpful, and whether or not his interior life is reflective, his marriage is loving and his work fulfilling, Meyers told Baptist News Global.</p>
<p>“Piety aside, these questions guide me for the ‘development of the soul,’” he said, borrowing a quotation from Alexander Solzhenitsyn.</p>
<p>The mistake a lot of Christians make is not relying on their faith to help them make the improvements they seek, Ed Stetzer said in a New Year’s Day article for Christianity Today.</p>
<p>The failures that typically accompany areas like food and exercise also plague efforts at improved Bible study, prayer and worship attendance.</p>
<p>“If we as believers hope to make long-lasting, life-giving changes, we need to find ways to keep our word and stick with our goals long past January 2nd,” Stetzer said.</p>
<p>The key is to rely on faith to accomplish important changes, he said.</p>
<p>This New Year’s, Stetzer added, “if we find ourselves thinking that our own strength is sufficient to carry us to places of greater faith in God or dependency on him, we’re sorely confused.”</p> | Perspective, faith are key to successful new year’s resolutions, say ministers | false | https://baptistnews.com/article/perspective-faith-key-successful-new-years-resolutions-say-ministers/ | 3 |
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<p>Former Governor, Mitt Romney, is allegedly stepping up his game to not only <a href="" type="internal">talk the talk</a>, but walk the walk. If rumors are true, Romney would&#160;attempt to insert himself as the fall candidate to take on whoever the Democratic nominee is. Could Romney pull such a move off? After his previous failure, would he have any chance against Clinton or Bernie?</p>
<p>From: <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/03/politics/mitt-romney-stop-trump-at-convention/index.html" type="external">CNN</a></p>
<p>Mitt Romney has instructed his closest advisers to explore the possibility of stopping Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention, a source close to Romney's inner circle says.</p>
<p>The 2012 GOP nominee's advisers are examining what a fight at the convention might look like and what rules might need revising.</p>
<p>"It sounds like the plan is to lock the convention," said the source.</p>
<p>Romney is focused on suppressing Trump's delegate count to prevent him from accumulating the 1,237 delegates he needs to secure the nomination.</p>
<p>But implicit in Romney's request to his team to explore the possibility of a convention fight is his willingness to step in and carry the party's banner into the fall general election as the Republican nominee. Another name these sources mentioned was House Speaker, Paul Ryan,&#160;Romney's running mate in 2012.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/03/politics/mitt-romney-stop-trump-at-convention/index.html" type="external">Continue Reading</a></p>
<p>0 comments</p> | LEAKED: Romney Will Attempt to Block Trump at RNC | true | http://freedomsfinalstand.com/leaked-romney-will-attempt-to-block-trump-at-rnc/ | 0 |
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<p>Thomas Paine, the great pamphleteering terrorist-provocateur of the Age of Reason, devoted his final pamphlet, Agrarian Justice (1795), to formulating a publicly financed economic security system. Agrarian Justice proposed that all citizens inheriting property would pay a 10% tax to finance a one-time payment of fifteen pounds sterling to all citizens upon their twenty-first birthday-a payment designed to finance their start in life (something I’ll anthropologically note that various cultures wisely accomplish with the institutions of dowry and bridewealth). By Paine’s calculations this 10% tax would also have financed payments of ten pounds sterling each year to all citizens over the age of fifty to guard against poverty in their old age. Paine’s scheme was written in revolutionary times and never came to pass as neither France nor America were inclined to experiment with such a radical proposal. Another seventy years passed before America financed its first public pension system-though this and all subsequent American efforts lacked Paine’s proactive comprehensive design as these plans were always conceived as reactions to traumatic events like the Civil War and the Great Depression.</p>
<p>Today, President Bush’s clamor to raid the Social Security fund in the name of privatization is reminiscent of President Johnson and the Democratic Congress’ largely forgotten 1968 agreement to add the then secure Social Security Trust Fund to the General Fund in order to float cash for the Vietnam War and a bevy of domestic programs-a decision that helped secure our current trajectory towards Social Security’s insolvency. This 1968 bookkeeping trick helped hide the costs of the war and delayed the war’s economic impact by creating the illusion of budgetary viability as war spending grew to unacknowledged levels. Now that Americans find themselves with new expensive wars, unacknowledged deficit spending, a weakened economy, and plans to radically transform Social Security, they would do well to carefully consider some key elements of the history of the Social Security system before they allow the President to direct its plundering.</p>
<p>What is missing in the current public discussions advocating privatizing Social Security is a realization of what Social Security was and wasn’t designed to do, we are also lacking an analysis of the likely impacts of investing and then divesting these funds in the stock market. What Bush’s privatization apologists never acknowledge is that the Social Security Act did not haphazardly become disengaged from the American stock market system: This was a central design feature for very good reasons. As an investment, Social Security is indeed a low interest returning investment, but it was never designed to function any other way. It was designed to be a depression protection safety-net fund established outside of the whims of the stock market to protect Americans against the inevitability of another market collapse.</p>
<p>What is lost in the current giddiness over the prospect of stock market gambling with Social Security funds is an historical acknowledgment that market economies periodically become unstable and collapse. While most Americans know that Social Security was born of the Great Depression, there is little realization that FDR designed Social Security to address not just the problems of the 1930s, but also the recurrent flaws of an economic system that brought such other events as the Panic of 1873 and the recession of 1883-and the Social Security Fund was designed to protect Americans from the recurrence of these devastating features of capitalist markets. World War Two and the Cold War’s debt-laden spending frenzies allowed American politicians to delay finding solutions to these problems by subsidizing markets with military-industrial tax dollars, but the fundamental problems with markets remain. These problems in part derive from an inherent contradiction of capitalism: The fact that markets cannot expand infinitely-at some point what goes up, must come down.</p>
<p>While Social Security does little to protect against inflation (something it was not designed to do) it does protect against the potential ravages of economic collapses. To invest Social Security in the stock market would render this depression-safety-net worthless, and possibly could even hasten conditions of something hitherto unseen: a perfect storm in the market with the coming of an inevitable demographically driven market collapse.</p>
<p>Make no mistake, those who designed and fought for the Social Security system viewed it as a safe haven for funds outside of and protected from the stock market. Look no further than President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s August 14, 1935 statement that his new Social Security Act,</p>
<p>“Represents a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means completed-a structure intended to lessen the force of possible future depressions, to act as a protection to future administrations of the Government against the necessity of going deeply into debt to funding relief to the needy ­a law to flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and of inflation-in other words, a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide for the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness.”</p>
<p>Thus the Social Security Act of 1935 created a safe harbor trust fund-separate from the monies collected through taxes to fund the general federal budget-for low-yield funds to accumulate and weather-out the inevitable economic bad times. This “separate fund” was betrayed by LBJ when it was added to the general fund, and now President Bush wants to complete this betrayal by siphoning the fund to pump-up the stock market.</p>
<p>If you can overlook just how fiscally ill-advised this is, it is actually a very politically shrewd move. President Bush’s plan of privatizing Social Security would predictably bring remarkable short-term market gains. It is obvious that pumping such large funds into the stock market will cause the market to sore-this is the nature of the market: buying stocks in mass quantities makes markets climb. During his 2004 campaign Bush was intentionally silent on the specifics of his Social Security rehabilitations plan but past statements have both included and excluded Baby Boomers from his proposed privatization plan-though he has lately suggested that only “younger workers” could participate in privatization. To see how current and future demographic waves could endanger both Social Security and the stock market, let’s consider the market dynamics that the current wave of Baby Boomers would impact if America adopted a privatized Social Security plan today.</p>
<p>By the year 2040, America’s “dependency ratio” (the key demographic indicator used to measure non-wage earners, a ratio indexing people under the age of 15 and over 64 against the rest of the population) will almost double. Today the dependency ratio is about 21 (meaning that 21% of Americans are under the age of 15 and over 64) and barring a pandemic, meteor strikes or cryogenic revolution, this figure should remain stable for another five years. But as Baby Boomers age the Census Bureau’s figures show the dependency ratio sky-rocketing (due to aging Baby Boomers, and low Boomer fertility rates) to over 35 in the year 2030-and the dependency ratio will remain this high until the year 2050. In real numbers, this means that America will shift from a population of 35-million people over the age of 65 to a population of over 53-million in 2020 and 70-million in 2030-a process peaking with an aged population of almost 80-million in the year 2050.</p>
<p>But if Bush and his trailing band of Democratic and Republican members of Congress were allowed to privatize the Baby Boomer’s Social Security fund, what would happen when this great wave of Boomers cashes-out of the market in mass? Such a predictable demographic wave of institutionalized stock dumping would bring a market drop as the baby boomers retire in an ever-crescendoing bulge. But this crash is temporally remote enough that those politicians voting for privatization will long be out of office and safely away from the scene of the crime when the tumble would come to pass. Instead, they can grow strong in office as they bask in the glory of what may be a record market rally caused by the initial Social Security cash-infusion. For those of us scheduled to arrive late to the Social Security trough, after the bulk of the Boomers have eaten their fill, we may well watch as our Social Security funds are used to push the DOW and NASDAQ to unimaginable heights, only to crash once the crest of this demographic wave withdraws funds from the market. There is some irony that the very fund designed to protect people from the peaks and valleys of capitalism’s markets is now being leveraged to fund what could be an epic market drop. But one of the paradoxes of cultural change is that cultures make short-term choices that have long-term consequences, and there are often few constraints in societies such as ours preventing the short term from winning over the long term (Don’t expect the AARP to confront this argument, unless Social Security privatization cuts them out of the hefty brokerage fees they are already earning.).</p>
<p>There are elements of Thomas Paine’s radical pension proposal that should be considered by American policy makers concerned with fixing Social Security, though our post-industrial world has problems unforeseen by Paine. His America did not have to pay high taxes to subsidize Halliburton, UNICAL, Raytheon, or Boeing’s shareholder profits in wars of empire-and under these conditions a mere 10% inheritance tax doesn’t go as far as it did in Paine’s day. But he was wise to search for funding in the inheritance of wealth. As Thomas Paine realized, the dead provide some solutions for the living. Today, more aggressive estate taxes on the rich could easily and relatively painlessly-after all the money is pried from the hands of the dead-be used to correct for the coming Social Security shortfalls.</p>
<p>There is a stark contrast between FDR’s emphasis on “caring for human needs” and Bush’s focus on caring for market needs. While we can expect President Bush’s commitment to protecting the inter-generational wealth of elites will steer him away from Social Security solutions that rely on capturing wealth from estate taxes, this is where the solution for the coming collapse of Social Security must be found if we are to meet the human needs of a coming wave of retirees and those who must live in the world they leave behind.</p>
<p>DAVID PRICE teaches anthropology at St. Martin’s College in Olympia, Washington. His latest book, <a href="" type="internal">Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists</a> has just been published by Duke University Press. His Atlas of World Cultures has just been republished by the Blackburn Press. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p> | Social Security Pump and Dump | true | https://counterpunch.org/2004/12/23/social-security-pump-and-dump/ | 2004-12-23 | 4 |
<p>Right about now, some brides are in a desperate race to shed pounds before their June weddings. And Slim Fast has come to their rescue with a new ad campaign that features fat bride cake toppers and asks, "Need to lose a little weight before your wedding?" The admittedly clever ads are definitely sexist, but reflect the culture we live in. Grooms don't worry about their weight as much as their brides are expected to. That's kind of funny because the only person I know who has tried Slim Fast to shed pounds is a man. He stopped using the product because it caused him to have grossly nauseating gas. And I also remember hearing that Slim Fast could cause anal leakage, so I think any bride would prefer to have a few extra pounds than to offend her guests with her stench and the possibility of a brown stain on her <a href="" type="internal">Vera Wang</a> gown.</p>
<p>Check out two more ads after the jump. And let us know your thoughts on the ads. [ <a href="http://bridepop.com/wedding-fun/hilarious-slim-fast-advertisments/" type="external">BridePop</a>]</p>
<p /> | Slim Fast Targets Brides With Fat Cake Toppers | true | http://thefrisky.com/post/246-slim-fast-targets-brides-with-fat-cake-toppers/ | 2018-10-03 | 4 |
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<p>ATHENS, Greece — Greek journalists are striking to protest austerity measures, pulling all television and radio news broadcasts off the air a day before a nationwide general strike expected to shut down services across the country.</p>
<p>Wednesday’s media strike meant news websites were not being updated until Thursday morning, and no Thursday newspapers would be published.</p>
<p>Journalists are protesting sweeping social security reforms that will affect pension funds. The media sector has been hammered by both Greece’s financial crisis and a global slump in newspaper sales and media advertising. Journalists working for Greek media are often left unpaid for several months despite continuing to work.</p>
<p>Greek private and public sector workers are walking off the job Thursday in a general strike that will affect all services, from transport to schools.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> | Greek journalists on 24-hour strike to protest austerity | false | https://abqjournal.com/903863/greek-journalists-on-24-hour-strike-to-protest-austerity.html | 2 |
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<p>In the post 9/11 world there has been strong concern about nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists or “rogue” states. The pretext for the initiation of the US war against Iraq was the concern that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, including a suspected program to develop nuclear weapons, posed an “imminent threat” to the United States. While it turned out that Iraq had neither such weapons nor programs, the United States continues to maintain a large nuclear arsenal as a matter of long-standing national policy. Whether US nuclear weapons policies serve to promote prospects for world peace and national security, or conversely to undermine them, is a question that begs for serious public debate.</p>
<p>US nuclear weapons policy should be a subject of concern to every American. Yet there exists some kind of taboo that prevents the subject from being debated in public forums, in the media, or in Congress. The US presidential elections provide an important opportunity for national discussion and debate on this issue. With the US nuclear arsenal of some 10,000 nuclear weapons, along with policies to research more usable nuclear weapons while ignoring international obligations for nuclear disarmament, there are critical issues that require public attention and informed debate.</p>
<p>Throughout the Cold War, the US and USSR built up their nuclear forces so that each threatened massive retaliation in a standoff of mutually assured destruction. This was a high-risk strategy. In the event of an accident, miscalculation or miscommunication, the world could have been engulfed in an omnicidal conflagration. While today the US and Russia are on friendly terms, each continues to base its nuclear policy, in major part, on the potential threat posed by the other.</p>
<p>Despite the enormous changes in the world in the aftermath of the Cold War, there has not been a serious public debate in the United States about nuclear weapons policy that takes into account changes in the global security environment. To the extent that there has been consideration of nuclear weapons policy, it has been almost entirely about preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons to other states and to non-state actors, with virtually no consideration of how US nuclear policy affects US and global security.</p>
<p>Current US Nuclear Weapons Policy</p>
<p>The debate about the role of US nuclear weapons has been almost non-existent, and yet US nuclear policy affects the security of every person on the planet, including, of course, every American. Current US nuclear weapons policy, under the Bush administration, sends a message to other states that the US intends to rely upon nuclear weapons for the indefinite future.</p>
<p>The major outlines of current US nuclear weapons policy are as follows:</p>
<p>. The US continues to rely upon its nuclear arsenal to threaten retaliation against a nuclear attack, and has extended this threat of nuclear retaliation to chemical and biological weapons attacks or threats on the US, as well as its troops or allies, wherever they are located in the world.</p>
<p>. Despite previous promises not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states, the US has developed contingency plans to use nuclear weapons against five non-nuclear weapon states: Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Syria and Libya. (It is possible, but still not certain, that North Korea has now developed a small nuclear arsenal.)</p>
<p>. The US has withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, in order to develop missile defenses, making way for the development of space weapons, despite promising to preserve and strengthen this treaty.</p>
<p>. The US has not ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, despite making commitments to do so. While it still adheres to the nuclear testing moratorium, except for sub-critical tests and computer simulations, it has allocated funds to reduce the time needed to ready the Nevada Test Site to resume testing.</p>
<p>. The US has entered into the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) with the Russians to reduce the deployed long-range nuclear weapons on each side to between 1,700 and 2,200 by the year 2012, but has failed to make these reductions irreversible in accord with the consensus agreement at the 2000 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference. Additionally, the treaty terminates in 2012 unless extended. Despite this agreement, each side continues to keep some 2,250 nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, poised to attack the other at a moment’s notice.</p>
<p>. The US has ended a decade-long Congressional ban on research and development of nuclear weapons under 5 kilotons (mini-nukes), and allocated funds to perform research on the development of such weapons, increasing the likelihood of use of nuclear weapons and blurring the distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>. The US has allocated funds for researching more powerful Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator weapons, another way of making nuclear weapons more usable and therefore more likely to be used.</p>
<p>. The US has allocated funds to create a facility to produce some 450 plutonium pits annually that could only be used for new nuclear weapons. This suggests to other nations that the US is planning to further develop new nuclear weapons and to possess and rely upon nuclear weapons for the indefinite future.</p>
<p>. The US has not adhered to the 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament agreed to in the year 2000 by the states that are parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, including the five declared nuclear weapon states.</p>
<p>. The US has not challenged the reliance on nuclear weapons by our allies, including Israel, UK and France, and has made no attempt to provide leadership for broad-based nuclear disarmament.</p>
<p>In sum, the current US approach to nuclear weapons is to rely upon them for extended deterrence, to research more usable weapons, to indicate that its reliance on these weapons is long-term, to violate treaty agreements, to unilaterally reverse previous commitments, and to fail to provide leadership toward significant and irreversible reductions in nuclear arms. In a post Cold War environment, with the United States wielding overwhelming military superiority, there is concern in many parts of the world that the United States could succumb to what has been referred to by Richard Falk, a leading international law professor, as the “Hiroshima Temptation,” to use nuclear weapons against a far weaker enemy without fear of meaningful response.</p>
<p>US nuclear weapons policy under the Bush administration appears to be rooted in a “do as I say, not as I do” approach. This raises two important questions: Does this policy make the US more secure? Is this a policy that the American people would support if they understood it? I believe the answer to both these questions is No.</p>
<p>A third question arises. Is it possible that members of the public could raise the issue of US nuclear weapons policy and stimulate a real debate on the current course of the country in this year’s presidential elections? It is of utmost importance that the American people recognize the importance of these issues and raise them with the presidential and congressional candidates, forcing these issues into the public arena.</p>
<p>Considerations to Guide US Nuclear Weapons Policy</p>
<p>In the post-Cold War and post-9/11 world there are important considerations that should guide US policy on nuclear arms. These include:</p>
<p>. Nuclear weapons cannot be used against another country with nuclear weapons without facing retaliation unless a country can deliver a devastating first-strike (preventive) attack that would be calculated likely wrongly to destroy nearly all of the other side’s retaliatory force (the remainder would be calculated likely wrongly to be stopped with missile defenses or to be “acceptable losses”). Such a first-strike attack would potentially kill tens of millions of innocent people, be highly immoral and unlikely to be successful.</p>
<p>. The use of nuclear weapons in a first-strike (preventive) attack against a country without nuclear weapons would be both immoral and illegal under international law.</p>
<p>. The only possible justification for nuclear weapons is their role as a deterrent. But, so long as nuclear weapons threaten other nuclear weapon states, the threatening nation will in turn be threatened, even if it possesses so-called missile defenses.</p>
<p>. The greater the number of nuclear weapons that exist in the world, the more likely that one or more of these weapons will fall into the hands of non-state extremists that could not be deterred from their use.</p>
<p>. Russia can no longer be considered an adversary of the United States, and this creates an ideal opportunity to negotiate with them far greater reductions in nuclear arms and to make these reductions irreversible.</p>
<p>. China can no longer be considered an adversary of the United States (in fact, it is a major trading partner), and US nuclear weapons policy should not provoke China to further develop its current minimal deterrent force. However, US development and deployment of missile defenses is causing China to increase its deterrence capability.</p>
<p>. By branding nations as part of an “Axis of Evil” and by demonstrating willingness to engage in preventive warfare against Iraq, the US provides incentives to other countries, such as North Korea, to develop nuclear deterrent forces.</p>
<p>. The greatest threat to US security arises from the possibility of extremists getting their hands on nuclear weapons and using them against a US city. The best way to prevent this possibility is to reduce nuclear weapons globally to a low number and assure that the remaining weapons are kept under strict control, preferably international control. It would also be necessary to establish a global inventory of weapons-grade fissile materials and the facilities capable of producing these materials and to place these under strict international control. The only way for this to happen is for the US to take leadership in promoting this course of action. The US would also have to provide additional funds to help assure the dismantlement and control of the aging Russian nuclear arsenal.</p>
<p>. India and Pakistan, relatively recent additions to the nuclear weapons club, have indicated that they are willing to eliminate their nuclear arsenals, but not unless all other countries will do so as well. They are not willing to live in a world of nuclear apartheid, further demonstrating that the effort to achieve nuclear disarmament requires US leadership.</p>
<p>. The widely recognized possession of nuclear weapons by Israel is provocative to other countries in the Middle East. Only the United States, due to the large amount of military aid it provides to Israel, can pressure Israel to forego its nuclear weapons and move forward with peace negotiations to resolve the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians.</p>
<p>. North Korea has indicated that it is willing to dismantle its nuclear arsenal and rejoin the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty if it is given security assurances by the US and economic aid. This seems like a solid basis on which to establish an agreement that would benefit both North Korea and the international community.</p>
<p>Given these considerations and the extent to which current US policy does not reflect them, there needs to be broad public discussion of these issues. This should include, and perhaps be led by, a debate among presidential candidates on the direction of US nuclear policy. The American people should demand that the candidates for the presidency of the United States address these most important security issues facing our country that will affect the future of all Americans.</p>
<p>A Responsible US Nuclear Weapons Policy</p>
<p>A responsible US nuclear policy should include the following:</p>
<p>1. Removing all US nuclear weapons from hair-trigger alert, in conjunction with similar initiatives from Russia.</p>
<p>2. Ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and supporting a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty that would place all weapons-grade nuclear materials in all countries under strict and effective international control.</p>
<p>3. Reinstituting US Negative Security Assurances not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states.</p>
<p>4. Pledging No First Use of nuclear weapons and making this legally binding.</p>
<p>5. Making all reductions in nuclear armaments irreversible through treaty agreements and verified inspection procedures.</p>
<p>6. Putting the development of missile defenses and space weaponization on hold while negotiating for the elimination of nuclear weapons under strict and effective international control.</p>
<p>7. Fulfilling US obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty for “a cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date” by ceasing to perform research on developing new nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>8. Fulfilling further US obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty “to pursue negotiations in good faith on … nuclear disarmament” by adhering to the agreed upon 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament, including “an unequivocal undertaking by the nuclear weapon states to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals.” The US should convene a meeting of all nuclear weapon states, declared and undeclared, to agree upon a treaty for the phased elimination of nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>Without such changes in US nuclear policy, it is likely that nuclear weapons will again be used by accident or design, including finding their way into the hands of extremists who will not hesitate to use them as a statement of rage against the US or other countries. Additionally, serious US efforts to achieve both regional and global prohibitions on weapons of mass destruction, nuclear and otherwise, will aid the country in resuming the leadership role that it has lost in recent years due to policies of unilateralism, exceptionalism and belligerence, policies reflective of double standards in both law and morality.</p>
<p>Each of us has a role to play in bringing these policy issues into the US presidential and congressional debates. Candidates should be asked to speak to his or her plan to reduce the security dangers that nuclear weapons continue to pose to the US and all humanity, indeed to all life on earth.</p>
<p>DAVID KRIEGER is president of the <a href="http://www.wagingpeace.org/" type="external">Nuclear Age Peace Foundation</a>. He can be contacted at <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a>.</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | An Opportunity for Debate on Nuclear Weapons | true | https://counterpunch.org/2004/02/20/an-opportunity-for-debate-on-nuclear-weapons/ | 2004-02-20 | 4 |
<p>ST. LOUIS (MO)The New York TimesBy LAURIE GOODSTEIN</p>
<p>T. LOUIS, June 21 — Seventeen years ago, the Vatican dispatched a 53-year-old New York priest named Harry J. Flynn to take over as bishop in a Louisiana diocese. His assignment was to rescue the faith of the Roman Catholics there whose children had been sexually violated by the Rev. Gilbert Gauthe, in the first nationally notorious case of a pedophile priest.</p>
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<p>The bishop could not fix everything in Lafayette, La., but in eight years he helped repair the damage. Today, as Archbishop Flynn, he closed the spring meeting of the nation's bishops with a progress report on the "monumental effort" they have undertaken to implement new policies to prevent sexual abuse.</p>
<p>"There is still a long road ahead of us," said Archbishop Flynn, who now heads the Archdiocese of St. Paul-Minneapolis. But he added: "Our commitment has not wavered. We have made a pledge to our people and to the people of this nation and especially to the vulnerable ones, and we will keep that pledge."</p>
<p>He announced that the bishops have formed a committee to consider guidelines on the housing, financial support and monitoring of abusive priests who were removed from working in the ministry but not from the priesthood, the situation for many of the offenders.</p>
<p>Archbishop Flynn was the original "fixer" bishop, but now he is part of a growing subset. After nearly 20 years of sporadic sexual abuse scandals culminating in last year's four-alarm crisis, there is now a small company of at least eight American bishops who have been called on by the pope to rush into troubled dioceses and help extinguish the flames.</p> | For the U.S. Catholic Church, a Mobile Unit of Superhealers | false | https://poynter.org/news/us-catholic-church-mobile-unit-superhealers | 2003-06-21 | 2 |
<p>OTTAWA, Ohio (AP) — An Ohio man who withdrew a guilty plea after serving part of a life sentence in the drowning of his 1-year-old son and later was found guilty in a jury trial was sentenced again on Monday.</p>
<p>A court official said a judge in Ottawa sentenced Michael Luebrecht to 20 years to life in prison. A Putnam County jury on Friday found Luebrecht guilty of aggravated murder. Luebrecht and his attorney had argued that medications he took for mental health issues contributed to the killing at his northwestern Ohio home in 2005.</p>
<p>Luebrecht had been sentenced to 25 years to life in prison after he pleaded guilty in 2006 in the drowning of his son, Joel.</p>
<p>A message seeking comment was left on Monday for Luebrecht's attorney.</p>
<p>Luebrecht testified at trial that he did not remember much in the months before his son's death, but said he clearly recalled killing him.</p>
<p>"There was a mission to kill Joel and that mission had to be done," he said, describing how he felt like there was an outside force pushing him.</p>
<p>The boy's mother testified that she blamed doctors who kept changing her husband's medication that he was taking for depression and obsessive compulsive disorder.</p>
<p>Amy Luebrecht said medications her husband took from 1994 to 2004 were working until his medication was changed.</p>
<p>County Prosecutor Gary Lammers noted that Luebrecht lied several times on the day of his son's death, including telling a neighbor that the boy fell into a bathtub.</p>
<p>OTTAWA, Ohio (AP) — An Ohio man who withdrew a guilty plea after serving part of a life sentence in the drowning of his 1-year-old son and later was found guilty in a jury trial was sentenced again on Monday.</p>
<p>A court official said a judge in Ottawa sentenced Michael Luebrecht to 20 years to life in prison. A Putnam County jury on Friday found Luebrecht guilty of aggravated murder. Luebrecht and his attorney had argued that medications he took for mental health issues contributed to the killing at his northwestern Ohio home in 2005.</p>
<p>Luebrecht had been sentenced to 25 years to life in prison after he pleaded guilty in 2006 in the drowning of his son, Joel.</p>
<p>A message seeking comment was left on Monday for Luebrecht's attorney.</p>
<p>Luebrecht testified at trial that he did not remember much in the months before his son's death, but said he clearly recalled killing him.</p>
<p>"There was a mission to kill Joel and that mission had to be done," he said, describing how he felt like there was an outside force pushing him.</p>
<p>The boy's mother testified that she blamed doctors who kept changing her husband's medication that he was taking for depression and obsessive compulsive disorder.</p>
<p>Amy Luebrecht said medications her husband took from 1994 to 2004 were working until his medication was changed.</p>
<p>County Prosecutor Gary Lammers noted that Luebrecht lied several times on the day of his son's death, including telling a neighbor that the boy fell into a bathtub.</p> | Man sentenced after 2nd conviction in toddler's drowning | false | https://apnews.com/amp/2c7f981d0dd94615af09c29c1ea3d750 | 2018-01-08 | 2 |
<p>NEW YORK (Reuters) – The New York Federal Reserve said on Friday its president, influential U.S. policymaker and bank regulator William Dudley, violated its code of conduct by failing to disclose that his half-sister was an employee of Wells Fargo &amp; Co (N:).</p>
<p>In a public disclosure statement, the New York Fed said a May-July investigation into the actions and correspondence of Dudley had concluded that the omission did not violate U.S. ethics laws, however. It also said it had no bearing on the central bank, and would not have necessitated a waiver or recusal.</p>
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<p>Fusion Media or anyone involved with Fusion Media will not accept any liability for loss or damage as a result of reliance on the information including data, quotes, charts and buy/sell signals contained within this website. Please be fully informed regarding the risks and costs associated with trading the financial markets, it is one of the riskiest investment forms possible.</p> | Fed investigated Dudley's omission of sibling at Wells Fargo | false | https://newsline.com/fed-investigated-dudley039s-omission-of-sibling-at-wells-fargo/ | 2017-09-01 | 1 |
<p>NEW YORK (AP) — Repairs on Superstorm Sandy-damaged rail tunnels used by trains linking New York with the rest of the Northeast Corridor could cause a service nightmare for hundreds of thousands of people.</p>
<p>Weekend crews have been working on two tunnels, under the Hudson River and the East River, but Amtrak engineers have found that damage from flooding in the 2012 storm was more extensive than first thought, requiring extended closures.</p>
<p>That's bad news not only for Amtrak passengers but also those on the Long Island Rail Road and New Jersey Transit using the tunnels. About 400,000 passengers ride trains through the tunnels each weekday.</p>
<p>Longer closures to do the work would cut service on Amtrak from 24 trains an hour to six, railroad officials said Thursday.</p>
<p>"The idea of going from 24 trains an hour to six trains an hour is really something that no one wants to see," Amtrak spokesman Craig Schulz said, adding that it would create a ripple effect on the Northeast Corridor from Boston to Washington.</p>
<p>Amtrak made the announcement as it released an engineering report detailing the damage to structural components from saltwater that inundated the tunnels during the storm, which was spawned in October 2012 when Hurricane Sandy merged with two other weather systems. While the report found no evidence that the tunnels were unsafe, it concluded that the saltwater has caused significant damage to the track, signal, electrical and mechanical systems.</p>
<p>The Amtrak spokesman said it would take a year to do the prep work for closing an East River tunnel, then another year to do the work. For the major repairs, one tube of the two Hudson River tunnels would have to be shut down for a year.</p>
<p>The report did not offer a firm timetable for the repairs.</p>
<p>It underscores the need for a new tunnel under the Hudson River known as the Gateway Project, which includes plans for two new tunnels to Manhattan's Penn Station. Amtrak proposed the Gateway Project in 2011, saying it would cost billions of dollars.</p>
<p>The railroad's preferred option for the Hudson tunnel would be to build the Gateway tunnel before closing the Hudson tunnel, Schulz said.</p>
<p>The report "puts an exclamation point" on the need to build a new tunnel, he said. "That is absolutely our best-case scenario."</p>
<p>Such a plan would allow trains to enter a new tunnel with two tubes while the existing tube is down for the necessary work, Schulz said.</p>
<p>Officials said they expected insurance to cover the estimated $689 million repair costs.</p>
<p>Only two of the four tubes of the East River tunnel, which runs from Penn Station to Queens, were damaged in the storm.</p>
<p>The Hudson River tunnel's two tubes link North Bergen, New Jersey, with 10th Avenue in Manhattan.</p>
<p>NEW YORK (AP) — Repairs on Superstorm Sandy-damaged rail tunnels used by trains linking New York with the rest of the Northeast Corridor could cause a service nightmare for hundreds of thousands of people.</p>
<p>Weekend crews have been working on two tunnels, under the Hudson River and the East River, but Amtrak engineers have found that damage from flooding in the 2012 storm was more extensive than first thought, requiring extended closures.</p>
<p>That's bad news not only for Amtrak passengers but also those on the Long Island Rail Road and New Jersey Transit using the tunnels. About 400,000 passengers ride trains through the tunnels each weekday.</p>
<p>Longer closures to do the work would cut service on Amtrak from 24 trains an hour to six, railroad officials said Thursday.</p>
<p>"The idea of going from 24 trains an hour to six trains an hour is really something that no one wants to see," Amtrak spokesman Craig Schulz said, adding that it would create a ripple effect on the Northeast Corridor from Boston to Washington.</p>
<p>Amtrak made the announcement as it released an engineering report detailing the damage to structural components from saltwater that inundated the tunnels during the storm, which was spawned in October 2012 when Hurricane Sandy merged with two other weather systems. While the report found no evidence that the tunnels were unsafe, it concluded that the saltwater has caused significant damage to the track, signal, electrical and mechanical systems.</p>
<p>The Amtrak spokesman said it would take a year to do the prep work for closing an East River tunnel, then another year to do the work. For the major repairs, one tube of the two Hudson River tunnels would have to be shut down for a year.</p>
<p>The report did not offer a firm timetable for the repairs.</p>
<p>It underscores the need for a new tunnel under the Hudson River known as the Gateway Project, which includes plans for two new tunnels to Manhattan's Penn Station. Amtrak proposed the Gateway Project in 2011, saying it would cost billions of dollars.</p>
<p>The railroad's preferred option for the Hudson tunnel would be to build the Gateway tunnel before closing the Hudson tunnel, Schulz said.</p>
<p>The report "puts an exclamation point" on the need to build a new tunnel, he said. "That is absolutely our best-case scenario."</p>
<p>Such a plan would allow trains to enter a new tunnel with two tubes while the existing tube is down for the necessary work, Schulz said.</p>
<p>Officials said they expected insurance to cover the estimated $689 million repair costs.</p>
<p>Only two of the four tubes of the East River tunnel, which runs from Penn Station to Queens, were damaged in the storm.</p>
<p>The Hudson River tunnel's two tubes link North Bergen, New Jersey, with 10th Avenue in Manhattan.</p> | Sandy-damaged tunnels could cause Amtrak nightmare | false | https://apnews.com/amp/c3811ff029464ac8be35314417fbfd23 | 2014-10-02 | 2 |
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<p>As of today, Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport has <a href="http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/99337" type="external">begun using</a> a new kind of x-ray to search passengers for possible weapons. The radiation-free x-ray, called a “millimeter wave,” scans a person’s entire body. In the process, it creates a blush-inducingly graphic image of the person being scanned. The TSA blurs the face in scans, and only allows a remote screener to see the final scan. But for some, that isn’t enough: “If you want to see a naked body,” ACLU director Barry Steinhardt told the Associated Press, “this is a naked body.”</p>
<p>The millimeter wave is just one of a few kinds of advanced technology (AT) x-rays being tested by the TSA. Another kind of AT x-ray has received similar outcry (it’s been called a “virtual strip search”). In response, the TSA altered the machine, but so much so that it obscured the very weapons it was supposed to find, as we <a href="/news/outfront/2007/07/beware.html" type="external">reported</a>in our <a href="/toc/2007/07/index.html" type="external">July/August issue</a>. The technology was initially developed for use in prisons and courthouses.</p>
<p>Despite privacy concerns, the TSA seems determined to roll out AT x-rays across the nation: they recently awarded more than $30 million in contracts to the companies that produce the machines and have used them at several airports including New York-Kennedy, Los Angeles International, and Regan National. So far, the machines have been voluntary, as an alternative to a pat-down in secondary screening. And, the TSA says, it has disabled the “save” function so that images cannot be stored or distributed. However, with the TSA’s history of violating <a href="http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2005/08/68560" type="external">passengers’ rights</a>, I wouldn’t bet on it.</p>
<p /> | TSA Starts Using New ‘Strip Search’ X-Ray Machines | true | https://motherjones.com/politics/2007/10/tsa-starts-using-new-strip-search-x-ray-machines/ | 2007-10-11 | 4 |
<p>What a blessing it has been. Here we are at the beginning of the silly season. A time when news traditionally evaporates in the heat of a British summer. A time when journos are reduced to inventing trivia to fill in the spaces between newspaper advertisements. Perhaps it was through Saint Francis de Sales, journalists’ very own patron saint, that divine blessings – yes plural – were so delivered to us.</p>
<p>If so, thank God for Brexit (the UK exiting the European Union) and the lesser star dust of UK Prime Minster resignation, replacement, and government reshuffle. The media managers really did get a break and good cause for celebration. No need to send their minions into the wilderness in search of tales of endless woe about the opposition Labour party. In particular its leader, by popular acclaim and parliamentary disclaim, Jeremy Corbyn.</p>
<p>The majority of Labour Members of Parliament (MP) don’t much care for Comrade Corbyn. Although the majority of party members outside the hallowed halls of Westminster appear to be quite pleased, supporting his consistent leftist positions on the economy, social affairs and international conflicts. Old hat socialism, say the MPs who thought former prime ministers Blair and Brown had well and truly buried the hatchet in that particular scalp.</p>
<p>The media men and women are nothing if not focused. Corbyn can never be elected and Labour will be in opposition for a decade or more, they say. And I suspect, they hope. Even worse may be in store. The party could split. Rich backers will payroll the modernizers, ranked on the reduced benches of the once great social democratic tradition. A leftist rump of Stalinists, Trotskyites, anarchists and fellow travelers carrying placards of protest will be left out in the cold.</p>
<p>Who is to say what the future holds? The past is a safer bet. Is it not true that even in the recent past, under capitalism but with social democracy in attendance, the days were brighter and the nights less lonesome? Where now there is despair there were once qualifiable signs of hope and a better future. Job security and other gains in industrialized societies, decolonialisation in much of what was once called the Third World, which asserted itself through the Non Aligned Movement and in other ways.</p>
<p>But that hasn’t lasted. The British Labour party and others of the social democratic tradition may lick their wounds but the condition is terminal. It’s had a good run; from the end of WW2 until the mid 1970s. Then the rot set in. There are some who said it would always be thus, others who denied it and none it seems, who were able to stop it.</p>
<p>An indicator that the end was nigh was writ large in the early 1970s. The US, in an effort to preserve home grown capitalism decided to abandon the gold standard. The US dollar was no longer valued to a certain fraction of an ounce of gold. It took some time to play out but the finance dudes won the day. The oligopolies of the extraction and manufacturing industries along with transport, pharmaceuticals, agribusiness, to say nothing of the media, fell in behind. Political parties of the left, right and centre changed step.</p>
<p>Social democracy holds the position that capitalism is part of the reality of life and the best course of action is to ensure that those without meaningful capital get the best deal possible within the confines of this particular reality. The reality can be challenged, stretched, made to include those who have traditionally been excluded. Improvements in the general condition of women are a good example of this last point.</p>
<p>Just accept the reality then live with it and work to improve it, says social democracy. To be fair, not all of the British Labour party believed acceptance was the only option. Being seen as a mass party many believed Labour was in a position to make radical changes beyond the pale of the predominant reality. Others believed it was capable of fundamental leftward change.</p>
<p>Another post WW2 paradigm was to be shattered. During the 1990s the reality which was the Soviet inspired model of socialism imploded. The oligopolies were emboldened as finance capital was now calling the shots. They saw new markets. New markets for recruiting cheap labour, acquiring raw materials to be processed under conditions more to their liking, and selling goods and services, often to a new class of well heeled buyers.</p>
<p>Given this, social democracy had its license to operate under the system of representative democracy revoked. It had become surplus to requirement. In Britain a long list Labour leaders, assisted by the media, took their party to the recycling plant. New Labour was the new ‘business friendly’ byproduct, fit for a brave new world. Some among the membership resigned, some protested. Others gladly accepted the new mantle, others played follow the leader. And, I don’t doubt, some are still playing follow the leader.</p>
<p>Along this arc of history, starting in the early 1970s there have been less spectacular stellar catastrophes. The decline of the shop stewards movement in the manufacturing industry is one. The movement of radical Christians who found a home and cause in Liberation Theology, is another. Perhaps not so well known or understood in the countries of north Atlantic hegemony, it is badly missed in Latin America. Alongside this is the Non Aligned Movement of poorer nations.</p>
<p>Yet another stellar catastrophe of the spectacular variety has risen above the horizon. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trans Pacific Partnership (TTP) represent the enfants terribles of monopoly capitalism’s free trade deals. President Obama and State Department officials now appear on TV speaking of “trans Atlantic” in a context which would have previously been expressed by the word NATO. Be alarmed.</p>
<p>These proposed shake downs are reminiscent of that scene in Godfather 2 where the assembled bosses of the Mob meet in pre revolutionary Havana to work out business deals. The Batista dictatorship offered the perfect setting for their carve up of the narcotics, illegal gambling practices, prostitution and protectionism trades.</p>
<p>One of the bosses remarks that in Cuba, 90 miles from the US, they are in partnership with a friendly government, free to make profits without, “the goddamn Justice Department and the FBI.” To which Michael, the up and coming Godfather replies, “We’re bigger than US Steel.” No Lincolnian impediments such as, government of the people, by the people, for the people.</p>
<p>What an inspiring vision it offered the Mobsters. And how it has come to pass in today’s reality. Be done with government interference and interventionist thinking inspired by social democracy. Privatise public services, deregulated the private sector; that’s the new role of government.</p>
<p>Brexit, has had a good airing though the media this summer. By the time the next silly season comes around a new headline may well be flavor of the month – Breakup. The constituent parts of the UK are contending with internal contradictions. Scotland is gaining momentum in the call for independence from the UK while pleading to remain in the EU. Some in Wales have similar independence aspirations; contagion could b in the air. Northern Ireland continues to be defined by its own in-built archicture; the international border with the Republic of Ireland.</p>
<p>If the UK atom is split, can the centre hold, can social democracy survive in this new, more predatory world? Probably not, in my view. The powers that be in the darkening world of neoliberalised/neoconservatised capitalism have no reason to give it space. So what is the future for those on the left, with their historic view of stages of socialism and communism?</p>
<p>UK newspapers are full to the brim of articles about Labour intrigue, infighting and contradictions. This is not solely a question of competing personalities and inflated egos. It’s a product of where the party is at in this historical time span and in the political space which now exists. To survive (if only in name), Labour must change and not back to social democracy. The oft vented and so far ill defined option of democratic socialism, in the face of home grown aggression and imperialist might, is largely untried.</p>
<p>The answer for the left, if indeed there is an answer, is probably that only time will tell. The political environment likely to exist after Breakup is hardly going to be confined to the UK. The European Union will feel the rattle of the same contradictions that shook up the off shore islands. If the peoples of the UK and indeed the world, continue to show irreverence for the establish order and those who would impose it on the people then there is hope that something new will emerge.</p>
<p>When Albert Einstein was exercising his mind with splitting atoms, relativity, infinity and space time he said we should be thinking in terms of new dimensions. Whatever the new dimensions of the post Brexit and post Breakup reality are, we, the people, should be defining them and reaching out to grab them.</p> | The Dusk of Social Democracy | true | https://counterpunch.org/2016/07/20/the-dusk-of-social-democracy/ | 2016-07-20 | 4 |
<p>The eruption of youth protests over gun violence in schools and other issues is another indicator that the&#160; <a href="https://popularresistance.org/newsletter-preparing-for-the-coming-transformation/" type="external">2020s could be a decade of transformation</a>&#160;where people&#160; <a href="https://popularresistance.org/newsletter-ensuring-justice-in-the-era-of-transformation/" type="external">demand economic, racial and environmental justice</a>&#160;as well as peace. Students who are in their teens now will be in their twenties then. They will have experience in how protests can change political culture.</p>
<p>Some&#160;view the youth awakening in these protests as&#160; <a href="https://popularresistance.org/march-for-our-lives-awakens-spirit-of-student-and-media-activism-of-1960s/" type="external">reminiscent of youth movements</a>&#160;in previous generations, others are less optimistic. We cannot predict the role this generation will play, but throughout the history of mass movements, youth have been a key factor by pushing boundaries and demanding change.</p>
<p>One of the slogans in the actions against gun violence is “adults failed to solve the problem.” The truth is, as many youth are aware, those currently in power have failed on many fronts, e.g. climate change, wealth disparity, racial injustice, never-ending wars and militarism, lack of health care and more. These crises are coming to a head and provide the environment for transformational changes, if we act.</p>
<p>Beware of Democratic Party Co-option</p>
<p>One of the challenges youth, and older, activists face is the Democratic Party. Democrats have a long history of co-opting political movements. They are present in recent mobilizations, such as the Women’s March and March for our Lives, which both centered on voting as the most important action to take.</p>
<p />
<p>Big Democratic Party donors, like George and Amal Clooney, provided massive resources to the March for Our Lives. The corporate media covered the students extensively, encouraged attendance at the marches and reported widely on them.</p>
<p>As&#160; <a href="https://popularresistance.org/gun-debate-a-narrow-opportunity-for-democrats-a-wide-one-for-the-left/" type="external">Bruce Dixon writes</a>, “It’s not hard to see the hand of the Democratic party behind the tens of millions in corporate contributions and free media accorded the March For Our Lives mobilization. 2018 is a midterm election year, and November is only seven months away. The Democrats urgently need some big sticks with which to beat out the vote this fall…”</p>
<p>Democratic politicians see the gun issue as an opportunity for the ‘Blue Wave’ they envision for 2018, even though the Democrat’s history of confronting gun violence has been dismal.&#160;When Democrats controlled Congress and the presidency, they did not challenge the culture of violence, confront the NRA or stop militarized policing that is resulting in hundreds of killings by police.</p>
<p><a href="https://popularresistance.org/marching-for-the-democrats-another-farce-on-washington/" type="external">Ajamu Baraka writes,</a>&#160;“Liberals and Democrat party connected organizations and networks have been quite adept at getting out in front of movements to pre-empt their radical potential and steer them back into the safe arms of liberal conformism.” Indeed&#160; <a href="https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/431-the-democrats" type="external">the history of the Democratic Party</a>&#160;since its founding as a slave-owners party has been one of absorbing political movements and weakening them.</p>
<p>For this new generation of activists to reach their potential, they must understand we live in a&#160; <a href="http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/14489-lifting-the-veil-of-mirage-democracy-in-the-united-states" type="external">mirage democracy</a>&#160;and cannot elect our way out of these crises. Our tasks are much larger. Violence is deeply embedded in US culture, dating to the founding of the nation when gun laws were designed for white colonizers to take land from Indigenous peoples and control black slaves.</p>
<p>When it comes to using the gun issue for elections, the challenge for the Democrats is&#160;“to keep the public anger high, but the discussion shallow, limited, and ahistorical,” as Bruce Dixon writes. Our task is to understand the roots of the crises we face.</p>
<p>Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz describes this in her new book,&#160; <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Loaded-Disarming-History-Second-Amendment-ebook/dp/B076BVNBL3/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1522267888&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=Roxanne+Dunbar-Ortiz" type="external">Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment</a>. The culture of violence in the US goes beyond the horrific shooting in schools to the militarization of our communities and military aggression abroad. The US military has&#160; <a href="https://popularresistance.org/us-has-killed-more-than-20-million-in-37-nations-since-wwii/" type="external">killed more than 20 million people in 37 nations since World War II</a>.</p>
<p>One step you can take in your community is to&#160; <a href="https://popularresistance.org/shut-down-firing-ranges-in-us-high-schools/" type="external">find out if there is a Junior ROTC program</a>&#160;in your local school and shut it down.</p>
<p>Potential for Youth to Lead in Era of Transformation</p>
<p>One of the reasons we predict the 2020s may be an era of transformation is because issues that have been ignored or mishandled by powerholders are becoming so extreme they can no longer be ignored.&#160; <a href="https://popularresistance.org/gun-debate-a-narrow-opportunity-for-democrats-a-wide-one-for-the-left/" type="external">Bruce Dixon</a>&#160;of Black Agenda Report writes the gun protests present an opportunity to highlight all the issues where Democrats (and Republicans) have failed us.</p>
<p>Youth are already involved, often playing leadership roles, in many fronts of struggle.&#160; <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-sawyer-mlk50-youth_us_5abd1b6fe4b06409775e4b28" type="external">Rev. Jared Sawyer, Jr. writes</a>&#160;that when racial violence arose at the “University of Missouri in recent years, student&#160; <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/missouri-football-players-strike-calling-for-university-presidents-resignation_us_563f4630e4b0411d30715897" type="external">athletes and scholars united in protest</a>, prompting the administration to take action. Organizations like&#160; <a href="https://byp100.org/about-byp100/" type="external">Black Youth Power 100</a>&#160;have arisen in the wake of police” violence against black people. Youth are on the front lines of the environmental movement, blocking pipelines and carbon infrastructure to prevent climate change. Youth are leading the movement to protect immigrants from mass deportation.</p>
<p>This week,&#160; <a href="https://popularresistance.org/hampton-university-students-take-to-the-streets-over-campus-conditions/" type="external">Hampton students took to the streets</a>&#160;over sexual violence, housing, food and other problems on campus. Students at Howard University started&#160; <a href="https://www.facebook.com/HUResist/" type="external">HU Resist</a>, to “make sure that Howard University fulfills its mission.” They are in their&#160; <a href="https://popularresistance.org/howard-university-students-in-third-day-of-occupation/" type="external">third day of occupying</a>&#160;the administration building.</p>
<p>At March for Our Lives protests, some participants saw the connections between gun violence and other issues.&#160; <a href="https://popularresistance.org/students-youth-speak-about-war-inequality-at-dc-march-for-our-lives-rally/" type="external">Tom Hall reported</a>&#160;that those who “attended the rally had far more on their minds than gun control and the midterm elections—the issues promoted by the media and the Democratic Party. Many sought to connect the epidemic of mass shootings in American schools to broader issues, from the promotion of militarism and war, to poverty and social inequality.” Youth also talked about tax cuts for the rich, inadequate healthcare, teacher strikes, the need for jobs and a better quality of life. He noted those who attended were “searching for a political perspective,” and that, while it was not seen from the stage, opposition to war was a common concern.</p>
<p><a href="https://popularresistance.org/change-is-coming/" type="external">Robert Koehler writes,</a>&#160;“This emerging movement must address the whole spectrum of violence.”&#160; He includes racist violence, military violence, mass incarceration and the “mortally sinful corporate greed and of course, the destruction of the environment and all the creatures.” What unites all of these issues, Koehler writes, is the “ability to dehumanize certain people.” Dehumanization is required to allow mass murder, whether by a single gunman or in war, as well as the economic violence that leaves people homeless and hungry, or for the violence of denying people necessary healthcare and to pay people so little they need multiple jobs to survive.</p>
<p>Movements are Growing, Now How Do We Win?</p>
<p>We have written about the stages of successful social movements and that overall the United States is in the final stage before victory. This is the era of building national consensus on solutions to the crises we face and mobilizing millions to take action in support of these solutions.</p>
<p>Protests have been growing in the US over the past few decades. Strong anti-globalization protests were organized under Clinton to oppose the World Trade Organization. Under the Bush administration, hundreds of thousands of people took the streets against the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq. The anti-war movement faded under the Obama administration, even though he escalated US militarism, but other movements arose such as Occupy, immigrant’s rights, the fight for 15, Idle No More and black lives matter. Erica Chenowith&#160; <a href="https://popularresistance.org/the-largest-protests-in-us-history-are-happening-now/" type="external">posits</a>&#160;that current youth activists “did their first activism with their moms. It’s a quicker learning curve for kids.”</p>
<p>At present, large drivers of mass protests are reaction to the actions of the Trump administration and the Democrats using their resources to augment and steer anti-Trump anger into elections. To prevent what happened to the anti-war movement under President Obama, people will need a broader understanding of the root causes of the crises we face, not the shallow analysis provided by the corporate media, and will need to understand how social movements can be effective.</p>
<p>To assist in this education,&#160;Popular Resistance is launching the Popular Resistance School. The first eight week course will begin on May 1 and will cover social movement theory – how social&#160;movements develop, how they win and roles people and organizations play in movements. All are welcome to participate in the school. There is no cost to join, but we do ask those who are able to&#160; <a href="https://popularresistance.org/donate/" type="external">donate</a>&#160;to help cover the costs.</p>
<p><a href="https://popularresistance.org/school/" type="external">For more information on the school and to sign up, click here.</a>&#160;Those who sign up will receive a weekly video lecture, a curriculum and an invitation to join a discussion group (each one will be limited to 30 participants). People who complete the course can then host the course locally with virtual support from Popular Resistance.</p>
<p>The next decade has the potential to be transformative. To make it so, we must not only develop national consensus that issues are being mishandled, that policies need to change and that we can change them, but we must also educate ourselves on issues and how to be effective. We have the power to create the change we want to see.</p> | Role of Youths in the Coming Transformation | true | https://truthdig.com/articles/role-of-youth-in-the-coming-transformation/ | 2018-04-03 | 4 |
<p>The day after 21-year-old Dylann Roof allegedly gunned down nine members of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a historic black church in Charleston, S.C., the coverage of the coverage was already piling up, much of it lamenting the apparent pass the media was giving Roof.</p>
<p>Despite the fact that the attack meets the textbook definition of terrorism, critics noted that the press was, by and large, not identifying Roof as a terrorist:</p>
<p>Items in this vein have continued to crop up over the ensuing days.</p>
<p>Sahara Reporters‘ clear-eyed first account of the Charleston massacre ( <a href="http://saharareporters.com/2015/06/18/us-state-senator-killed-terrorist-white-supremacist-sympathies-8-others-dead" type="external">6/18/15</a>)</p>
<p>Yet there was at least one news item that ran the day after the shooting that was not afraid to refer to it as a terrorist attack: “US State Senator Killed by Terrorist With White Supremacist Sympathies, 8 Others Dead,” reads the headline of a <a href="http://saharareporters.com/2015/06/18/us-state-senator-killed-terrorist-white-supremacist-sympathies-8-others-dead" type="external">news item</a> that appeared on <a href="http://saharareporters.com/about" type="external">Sahara Reporters</a>, a New York City-based news website that primarily covers government corruption in Africa, with a particular focus on Nigeria.</p>
<p>The Sahara Reporters piece uses the word “terrorist” six times to describe Roof and his alleged action, including in the headline, the subhead and a photo caption. The words “mental illness,” “troubled” and “loner” do not appear — in fact, no speculation whatsoever is made regarding Roof’s mental state or stability. Instead, South Carolina’s “known hate groups” are mentioned to provide context for Roof’s alleged actions, and Roof’s white supremacist activities and the historic allusions made by the patches on his jacket are front and center in the piece. And the massacre is clearly contextualized as occurring at “a time where the persecution of black ethnic minorities in the United States has been making world headlines.”</p>
<p>The piece’s distinctiveness from typical US reports on the attack doesn’t end there. The story’s lead prominently identifies Clementa Pinckney, the church’s pastor and one of the shooting victims, as a South Carolina state senator. While it seems clear at this point that Roof targeted Emanuel AME in part because of its history as a center of black resistance to white supremacy, it is not apparent that Roof was targeting Pinckney personally or because of his office. But one might expect the highly unusual fact of an elected official being killed in a terrorist attack to feature prominently in coverage–as it likely would have, had a white politician been killed by a person of color.</p>
<p>The straighforwardness of the reporting in the Sahara Reporters piece makes it easy to identify what many observers have asserted is missing from the US media’s coverage. Perhaps it’s not surprising to see an outlet that frequently covers Nigeria–which, after all, has some experience with ethnically motivated violence–get it right. Sahara Reporters&#160;earned wide notice in 2009 for publishing <a href="https://secure.saharareporters.com/2012/02/15/umar-farouk-abdulmutallab-underwear-bomber-how-picture-saharareporters-made-history" type="external">the first photo</a> of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called “underwear bomber” of Northwest Flight 253, and again in 2011 for breaking <a href="http://saharareporters.com/2011/08/26/bombing-un-offices-nigeria-carried-out-suicide-bomber" type="external">news</a>, <a href="http://saharareporters.com/2011/08/26/un-abuja-hq-bomb-blast-jonathan-ban-ki-moon-react" type="external">reactions</a>&#160;and <a href="http://saharareporters.com/2011/08/26/photonews-car-bomb-hits-united-nations-building-abuja" type="external">photos</a> of the car-bombing of a United Nations outpost in Abuja, Nigeria.</p>
<p>Journalists covering stories like Charleston, Ferguson and Baltimore–and other racial flashpoints that will undoubtedly continue to explode–would do well to take notes.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>Shane Smith (Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/jshanesmith" type="external">@JShaneSmith</a>) is a freelance writer based in&#160;Jersey City, &#160;N.J.</p> | How One Outlet Covered the Charleston Massacre Right | true | http://fair.org/home/how-one-outlet-covered-the-charleston-massacre-right/ | 2015-06-23 | 4 |
<p>In the early 1990s, real estate mogul Donald Trump was romantically linked with Carla Bruni, Italian model and former first lady of France. Bruni denied the allegations and claimed that he made the entire thing up.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/heres-why-carla-bruni-once-said-donald-trump-was-obviously-a#.jkyroBl8eG" type="external">BuzzFeed News</a> first uncovered the story on Tuesday. Here’s the full context:</p>
<p>On the morning of June 26, 1991, Donald Trump’s picture was splashed across the front page of the New York Post. Next to the photo, which featured then-girlfriend Marla Maples, was the headline “IT’S OVER.”</p>
<p>Trump, according to the Post, was leaving Maples for Italian model (and future first lady of France) Carla Bruni. That morning, NBC’s TODAY ran with the report.</p>
<p>“And Donald Trump is reportedly breaking up with Marla Maples, the woman said to have come between him and his wife Ivana,” anchor Doreen Gentzler announced. “The New York Post is reporting that she’s been ordered out of Trump’s luxury high-rise apartment, and that Trump has begun dating an Italian model named Carla Bruni.”</p>
<p>Trump confirmed to the Post the next day that Bruni was the “new one” in his life. Bruni, however, vehemently denied she was dating Trump, and according to one biography, Trump himself planted the story for publicity.</p>
<p>The episode illustrates just how personally involved Trump is in managing his own image through the press, a tactic he used to great effect as he rose to prominence in New York and one he continues to use as he runs for president.</p>
<p>Apparently, Bruni was left aghast when she learned about the scandalous claims. “Trump is obviously a lunatic,” she <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/heres-why-carla-bruni-once-said-donald-trump-was-obviously-a#.jkyroBl8eG" type="external">told</a> Daily Mail that same year. “It’s so untrue and I’m deeply embarrassed by it all. I’ve only ever met him once, about a year ago, at a big charity party in New York. And I haven’t seen him since, of that I’m sure.” She continued:</p>
<p>It’s all nonsense.</p>
<p>No doubt there are hundreds of models called Carla. Just because I’m well known they may have jumped to conclusions and put the wrong face to the name.</p>
<p>At one point Bruni even directly confronted Trump about planting the false rumors. According to Trump biographer Harry Hurt, Bruni is <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/heres-why-carla-bruni-once-said-donald-trump-was-obviously-a#.jkyroBl8eG" type="external">reported</a> to have yelled at Trump, screaming ‘How dare you do this!’,” and ‘It’s not true!’</p>
<p>Although the lewd lothario denied having anything to do with the character-smearing story, the circumstantial evidence against him is undeniable. “Evidence of Trump’s direct involvement emerged in <a href="http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20115475,00.html" type="external">PEOPLE</a>, which ran an article suggesting Trump posed as his own PR man in a phone interview with the magazine,” <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/heres-why-carla-bruni-once-said-donald-trump-was-obviously-a#.jkyroBl8eG" type="external">reports</a> BuzzFeed.</p>
<p>Shockingly (or not so surprisingly, depending on how much you’ve been following the campaign) Lyin' Trump™ (once <a href="http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/videos/a42765/donald-trump-misspells-lyin-ted-cruz/" type="external">erroneously spelled as LYEN</a>by The Donald, despite coming up with the moniker himself), doubled-down on his perfidious sexploits, <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/heres-why-carla-bruni-once-said-donald-trump-was-obviously-a#.jkyroBl8eG" type="external">telling Howard Stern in 2008</a> that he had “no comment” on whether he ever dated Bruni. Smugly, Trump stated,</p>
<p>Can I say no comment, let me just say no comment, I’m trying to be a diplomat for this country.</p>
<p>As a great diplomat, Howard, as a great diplomat for this country, let me just say no comment.</p>
<p>The "great diplomat" even went out of his way to sexually objectify Bruni, telling Stern that Bruni is one of those “Very flat chested women, not your kind of women, Howard.”</p>
<p>For any voters still uncertain about Trump-brand diplomacy, please consult the full audio of the Howard Stern interview posted below:</p> | Former French First Lady and Fake Ex-Lover: “Trump Is Obviously A Lunatic” | true | https://dailywire.com/news/4690/former-french-first-lady-and-fake-ex-lover-trump-michael-qazvini | 2016-04-05 | 0 |
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>It comes as no surprise that the present era has witnessed a resurgence of virulent complaint and outrage from the so called “left community.” Not that the tendency has ever been absent in recent history; but from the time of the 2000 election and the claim that President Bush “stole” the prize of state power through nefarious means, the chorus of complaints has risen to a fever pitch. With the Bush Administration’s response to the September 11th catastrophe–the Patriot Act I and impending II, the attack on Afghanistan, imprisonment of foreign nationals and American citizens, patriotic defense of American prerogative in the world, the Iraqi War and the assertion of the right to preemptive attack and total domination of other nations, the government has come under mounting denunciation and even acts of civil disobedience from those who still cling to the touching notion of respect for the right to life, the autonomy of nations, and the quaint principle of world justice.</p>
<p>Rather than unmask this fervid and largely irrational assault of empty claims and groundless declamations piece by piece, I will simply present an overview of the situation that will establish the inherent logic, the brilliant argument, that is to say, simply put, the wisdom of the Administration’s policy. In order to embark on this pursuit it is necessary to set out a framework, a meta-political position from which the present situation can be evaluated and its justification established through logical deduction. Of course, as in any deductive scheme, definitions, postulates and assumptions are required but rather than tax the lay reader with technical pronouncements and theoretical elaborations, I will simply lay out a general framework from which the argument can be seen to follow apace. And for this purpose, nothing could better serve than the logic of neo-liberal economic theory, a doctrine so inherently plausible that even its ideological opponents are powerless against its deductive power.</p>
<p>There are two basic points to be established from which everything else will follow with the necessity of Euclidean rigor.</p>
<p>1. The first thing to understand is the simple and unassailable contention that if each country contributes to the world what it is best suited to produce, without interference, the result cannot be anything other than the most perfect allocation of resources and the greatest well-being for the largest number of human beings. Lay people need only imagine the point by reflecting on Darwinian theory. It has been established, even to the acknowledgment of the liberal academics, that in the competition of animals and animal species the “fittest” will succeed. And in the struggle for scarce resources (“food” in theory of Malthus, from whom Darwin took his fundamental conception) each species will dominate by utilizing its particular survival skill to establish its position: the speed of the jaguar, the strength of the elephant, the instinctual reproductive brilliance of the ant and bee, these are specialized characteristics that afford each of these species a unique advantage in its distinctive environment. And hasn’t the great economist P. Samuelson informed us that “Again and again we have seen how specialization increases productivity and standards of living?” Certainly the point is obvious? For as he has rightly noted, specialization rests on “interpersonal differences in ability.” Of course, beyond the natural differences of human beings there are those that are further developed by the process of specialization itself.</p>
<p>Of course, all of this follows logically from the principle of comparative advantage. Once again, to employ one of Samuelson’s brilliant derivative examples (elucidating the model proposed so artfully by Ricardo) if the best lawyer in town is also the best typist, it “pays” him to permit his typist to go on typing while he concentrates on his more productive and unique capacity to lawyer. One may quibble that not everyone is socially empowered to become a lawyer and that the position in return confers special privilege, particularly in comparison to that of secretary, but that is a minor consideration that need not concern us at the moment. Nor need we worry ourselves with the fact that the wages of the secretary are sufficiently low to obviate the rationale for the lawyer doing his own typing. For notice that not only is the typist free to concentrate on typing, and thereby enhance her typing skill, but the division of labor makes it possible for this secretary to work content in the knowledge that a superior intellect is making the crucial decisions that will provide security for her existence. Of course, how people come to their particular social positions in the division of labor is an interesting question but it is best to consider it at another time.</p>
<p>The basic argument, fundamental to bourgeois economics and neo-liberal exchange and trade theory is quite simple, is it not? If everyone, and by logical extension every country, does what it is uniquely constituted to do, the result will be the greatest efficiency of the entire system, that is, the greatest efficiency of the global economic system. Since human beings, and by extension nations, are fundamentally rational, (and as great thinkers like Tarde, Burke and Durkheim have noted, nations would not exist over long periods of time if they did not embody some profound “logic,” though not of course enlightenment “reason,”) the very fact that trade among nations has come to establish a particular pattern of exchange must mean that this is the best possible exchange arrangement. Otherwise, reasonable persons and heads of state would have altered the arrangement long ago.</p>
<p>2. Now it only remains to turn to the second basic issue to be decided: what exactly is it that the United States produces more efficiently, more effusively, more copiously, than any other nation on earth and can be relied upon to continue in a similar manner? And the answer, I believe, is unavoidably obvious. The United States is presently the prime producer of military threat and assault, world intimidation, global violence, ideological mystification, international corruption, and material threat, bribery and extortion; in short, “patriotic gore.” Now it may be maintained that other countries possess many of these characteristics, for none of the major powers and not even many of the world’s smaller nations are without a similar capacity, honed and exercised over the course of their histories, to perpetuate extraordinary violence, brutality and human and ecological despoliation of quite extraordinary barbarity. One need only refer to Israel, Russia, Ireland, the Congo, Chile, India and on and seemingly on ad infinitum, to recognize that the United States is certainly not alone in its capacity for extreme destructiveness.</p>
<p>And if we look back to the beginning of the century and include Germany, The Soviet Union, China, Japan and Turkey, the list becomes longer and more impressive still. In fact, for short periods of time, it would have to be acknowledged that other nations have actually exceeded the United States in their barbarity. Probably no country can equal the horrors perpetrated by the Nazi regime in a scant twelve years of its total existence. And beyond Nazi Germany, one country or another can certainly match or even exceed the United States in sheer barbaric cruelty in one aspect of social life or another. In fact, when it comes to domestic slaughter, as in the case of Rawanda, where it is estimated that over 1,000,000 Tutsi died before the catastrophe evidenced itself in Zaire with the sustained death of an enormous number of Hutu refugees, or in the case of the Pol Pot slaughter in Cambodia, or in Indonesia where in 1965 the State eliminated the Communist Party and murdered some 600,000 persons in the process, to be followed in 1975 the invasion of East Timor and mass murder on a proportional scale roughly equivalent to the Cambodian example, it is clear that the United States cannot equal these figures among its own populace (excepting of course, such moments as the Civil War.) For the nature of American democracy entails that internal order be maintained largely (though with significant exception) through ideological means, whereas foreign domination is essentially to be maintained, not only by the threat of force, but by its regular perpetuation. There is a point here, no doubt. But for the totality of power, domestic and international, for its capacity to destroy not only countries and their peoples but environment conditions and resources, cultures and identities, dignity and hope, and for the length and breadth of its tenure and the scope of its systematic world engagement, certainly no other country can rival the unique ability of the United States at murderous mayhem.</p>
<p>It is to its considerable accomplishment, its particular “comparative advantage,” that from its inception America was violent and expansive. In 1585, before the English established permanent villages in Virginia, Richard Granville “sacked and burned” an entire Indian village. Nor were things substantially different in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Soon we would be witnessing the importation of Black slaves. It is important to keep this point in mind when assessing America’s “comparative advantage.” For no other country in the modern era can claim so expansive and deeply rooted a tendency to imperial domination; and so, when one considers which contemporary nation has the “”comparative” advantage” in matters of this sort, one has to conclude that not only by simple behavioral evidence, but by socially constructed character, the United States is singularly prepared to adopt the role of world Leviathan. American roots in grandiose, fundamental evangelicalism and technological, enlightenment rationality combined to place instrumental reason in the service of a sense of world superiority. In summary, the American tendency to global domination is not only extensive, but so deeply rooted in the American system that we have good reason to believe that it can be trusted to persist in the face of world opposition.</p>
<p>If we merely consider the American record since the end of the Second World War, we cannot help but be enormously impressed. A brief, and by no means complete, survey of the recent historical record will provide us with an admirable record of American intervention in the world (military and non-military: China, 1945-1960; Italy, 1947-1948; Greece,1947-1950; The Philippines, 1940’s-1950’s; Korea, 1945-1953; Albania, 1049-1953; Eastern Europe, 1948; 1956; Germany, 1950’s; Iran; 1953; Guatamala, 1953-1954; Costa Rica, mid 1950’s, 1970-1971; Syria, 1956-1957; the Middle East, 1957-1958; Indonesia, 1957-1958; Vietnam, 1950-1973; Cambodia, 1955-1973; Laos, 1957-1973; Haiti, 1959-1963, 1986-present; Guatamala, 1960; Ecuador, 1960-1963; the Congo, 1960-1964; Brazil, 1961-1964; Peru, 1960-1965; Dominican Republic, 1960-1966; Cuba, 1959-1980’s; Indonesia, 1965-2000; Ghana, 1966; Uruguay, 1964-1970; Chile, 1964-1973; Greece, 1964-1974; Bolivia, 1964-1975; Guatamla, 1962-1980’s; Iraq, 1972-1975, 1990; Angola, 1975-1980’s; Zaire, 1975-1978; Jamaica, 1976-1980; Seychelles, 1979-1981; Grenada, 1979-1984; Morocco, 1983; Surinane, 1982-l984; Libya, 1981-1989; Nicaragua, 1981-1990; Panama, 1969-1991; Bulgaria, 1990; Afghanistan, 1979-1982, 2000-present; El Salvador, 1980-1994; Yugoslavia, 1999-2001; and of course, Iraq, 2003. What an extraordinary achievement, and this record covers only the fifty eight years. Were we to go back to the 18th and 19th centuries, to the devastating slaughter in the Philippines and the war against Mexico, for example, the accomplishment of American domination would be even more noteworthy.</p>
<p>Two additional points are worthy of consideration: First, I have noted instances of American intervention in the affairs of other countries, both through military and no-military means. But we should also note those instances in which the United States was not the primary aggressor, but established the context and offered support for those countries that carried out the main violence. The situation in the Congo which led to the murder of Lumumba is a case in point; Belgium was certainly the direct murderer of Lumumba, but the United States provided more than ideological support. CIA Director Allen Dulles warned of “a communist takeover of the Congo with disastrous consequences…..for the interests of the free world, ” and supported his position with the creation of a fund of $100,000 to replace Lumumba with a “pro-Western group.” True to its position, the Eisenhower administration “supported the Belgian military intervention on behalf of Katanga…” In short, the United States not only carried out violent intervention throughout the world, but conspired with other nations to facilitate their aggression. But any reader can supply a large number of such instances. There are few places in the world in the past century in which American support has not been relevant to local slaughters.</p>
<p>Second in developing an argument grounded in neo-liberal notions of rational efficiency it must not be thought that any particular judgments of value are involved. As any academic well knows, the first principle of theoretical study is the notion of value neutrality, objectivity, of impartiality as bequeathed us by such towering figures as Max Weber in his classic statement of the separation of fact and value.</p>
<p>Though such terms as “aggression,” “violence,” “destruction,” “terror,” “intimidation,” “barbarism,” and “murder” have been freely used in this brief essay, it should not be concluded that they represent any statement of moral judgment. One must eschew all tendency to assume that a judgment of value is being exercised in this account. Murder, villainy, torture, violence, intimidation and slaughter are facts of the world. Whether one approves of them or not is a completely separate issue. Nothing could be more factual than the cessation of life following the bombing of Hiroshima or Dresden. At one moment of space-time there were live human beings; at another, there were previously live human beings, now dead. That is how the world is to be described. That is, of course, not how contemporary governments describe such situations and the United States is no exception. But the terms used by nations are merely attempts by emotional means to move large number of the ignorant and uninformed. The only relevant criteria actually applied by modern states are political power and economic expansion, and, once again it must be insisted that these are facts; hard, quantitative, inexpugnable facts.</p>
<p>It is not for the present author to determine whether mass murder is good or bad, for example; reasonable people will disagree about the value of such states of affairs, as they have in the past and are likely to continue in the future. This may suggest that moral judgments are less matters of reason than pure emotion or social conditioning, but this is a subject for another discussion.</p>
<p>What has been argued here is relatively simple and purely what we might sutably call, logico-empirical: first, that the most rational allocation of capacities is enhanced by each nation providing that practice that distinguishes it from the rest; and second, that the obvious advantage of the United States in this consideration is its clear monopoly over the practices, motives, resources, psychological imagination and single minded commitment to world domination, oppression, military intimidation and superordinate arrogance. However one judges these characteristics, they seem to the present writer to be simple facts of the world that serve to mark the United States as the country uniquely qualified to serve as the vanguard of world tyranny.</p>
<p>Signed, Herman Neutics and Associates</p>
<p>RICHARD LICHTMAN is the author of “ <a href="" type="internal">The Production of Desire</a>,” “ <a href="" type="internal">Essays in Critical Social Theory</a>,” and most recently, “ <a href="" type="internal">Dying in America</a>,” which among other aspects, includes a memoir of the death of his father. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p> | Whining, Whimpering Leftists Confront the Logic of American World Domination | true | https://counterpunch.org/2003/06/09/whining-whimpering-leftists-confront-the-logic-of-american-world-domination/ | 2003-06-09 | 4 |
<p>&lt;a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-120519910/stock-photo-young-caucasian-mother-taking-care-of-her-baby-sitting-on-the-sofa.html"&gt;Nata Sdobnikova&lt;/a&gt;/Shutterstock</p>
<p />
<p>Couch potatoes take heed: Sofas and beds, like so many other <a href="" type="internal">household items</a> we hear about these days, might be messing with our bodies.</p>
<p />
<p>A <a href="http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es5025299" type="external">study</a> on fire retardants written by scientists at the Environmental Working Group and Duke University and published this week in Environmental Science and Technology delivered some pretty disturbing news: Of the 22 mothers and 26 children tested, 100 percent showed exposure to a fire retardant called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tris%281,3-dichloro-2-propyl%29phosphate" type="external">TDCIPP</a>, a likely carcinogen, and the average concentration in children was nearly five times that of their moms. The study measured the concentration of fire retardant “biomarkers,” or compounds produced when the fire retardants are broken down, in the participants’&#160;urine. In addition to finding TDCIPP, researchers found high levels of the chemicals used to make the popular fire retardant brand, <a href="http://chemturaflameretardants.com/" type="external">FireMaster</a>.</p>
<p>The Environmental Working Group <a href="http://www.ewg.org/research/flame-retardants-2014" type="external">report</a> accompanying the study explains, “People end up with fire retardants in their bodies mainly by inhaling or swallowing dust.” Many flame retardants are “additives,”&#160;meaning that they are added to our furniture and other products instead of binding with chemicals through chemical reactions. This makes them a lot more likely to migrate out of the products in the form of dust.</p>
<p>The researchers suspected that kids had higher exposure levels than their mothers simply because they spend more time on the floor, where dust accumulates, and because they put their hands in their mouths more. A <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24485814" type="external">study</a> from earlier this year found that kids who wash their hands five or more times a day had fire retardants on their hands at concentration levels 30 to 50 percent lower than those who washed their hands less frequently.</p>
<p>Here’s a rundown of four of the chemicals examined in the most recent study, their associated health effects, and where they are commonly found:</p>
<p>TDCIPP is a common flame retardant in couches, mattresses, and other cushioned furniture. A 2012 Duke University <a href="http://pubs.acs.org/doi/ipdf/10.1021/es303471d" type="external">analysis</a> of 102 couch cushion samples found evidence of TDCIPP in more than half of the couches purchased after 2005. The scientists <a href="http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es2007462" type="external">also found</a> traces of the retardant in over a third of the 101 car seats, baby carriers, portable mattresses, and other baby products sampled. Animal studies have <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;ved=0CCAQFjAA&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.oehha.ca.gov%2FProp65%2Fhazard_ident%2Fpdf_zip%2FTDCPP070811.pdf&amp;ei=fYThU_uJFIX7oASFuYG4CA&amp;usg=AFQjCNFTqkdbIaRONnrnM59_bzo5Cx333g&amp;sig2=9YJt3XCJYSqkYYCZ9Itt4w&amp;bvm=bv.72197243,d.cGU" type="external">shown</a> TDCIPP to cause tumors in multiple organs, and TDCIPP is listed in California as a carcinogen and labeled by the Consumer Product Safety Commission as a “probable carcinogen.”&#160;The TDCIPP biomarker&#160;was found in 100 percent of kids and 100 percent of mothers. The children’s concentrations were, on average, nearly five times larger than those of their own moms.</p>
<p>FireMaster components: Three of the chemicals studied are components of FireMaster 550 and FireMaster 600, two products of a fire retardant brand produced by chemical manufacturer <a href="http://chemturaflameretardants.com/" type="external">Chemtura</a> and commonly used in mattresses and furniture cushioning. The <a href="http://pubs.acs.org/doi/ipdf/10.1021/es303471d" type="external">2012 study</a> by researchers at Duke found evidence of FireMaster 550 in 18 percent of couches purchased after 2005 and 17 percent of baby products. The components:</p>
<p>Amy Lamott, a representative Chemtura, acknowledged that these chemicals are in FireMaster products, but wrote, “We rigorously test our products to ensure the risk of health effects is low and the fire protection benefits are real. Our products have been approved by an EPA review process, and we review any study that might offer new information. In a real world environment, exposure levels of flame retardants are low—and the fire safety benefit outweighs any potential risk that has been found.”</p>
<p>The recent studies on flame retardants still beg the question: why are we putting these chemicals in furniture to begin with? Back in 1975, California passed a law requiring the foam of all furniture sold in the state to withstand the ignition of a small flame for twelve seconds. One cheap and easy way for furniture manufacturers to live up to the standard was apply large amounts of fire retardants to the foam—of the 102 couch foams sampled in the <a href="" type="internal">2012 study</a> referenced above, 85 percent of them contained at least one fire retardant, and the chemicals accounted for as much as 11 percent of the weight of couch foam. Many furniture companies douse all of their foam in retardants in order to avoid making California-specific furniture, but because there are no federal labeling laws, consumers often can’t tell what’s in their furniture. The same 2012 study found that 60 percent of unlabeled couch foam samples contained fire retardants.</p>
<p>When studies started suggesting that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polybrominated_diphenyl_ethers" type="external">PBDE</a>, a class of common flame retardants, was associated with neurodevelopmental problems in children, chemical manufacturers phased out PBDE chemicals between 2004 and 2013. The Duke/EWG study released this week was the first study to test exposure levels to flame retardants that have become popular since the phase out of PBDE.</p>
<p>Despite all this glum news, things may be looking up. In 2012, California Governor Jerry Brown revised the flame law due to health concerns about flame retardants and the inefficacy of applying retardants to foam rather than to the surface of furniture. The new law, <a href="http://blogs.kqed.org/science/2013/11/21/its-official-toxic-flame-retardants-no-longer-required-in-furniture/" type="external">effective January 1st</a> of this year, requires furniture manufacturers to meet a “smolder test” instead of the 12-second test. The flame retardants listed above aren’t prohibited—they’re simply not required to meet the new standards. Old furniture dispenses dust long after it’s bought and it’s too soon to tell how much the new law will affect chemical treatment of furniture, but for now, we can keep our (recently washed) fingers crossed.</p>
<p /> | Your House Is Killing You: Couch Edition | true | https://motherjones.com/politics/2014/08/couch-furniture-fire-retardant-cancer/ | 2014-08-06 | 4 |
<p>Shares of Glu Mobile Inc. (NASDAQ: GLUU) were up 11.2% as of 3:15 p.m. EST Monday after a positive analyst note.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>More specifically, Roth Capital analyst Darren Aftahi maintained his "buy" rating on the free-to-play games specialist, but also increased his per-share price target to $5.25 from $4.75. Glu Mobile stock is trading at roughly $4.63 per share as of this writing.</p>
<p>Keeping in mind Roth Capital hosted a meeting with Glu Mobile management last week,&#160;Aftahi voiced his belief that both augmented reality trends and localization could mean higher-than-expected bookings next year relative to Wall Street's expectations.</p>
<p>To be fair, these catalysts shouldn't be entirely surprising as management listed both as areas of focus during the company's quarterly conference call last month. According to CEO Nick Earl at the time, Glu Mobile plans to introduce augmented reality features within its Design Home app -- the parent company of which it <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/11/04/glu-mobile-stock-can-bounce-back-after-hitting-roc.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;referring_guid=ca48dd74-deaf-11e7-83bb-0050569d4be0&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">acquired just over a year ago Opens a New Window.</a>&#160;-- to "create a more in-depth and interactive experience."</p>
<p>In addition, Earl outlined plans to create localized versions of existing games for new geographies to expand their respective addressable markets. He promised more details as Glu Mobile finalized its growth plans for 2018.</p>
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<p>With shares up nearly 140% so far in 2017, most recently helped by a wave of enthusiasm surrounding a <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/10/12/why-glu-mobile-inc-stock-popped-today.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;referring_guid=ca48dd74-deaf-11e7-83bb-0050569d4be0&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">new social app featuring Taylor Swift Opens a New Window.</a>, Glu Mobile certainly has momentum on its side for the time being. &#160;But if Glu Mobile shows any signs of faltering as it implements its growth strategy, I fear shares will fall hard and fast in response.&#160;And I think investors would do well to exercise caution in the coming quarters.</p>
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<p><a href="http://my.fool.com/profile/TMFSymington/info.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;referring_guid=ca48dd74-deaf-11e7-83bb-0050569d4be0&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">Steve Symington Opens a New Window.</a> has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a <a href="http://www.fool.com/Legal/fool-disclosure-policy.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;referring_guid=ca48dd74-deaf-11e7-83bb-0050569d4be0&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">disclosure policy Opens a New Window.</a>.</p> | Why Glu Mobile Inc. Stock Popped Today | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2016/11/21/why-glu-mobile-inc-stock-popped-today.html | 2017-12-12 | 0 |
<p>&lt;a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/newshour/4808548585/"&gt;Larisa Eptako&lt;/a&gt;/Flickr</p>
<p />
<p>Recently, bipartisan momentum has been building behind an issue that has historically languished in Congress: criminal-justice reform. Recent Capitol Hill briefings have drawn lawmakers and activists from across the political spectrum—from Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) to Koch Industries general counsel Mark Holden, whose boss, conservative megadonor Charles Koch, has made reform a <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/13/koch-bros-to-bankroll-prison-reform.html" type="external">key philanthropic priority.</a></p>
<p>The emergence of this unlikely coalition has been building for some time: Liberals have long been critical of the criminal-justice status quo, and many “tough on crime” conservatives—growing concerned by the staggering costs of mass incarceration and the system’s impingement on liberty—are beginning to join their liberal and libertarian-minded colleagues. In the past, bills aimed at overhauling the criminal-justice system have stagnated on Capitol Hill, but the bipartisan players who are coming together to push for change means that there are some reforms that could realistically gain traction, even in this divided Congress.</p>
<p>Earned-time credits: These programs, under which prisoners can work to earn an early release by completing classes, job training, and drug rehab, are highly popular among reformers. <a href="" type="internal">Many states already offer them</a>, and they’ve been touted as smart, efficient ways to reduce prison populations as well as recidivism rates. Jay Hurst, a criminal-justice lawyer and commentator at the Hill, says that this is the likeliest issue where Congress could pass legislation this year.</p>
<p>Easing up mandatory minimums: These laws, which broadly require those convicted of certain crimes to serve set sentences regardless of the specifics of the case, are considered hallmarks of the tough-on-crime approach politicians used to embrace. Critics, such as advocacy group Families Against the Mandatory Minimum, <a href="http://famm.org/mandatory-minimums/" type="external">argue that these laws</a> “undermine justice by preventing judges from fitting the punishment to the individual” and that they are one of the main reasons for overcrowded prisons. According to Jesselyn McCurdy, a criminal-justice expert at the American Civil Liberties Union, half of those locked up in federal prison are there for drug offenses, to which mandatory minimums are often rigorously applied.</p>
<p>Last January, Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) introduced the Smarter Sentencing Act, which intended to reduce the size of the prison population and rein in ballooning costs <a href="https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/s1410#summary/oursummary" type="external">by reducing mandatory minimum sentencing</a>, especially for drug-related crimes. Someone serving a 10-year sentence for a nonviolent crime could theoretically get out in five, under the legislation. The bill also proposed broadening judges’ discretion to sentence below federal minimums, known as the “safety valve” for oversentencing.</p>
<p>The Durbin-Lee bill died in committee—a common fate for criminal-justice legislation—and a total overhaul of mandatory minimums could be a tough ask for this Congress. The Senate Judiciary Committee’s new chair, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), is a <a href="http://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/grassley-floor-statement-smarter-sentencing-act" type="external">vocal defender of sentencing minimums</a>. Still, experts say there’s reason to believe some progress could get made. “Safety valve relief could happen this Congress,” Hurst said, because it’s considered a more moderate path to reducing sentences.</p>
<p>Juvenile-justice reform: Criticism has grown louder over the way the justice system treats juveniles, from its practice of trying younger teenagers as adults to its placement of some minors in <a href="" type="internal">brutal solitary confinement.</a> Last summer, Booker and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) introduced the REDEEM Act (a.k.a. the Record Expungement Designed to Enhance Employment Act), which—among other things—aimed to eliminate solitary confinement for minors, and <a href="http://www.booker.senate.gov/?p=general&amp;id=33" type="external">provided incentives</a>, such as first dibs on public safety grant money, to get states to stop trying minors in adult courts.</p>
<p>REDEEM stalled in committee, but Michael Harris, senior attorney at the National Center for Youth Law, thinks this Congress will make progress. “There will be bipartisan support for legislative action on solitary,” Harris says. “There is growing support for limiting it…many places are just using it way too much.”</p>
<p>Reducing recidivism: A major talking point from reformers on the left and the right is the need to transform prisons into places that actually rehabilitate inmates—not the existing “graduate schools of crime” that encourage repeat offenses. For years, “policymakers across the political spectrum saw high rates of re-offense as inevitable,” so they just kept offenders behind bars, <a href="https://www.bja.gov/Publications/CSG-ReducingRecidivism.pdf" type="external">according to a report from the Bureau of Justice Assistance</a>, an office within the Department of Justice. Some states, however, have changed their approaches to incarceration and reduced recidivism rates dramatically. North Carolina passed reforms in 2011 that allocated more resources towards smoothing parolees’ transitions into regular life through advising and planning help. The state’s recidivism rate has gone down nearly 20 percent, and it has closed nine correctional facilities.</p>
<p>In late 2013, Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) introduced the <a href="https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/s1783#summary" type="external">Federal Prison Reform Act of 2013</a>, which aimed to translate successful state reforms to the federal level. The central proposal was to require that all inmates be classified by risk of recidivism (low, medium, or high) and allocate resources based on that. The bill was not enacted, but Whitehouse’s office confirmed that his cooperation with Sen. Cornyn will continue in this Congress, and it’s possible they’d revive their previous bill. <a href="#correction" type="external">*</a></p>
<p>Sealing and expunging records: The key provision of Paul and Booker’s REDEEM Act is one that gives adults convicted of nonviolent offenses a <a href="http://www.paul.senate.gov/?p=press_release&amp;id=1192" type="external">path to sealing their criminal records</a>—something that could make finding employment much easier. It also provides for the “automatic expungement” of nonviolent crimes committed before the age of 15, and sealing the records of nonviolent offenders between 15 and 18. Harris thinks this issue could find new life in the new Congress: “It makes sense to pass bills like this.”</p>
<p>Despite the bipartisan efforts, many experts still believe that there are plenty of issues that could pose serious obstacles to compromise. Beyond the disagreement on mandatory minimums, there’s potential conflict on the role of for-profit prisons, which conservatives praise and <a href="http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2013/08/cory_booker_calls_for_widespread_prison_reform_on_anniversary_of_march_on_washington.html" type="external">Democrats like Booker loathe</a>. Additionally, support for loosening drug penalties—particularly for marijuana—is growing broadly popular, but <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/03/the-republican-partys-pot-dilemma/284289/" type="external">powerful Republicans remain vocal opponents</a>. The ACLU’s McCurdy says that, despite potential hang-ups, she’s encouraged by the bipartisan concern over the state of the justice system. “I’m encouraged by how many diverse groups have come on board, which sends a signal to leadership that this is something the American people really want to get done,” she says.</p>
<p>There is one especially powerful force pushing along reform: The federal government is <a href="http://www.justice.gov/sites/default/wp-content/uploads/jmd/legacy/2014/05/26/bop.pdf" type="external">expected to spend nearly $7 billion</a> on prisons this year, and conservatives in charge of Congress will be under pressure to bring down costs. “With every Congress, I’m hopeful for reform,” Hurst says. “But this Congress’ argument is based on money, not humanity, which is why it’s more realistic that it’d happen.”</p>
<p>Correction: The original version of this article misstated the fate of the Federal Prison Reform Act of 2013.</p>
<p /> | On These 5 Things, Republicans Actually Might Work With Dems to Do Something Worthwhile | true | https://motherjones.com/politics/2015/02/5-areas-where-we-could-see-real-bipartisan-reform-criminal-justice/ | 2015-02-03 | 4 |
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<p>FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. - Northern Arizona is in store for a white Christmas.</p>
<p>The National Weather Service says a cold front will plunge into Arizona on Thursday and stick around for the holiday, bringing snow, winds and cold temperatures. Snow levels are expected to fall to 3,000 feet or lower.</p>
<p>Forecasters aren't sure how much snow will fall but they say it will be widespread and potentially significant.</p>
<p>Higher elevations could get a couple of inches of snow earlier in the week.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> | White Christmas in forecast for northern Arizona | false | https://abqjournal.com/694913/white-christmas-in-forecast-for-northern-arizona.html | 2 |
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<p>When workers took to the streets of Madison, Wisconsin in February to protest a “budget repair bill” that would essentially do away with teacher’s and other public service unions, Wayne Kramer (MC5), Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine), and The Street Dogs (with Mike McColgan, formerly of The Dropkick Murphys) were among the musicians that showed up to lend their support. In the August 1997 edition of Live! Music Review editor BILL GLAHN interviewed Kramer during his Citizen Wayne tour. Much of the interview centered on the plight of workers and Kramer’s comments are as relevant today as they were then.</p>
<p>“I’m in the business of disrupting business.”</p>
<p>– Wayne Kramer during a performance in St. Louis during his Citizen Wayne tour.</p>
<p>BILL GLAHN: There seems to be a genuine camaraderie on the new record with working people.</p>
<p>WAYNE KRAMER: Yes, I honor work. And I honor the working man and woman. I think working people are being fucked across the board. I think big business makes more and more money every year. Wall Street makes higher profits. Corporate CEO’s salaries are inconceivable in size – the amounts of money they make. And still they cut benefits, cut jobs. I think wages and wealth are the civil and human rights issues of today. I think we have management consultants… they’re the new goon squads. They downsize and streamline. And people’s jobs go out the window.</p>
<p>Last night you said from the stage that you didn’t think any intelligent person could be an optimist today.</p>
<p>I don’t see anything out there that makes me optimistic. But I do believe I am a prisoner of hope – that there are ways to overcome injustice. You can call me old school but I still believe in things like self-determination and equality and peace and love.</p>
<p>It doesn’t really seem like things are getting better.</p>
<p>I played a demonstration called Motown Action ’97 to support the striking newspaper workers up there (Detroit). They’ve been on strike for over two years now. A lot of those people are personal friends of mine. Gary Graff and Sue Whitehall – the music writers. They’ve supported my work all through the years. And the toll that it’s taken on them has got to be (pause)… serious.</p>
<p>The National Labor Relations Board ruled the day before the rally that the management had been guilty of unfair practices all along. So all the trade unions came to Detroit. There were some estimates – 125,000. I had a chance to talk to John Sweeney of the AFL-CIO. I believe in unions. I believe that unions are the only way working people can interface with big management and get any kind of fair deal. Otherwise they would just run us over and spit us out. They don’t’ care.</p>
<p>One of the misplaced priorities of capitalism is profit at any cost. I believe in free market economy and free market capitalism but as a group we can organize and use what political power we have. It was kind of moving to see United Mine Workers, carpenters, plumbers, pressmen, Teamsters from all over the country there to show their support. Teachers. The teacher’s union has over 800,000 members! I think unions can be a strong voice.</p>
<p>But a lot of the guts have been taken out of unions.</p>
<p>Yeah, but I think Sweeney has a vision. Union budgets in the last 10 years have spent 3 per cent on organizing. Sweeney said we can’t survive like this. So he’s committed 30 per cent across the board on a national level and a local level to go back into organizing. To get the rank and file. To go into the neighborhoods. To go to the churches. To go to people’s homes. And convince them of the value of the union. And the strength of the union. Things like record store clerks. There was Borders Books and Records. There was a movement afoot to form a union and the management squashed it. But I think the union can come back. So my pitch to John Sweeney was, “If I can be the point man in the rock &amp; roll world, then count me in.” I had to be there. I’m from Detroit. Those are my people.</p>
<p>I was a member of the UAW for nine years. I worked at Honda’s East Coast warehouse – the only Japanese car facility to organize successfully. It didn’t come without a toll. But it was possible. Not long afterwards, Reagan did his bit on the air traffic controllers…</p>
<p>Reagan busted their backs. He busted the backs of unions, period. Reagan… His legacy… What a dog he was! So I try to honor the worker in my work – in songs. I’m from that background. I worked myself at things besides music and so I relate to it. It’s the same struggle. You make a decision. You take a stand. It’s like the war in Vietnam. It’s like racism. And I took a stand and that’s where I’m at on it. Some people don’t like it and think it’s unpopular but tough shit.</p>
<p>Unions have received some bad press.</p>
<p>And let’s not kid ourselves. There has been some corruption in the unions.</p>
<p>Some people will tell you that unions have outlived their usefulness. But I think a lot of people are seeing it different now.</p>
<p>Right. I used to say (in “Back When Dogs Could Talk”) ‘my blue collar workers’ but now I include white collar workers as well, because they’re suffering, too. As I said – the new goon squads… management consultants… I’m trying to spread some consciousness in my world. I believe in the dignity of work. Work is the glue that holds us together. When your neighborhoods where there’s no work and there’s no opportunity or possibility – those are the neighborhoods that are destroyed by crack, alcoholism. If you combine meaningful work and love – that equals living. When you leave those things out, then you’ve opened the door for all manner of personal psychic demons.</p>
<p>You were saying that you believe in a free market society. Do you still believe that that exists here in the States?</p>
<p>Yeah, I think there’s entrepreneurial possibilities, like what you do with your magazine, what people like Brett Gurowitz do with Epitaph Records, what independent filmmakers do. By making things happen themselves. I certainly encourage all that. The best thing about punk rock is that it’s ‘do it yourself.’ There’s no manual. We’re learning as we go.</p>
<p>Don’t you think a lot of doors have been closed, though. Especially in the music business?</p>
<p>(nodding his head) Yup.</p>
<p>If you go back to the ’50s or the punk era, small labels thrived. Now there’re six labels.</p>
<p>(still nodding) Yup. Well these guys, these six major labels, they don’t care anything about you, your artists, your health, your career. They’re concerned about market share and profits. The last thing they’re interested in is music. I saw an interview last week with Tony Brown (Nashville record executive) and he said (paraphrasing) “What we do is we find young people who don’t know anything and have never played anywhere and have never done anything and we run them through media training, put records out on them, and put them on the road for three or four years and we destroy them. We destroy their lives. We destroy their health. We destroy their marriages. And then we throw them away and we get more.”</p>
<p>Which I thought was pretty upfront because that’s exactly what they do. Major labels, across the board. This industry – the record industry – is built on the dreams of young people. They take youth culture, record it, manufacture it, package it, sell it back to the youth and rake in all the profit. Very few musicians ever end up with anything. For every Tom Petty and Springsteen, there are hundreds of men and women out there starving. Working two jobs so they can still be in a band for this dream of making it.</p>
<p>This is the big hypocrisy, because the music industry has such a reputation for (caring)…</p>
<p>Let’s save Tibet.</p>
<p>Save Tibet. Fuck Americans.</p>
<p>Yeah! Let’s save the whales.</p>
<p>Here’s an industry that gets behind every welfare issue or homeless issue. A US$40 billion industry that doesn’t supply basic health care needs or benefits for their primary money earners.</p>
<p>This is a big issue with me. This is something that I want to pursue with Sweeney. Go across the board. How many musicians do you know who have health insurance? I don’t know any. How many record executives have health insurance? Record executives – they’ve got pension plans. They’ve got health insurance. Every musician I know works three jobs and has nothing. I’m 49 years old now. Health is starting to become an issue with me. My great fear in life, like everybody’s, is to be old and homeless and sick with no money. That’s what motivates me in the morning. To get up and write a song, get on the phone, book a tour, make shit happen, get a record together.</p>
<p>Let’s talk a little about the tour. How long is it going on?</p>
<p>This tour is 30 cities, about five weeks.</p>
<p>Are you doing one tour this year?</p>
<p>No, I’ll do a lot this year. I usually do two or three. There’ll be a European tour and a Japanese or Australian tour. I love to work. I’m a musician. I love to play.</p>
<p>You have a new bass player (Doug Lunn). He wasn’t on the record, was he?</p>
<p>No. Paul (Ill), like so many musicians in L.A., works in about five bands. One of the other bands he works in, he’s a full partner. He’s a writer in it. He felt as though he needed to make a commitment to them and he needed to be in Los Angeles over the summer. I, of course, had to honor that. I mean he was gracious enough to do my gig for as little as I can pay. He worked real hard for me and he’s a wonderful musician. We will continue to work together but he couldn’t tour this year.</p>
<p>Well Doug is certainly more than capable. I was really impressed by last night’s show.</p>
<p>He’s a monster! A beautiful musician.</p>
<p>This is really a fabulous rhythm section. I think you’ve been blessed to work with some great ones. Brock (Avery) is a marvelous drummer.</p>
<p>The rhythm section is the most important part of the band. And I can say that as a guitar player. In a band, the bass player and drummer have gotta be smokin’. A band is only as strong as the rhythm section. You can have a great front man, a great guitar player – but if the rhythm section ain’t working you’re fucked.</p>
<p>I think musicians are probably much more aware of you than the public in general.</p>
<p>Absolutely.</p>
<p>And as someone who was in a band that really mattered. I would imagine the MC5 had the same dreams as anybody else who ever started a band – to be successful – but the MC5 demanded to be successful on their own terms and it fell apart.</p>
<p>Oh, we wanted more than to be successful. We wanted to change the world. Our idea was to have a new music. A new politics.</p>
<p>Did popularity ever enter into that?</p>
<p>Of course. Even Chairman Mao says bad art is bad for the revolution. You have to make good music. People have to appreciate what you do. And, of course, we wanted to be accepted and loved for our work.</p>
<p>Do you think that the fact that the MC5 fell apart has made you a better artist today?</p>
<p>I have to feel that this has all been a process you go through. That it couldn’t have gone any other way. That would be idle speculation. Brett (Gurowitz) and I have discussed it and Atlantic Records made their mistake – Ahmet Ertigan, who is one of the most pernicious of the record company thieves and scoundrels and robber barons and exploiters – he made a mistake by not supporting the MC5. Had he supported the MC5 chances are we would have gone on to make millions of dollars for Atlantic Records and for each other, and today I would be in an income bracket with Bob Seger and Ted Nugent and Neil Young. The MC5’s influence would have been vast and everybody would know the music of Sun Ra and John Coltrane today.</p>
<p>But the world wouldn’t have Dangerous Madness and Citizen Wayne.</p>
<p>Right. Right. And I have to look at it like these are the cards that I’ve been dealt and make the best of them. The center never holds. The only thing you can count on is that things will change. I think as an artist your responsibilities are to yourself and your art – that if you have a commitment to writing great songs, making great records, doing great gigs, that’s the best you can do.</p>
<p>There’s a lot of ancillary things you can do, a lot of influence and focus that you can draw to things, but your real commitment is to yourself and your art. Cause in the end we’re only here for a short time and you’re dead for a long, long time. What’s left is the work you do. That’s why I’m committed to work as I am. I would hate to die and feel like “I shoulda, I wish I coulda.” So that’s why to me it’s all about doin’ the work.” Too me, that song “Doin’ the Work” on Citizen Wayne, is a love song.</p>
<p>2011 UPDATES</p>
<p>Tom Morello, Ike Reilly, Wayne Kramer, and Street Dogs performed “ <a href="" type="internal">Kick Out The Jams</a>” at Monona Terrace during the Rally for Wisconsin’s Workers in Madison, Wis. on Feb. 21, 2011, in support of public employees whose collective bargaining rights are threatened by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s proposed budget repair bill.</p>
<p>The musicians that came to Madison are sharing the stage with everyday workers. Unlike some other big brand benefits, where stars opt to speak FOR folks, this is one where they are speaking alongside of folks. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cLJhRfhUAo" type="external">Unity</a>.</p>
<p>At the time of this writing, protesters are still occupying the Capitol Building in Madison, WI with continuous demonstrations and more rallies planned. The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (stage workers union) is providing the staging and labor for one such event and you can help defray the costs <a href="http://forwardwisconsinfest.com/" type="external">here</a>.</p>
<p>BILL GLAHN wrote, edited and published Live! Music Review, a magazine devoted to bootleg recordings when bootlegs were not so common. And they are still not so common today. Live! Music Review is also on Facebook and on Twitter (LMRonTwit). Do drop by to say hello and, as Bill says, all comments welcome.</p>
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<p /> | In the Business of Disrupting Business | true | https://counterpunch.org/2011/03/04/in-the-business-of-disrupting-business/ | 2011-03-04 | 4 |
<p>Hundreds of far-right activists demonstrated <a href="http://rt.com/news/czechs-arrested-roma-demonstration-955/" type="external">against</a> the Roma populations in towns and cities across the Czech Republic over the weekend.</p>
<p>Clashes between protesters and police <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23830623" type="external">took place</a> in Ostrava and Ceske Budejovice when marchers tried to enter Roma neighborhoods.</p>
<p>Ostrava <a href="http://rt.com/news/czechs-arrested-roma-demonstration-955/" type="external">saw stones thrown</a> and violent clashes with 60 people arrested.</p>
<p>Police responded with tear gas to break up the march. About 75 people were arrested around the country.</p>
<p>On Saturday, a counter-demonstration in Plzen occurred to meet the anti-Roma protest that included about 400 people.</p>
<p>Amnesty International warned earlier that protests against the Roma people were being organized across the Czech Republic.</p>
<p>"We have seen a deeply worrying trend over the past year with entrenched discrimination against Roma reaching new heights. This is a fundamental issue that the Czech authorities can't ignore," <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23830623" type="external">said</a> Amnesty International's John Dalhuisen.</p>
<p>There has been sporadic violence against the Roma population in the Czech Republic in the last few years.</p>
<p>In 2010, extremists <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23830623" type="external">set fire</a> to the home of a Roma family, severely burning a child.</p>
<p>It is believed there are between&#160;250,000 and 300,000 Roma in the country.</p> | Anti-Roma protests hit Czech Republic, 75 arrested | false | https://pri.org/stories/2013-08-25/anti-roma-protests-hit-czech-republic-75-arrested | 2013-08-25 | 3 |
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<p>The Human Services Department is getting pushback from some lawmakers who say the state’s biggest behavioral health providers are being smeared by the suspension of their funding and secrecy surrounding their alleged wrongdoings.</p>
<p>Senate President Pro Tem Mary Kay Papen, D-Las Cruces, a longtime advocate for the mentally ill, said HSD is trying “to divert attention from its own and OptumHealth’s mismanagement of behavioral health services and expenditures.”</p>
<p>Human Services Secretary Sidonie Squier last week halted Medicaid and other funding to 15 providers, saying an in-depth audit by a Boston firm showed $36 million in overpayments over three years, widespread mismanagement and possible fraud.</p>
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<p>The audit results were turned over to the attorney general and, except for a summary from the department, have not been released to the providers or the public.</p>
<p>Providers can apply for exceptions to the payment freeze.</p>
<p>The Human Services Department said Tuesday that behavioral health funding has been resumed to Service Organization for Youth, in Raton, and The Counseling Center in Alamogordo, on the condition they get intensive retraining and monitoring.</p>
<p>The department has lined up five Arizona contractors to provide training and oversight of the nonprofits at a potential cost of $17.8 million.</p>
<p>Papen, in a written statement, said the state’s Behavioral Health Collaborative and its contractor, OptumHealth, are supposed to oversee the providers.</p>
<p>“Instead of bringing in more managers, we should require the ones we already have to do a better job,” Papen said.</p>
<p>The lawmaker complained the providers haven’t been given an opportunity to explain or defend themselves, or come into compliance, and that HSD’s handling of the audit results “has been without regard for the professional reputations” of the providers.</p>
<p>HSD spokesman Matt Kennicott said federal regulations require that specific audit information not be released, “as doing so would negatively affect the attorney general’s investigation.”</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Sen. Gerald Ortiz y Pino, D-Albuquerque, co-chairman of the Legislature’s interim Health and Human Services Committee, said it “just does not sound right” that all of a sudden there’s a fraud problem involving providers who have served the state for decades.</p>
<p>“I don’t believe you should be able to spend $17 million of taxpayers’ money rectifying problems you’re not willing to specify,” the lawmaker said.</p>
<p>“I want information. … If there were mistakes made, tell us what they are,” said Sen. Gay Kernan, R-Hobbs, an interim committee member who worried about the impact of the funding cutoff on services to substance abusers and the mentally ill.</p>
<p>HSD’s Kennicott said the agency has “extensive plans in place” in the event of service disruptions, but that providers have “a contractual and ethical obligation” not to close their doors.</p>
<p>Roque Garcia, CEO of Southwest Counseling Center in Las Cruces, notified his staff on Tuesday that he deposited personal funds into the nonprofit’s account to keep it afloat through July 13.</p>
<p>“SWCC has been in Las Cruces for 50 years, and now we all stand accused of fraud without the ability to clear our names. … All our past audits have been good to excellent,” he said in an email to staff.</p>
<p>A May 2011 letter from OptumHealth gave SWCC scores of 92 percent and 98 percent for reviews of the facility site and treatment records.</p>
<p>Scores of 85 percent are considered passing.</p>
<p>Another big provider among the 15, TeamBuilders Counseling Services, got scores in the spring of 2012 of 100 percent and 97.8 percent for the same reviews.</p>
<p>Elizabeth Martin, CEO of OptumHealth New Mexico, said the firm has “referred potential cases of fraud, waste or abuse to the state, in accordance with state guidelines,” since it began work in 2009.</p>
<p>Optum said it reviews all claims each month to identify billing irregularities and other suspicious activity; findings can trigger further billing audits, as can tips to a waste, fraud and abuse tip line.</p> | Legislators question health audit | false | https://abqjournal.com/217044/legislators-question-health-audit.html | 2 |
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<p>As I’ve said numerous times already, while Donald Trump is truly awful, I still think Speaker of the House <a href="" type="internal">Paul Ryan is worse</a>. I’d much rather deal with an <a href="" type="internal">obvious con man like Trump</a> than a slimy, sell-his-soul just to get away with stealing a dollar from a poor person “Christian conservative” sociopath like Ryan.</p>
<p>Trump is absolutely terrible, but it’s those who are enabling him who are really to blame. Donald Trump is only allowed to behave how he does, while still thinking it’s okay to do so, because of the millions of people who support him and the political party that refuses to hold him accountable.</p>
<p>And the de facto leader of that party is Paul Ryan — a man who once said Trump <a href="" type="internal">didn’t represent conservative values</a>, and called his bigoted attacks on a federal judge who’s of Mexican heritage “textbook racism.”</p>
<p>It seems I’m not the only person who’s recognized <a href="" type="internal">Ryan’s spineless hypocrisy</a> when it comes to defending and supporting Trump. Former Republican congressman Bob Inglis took to Trump’s favorite social media site, Twitter, to rip into what a coward he’s been when dealing with Trump’s corruption and scandals:</p>
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<p>He later went on to reply to a tweet sent out by CNN’s Jake Tapper where he reminded everyone that he voted for Bill Clinton’s impeachment and called for his resignation. Though he was also quick to point out that what Clinton had done was far “less serious” than the multiple scandals surrounding Trump.</p>
<p>Inglis is&#160;absolutely right. When it comes to Trump, Republicans <a href="" type="internal">have been unapologetic&#160;hypocrites</a>. These are the people who spent years on ridiculous “investigations” into Benghazi, often painting it as a conspiracy on par with Watergate. They’re also many of the same hypocrites who pledged, had she won, to spend years investigating Hillary Clinton’s emails — even after the FBI cleared her of any wrongdoing.</p>
<p>Yet when it comes to Trump, many of these Republicans, Ryan included, <a href="" type="internal">have done everything possible</a> to downplay his strange pro-Russian behavior; the long list of people he has around him with connections to Russia; his rather obvious attempts to obstruct justice; firing the FBI director then saying the on-going Russia investigations played a part; his son-in-law apparently trying to set up a secret meeting with Russian bankers; associates lying about meetings with Russian officials; and the fact that he still refuses, and has continually lied about, releasing his tax returns.</p>
<p>There’s absolutely no way they’d let a Democrat — any Democrat — get away with even a fraction of <a href="" type="internal">what they’ve ignored about Trump</a>. Just the tax return issue, alone, would have Republicans in full meltdown mode.</p>
<p>This is why I’ve said, while I believe Donald Trump will be remembered by future generations as one of the biggest mistakes in our nation’s history, we must&#160;emphasize that the Republican Party stood by, like cowards, and defended his <a href="" type="internal">lies, scandals, and unhinged behavior</a>&#160;almost every step of the way.</p>
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<p>23 Facebook comments</p> | Ex-GOP Congressman Blasts Paul Ryan’s Spineless Hypocrisy on Trump | true | https://forwardprogressives.com/ex-gop-congressman-blasts-paul-ryans-spineless-hypocrisy-trump/ | 2017-06-10 | 4 |
<p>President Donald Trump in 2013 had dinner with the publicist at the center of the Donald Trump Jr. controversy, according to video <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/12/politics/video-trump-relationships-russian-associates" type="external">obtained exclusively by CNN.</a></p>
<p>Rob Goldstone set up a meeting last year between Trump Jr. and a Kremlin-linked lawyer who offered up compromising information about Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.</p>
<p>Trump Jr. on Tuesday released a chain of emails between him and Goldstone that led up to the meeting, showing he had been told he would receive information harmful to Clinton, and that Russia backed his father’s campaign. Goldstone also said in the emails Emin Agalarov, whose billionaire father Aras had ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, asked to <a href="http://www.newsmax.com/Politics/jay-sekulow-trump-jr-russia-meeting/2017/07/12/id/801187/" type="external">set up the meeting.</a></p>
<p>Trump is seen in the CNN video with Goldstone and the Agalarovs on the eve of the Miss USA pageant in Las Vegas. The Agalarovs and Trump became business partners, and Trump on that night announced a multimillion dollar deal to bring the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow in 2013.</p>
<p>Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney, and Keith Schiller, now the director of Oval Office operations, were also in the video.</p> | CNN Video Shows Trump Knew Publicist Who Set Up Trump Jr. Meeting | false | https://newsline.com/cnn-video-shows-trump-knew-publicist-who-set-up-trump-jr-meeting/ | 2017-07-12 | 1 |
<p>Amber Randall – Civil Rights Reporter on October 13, 2017</p>
<p>The New York Times issued new social media guidelines for its reporters Friday, warning them against posting things on social media that could be construed as “biased” or “partisan.”</p>
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<p>The guidelines, created with the input of the outlets’ top reporters, are meant to protect TheNYT’s reputation and prevent accusations of bias from readers,&#160; <a href="https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/10/13/reader-center/social-media-guidelines.html?_r=0&amp;referer=https://t.co/6odzfyxdxB?amp=1" type="external">executive editor Dean Baquet announced in a release</a>.</p>
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<p>“In social media posts, our journalists must not express partisan opinions, promote political views, endorse candidates, make offensive comments or do anything else that undercuts The Times’s journalistic reputation,” the guidelines read.&#160;“Our journalists should be especially mindful of appearing to take sides on issues that The Times is seeking to cover objectively.”</p>
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<p>Other recommendations include journalists not making complaints about customer service over Twitter, refraining from joining groups on Facebook that can be seen as partisan (unless covering them for an article) and being respectful to readers who may criticize NYT articles. Journalists should not block readers who criticize them, but are free to do so if a reader turns abusive.</p>
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<p>“If you are linking to other sources, aim to reflect a diverse collection of viewpoints. Sharing a range of news, opinions or satire from others is usually appropriate. But consistently linking to only one side of a debate can leave the impression that you, too, are taking sides,” the guidelines read.</p>
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<p><a href="http://dailycaller.com/2016/09/30/here-are-the-mainstream-reporters-who-are-open-about-their-anti-trump-bias/" type="external">The new guidelines come after Baquet argued that journalists</a>&#160;shouldn’t be sharing their personal opinions with the public, as it makes it hard for the publication to say it is covering the administration aggressively but fairly.</p>
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<p>“We’re doing this because it’s journalistically sound, we’re not doing this because we have a vendetta or [because] we’re trying to take him out, and I can’t do that if I have 100 people working for the New York Times sending inappropriate tweets,” Baquet said.</p>
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<p>Journalists should ask themselves questions before they tweet or post something if they are unsure if it is biased or not. They should question whether they would print it in TheNYT and whether it would cause people to doubt that the outlet can cover events fairly.</p>
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<p>“As you can see, we have tried to strike a balance. We want our newsroom to embrace social media, which offers us so many opportunities to connect with readers, listeners and viewers (not to mention sources), extending the reach of The Times,” the guidelines read.</p>
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<p><a href="https://twitter.com/ARAND1990" type="external">Follow Amber on Twitter</a></p>
<p>Send tips to&#160; <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a>.</p> | The New York Times Asks Its Reporters To Be ‘Non-Partisan’ Over Social Media | true | http://thepoliticalinsider.com/new-york-times-social-media/ | 0 |
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<p>By Bob Allen</p>
<p>Southern Baptists’ top public policy official says he sees God working in unexpected ways in the lives of people he encounters while representing the nation’s second-largest faith group after Roman Catholics in the nation’s capital.</p>
<p>Russell Moore, head of the SBC Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, <a href="http://multimedia.sebts.edu/?p=5958" type="external">said</a> in a panel discussion at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary Feb. 6 that part of his work in Washington involves “Nicodemus moments,” reminiscent of the Bible story about a Jewish ruler who comes seeking spiritual answers from Jesus in John Chapter 3.</p>
<p>“God is working magnificently right now on Capitol Hill, … but God is working in places —&#160;it seems to me —&#160;that are the most distant from Christianity than those that are solidly within Christianity,” Moore said at the 2015 <a href="http://www.sebts.edu/news-resources/conferences/Go_collegiate_conf/default.aspx" type="external">GO Conference</a> Feb. 6-7 at the Southern Baptist Convention seminary in Wake Forest, N.C.</p>
<p>“The places that you would expect that are kind of close to a Christian worldview are, in my experience, the hardest to the gospel right now,” Moore said. “But those places that you would look at and you would say, this is an organization or this is a television network or a newspaper or whatever that is hostile completely to everything that the gospel is about, there are all sorts of people there who are saying ‘I’ve got some questions here’ and the Lord is working in their lives that way.”</p>
<p>Moore said one of the most impressive conversations he had was with “a guy in government who came to Christ” because of his experience with a “church in another denomination.”</p>
<p>“The church had been there for 200 years,” Moore said. “George Washington was a member of that church. The denomination had become really liberal, really dismissive of the Word of God, and they had taken the property away from this church, because they were standing on the Word of God.”</p>
<p>“And this guy just went as a gawker, just to see this church in their last service before they handed the keys over to the denomination,” he continued. “And he said he got in there and these people are singing, they’re crying because they’ve been in that church all their lives, but they were triumphant.</p>
<p>“And he said the pastor stood up and said, ‘These are buildings. They’ve meant a lot to us, but they’re just buildings. The gospel is more important than these buildings.’ And the guy said he was sitting there thinking, ‘This is crazy. This is primo real estate.’ And that really started him asking ‘Why are they responding this way?’ And as he heard the gospel being preached he came to Christ. Now he’s leading Bible studies, leading people to Christ on Capitol Hill.”</p>
<p>Moore advised students not to listen to people who say politics are unimportant, because believers are to be focused on spiritual concerns instead of those that are temporal and worldly.</p>
<p>“You are still in the world even though you are not of the world,” he said. “Think about what the Scripture teaches in Romans 13. It says that Caesar has a responsibility to God to act justly. In a democratic republic, that means everybody makes those decisions. So you’re actually held accountable to God for the decisions that you are making in the running of the country for the common good.”</p>
<p>“It’s the equivalent of Pontius Pilate saying ‘I don’t want to deal with this,’” he said. “Well you have to deal with this, because it’s your job, but you have to do it in a way that is glorifying to God. So not voting in this system of government is a dereliction of your duty to love neighbor.”</p>
<p>When it comes to knowing how to vote, Moore counseled: “There are going to be some issues that are clearly revealed in Scripture that we have to understand are clear that are there and we’re all together on. There are going to be other issues that are not as clear in Scripture, where we can come to different understandings” and disagree about the best way to move toward a desired goal.</p>
<p>Moore said it’s important in voting to remember the Bible <a href="http://biblehub.com/psalms/146-3.htm" type="external">verse</a> that says “do not put your trust in princes.”</p>
<p>“There’s no political party that’s going to usher in the Kingdom of God, so we don’t put any hope in a political party,” he said. “We don’t see them, as our allies on this issue or that issue, as people who are allies on everything. We don’t do that.”</p>
<p>“Nor do we see the people who may disagree with us on some things as our enemies on everything or opponents on everything,” he said. “So we kind of hold it with a little bit of distance, and recognize that we’re first people of the Kingdom of God.”</p> | SBC public policy chief says God at work in Washington | false | https://baptistnews.com/article/sbc-public-policy-chief-says-god-at-work-in-washington/ | 3 |
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<p>Journalist Colin Hansen’s groundbreaking 2008 book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Young-Restless-Reformed-Journalists-Calvinists/dp/1581349408" type="external">Young, Restless, Reformed</a> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Young-Restless-Reformed-Journalists-Calvinists/dp/1581349408#reader_1581349408" type="external">dubbed</a> Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., “ground zero” of the New Calvinist movement in the Southern Baptist Convention, but it was a far different place 35 years ago, according to an early proponent of a grassroots effort to ostensibly return America’s second-largest religious body to its Reformation roots.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.capitolhillbaptist.org/about-us/leadership-staff/member/1267131/" type="external">Mark Dever</a>, senior pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., said in a June <a href="http://founders.org/interviews/reformation-and-the-sbc-a-round-table-interview-with-tom-ascol-mark-dever-and-jared-longshore/" type="external">interview</a> posted on the Founders Ministries blog that he didn’t realize how far the flagship Southern Baptist school had drifted from the “Princeton theology” behind the <a href="http://www.sbts.edu/about/abstract/" type="external">Abstract of Principles</a> doctrinal statement included in its 1858 charter until he read Dale Moody’s 1981 systematic theology <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Word-Truth-Christian-Doctrine-Revelation/dp/0802804896" type="external">The Word of Truth</a>.</p>
<p>Mark Dever (right) being interviewed at the June SBC annual meeting in Phoenix by Jared Longshore (left), along with Tom Ascol (center) of Founders Ministries. (Founders.org)</p>
<p>Dever, at the time an undergraduate student in Duke University’s unabashedly liberal religion department, said when he first heard about Moody’s book he thought: “Oh, a Southern Baptist has published this. This is going to be helpful.”</p>
<p>After purchasing and reading the book, Dever said: “I felt like a snake had bitten me.”</p>
<p>“There was no affirmation of bodily resurrection,” he said. “Substitutionary atonement was made fun of. And I realized this man has been teaching with my tithe dollars and the tithe dollars of Christians in my church for the last 50 years at Southern Seminary, or 40 at that time. So I knew things were bad, then.”</p>
<p>Dever, founder of 9Marks, a Christian ministry promoting Calvinistic practices such as elder-led congregations and exercising church discipline, said he first heard about Founders Ministries, a Reformed Baptist group within the SBC, when he read a magazine story about the group’s first annual conference in 1983.</p>
<p>“I’m down in the basement,” he recalled. “Connie, my wife, is up on the first floor, and when I’m reading about it I yell up, ‘Hey, Connie! There are some other Calvinistic Southern Baptists.”</p>
<p>Then a first year master of divinity student at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, Dever said before that day he “thought I was pretty much the only one out there.”</p>
<p>“I said, I don’t know what this is, but I’m going next year,” he recalled.</p>
<p>When he arrived at the 1984 Founders Conference in Memphis, Tenn., Dever said the existing Southern Baptist Calvinistic world “could have met in an elevator booth.”</p>
<p>The movement turned a corner in 1993, with the election of Dever’s longtime friend Albert Mohler as president of Southern Seminary, pledging to uphold the “confessional faith” of founders including Abstract author <a href="http://archives.sbts.edu/the-history-of-the-sbts/our-professors/basil-manly-jr/" type="external">Basil Manly Jr</a>. and the first president, <a href="http://archives.sbts.edu/the-history-of-the-sbts/our-presidents/james-p-boyce-1859-1888/" type="external">James Pettigru Boyce</a>.</p>
<p>Dever said when he enrolled at Southern Seminary in 1986, Mohler was a fundraiser for then-president Roy Honeycutt who rejected the “inerrantist” label and supported women’s ordination.</p>
<p>“I think he was just inconsistent in his own thinking when I met him,” Dever said looking back on their friendship. “So much so, that though I knew him very well for a year and a half, when he became the editor of the Christian Index in Georgia I started getting his editorials over in England, where I am a student —&#160;I’m over there six-and-a-half years, from ’88 to ’94 —&#160;I’m surprised by how conservative his editorials are, and I’m tickled pink, because he’s like nailed his colors to the door. And those weren’t even his colors three years earlier.”</p>
<p>Dever said he understands why people who knew Mohler at Southern Seminary view the change of heart as betrayal, but he doesn’t see it that way.</p>
<p>“Knowing Al well, I realize that is not at all what happened,” Dever said. “What happened with Al is you had an orthodox, evangelical, bright student at 16 or 17 down in Florida. He goes to Samford in Birmingham, and I think he doesn’t have a category for the kind of liberal things he was taught in a Baptist school. So he’s just thinking this is what you do as grownups. Then he goes to Southern Seminary, and that’s exacerbated.”</p>
<p>“I think there, though he advocates things like women’s ordination, I think he begins to feel the tension,” he continued. “Then when he’s in the doctoral studies with Timothy George, and he starts reading people like Augustine and Calvin, he really feels the tension —&#160;which I think Timothy George helps him to feel. That’s right when I meet Al.”</p>
<p>“So when I meet Al, he’s not an inerrantist,” Dever said. “He is an egalitarian, but I don’t think he’s comfortable in those positions. When I announce myself to him in our first conversation as an inerrantist, which you say that in 1986 in the office of the president of Southern Seminary, in which Al was the fundraiser, those were fighting words. Those were insulting, dirty words.</p>
<p>“So that was an interesting conversation we first had and continued to have.”</p>
<p>Dever dismissed the half-joking suggestion that he deserves credit for “reforming” Al Mohler.</p>
<p>“I don’t know that Al learns much from living people,” Dever said. “We’re too slow. He learns from books. He learns from things he can read quickly and absorb. His dissertation on God’s providence was on evangelical responses to Karl Barth. He had the kind of appropriators, the critical interactors and the rejecters, and I think what happened over the years that I knew Al, he began as an appropriator and he became a kind of critical friend and ultimately a rejecter.”</p>
<p>“I think as he did those doctoral studies putting him in touch with all of those, including Carl Henry, all of those primary sources, he became convinced that the stuff that Southern Seminary was founded to teach the Bible is actually what the Bible said,” Dever said.</p>
<p>“I think Al’s friends at the time who were more liberal were right that he changed, but they were wrong in understanding how or why he changed. He really did change in what he thought the Bible taught.”</p> | Veteran of Southern Baptist Calvinist ‘reformation’ reflects on success | false | https://baptistnews.com/article/veteran-southern-baptist-calvinist-reformation-reflects-success/ | 3 |
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<p>The return of partial service into Hoboken Terminal was welcomed by commuters — even if some had still-painful memories of the Sept. 29 crash.</p>
<p>Sheilah Tiangco-Hugo had been in the first car that day and remembered being jolted out of her seat when the train sped up as it approached the track’s end. She braced for impact on the floor and watched as a concrete slab crashed down on the seat she had occupied moments earlier.</p>
<p>“That slab could have cut me in half,” Tiangco-Hugo said in River Edge as she waited for the train with several other people.”I started praying and saying, ‘Is this really happening?'”</p>
<p>Her back still hurts from the crash, Tiangco-Hugo said. But it didn’t stop her from boarding Monday’s 8:11 a.m. train for Hoboken.</p>
<p>Eight of the 17 tracks at Hoboken Terminal reopened, according to New Jersey Transit. Tracks 10 to 17 reopened, while tracks 1 to 9 will remain out of service until further notice as repair work continues in that section of the busy station, where commuters connect with other trains and with ferries heading into New York City,</p>
<p>Crews have erected a big plywood wall to block off the area where the accident occurred, and foot traffic to the PATH was being diverted to another entrance.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>NJ Transit workers were standing on the platform to greet commuters, handing out free water bottles next to a sign that said, “Thanks for your patience.”</p>
<p>Also on Monday, commuters who were aboard the train that crashed were able to retrieve most of the belongings they had left behind. NJ Transit said some items have not been reached yet.</p>
<p>With rail service in and out of the terminal running on a modified schedule, NJ Transit warned commuters that its bus, rail and light rail services may experience crowding conditions and delays.</p>
<p>With the resumption of service, a new rule will require that the conductor join the engineer whenever a train pulls into the terminal. That means a second set of eyes will be watching as a train enters the final phase of its trip at stations where there are platforms at the end of the rails.</p>
<p>The engineer in the crash was alone at the time. He has told federal investigators he has no memory of the crash.</p> | Rail service resumes at New Jersey station after fatal crash | false | https://abqjournal.com/863903/train-service-set-to-resume-after-deadly-new-jersey-crash.html | 2016-10-09 | 2 |
<p>XPO Logistics Inc. late Friday said it eliminated 190 positions, affecting less than 1% of the workforce, primarily to address redundancies with its acquisition of Con-way Inc. last year, The move is expected to cut costs by $20 million annually and boost operating profit by at least $170 million over two years. Shares of XPO were unchanged in extended trading after surging 7.9% during the regular session.</p>
<p>Copyright © 2016 MarketWatch, Inc.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p> | XPO Logistics Cuts 190 Positions To Streamline Operations | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2016/01/29/xpo-logistics-cuts-10-positions-to-streamline-operations.html | 2016-01-29 | 0 |
<p>To the best of memory, one of the first authors, whom I respect, to shed doubts on the possibilities of an American military attack on Iran was Tariq Ali. In an article, on Counterpunch (May 11, 2006), he argued succinctly that Iran had been nothing but helpful to the American colonial ventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. So, why would the U.S. attack Iran and turn a big helping asset in the region into a colossal hostility, which would in turn make Americans’ presence in the region far more hellish?</p>
<p>A lot of Iranian socialists, liberals, radical democrats and plenty of people in the clerical and merchant classes, as well as millions of ordinary citizens know that the ruling classes in the U.S., divided as they are over attacking Iran militarily, are united in preferring an Islamic Republic, rather than a secular republic, in Iran. The American rulers know, or at least calculate, that any other political formation in Iran will definitely be socially to the left of the current set up. The Mullahs also know that the Americans know this. So, both are clear on this.</p>
<p>Those of us who grew up under Shah’s dictatorship used to think that he was the limit, but of course leave it up to the clergymen, the ideological singing birds of the ruling classes in Iran for the past one thousand years and more, to come up with an infinitely improved dictatorship, something the Pahlavi ‘dynasty’ could only dream about (the ‘dynasty’ was a mere two kings long; both took power through Western-supported coups; I’d call it ‘foreign investment’, not ‘dynasty’).</p>
<p>In terms of a sufficiently thorough dictatorial set up, then, beneficial to anybody wishing to do business (wink) with Iran, Western imperialists cannot have it any better than the regime that exists there now; they don’t want this regime to disappear. So, if and when talking regime change, they mean merely a change of behavior. The major differences between the American and the Iranian regimes revolve around the terms and conditions under which the Islamic Republic will continue to rule.</p>
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<p>Over the recent years of the verbal back and forth between the ugly duckling Uncle Sam and bad, bad Ayatollahs, I have noticed a curious side-correlation. The rise in the level of belligerent talk directed at Iran coming out of Washington has usually accompanied a rise of violence in Iraq. Every time the Americans experience intensified resistance from the Iraqis, there is a surge of accusations regarding Iranian nuclear ambitions and ‘meddling in Iraq’.</p>
<p>So, one can imagine that what the U.S. administration is really saying is that the Iranian regime and their capable military and paramilitary presence, in terms of personnel and influence in Iraq, are not doing enough to keep the violence under an acceptable level; ‘acceptable’ meaning here, a level which can still be spun somehow positively in the establishment mass media in the west, particularly in the U.S.</p>
<p>For example, right now, due to Iranian exertion of influence, as thoroughly reported by Patrick Cockburn, Sadr’s militia’s have been given stand-down orders. This has partly been responsible for the ‘relative success’ of the so-called surge of American military forces into the Baghdad area. In such a context, a death rate of more than 550 per month in Iraq, in the American mass media, can be presented as a ‘success’. In order for this death rate to be presented as progress, they Iranian regime has done its fare share. No wonder then that, diplomatically, the Iranians act like the Americans owe them something; which they indeed do!</p>
<p>Mixed in with the nuclear-related accusations, when attacking Iran diplomatic-verbally, has been the issue of Iranian military involvement in Iraq. Starting at least since 2004, we have heard accusations of ‘Iranian meddling’ by U.S. military and political leaders. That these accusations of ‘foreign meddling’ are forwarded by a mercenary army of more than 350,000 (including the contractors) who flew or sailed thousands of miles to get to Iraq is of course totally beside the point.</p>
<p>The factual truth, however, is different. The Americans knew from the very start of the invasion’s planning stages that the Iranians would be there; in fact, during the aerial bombardments and the initial land invasion of Iraq in 2003, American military was coordinating with the Iranian-based Badr brigades, which meant coordinating with the Iranian military.</p>
<p>So far as Iranian ‘meddling’ goes, then, the Americans were relying on it to achieve their own politico-military objectives in Iraq. So, to now turn their presence in Iraq into an excuse to attack Iran is not just outrageous, it is in fact insane. Would the U.S. not intervene in Mexico if, say, a European countries, or, who’s kidding who, even if Belize invaded Mexico?</p>
<p>A broken Afghanistan and a broken Iraq, along with a huge American military presence on two of its borders with enormously destabilizing effects; all these have brought lots of problems for the Iranian government. Yet, the plus side has outpaced the negative by strides. In short, the Iranian regime does not have an unambiguous anti-imperialist stance vis-à-vis the U.S; in fact, at key junctures it has moved quite pro-imperialistically.</p>
<p>As relates to the U.S. side, Zbigniew Brzezinski is as well an established heavy weight as there has ever been, in contemporary political life of American capitalism. His share in the architectural design of late twentieth century posture of the U.S. imperialism vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, and in particular his role in militarization and destabilization of Afghanistan starting in late 1970s, is well known. As well, he was and is a big supporter of the ‘adventures’ in Iraq and Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Most recently, Brzezinski has reiterated that the Iranian regime must be engaged with diplomatically by the U.S. and not belligerently, while talking like a bully. This stance is consistent with his pronouncement back in late 1970s that Ayatollah Khomeini was a man the U.S. could consider a strategic ally. Remember his ‘Green Belt’ strategy? Well, the late Ayatollah fit right in the buckle of the belt.</p>
<p>Western imperialists plan ahead and do have enormous resources to employ as they adapt to changed situations. Chance does favor those better prepared; especially when those chances are created by the better prepared.</p>
<p>Iran may talk big about anti-imperialism, but has cooperated with the U.S. at strategic junctures. The Ayatollahs helped the Afghan mujaheddin from their early days (cooperating with the U.S.); they helped Reagan administration get money for the Contra army to harass and terrorize a truly revolutionary government in Nicaragua; later still, they facilitated the U.S. invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq.</p>
<p>The Iranian government, like most other states, knows that there are limits to the U.S. power, and that the U.S. rulers need cooperative regional client states. And the American policy makers know well the price for a successful-looking reorganization of Iraq: with the helpful hand of the Iranians, they can make a show case of the ‘success’ of U.S.’s power projections, military and otherwise, oh so beneficial for the ‘stability’ of the region and for its future prospects for economic development; all of it privatized, securitized and stashed away in fat western banks.</p>
<p>The fact is, as Gary Leupp among others has explained, the U.S. ruling class is divided over whether or not to militarily push the mullahs a bit further, so as to extract the concessions they are seeking. Likewise, the regime in Iran is very much divided over how to approach the Americans. However, the Iranian theocrats have a unique problem when it comes to this one particular issue.</p>
<p>If there is one bit of legitimacy that holds the Islamic Republic as something unique — compared to the Pahlavi regime, which the people overthrew — it is their ‘anti-imperialist’, or more specifically anti-American-imperialist, stance (they do lots of economic and other dealings with many European powers).</p>
<p>In terms of lack of democracy and the presence of violently repressive measures taken by the state to maintain control, the mullahs are far more effective than anything the Shah could put together. Additionally, in terms of economic mismanagement, they have done thousands of times worse than the Shah, who at least could deliver an economic ‘development plan’ that froze the inflation rate to lower single digits for some twenty years.</p>
<p>The mullahs, on the other hand, have produced inflation rates in the hundreds of percents per year, for decades; poverty rate is above 50%; class A drug addiction, in a country of 68 million, is crippling the lives and aspirations of some eight million (a conservative estimate); meanwhile, the clerical and merchant ruling classes, who are not by any measure of imagination productive and purely speculative in their economic activities, are building giant mansions on choice real estate around Iran, and luxury villas and houses around the world, while padding their Swiss bank accounts.</p>
<p>So, if they were to give up their Anti-Americanism, their last shred of a fig leaf, what else would they have that shows any improvement on the previous regime, to prove their legitimacy?</p>
<p>Still, there is a very strong ‘realist’ faction (sure, we have them too) within the regime that has wanted for a long time to ditch all pretence of anti-American posturing, and get on with the business of doing business. This faction includes big establishment figureheads such as Hashemi Rafsenjani and Khatami, and has a strong social appeal among swaths of the middle classes and professionals ideologically aligned with the regime, among the ideologically neutral, and the support runs even as deep as mid-ranking Revolutionary Guards officers.</p>
<p>The Americans know this, as do the Europeans. If this were not the case, there would not be any backdoor negotiations (always the prelude to overt ones), nor would there be any overtures such as sending undersecretary William Burns to the nuclear negotiations between Iran and the European powers underway in Geneva, on July 19.</p>
<p>So, in short, the Americans as well as the Europeans do not want a complete regime change in Iran (at least not for a while), but merely a change of behavior of the Iranian regime.</p>
<p>All of this leads one to conclude that if a military attack takes place, it is because the U.S. administration of George Bush (or McCain or Obama) has reached the conclusion that the only way to force the ‘behavior change’ is by splitting the Iranian regime through a military shock, thus nudging the pro-American faction to take more decisive actions in the fog of the chaos. Any military attack by the U.S. would be done in the spirit of splitting the Iranian regime and forcing a regime self-adjustment or fine-tuning.</p>
<p>A final point is to pay attention to what is entailed in ‘normalization’. To a lot of people, normalization has a soothing diplomatic sound to it. It forms the artificial antonym of ‘attacking’. An ‘attack’ on Iran is strictly defined to be something that can happen only militarily. The economic attacks, meanwhile, are not even registered on the liberals’ and most leftists’ radars. Yet, the economic interests are the real motivation driving the aggressive diplomatic postures as well as the threats or actual uses of military harassment.</p>
<p>When discussing ‘normalization’ of relations, what are we really talking about? We are talking about allowing a certain market to be penetrated by certain western economic interests. The economic interests should be self-evident, and the recent announcements by Iranian government regarding new laws allowing unlimited foreign ownership rights in Iranian firms and resources is a clear enough indication that the current regime is willing and able to accommodate all western needs. Last month, Iran’s deputy minister of commerce, Gazanfari, declared to a South Korean delegation that, “The volume of foreign investment in Iran is not subject to any limitation,” (see: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=45836).</p>
<p>The second plank of the ‘normalization’, in the particular case of the U.S., is the restoration of full diplomatic relations, with embassies and the works. This means the return of American spies to Iran, under a full legal protection, which, according to knowledgeable sources, is usually a precondition for relational normalization with Uncle Sam.</p>
<p>Understandably, professional spooks are impatiently lining the corridors of the American intelligent and foreign services, ready to be deployed to their posts of choice in any of the very desirable locations around Iran. These days, besides the beautiful geography, a wide range of habitats, great people and great food, these professionals can even enjoy the added delights of temporary sighe brides, should they wish to partake.</p>
<p>These professionals are actively for ‘normalization’; as is Sen. Biden, as is Brzezinski and the entire ‘realist’ wing of the American imperialism; as are some ‘leftist’ organizations such as CASMII who, consciously or unconsciously, have become unofficial lobbyists for a theocratic dictatorship, the Islamic Republic; all of whom, and their NGO brothers and sisters, must surely toast their drinks and clink their glasses to the soon-please-come-quick detente that would bring them back to Iran, pockets full of grant money from CIA, NSA, State Dept., or whatever, salivating all over the scene, padding resumes, telling us how to dig holes and plant things we have planted for thousands of years.</p>
<p>*&#160; *&#160; *</p>
<p>Iranian people, free from imperialist interference, will change their regime, as they have been trying to do peacefully for some time now. Iranians are not deeply religious (in the strict, establishmentarian sense of the term), though the current regime does have a sizeable and clearly well organized (since they have the state) minority of supporters. But, this support, according to regime’s own men (e.g., Hashemi Rafsanjani) adds up to at most 15% of the population. The 85% of the population not actively with the regime is the unknown, and therefore the variable, factor.</p>
<p>Iranians have in fact a deep-rooted tradition of skepticism toward religious thought, something that has been aesthetically best expressed by our great poets historically. Further, we have a strong tendency toward an egalitarian society. Long before Saint Simon, Proudhon, Robert Owen, or Babeuf, and long before Marx, Engels or Lenin, we had <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazdak" type="external">Mazdak</a> (died c. 524 A.D.), a popular figure in our historical consciousness, who stood against the corrupt established clerical hierarchy of his own day, and advocated for public ownership of all resources as well as for eradication of classes.</p>
<p>Our history and our egalitarian natural inclinations are known to both the Iranian regime as well as to the westerners, and they know that any opening of the gates will unleash a situation, the outcome of which can be a big loss to big business and a huge setback to imperialists’ strategic designs for our country. So, they will try their best to keep the gates closed by keeping the current regime in power, with certain adjustments, which will be extracted one way or another.</p>
<p>Socialists worldwide, and particularly in the middle east and Iran, must persist on a line of thinking and action that demands the independence of all the countries in the region, including Iran, from western imperialism in all its forms; we must consistently demand freedom from threats of military attacks and freedom from a ‘normalization’ that enslaves the people of Iran, or any other country to western economic interests.</p>
<p>REZA FIYOUZAT can be reached at: <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
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<p>&#160;</p> | U.S. and Iranian Relations | true | https://counterpunch.org/2008/08/14/u-s-and-iranian-relations/ | 2008-08-14 | 4 |
<p>De Beers Group said Wednesday that Gareth Mostyn, the company's executive head of strategy and corporate affairs, is leaving to join the Church of England as its chief finance officer and chief operations officer.</p>
<p>Mr. Mostyn joined Anglo American PLC, the majority shareholder in De Beers Group, as head of corporate finance in 2008, before moving to De Beers as chief financial officer in 2012.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>He will leave De Beers in early 2018. A replacement will be announced in due course.</p>
<p>Shares in Anglo American at 0823 GMT were down 1.2%, or 17.50 pence, at 1,428 pence.</p>
<p>Write to Oliver Griffin at [email protected]</p>
<p>(END) Dow Jones Newswires</p>
<p>October 25, 2017 04:42 ET (08:42 GMT)</p> | De Beers Executive Head of Strategy, Corporate Affairs Steps Down | true | http://foxbusiness.com/features/2017/10/25/de-beers-executive-head-strategy-corporate-affairs-steps-down.html | 2017-10-25 | 0 |
<p>ATHENS, Ohio (AP) - Mike Laster had five 3-pointers and 31 points, both career highs, and Ohio used a fast start to roll to a 76-61 win over Northern Illinois on Saturday.</p>
<p>Teyvion Kirk added 16 points for the Bobcats (8-6, 1-1 Mid-American Conference), who led 36-22 at the half after shooting 52 percent while the Huskies were at 29 percent.</p>
<p>Laster scored the first four points of the game, Kirk had the next four and a 3-pointer by Jordan Dartis had Ohio up 27-10 with 8:07 left in the first half.</p>
<p>Northern Illinois (8-7, 1-1) had an early 10-0 run in the second half to get within six but Laster or Kirk, who combined for 27 points after the break, had an answer. Northern Illinois shot 56 percent in the second half, going 6 of 12 from distance, but Ohio shot 62 percent.</p>
<p>Laster was 10 of 12 from the field, 5 of 6 behind the arc, and 6 of 7 from the foul line as he converted three 3-point plays.</p>
<p>Dante Thorpe and Eugene German had 15 points apiece for the Huskies and Levi Bradley added 14.</p>
<p>ATHENS, Ohio (AP) - Mike Laster had five 3-pointers and 31 points, both career highs, and Ohio used a fast start to roll to a 76-61 win over Northern Illinois on Saturday.</p>
<p>Teyvion Kirk added 16 points for the Bobcats (8-6, 1-1 Mid-American Conference), who led 36-22 at the half after shooting 52 percent while the Huskies were at 29 percent.</p>
<p>Laster scored the first four points of the game, Kirk had the next four and a 3-pointer by Jordan Dartis had Ohio up 27-10 with 8:07 left in the first half.</p>
<p>Northern Illinois (8-7, 1-1) had an early 10-0 run in the second half to get within six but Laster or Kirk, who combined for 27 points after the break, had an answer. Northern Illinois shot 56 percent in the second half, going 6 of 12 from distance, but Ohio shot 62 percent.</p>
<p>Laster was 10 of 12 from the field, 5 of 6 behind the arc, and 6 of 7 from the foul line as he converted three 3-point plays.</p>
<p>Dante Thorpe and Eugene German had 15 points apiece for the Huskies and Levi Bradley added 14.</p> | Laster scores 31, Ohio tops Northern Illinois 78-68 | false | https://apnews.com/d709bb047a604ce3919177d3a491e0df | 2018-01-06 | 2 |
<p>Tibet's exiled leader announced that after half a century of floating the idea, he is ready to <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12689911" type="external">hand over</a> his political power to an elected official. The 14th Dalai Lama has led his government in exile since the Tibetan uprising of 1959 was put down, forcing him to flee the country.</p>
<p>BBC:</p>
<p>"As early as the 1960s, I have repeatedly stressed that Tibetans need a leader, elected freely by the Tibetan people, to whom I can devolve power," he said at Dharamsala, the Indian town that has become his base.</p>
<p>"Now, we have clearly reached the time to put this into effect."</p>
<p />
<p><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12689911" type="external">Read more</a></p> | Dalai Lama to Give Up Politics | true | https://truthdig.com/articles/dalai-lama-to-give-up-politics/ | 2011-03-10 | 4 |
<p>Years later, Fox's Bill O'Reilly continues to have selective amnesia when it comes to his visit to Sylvia's restaurant in Harlem with the Rev. Al Sharpton.</p>
<p>Bill-O opened his show this Friday night with another rant about how liberals and political correctness are destroying the universe, and <a href="http://foxnewsinsider.com/2014/05/16/performance-%E2%80%98ymca%E2%80%99-school-talent-show-canceled-being-racist" type="external">complaining about</a> a <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/fox-and-friends/blog/2014/05/16/%E2%80%98hump-day%E2%80%99-event-cancelled-after-students-claim-bringing-camel-campus-was-racist" type="external">couple of their</a> latest faux "scandals" which they use to keep the outrage machine cranked up to 11 on a daily basis.</p>
<p>While ranting that minorities should be furious with liberals for supposedly using them as political pawns to stifle dissent, and accusing poor conservative victims like himself of racism, O'Reilly decided to once again claim that his remarks about his visit to the Harlem restaurant Sylvia's with Sharpton <a href="" type="internal">were taken out of context.</a></p>
<p>O'REILLY: I used the example of Sylvia's restaurant in Harlem, where I dined, excuse me, with Al Sharpton, and I picked up the check as I always do.</p>
<p>I said on the radio that Sylvia's was a great place and the same or better than any other restaurant. There was no cultural difference.</p>
<p>I was trying to illustrate the foolishness of generalized bigotry.</p>
<p>The vile Media Matters web site immediately said I was condescending and Sharpton, sometime later parroted that, even though he knows it's untrue.</p>
<p>How dare <a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/2007/09/21/oreilly-surprised-there-was-no-difference-betwe/139893" type="external">Media Matters record O'Reilly and quote exactly what he said.</a> The nerve of them. All these years later and Bill-O thinks we can't go back and listen to him on these things called recording devices.</p> | O'Reilly Continues To Have Selective Amnesia On Visit To Harlem Restaurant | true | http://crooksandliars.com/2014/05/oreilly-continues-have-selective-amnesia | 2014-05-17 | 4 |
<p>President Donald Trump is spoiling for a fight with Congress over funding a border wall with Mexico, but he’ll have a hard time waging that battle because of a looming deadline to avert a U.S. debt default.</p>
<p>Some of the president’s advisers consider a tough stand on border wall funding crucial to Trump’s credibility and even political survival, two White House officials said. Before his departure last week as Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, urged the president to go through with a government shutdown if necessary to force congress into providing money for the wall, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss strategy.</p>
<p>As allies in corporate America and the Republican establishment pull away from Trump and he declines in national polls, the president is increasingly dependent on a core following for whom his campaign vow of a border wall remains a visceral issue. The wall drama plays out as his decision to pour more troops and resources into Afghanistan risks disappointing supporters drawn by his pledges to cut U.S. military involvement abroad.</p>
<p>Failure to make progress on the border wall — or at least go to the mat on the issue — may fracture what has been a solid political base for the president, added a Republican consultant who closely follows that group of voters. Those loyal supporters haven’t shown signs of wavering amid the political backlash over Trump’s remarks on the violence in Virginia, but they need to see results on his promise of change if they are to stick with him, according to consultant, who also spoke on condition of anonymity.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-24/how-trump-s-wall-could-shut-the-government-down-quicktake-q-a" type="external">Q&amp;A: How Trump’s Wall Could Shut Down the Government</a></p>
<p>At a rally in Phoenix on Tuesday, Trump drew the line in the sand Bannon had urged.</p>
<p>“If we have to close down our government, we’re building that wall,” Trump pledged. “One way or the other, we’re going to get that wall.”</p>
<p>In public, Trump has stopped repeating his vow to make Mexico pay for the wall — which Republican lawmakers have estimated would require $12 billion to $15 billion — though his aides insist that’s still the president’s intention. The House included $1.6 billion to start construction of a section of wall in a package of spending bills for the next fiscal year that passed in the House in July, but the Senate hasn’t acted on it yet.</p>
<p>‪Asked Thursday if Trump would sign a spending measure that doesn’t include wall funding, press secretary Sarah Sanders was firm: “He won on talking about building the wall and he’s going to make sure that it gets done.”</p>
<p>Yet Sanders also repeated assurances that Trump is determined to avert a U.S. default, saying of the legal debt limit the U.S. is about to hit that the president is “still committed to making sure it gets raised.”</p>
<p>Getting Crowded</p>
<p>The dilemma for Trump is that in a crowded legislative calendar Congress needs to pass a spending measure to keep the government open after Sept. 30 at the same time it’s facing a deadline to raise the nation’s debt limit. While Republican leaders have yet to reveal a plan for how they’ll proceed, a likely scenario is to package the two measures together to get them to the president’s desk.</p>
<p>If the two issues are combined, that would compound the economic consequences of a stand-off. While federal government shutdowns have often provoked anger from voters, the U.S. has experienced a number of them with little long-term damage. But the country hasn’t ever defaulted on its debt, a step that could rattle financial markets and damage the U.S. reputation for creditworthiness</p>
<p>Trump fulminated against Republican congressional leaders over the debt-limit “mess” in a Twitter posting Thursday morning, saying they ignored advice he gave to include the debt-ceiling increase in a popular veterans bill. The tweet spurred a spike in investor concern that Congress and the White House may not act in time.</p>
<p>After his tweets, the rate on Treasury bills maturing Oct. 12 jumped by as much as 5 basis points, the largest intraday move since March.</p>
<p>Rates on those bills — which mature around the time the Treasury would be expected to run out of money unless there’s a debt limit increase — began rising Wednesday, one day after Trump threatened to shut down the government over getting money for the wall.</p>
<p>Back in July, House Speaker Paul Ryan and other GOP leaders did discuss using a veterans bill as a vehicle to raise the debt ceiling.&#160;But conservatives in the House are demanding that steep spending cuts accompany any debt bill.&#160;Lawmakers are still trying to figure out whether there is a debt bill that can pass with only Republican votes in the House, or whether they will need to move a bill with bipartisan support that doesn’t contain any spending cuts.</p>
<p>Democrats are almost uniformly opposed to paying for the border wall and their leaders are putting the onus for raising the government’s borrowing authority on Republicans, who control the White House and both chambers of Congress.</p>
<p>“Republicans need to stop the chaos and sort themselves out in a hurry,” House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said in a statement Thursday.</p>
<p>Ryan, who answered questions Thursday from employees at Boeing Co. in Everett, Washington, said the debt ceiling will be raised.</p>
<p>“I’m not worried that it isn’t going to get done because it’s going to get done,” he said.</p>
<p>Like Ryan, Republican Representative Charlie Dent said lawmakers also don’t want a government shutdown in October. Dent, who’s from the swing state of Pennsylvania, said bringing the government to a halt over $1.6 billion in wall money would be a “fool’s errand” and “political malpractice.”</p> | Trump Battle for Wall Money Squeezed by Deadline for Debt Limit | false | https://newsline.com/trump-battle-for-wall-money-squeezed-by-deadline-for-debt-limit/ | 2017-08-25 | 1 |
<p>Time’s Mark Halperin and New York Magazine’s John Heilemann’s new book ‘Game Change’ has caused enough of a ruckus that the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz wondered why they didn’t interview the candidates.</p>
<p>From the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/17/AR2010011702883.html" type="external">Washington Post</a></p>
<p>In the final weeks of the presidential campaign, we are now told, Barack Obama and his team grew so furious at Joe Biden’s repeated gaffes that “not only was Biden kept off Obama’s nightly campaign conference call, he wasn’t even told it existed.”</p>
<p>The running mate was so frustrated with how he was being handled — especially when “his access to the press was severely limited” — that he questioned new staffers on whether they were loyal to him or the Chicago gang. And after one particularly damaging blunder, “Obama phoned Biden and laid into him.”</p>
<p>These passages, from the new book “Game Change,” are at odds with the smoothly functioning Obama machine depicted by much of the media. What’s more, the book contains so much reporting of behind-the-scenes screaming and ugliness as to raise questions about whether journalists missed — or were misled about — much of what transpired in 2008.</p>
<p>To be sure, Time’s Mark Halperin and New York Magazine’s John Heilemann had the advantage of reconstructing the events after the fact, aided by operatives who were given a cloak of anonymity to dish and perhaps settle scores.</p>
<p>“One of the things people have said is that we’ve let the losers write the history, we’ve relied on people with axes to grind,” Halperin says. “We were so careful, so cautious in our sourcing. You won’t see a negative portrait, a negative description that relies simply on a person with an ax to grind.”</p>
<p>Within John McCain’s campaign, Heilemann says, “there were people who didn’t like Sarah Palin. We also talked to Sarah Palin loyalists.”</p>
<p>The book’s technique — omniscient narrative — is hardly new, and Halperin and Heilemann are veteran scribes who have known their political sources for years. But didn’t they have a responsibility to ask the former candidates for comment?</p>
<p>Jay Carney, a spokesman for Biden, says that “if the authors were concerned with accuracy, they might have checked their reporting with members of the vice president’s staff or sought to check it with the vice president himself. They did not.” He says the book, “perhaps unintentionally,” leaves readers with “the gross misimpression” of lingering tension between the two men.</p>
<p>Halperin calls that “a fundamentally false charge.” Adds Heilemann: “Jay’s perfectly aware we talked to many people in the vice president’s office.”</p>
<p>‘Background’ bonanza</p>
<p>The book, which had its debut on “60 Minutes,” relies on interviews with more than 200 people conducted on “deep background,” meaning the information could be used without identifying the sources. This enables the authors to describe unvarnished versions of heated and often profane arguments involving the candidates and their staffs, but it is also a recurring weakness. The most cooperative sources may have gotten to spin the narrative their way, and no one — such as Steve Schmidt, the former McCain aide who has publicly criticized Palin — was pressed to be on the record.</p>
<p>After watching what was depicted as Hillary Clinton’s befuddled reaction to losing the Iowa caucuses, one unnamed Clinton lieutenant is quoted as having said: “This woman shouldn’t be president.” This seems unfair, since readers have no way to evaluate the person’s motivation. Could it have been Patti Solis Doyle, whose thoughts are sometimes quoted — and who was fired as campaign manager? Halperin says it was a senior adviser whose reaction typified the shock that Clinton aides felt about the candidate’s behavior.</p>
<p>“Game Change” caused an immediate furor by quoting Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid as having said “privately” that Obama could win the presidency because he was “light-skinned” and had “no Negro dialect.” Reid apologized for the clumsy remarks, which his office confirmed he made to Halperin and Heilemann. But even with their source admitting the conversation, the authors refuse to confirm that they interviewed Reid. It’s not “in the public interest,” Halperin argues, for them to “get on the slippery slope” of acknowledging interviews.</p>
<p>Deep background means that you can describe someone’s thinking or reconstruct verbatim dialogue when you’re writing about events involving that person. As an author who has used the technique, I don’t believe it entitles you to directly quote what someone said to you, which effectively puts it on the record, and several other journalists have said they agree.</p>
<p>Still, the depth of the reporting here captures the craziness of campaigning in a more textured way than most contemporaneous accounts. What some critics dismiss as mere gossip — Clinton saying that Obama had “a lot of nerve” to touch her shoulder during a tense tarmac meeting — reveals something about the personal nature of the fight. That includes outright duplicity, such as Clinton’s reaction when one of her national co-chairs raised Obama’s past drug use — “Let’s push it out!” she said — even as her campaign disavowed the attack.</p>
<p>The timing of the books’ release couldn’t have been worse for the Democrats as it paints a picture of dysfunction and argument heretofore unkown during the 2008 campaign just as the party is struggling after a brusing battle on health care and recent losses in gubenatorialraces in New Jersey and Virginia.&#160;</p>
<p>This certainly won’t be the last word about the 2008 campaign but ir may serve as a precursor to future commentary on the elections in November.</p>
<p>Post #2557</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | Why Didn’t ‘Game Change” Authors Talk to the Candidates? | true | http://aim.org/don-irvine-blog/why-didnt-game-change-authors-talk-to-the-candidates/ | 2010-01-18 | 0 |
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<p />
<p>Aside from variations in cabins and service quality, there’s the major concern of how likely you are to get delayed. Fly on the wrong airline and your odds of a delay are as high as 55 percent; choose the right one and that number shrinks way down to just 11 percent. That’s enough to make or break a vacation’s spell, no matter where you’re sitting on the plane.</p>
<p>But how do you know which airlines to steer clear of, and which ones to prioritize?</p>
<p>Every year, the aviation insights company FlightStats puts together a list of the international airlines with the best on-time performance records. It’s the capstone to the company’s year-round efforts to track delay and cancellation patterns for airlines across the globe. We’ve asked them to share all of their annual findings so we can point out the losers, too. Without further ado, here are the full results, along with your likelihood of getting delayed on each carrier:</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>The Worst 10 International Airlines of 2016:</p>
<p>– 10. Hainan Airlines – 30.3 percent</p>
<p>– 9. Korean Air – 31.74 percent</p>
<p>– 8. Air China – 32.73 percent</p>
<p>– 7. Hong Kong Airlines – 33.42 percent</p>
<p>– 6. China Eastern Airlines – 35.8 percent</p>
<p>– 5. Asiana Airlines – 37.46 percent</p>
<p>– 4. Philippine Airlines – 38.33 percent</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>– 3. Air India – 38.71 percent</p>
<p>– 2. Icelandair – 41.05 percent</p>
<p>– 1. El Al – 56 percent</p>
<p>The Best 10 International Airlines of 2016:</p>
<p>– 10. Qantas – 15.7 percent</p>
<p>– 9. TAM Linhas Aéreas – 14.93 percent</p>
<p>– 8. Delta Air Lines – 14.83 percent</p>
<p>– 7. Singapore Airlines – 14.55 percent</p>
<p>– 6. ANA – 14.46 percent</p>
<p>– 5. Austrian – 14.26 percent</p>
<p>– 4. Qatar Airways – 13.66 percent</p>
<p>– 3. JAL – 12.2 percent</p>
<p>– 2. Iberia – 11.82 percent</p>
<p>– 1. KLM – 11.47 percent</p>
<p>According to Jim Hetzel, vice president of aviation and distribution at FlightStats, compiling the list is no small feat. The only comparable resource is the monthly report that the U.S. Department of Transportation puts out on major domestic carriers, relying uniquely on self-reported data from the biggest carriers in the United States; it doesn’t factor in any of those airlines’ international flights.</p>
<p>“We stitch data together from 500 different sources,” said Hetzel, likening the process to creating a giant quilt.</p>
<p>Among those sources are flight-tracking and positional services, airport runway times, radar services, airline records, airport data, and such governing bodies as Eurocontrol and the Federal Aviation Administration. “All of these pieces come in in different formats, all with different elements of value, and a lot of times the sources don’t agree,” said Hetzel as to why his business is so unrivaled.</p>
<p>“We’ve built the technology and logic to sort that out and validate information across multiple sources. It’s a pretty interesting process,” he said.</p>
<p>As for this year’s results? Hetzel says they’re the best numbers yet. “I’m seeing a big improvement in overall performance across the board as the industry becomes more and more competitive,” he said, noting that on-time performance has become a major selling point for airlines. “It’s a huge win for travelers.” (Air India disagrees with the above assessment, spokesperson Dhananjay Kumar said in a statement.)</p>
<p>In an especially impressive coup, Delta still ranked in the top 10 carriers after suffering a days-long system outage in the summer that made headlines around the world. Other results go against the grain of local reputations for punctuality. Latin American carrier Copa would have taken the top spot on this list if its route network were larger; it didn’t qualify it as a truly international carrier because it doesn’t serve three or more regions with a substantial route network. And Swiss fell in the middle of the pack, notwithstanding Switzerland’s identification with precision clockwork.</p> | These are the best- and worst-performing airlines in the world | false | https://abqjournal.com/923819/these-are-the-best-and-worst-performing-airlines-in-the-world.html | 2017-01-09 | 2 |
<p>This never would have happened when Hosni Mubarak was president.</p>
<p>On Friday evening, a few dozen protesters gathered outside the gate of Kasr al-Ittihadiya, one of three presidential palaces in Cairo. It was a small demonstration by Egyptian standards.</p>
<p>On this street, next to the place where the ousted dictator used to conduct affairs, Egyptians knew they could be stopped just for walking down the sidewalk in a group of five or more people.</p>
<p>A large demonstration here would not have been tolerated.</p>
<p>Hundreds of riot police were lined up outside the palace. And they stood by, looking bored, as protesters sent a message to their new president.</p>
<p>“Mohammed Morsi was brought to power by the revolution,” said activist Mohammed Talaat. “He has an obligation to free thousands of protesters still in military custody. This should be his top priority.”</p>
<p>Talaat said he hoped the president is being honest when he says he is listening to the concerns of the people. They have no small amount of concern.</p>
<p>That was apparent on Saturday morning outside Abdeen Palace in downtown Cairo, another seat of government where President Morsi is expected to conduct official business. Outside one of the entrances, several dozen people gathered to submit personal petitions to the president himself.</p>
<p>Mahahten Abdel-Moneim Ibrahim came to Cairo from the Nile Delta town of Mansoura, a few hours drive away. She held a hand-written plea to President Morsi and waited for her turn to enter the palace and submit the petition to officials inside.</p>
<p>Ibrahim said her 34-year-old son got married almost a year ago. But he could not afford the rent and lost his apartment. Now, he is living at his parents’ home and he is desperate. The young man even threatened to kill himself out of shame, she said.</p>
<p>“Please, can the president help her son and daughter-in-law find a place to live?" she said.</p>
<p>When asked if she expected Morsi to fix things, Ibrahim said, “Sure, God willing.”</p>
<p>A young father named Walid Maher came to the palace with his pregnant wife and their disabled 3-year-old girl.</p>
<p>“I make $3 a day selling packets of tissues on the street in Cairo,” he said. “My daughter’s medical bills add up to about $30 a week.”</p>
<p>The toddler can’t talk or walk, he said, and she needs surgery that costs more than $30,000.</p>
<p>Maher said he came to ask Egypt’s president for a better job, or at least some housing assistance, just to get by.</p>
<p>Morsi is said to be locked in a power struggle with the powerful Egyptian military. But listening to people’s stories outside the palace offered a close-up view at the president’s biggest challenge: meeting the daily needs of millions of people living at the bottom of Egypt’s crippled economy.</p>
<p>The former leader with the Muslim Brotherhood has promised the Egyption public big things. He has vowed to deal with the following five priorities in his first 100 days: traffic, trash, security, food and fuel. On top of that, Morsi’s government opened up two public complaint offices.</p>
<p>Within five days, the offices received 10,000 petitions.</p>
<p>And they are still coming in, from Egyptians like 60-year-old Mohammed Abu-Zeid Shayhoun.</p>
<p>Standing outside Abdeen palace, Shayhoun said he is nearly blind and can no longer work. He lives with his wife and four kids in a one-room apartment in Cairo and he brings in a pension of about a $1 a day.</p>
<p>“I went to local officials to ask for assistance and they told me to go ‘ask the revolution,’ ” Shayhoun said. “It was us, the poor people, who made the revolution happen. If President Morsi doesn’t help us, we will have another revolution and we’ll get rid of him too.”</p>
<p>The ruling military council says it wants to hand over power to a civilian authority, but the generals still control most of the levers of political power in Egypt. Morsi is staking his political success on electoral politics. The question is, has he set himself up for failure by raising impossibly high expectations?</p>
<p>Mohamed El-Baltagy is a member of parliament and a senior official with the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party.</p>
<p>“No one leader can solve everyone’s problems,” Baltagy said, at the party’s headquarters in downtown Cairo. “But President Morsi takes these petitions from the public seriously.”</p>
<p>Baltagy says it's not the time or the place to be making demands of the new government, though.</p>
<p>"People will see the president is serious, when he starts to deliver on his promises," he said.</p> | Egypt's President Morsi invites public petitions for government help | false | https://pri.org/stories/2012-07-17/egypts-president-morsi-invites-public-petitions-government-help | 2012-07-17 | 3 |
<p>QUITO, Ecuador (AP) — Former President Rafael Correa on Tuesday left the political party that helped cement his rise to power in Ecuador, the latest step in a fight with the man he chose to succeed him and continue his "Citizens' Revolution."</p>
<p>Correa announced he is removing himself from Alianza Pais, the leftist movement he founded in 2006. More than two dozen other leaders and lawmakers are also quitting.</p>
<p>The departing faction intends to start a new party called Citizens' Revolution, the phrase Correa often uses to describe his socialist movement aimed at reducing the nation's inequality.</p>
<p>President Lenin Moreno has fallen out of favor with Correa since his election last year. Moreno pushed through a national referendum next month in which Ecuadoreans will vote on a proposed constitutional amendment that would make it impossible for Correa to run again for president.</p>
<p>QUITO, Ecuador (AP) — Former President Rafael Correa on Tuesday left the political party that helped cement his rise to power in Ecuador, the latest step in a fight with the man he chose to succeed him and continue his "Citizens' Revolution."</p>
<p>Correa announced he is removing himself from Alianza Pais, the leftist movement he founded in 2006. More than two dozen other leaders and lawmakers are also quitting.</p>
<p>The departing faction intends to start a new party called Citizens' Revolution, the phrase Correa often uses to describe his socialist movement aimed at reducing the nation's inequality.</p>
<p>President Lenin Moreno has fallen out of favor with Correa since his election last year. Moreno pushed through a national referendum next month in which Ecuadoreans will vote on a proposed constitutional amendment that would make it impossible for Correa to run again for president.</p> | Ex-Ecuador leader Rafael Correa leaves leftist ruling party | false | https://apnews.com/amp/d38e97dc96894e5dbf17d0e504c00c70 | 2018-01-16 | 2 |
<p>COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — Authorities have determined that the death of a toddler in Colorado Springs was a homicide.</p>
<p>Police Lt. Howard Black says 3-year-old Bella Ritch died at a hospital after she was knocked unconscious Oct. 2. The El Paso County coroner’s office says she died of blunt-force trauma, and the investigation remains active.</p>
<p>No arrests have been made, and no other information was released.</p>
<p>COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — Authorities have determined that the death of a toddler in Colorado Springs was a homicide.</p>
<p>Police Lt. Howard Black says 3-year-old Bella Ritch died at a hospital after she was knocked unconscious Oct. 2. The El Paso County coroner’s office says she died of blunt-force trauma, and the investigation remains active.</p>
<p>No arrests have been made, and no other information was released.</p> | Coroner: Toddler’s death in Colorado Springs was homicide | false | https://apnews.com/7ca8089163b04f2d9cf259992b8b1dce | 2018-01-17 | 2 |
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<p>ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Channel 14-KFOX in El Paso is one of several television stations in four U.S. markets to be sold by the Cox Media Group to the Sinclair Broadcast Group in an agreement announced by both companies on Monday, the <a href="http://www.elpasotimes.com/newupdated/ci_22665351/channel-14-kfox-be-sold-sinclair-broadcast-group" type="external">El Paso Times</a> reported.</p>
<p>KFOX Vice President/General Manager John Witte told the Times that the sale to Sinclair is not expected to change the shows, programs and local news on the station, which will remain a Fox network affiliate.</p>
<p>KFOX also will retain its 78 full- and part-time employees in El Paso and Las Cruces, Witte told the paper.</p>
<p>The other Cox television stations to be sold along with KFOX are WJAC, an NBC affiliate in Johnstown, Pa.; WTOV, an NBC affiliate in Steubenville, Ohio; and KRXI, a Fox affiliate, and KAME, a MyNetwork affiliate, both in Reno, Nev., according to the Times.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> | El Paso TV station KFOX to be sold | false | https://abqjournal.com/172672/el-paso-tv-station-kfox-to-be-sold.html | 2 |
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<p>Members of President Donald Trump’s Evangelical Advisory Board are reportedly taking credit for a six-month delay until a program protecting 800,000 young illegal immigrants is ended.</p>
<p>“We are responsible for this extension . . . That’s our work,” Tony Suarez, executive vice president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/09/05/trumps-evangelical-advisers-claim-credit-for-six-month-delay-on-rescinding-daca/" type="external">told the Washington Post</a>.</p>
<p>According to the Post, Suarez said he and conference president Samuel Rodriguez have worked on behalf of “Dreamers” since the board was formed last summer —&#160;and stepped up pressure last week.</p>
<p>On Friday, a small number of evangelical pastors met with Trump, with Jentezen Franklin, a pastor from a multiethnic church near Atlanta, pleaded with Trump on behalf of those protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, the Post reported.</p>
<p>“I shake their hands at the end of my sermons,” Franklin said he told the president, the Post reported. “I stand and shake hands for hours: I pastor the dreamer kids.”</p>
<p>A White House official didn’t directly corroborate the advisory board’s assertion, the Post reported, saying only a large number of people were “part of the process.”</p>
<p>Though other presidential advisory boards <a href="https://www.newsmax.com/Politics/business-panel-donald-trump-disband/2017/08/17/id/808128/" type="external">have been disbanded</a> in the wake of Trump’s statements following a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Suarez said he’ll continue to serve.</p>
<p>“If the administration gives us a deaf ear, that is a different conversation,” he told the Post. “In today’s decision, we see the result of having access to the president. We were able to be a voice for the voiceless.”</p> | Evangelical Board: We're Responsible for 6-month Delay on DACA | false | https://newsline.com/evangelical-board-were-responsible-for-6-month-delay-on-daca/ | 2017-09-05 | 1 |
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<p>The lab called attention to the honors in a news release today.</p>
<p>“To have three of our premier scientists recognized on this list is a great honor and attests to the intellectual vitality that feeds the breadth of disciplines essential to our national security mission,” said LANL Director Charles McMillan. . “The fact that one of those named is a former student and postdoctoral researcher makes me confident that our pipeline programs are actively inspiring future generations of scientific excellence.”</p>
<p>The lab provided these profiles of and comments from the three scientists:</p>
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<p>Alan Perelson</p>
<p>Alan Perelson</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>“It is an honor to have the value of my work recognized and to be included in this list,” Perelson, of the Laboratory’s Theoretical Biology and Biophysics group, said. “However, the real success in my area of modeling infectious disease only comes when the work has an impact on treating diseases such as HIV, influenza and hepatitis and ultimately in saving lives.”</p>
<p>Perelson is part of a multinational team whose work contributed to the <a href="http://links.govdelivery.com:80/track?type=click&amp;enid=ZWFzPTEmbWFpbGluZ2lkPTIwMTQwNzIyLjM0MzI2ODExJm1lc3NhZ2VpZD1NREItUFJELUJVTC0yMDE0MDcyMi4zNDMyNjgxMSZkYXRhYmFzZWlkPTEwMDEmc2VyaWFsPTE3MDA4MTE4JmVtYWlsaWQ9bW9zd2FsZEBhYnFqb3VybmFsLmNvbSZ1c2VyaWQ9bW9zd2FsZEBhYnFqb3VybmFsLmNvbSZmbD0mZXh0cmE9TXVsdGl2YXJpYXRlSWQ9JiYm&amp;&amp;&amp;101&amp;&amp;&amp;http://www.lanl.gov/newsroom/publications/connections/2013-03/understanding-hep-c.php" type="external">understanding of the Hepatitis C virus and a possible cure</a>. Originally from New York City, he is a Senior Fellow at the Laboratory, an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, an adjunct professor of bioinformatics at Boston University, an adjunct professor of biology at the University of New Mexico and an adjunct professor of biostatistics at the University of Rochester’s School of Medicine.</p>
<p>He earned his bachelor’s degrees in life sciences and in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his doctoral degree in biophysics from the University of California-Berkeley. He has been the group leader of the Theoretical Biology and Biophysics group at the Laboratory. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the recipient of the National Institute of Health’s MERIT Award. Perelson has published more than 490 articles that have been cited over 45,000 times.</p>
<p>Bette Korber</p>
<p>Bette Korber</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>Korber is also part of the Laboratory’s Theoretical Biology and Biophysics group.</p>
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<p>“I am proud to have made the list and it is particularly nice to be there along with my colleague Alan Perelson,” she said.</p>
<p>Korber is a Laboratory Fellow and also works at the <a href="http://links.govdelivery.com:80/track?type=click&amp;enid=ZWFzPTEmbWFpbGluZ2lkPTIwMTQwNzIyLjM0MzI2ODExJm1lc3NhZ2VpZD1NREItUFJELUJVTC0yMDE0MDcyMi4zNDMyNjgxMSZkYXRhYmFzZWlkPTEwMDEmc2VyaWFsPTE3MDA4MTE4JmVtYWlsaWQ9bW9zd2FsZEBhYnFqb3VybmFsLmNvbSZ1c2VyaWQ9bW9zd2FsZEBhYnFqb3VybmFsLmNvbSZmbD0mZXh0cmE9TXVsdGl2YXJpYXRlSWQ9JiYm&amp;&amp;&amp;102&amp;&amp;&amp;https://www.newmexicoconsortium.org/" type="external">New Mexico Consortium</a>. Her work focuses on the human immune response to HIV infection and HIV evolution. She uses that knowledge as a foundation to enable HIV vaccine design. She also leads the HIV sequence and immunology database project at Los Alamos, a global service for HIV researchers.</p>
<p>She earned her bachelor’s degree in chemistry from California State University-Long Beach, where she comes from, and her doctoral degree in Chemistry and Biology from the California Institute of Technology.</p>
<p>Allison Aiken</p>
<p>Allison Aiken</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>“I am excited to be on the list and I am very thankful to all of my mentors and colleagues,” Aiken, of the Laboratory’s Earth System Observations group, said.</p>
<p>Aiken was converted from a post-doctoral researcher to a research scientist last year at the Laboratory and is early in her career for such a distinguished recognition; her focus has been on ambient aerosol measurements. She received her undergraduate degrees from Furman University in 2002 in both chemistry and biology, where she was already combining laboratory and field work.</p>
<p>Originally from Winter Park Florida, she came to the Laboratory as a student in 2000, which inspired her to pursue her doctorate degree in atmospheric science. She received her doctoral degree in Chemistry in 2008 from the University of Colorado-Boulder for her work on aerosol mass spectrometry, which included both laboratory and field measurements. While earning her doctoral degree, she developed a new and largely applied elemental analysis procedure for aerosol mass spectrometry. Her specialties include the complex data analysis required from real-time direct online aerosol measurements.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>Highlighting some of the standout researchers from the past decade, Thomson Reuters compiled 3,000 of the most influential authors in 21 fields of science or social science. The researchers made the list by writing the greatest numbers of reports officially designated by essential science indicators as highly cited papers.</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | 3 at LANL among ‘most influential scientific minds’ | false | https://abqjournal.com/433404/3-at-lanl-among-most-influential-scientific-minds.html | 2 |
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<p>It’s World Contraception Day, and <a href="http://www.guttmacher.org/media/nr/2012/09/25/index.html#.UGMK-X-49vw.twitter" type="external">Guttmacher has come out</a> with a U.S. study finding the obvious, but still necessary to point out: Women take contraception because it makes their lives better.</p>
<p>New evidence confirms what most people already believe: Women use contraception because it allows them to better care for themselves and their families, complete their education and achieve economic security, according to “ <a href="http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/j.contraception.2012.08.012.pdf" type="external">Reasons for Using Contraception: Perspectives of U.S. Women Seeking Care at Specialized Family Planning Clinics</a>,” by&#160;Jennifer Frost&#160;and&#160;Laura Lindberg&#160;of the Guttmacher Institute.</p>
<p>“Women value the ability to plan their childbearing, and view doing so as critical to being able to achieve their life goals,” says study author&#160;Laura Lindberg. “They need continued access to a wide range of contraceptives so they can plan their families and determine when they are ready to have children.”*</p>
<p>While it seems ridiculous to think we actually have to conduct studies like this, it’s become abundantly clear that politicians&#160;and pundits alike have been trying to say/legislate otherwise — for both contraception and abortion. And since people who choose abortion actually do so for <a href="http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3711005.html" type="external">similar reasons</a> as they do for contraception, these kinds of studies show more&#160;than the fact that reproductive freedom allows us to pursue our life goals — but that restrictions on those freedoms are infringements on the educational opportunities, economic security and&#160;all of the fundamental pieces that contribute to the lives we desire for ourselves. It’s not just our bodily integrity that’s on the line, but our futures.</p>
<p>*Or&#160;if&#160;they want to have children.</p> | Breaking: Women take contraception because it makes their lives better | true | http://feministing.com/2012/09/26/breaking-women-take-contraception-because-it-makes-their-lives-better/ | 4 |
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<p>Shares of ski operator Vail Resorts Inc. rose 3% in premarket trade Friday, after the company blew past earnings estimates for its latest quarter and said it is raising its dividend. Vail said it had net income of $149.2 million, or $3.63 a share, in its fiscal fourth quarter to end January, up from $116.9 million, or $3.14 a share, in the year-earlier period. Revenue rose to $725.2 million from $599.4 million. The FactSet consensus was for EPS of $3.40 and revenue of $709 million. "We had strong results during the holidays and the month of January despite a slower start to the season at our U.S. resorts resulting from below average early season conditions," Chief Executive Rob Katz said in a statement. The company said its board has approved a 30% increase in its quarterly dividend to $1.053 per share, payable April 13 to shareholders of record as of March 29.</p>
<p>Copyright © 2017 MarketWatch, Inc.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p> | Vail Resort Stock Climbs 3% As Earnings Blow Past Estimates, Company Raises Dividend By 30% | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/03/10/vail-resort-stock-climbs-3-as-earnings-blow-past-estimates-company-raises.html | 2017-03-17 | 0 |
<p />
<p>DigiTimes recently published an article in which it said that both Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (NYSE: TSM) and its archrival Samsung (NASDAQOTH: SSNLF) are seeing lower-than-expected manufacturing yield rates on their new 10-nanometer manufacturing technologies.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Image source: Apple.</p>
<p>This, the report suggests, could have an impact on Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) upcoming iPads.</p>
<p>"TSMC is scheduled to start making Apple's A10X chips for the next-generation iPad series slated for launch in March 2017," the report says. DigiTimes, citing industry sources, explains that "unsatisfactory yields for the foundry's 10nm process could disrupt the schedule."</p>
<p>But I don't think Apple investors ought to worry too much about a potential iPad schedule slip due to 10nm yield woes. Here's why.</p>
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<p>In fiscal year 2016, Apple shipped 45.59 million iPad units, or just under 22% the number of iPhone units that it shipped during that time.</p>
<p>From a raw volume-shipment perspective, iPad is nowhere close to iPhone.</p>
<p>Furthermore, while Apple tends to see a massive mix shift toward its latest iPhone models when new ones are released, the shift toward the latest iPad models is unlikely to be as significant once new models are released.</p>
<p>Apple doesn't break down its unit shipments by individual model, but a recent report from market-research company IDC claimed that even with the iPad Pro (9.7-inch and 12.9-inch versions) on the market, "the iPad Air and Mini lines have been the models with mass appeal, accounting for more than two-thirds of [Apple's iPad] shipments this quarter."</p>
<p>It is unlikely that iPad models with 10nm A10X chips will account for the bulk of Apple's iPad sales in the quarters following the launches of the new devices; it's more likely that most of the iPad models that Apple ships will use older chips, manufactured in more mature 14/16-nanometer technologies.</p>
<p>So, if manufacturing yields on the 10nm A10X chip are low, this will only impact a fraction of Apple's total iPad volume shipments. And since the required volumes are so low, Apple might very well be able to compensate for low yields by simply having TSMC run more A10X wafers (and potentially having TSMC eat the increased costs associated with the lower-than-expected yields).</p>
<p>Although I don't think a chip-related delay of the new iPad models is likely, it's important to put the relationship of Apple's iPad sales to Apple's overall business into perspective. Shipments of iPads are far dwarfed by iPhone shipments, and average selling prices on iPad models are generally much lower than they are on iPhone models.</p>
<p>That means that, in fiscal year 2016, iPad revenue made up -- and this figure is rounded up -- just 9.6% of the company's total revenue. Unless the tablet market can be fundamentally reinvigorated, which seems unlikely in the near term (Apple's iPad sales have continued to plunge even as it introduces solid new products), being a month or two late with new iPads just isn't going to make a lasting difference to Apple's financial performance.</p>
<p>10 stocks we like better than Apple When investing geniuses David and Tom Gardner have a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, the newsletter they have run for over a decade, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has tripled the market.*</p>
<p>David and Tom just revealed what they believe are the <a href="http://infotron.fool.com/infotrack/click?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fool.com%2Fmms%2Fmark%2Fe-foolcom-sa-bbn-dyn%3Faid%3D8867%26source%3Disaeditxt0010449%26ftm_cam%3Dsa-bbn-evergreen%26ftm_pit%3D6312%26ftm_veh%3Dbbn_article_pitch&amp;impression=b6f62dc8-d71c-43e7-b664-584f375e4e78&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">10 best stocks Opens a New Window.</a> for investors to buy right now and Apple wasn't one of them! That's right -- they think these 10 stocks are even better buys.</p>
<p><a href="http://infotron.fool.com/infotrack/click?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fool.com%2Fmms%2Fmark%2Fe-foolcom-sa-bbn-dyn%3Faid%3D8867%26source%3Disaeditxt0010449%26ftm_cam%3Dsa-bbn-evergreen%26ftm_pit%3D6312%26ftm_veh%3Dbbn_article_pitch&amp;impression=b6f62dc8-d71c-43e7-b664-584f375e4e78&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">Click here Opens a New Window.</a> to learn about these picks!</p>
<p>*Stock Advisor returns as of Nov. 7, 2016</p>
<p><a href="http://my.fool.com/profile/aeassa/info.aspx" type="external">Ashraf Eassa Opens a New Window.</a> has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Apple. The Motley Fool has the following options: long January 2018 $90 calls on Apple and short January 2018 $95 calls on Apple.</p>
<p>Try any of our Foolish newsletter services <a href="http://www.fool.com/shop/newsletters/index.aspx?source=isiedilnk018048&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">free for 30 days Opens a New Window.</a>. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that <a href="http://www.fool.com/knowledge-center/motley.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">considering a diverse range of insights Opens a New Window.</a> makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a <a href="http://www.fool.com/Legal/fool-disclosure-policy.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">disclosure policy Opens a New Window.</a>.</p> | Why Apple Inc.'s Next iPad Pro Won't Be Delayed Due to Chip Yields | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2016/12/27/why-apple-inc-next-ipad-pro-wont-be-delayed-due-to-chip-yields.html | 2016-12-27 | 0 |
<p><a href="" type="internal" /></p>
<p>Seth Connell <a href="" type="internal">reports</a> that Chicago has a certain level of notoriety for the simply shocking rate of murder and gun crimes in the city, but one must always be sure to provide the caveat that most of the crime is highly concentrated even within the city. There are some very safe areas of Chicago, then some very, very bad ones. This considered though, Chicago does not have the highest rate of gun homicides; Baltimore, Maryland does.</p>
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<p>According to the site <a href="http://heyjackass.com/" type="external">HeyJackass!</a>, which documents the crime rates in various parts of Chicago, a total of 503 have been shot and killed. Another 2,425 have been shot and wounded, with a total of 2,2928 shot so far this year. Total homicides now number at 540.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that Chicago has about 2.7 million residents. The gun homicide rate is at approximately 18 per 100,000 people. That’s well over the national average of 3.5 per 100,000 according to the <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm" type="external">CDC</a> statistics for 2014.</p>
<p>Breaking news updates and daily headlines from a news source you can trust.</p>
<p>According to <a href="http://dailycallernewsfoundation.org/2017/10/06/forget-chicago-baltimore-has-more-than-double-its-gun-homicide-rate/" type="external">The Daily Caller</a>, Baltimore, the city of 621,000 residents currently has 275 gun homicides so far this year. That puts the gun homicide rate at an astounding 44 per 100,000, more than twice that of Chicago, despite the fact that Baltimore is a fraction of the size.</p>
<p>The city — which is another Democratic stronghold — set a homicide record back in 1992, when there were 100,000 more residents. That year, there were 262 homicides according to the <a href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-ci-shooting-20171002-story.html" type="external">Baltimore Sun</a>.</p>
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<p>The city has had five months with at least 30 murders in those months. The Sun notes that between 2008 and 2014, no month ever had more than 30 murders.</p>
<p>Baltimore’s leaders said they plan to stick with their earlier plan for tackling the violence, believing it will ultimately bring the homicide rate down.</p>
<p>Mayor Catherine Pugh said the strategy involves working with police to get more officers out on the streets in the short term and creating more educational and economic opportunities for city residents in the long term.</p>
<p>“With all of that, I believe that time will tell the story that Baltimore’s violence has been reduced,” Pugh said.</p>
<p>Despite this, the crime rates in Maryland’s biggest city continue to skyrocket at alarming rates. Making the job of reducing the crime rate even more difficult is the fact that the Baltimore Police Department has had an alarming number of misconduct cases reported, leading many cases to be thrown out because of tainted evidence.</p>
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<p>I <a href="" type="internal">have reported</a> on <a href="" type="internal">several incidents</a> where Baltimore Police officers are busted on their own body cameras planting evidence, then leaving the area for a short time; only a few minutes later, they claim to have “found” drugs in the location where they planted the evidence.</p>
<p>Many innocent people have been arrested on drug charges because of their planted evidence.</p>
<p>The Daily Caller notes that eight officers have been implicated in misconduct investigations, where evidence is falsified. Because of that, State Attorney Marilyn Mosby (yes, that Marilyn Mosby) has had to throw out more than 100 cases connected to those officers, and her office is in the process of reviewing about 850 more.</p>
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<p>Because of the department’s systemic misconduct, many investigations are tossed, and actual criminals are put back into communities where they continue to commit violent crimes, this time with impunity because of officials’ idiocy.</p>
<p>Just like many other Democratic strongholds, the driving force behind much of this societal breakdown lies with those who claim to be the most active proponents of their community, the ones who continuously try to expand the scope of the abysmal welfare state, set up more abortion mills in their cities, and who advocate for policies that prevent the good people from stopping the violent crime that does exist.</p>
<p>It’s a cycle of lunacy that will continue for the foreseeable future. It will only end when these locations collapse in on themselves, and then have a total reset.</p>
<p>What do you think? Scroll down to comment below.</p> | Where Liberals Who Want Gun Control Should Go Right Now | true | http://thefederalistpapers.org/us/liberals-want-gun-control-go-right-now | 0 |
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<p><a href="" type="internal" />California’s vital farm sector could see costs rise sharply if <a href="http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201320140SB25&amp;search_keywords=" type="external">SB 25</a> becomes law. Backed by state Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, it would allow the United Farm Workers labor union to force an employer into mandatory mediation at any time.</p>
<p>The bill would put farm workers under the state’s Mandatory Mediation and Conciliation law. Under that law, the California Agriculture Labor Relations Board could impose wages, terms and conditions of employment on the farm workers and the company itself. The terms of an agreement would decided by a single arbitrator/mediator, who meets with the employer and the union separately, and drafts the contract. Workers never would get to vote on the contract (as they do with collective-bargaining agreements).</p>
<p>The bill is sponsored by the <a href="http://www.ufw.org" type="external">United Farm Workers</a>&#160;labor union, which has come under hard times since legendary co-founder Cesar Chavez died in 1993. As the Nation magazine <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/165479/cesar-chavez-and-farmworkers-what-went-wrong#" type="external">reported in 2012,</a> mismanagement has caused the union’s membership to nosedive from a peak of 50,000 to about 6,000 today.</p>
<p>Steinberg, a former labor union lawyer, is not only carrying the legislation, but using his considerable influence to get the bill signed into law.&#160;&#160; <a href="http://leginfo.ca.gov/pub/13-14/bill/sen/sb_0001-0050/sb_25_bill_20130619_amended_asm_v96.pdf" type="external">SB 25</a>&#160; passed both houses of the Legislature and awaits a decision by Gov. Jerry Brown on whether to sign it.</p>
<p>Farm owner Dan Gerawan calls Steinberg’s bill a “surgical strike against the industry.”&#160; <a href="http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201320140SB25&amp;search_keywords=" type="external">SB 25</a>&#160;could wipe out Gerawan’s family-owned farm, currently employing 5,000 workers, as well as six other targeted farming businesses.</p>
<p>Farmers and growers could be forced into fast track mandatory binding mediation with a collective bargaining agreement. This would severely limit any due process an employer may have to appeal a mediator’s order to a court.</p>
<p><a href="http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201320140SB25&amp;search_keywords=" type="external">SB 25</a>&#160;would expand the use of mandatory mediation under California’s <a href="http://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2298&amp;context=lawreview" type="external">Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975</a>, and would&#160;remove the current requirement that the employer must have committed an Unfair Labor Practice prior to mandatory mediation. SB 25&#160;seeks to shorten the length of time it takes for a mediation decision to become binding, as well as reduce the number of negotiations that qualify for the process.</p>
<p>Dan Gerawan’s story depicts a state government seeking to encroach on private sector business. Gerawan says that, if <a href="http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201320140SB25&amp;search_keywords=" type="external">SB 25</a>is signed into law, he could lose his business and thousands of his workers could lose their jobs.</p>
<p>He believes the real motive behind <a href="http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201320140SB25&amp;search_keywords=" type="external">SB 25</a> targets his 5,000 workers, as well as other large farming companies’ workers. Forcing Gerawan’s workers into the UFW would almost double the union’s size — assuming the workers didn’t lose their jobs. <a href="" type="internal" /></p>
<p>The UFW won an election to organize Gerawan Farming more than 20 years ago. The election was certified by the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board in 1990. The UFW held only one meeting a couple of years later, then abandoned the farm due to lack of worker support, according to Gerawan. There was never a contract.</p>
<p>Gerawan has testified at each legislative committee hearing for SB 25 that his company offers the highest paying employment package in the industry; his workers don’t need or want the union.</p>
<p>“After campaigning to represent those workers over 20 years ago and being certified as their exclusive bargaining agent in 1992, the UFW did essentially nothing to represent those workers,” Gerawan said.</p>
<p>Then, without warning, the UFW union reentered the scene in late 2012, claiming it represented Gerawan’s workers.</p>
<p>“To our knowledge, the UFW has never asserted, as a justification for its failure to do anything, an alleged statement by us that we would not sign a contract,” Gerawan explained. “They didn’t file unfair labor practice charges, or even send us a letter, or call us in 20 years.”</p>
<p>The UFW recently invoked the <a href="http://www.alrb.ca.gov" type="external">Agricultural Labor Relations Act</a>, and the <a href="http://www.alrb.ca.gov" type="external">California Agricultural Labor Relations Board</a> compelled Gerawan Farming into Mandatory Mediation and Conciliation.</p>
<p>The UFW has invoked the law only a few times since 1975 because the union cannot use mediation until it gains contracts. According to Gerawan, the union has been largely unsuccessful in its attempts to organize workers in the last two decades. “The UFW is so inept,” Gerawan said. “They abandoned the workers, and now they are back to pick the pockets of the highest paid workers in the industry.”</p>
<p>“The UFW won a contested election at my family’s company 23 years ago,” Gerawan first told me in June. “But after only one bargaining session, they disappeared. The UFW completely abandoned the workers. We have no right to opt-out. Neither do our workers. They won’t be asked to ratify this contract. They won’t be asked to authorize the UFW to negotiate. They are not given that choice.”</p>
<p>SB 25 would be a weapon so powerful there would no longer be a need to negotiate with the UFW, only to capitulate to union demands, according to Gerawan.</p>
<p>In 2011, Steinberg authored&#160; <a href="http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/11-12/bill/sen/sb_0101-0150/sb_104_bill_20110112_introduced.pdf" type="external">SB 104,</a>which sought to give the UFW the ability to organize farm workers by using a card-check system. Card-check allows a union to organize if a majority of employees simply sign a card. The card is then made public to the employer, the union organizers and co-workers. It’s easy to intimidate workers into signing because there’s no secret&#160; ballot.</p>
<p>Brown&#160; <a href="http://gov.ca.gov/docs/SB_104_Veto_Message.pdf" type="external">vetoed SB 104&#160;</a>and said&#160;he wasn’t convinced the ALRA needed the drastic changes to the law. Brown signed&#160;California’s&#160;1975&#160;Agricultural Labor Relations Act into law during his first stint as governor. The ALRA provides many of the worker protections that previously needed to be negotiated in union contracts.</p>
<p>Simultaneously, while Steinberg is losing no time pushing SB 25 through the Legislature, the UFW and ALRB mandatory mediation is speeding toward a board-ordered contract, according to Gerawan.</p>
<p>Gerawan was in the Capitol on August 15 with a large group of farm workers who also oppose SB 25, meeting with lawmakers about the ramifications of SB 25.</p>
<p>“No staff or member argued that there was anything fair about the bill,” Gerawan said. “They all agreed it sounded unfair. Many Democrats seemed actually outraged over it.” However, Gerawan said there is tremendous political pressure on lawmakers from Steinberg.</p>
<p>Gerawan said he’s not giving up the fight. “SB 25 will put us out of business,” Gerawan said. “Out of earshot of my employees,&#160;I stepped back into the legislators’ offices when I was at the Capitol last week, and told lawmakers this.”</p>
<p>Gerawan said he is hopeful for a veto from Brown.</p> | SB 25: A ‘surgical strike’ against CA agriculture | false | https://calwatchdog.com/2013/08/26/sb-25-a-surgical-strike-against-ca-agriculture/ | 2018-08-20 | 3 |
<p>TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) — Already winter-weary parts of the Midwest and East Coast are dealing with a mounting number of weather-related headaches, from highway pileups to frozen pipes and a rash of car thefts. And there's more to come.</p>
<p>Bitter temperatures and snow squalls have been blamed for a handful of deaths and canceled a long list of New Year's celebrations.</p>
<p>Icy roads in central Michigan caused more than 30 crashes Friday on highways near Flint while a chain-reaction crash involving about 40 vehicles in the southwestern part of the state left three hurt.</p>
<p>Coastal South Carolina saw a rare bout of freezing rain and drizzle on Friday that forced bridges from Charleston to Myrtle Beach to shut down for de-icing.</p>
<p>Police in the Cincinnati area say a half-dozen cars have been stolen in recent days after being left running unattended by owners trying to warm them up. Cincinnati police warned in a tweet that leaving your car running means "the only person who will be warm is the thief who stole your car."</p>
<p>More snow is on the way in Erie, Pennsylvania, where 65 inches have fallen since Christmas Eve. Now parts of the surrounding county could get up to 16 inches of more snow by Sunday.</p>
<p>A call center set up to help people dig out has been overwhelmed. "The phones have been ringing off the hook," said Josh Jaeger, a coordinator for the center told the Erie Times-News.</p>
<p>Cleanup continued inside Michigan State University's basketball arena after a frozen water pipe burst and flooded a hallway, but the mess wasn't expected to interrupt a game Friday.</p>
<p>Diann Wears, of Toledo, said she was already fed up with winter as she stood along a slush-covered sidewalk while waiting for a bus.</p>
<p>"And it's just the beginning," she said Friday. "I'm sure it will get worse."</p>
<p>Frigid conditions in Boston took their toll on the nation's fifth-largest transit system.</p>
<p>The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority has spent heavily to winterize what's known as the "T'' since it was crippled by record-breaking snowfall in 2015. But the agency reported "severe delays" on one of its lines Friday, citing a broken piece of track and a disabled train, among other problems.</p>
<p>Several deaths have been linked to the wintry weather during the past week.</p>
<p>In South Dakota, an 83-year-old woman died from exposure to the cold after she crashed her car and then got out to look for help. Search crews found her body in a ditch on Sunday. Three people were found dead in a canal along Lake Erie earlier this week after their car slid off an icy road.</p>
<p>The National Weather Service predicts another blast of arctic air will chill much of the eastern two-thirds of the U.S. through the weekend and into 2018.</p>
<p>Temperatures could fall into the single digits as far south as Oklahoma and sink to zero or below Friday night in Nebraska and Iowa and remain there for at least three days.</p>
<p>"It's pretty unusual to get that long of a streak where it's completely below zero," said Iowa's State Climatologist Harry Hillaker. "Historically, that doesn't happen very often in Des Moines."</p>
<p>The Pacific Northwest and northern Rockies braced for storms forecasters warned could bring several feet of mountain snow and freezing rain.</p>
<p>With the bitter cold expected to stick around, many New Year's Eve plans are being scuttled.</p>
<p>Shore towns in New Jersey canceled plans for polar bear plunges in the Atlantic Ocean and organizers pulled the plug on the annual light bulb drop in Sunbury, Pennsylvania.</p>
<p>In Boston, organizers of the L Street Brownies plunge scoffed when asked if they were scared off by the weather.</p>
<p>"It's a go. It's always a go. We never give up," Dan Monahan told the Boston Herald about the event that attracts more than 600 swimmers each year and has gone on for more than a century. "We're stubborn people in Boston. We're about tradition."</p>
<p>Fireworks shows have been called off in Omaha and at Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey. And New York City's Coney Island says it will be too cold for free rides on the Wonder Wheel and Thunderbolt roller coaster.</p>
<p>Animal advocates urged people to protect their pets from the cold. Wild animals weren't immune from the dangers of winter, either.</p>
<p>In Ohio, wildlife officers mulled how to rescue a deer stuck on an ice-covered river. They managed to lasso the deer with a rope and pull it to shore Friday, but they had to euthanize the injured animal.</p>
<p>TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) — Already winter-weary parts of the Midwest and East Coast are dealing with a mounting number of weather-related headaches, from highway pileups to frozen pipes and a rash of car thefts. And there's more to come.</p>
<p>Bitter temperatures and snow squalls have been blamed for a handful of deaths and canceled a long list of New Year's celebrations.</p>
<p>Icy roads in central Michigan caused more than 30 crashes Friday on highways near Flint while a chain-reaction crash involving about 40 vehicles in the southwestern part of the state left three hurt.</p>
<p>Coastal South Carolina saw a rare bout of freezing rain and drizzle on Friday that forced bridges from Charleston to Myrtle Beach to shut down for de-icing.</p>
<p>Police in the Cincinnati area say a half-dozen cars have been stolen in recent days after being left running unattended by owners trying to warm them up. Cincinnati police warned in a tweet that leaving your car running means "the only person who will be warm is the thief who stole your car."</p>
<p>More snow is on the way in Erie, Pennsylvania, where 65 inches have fallen since Christmas Eve. Now parts of the surrounding county could get up to 16 inches of more snow by Sunday.</p>
<p>A call center set up to help people dig out has been overwhelmed. "The phones have been ringing off the hook," said Josh Jaeger, a coordinator for the center told the Erie Times-News.</p>
<p>Cleanup continued inside Michigan State University's basketball arena after a frozen water pipe burst and flooded a hallway, but the mess wasn't expected to interrupt a game Friday.</p>
<p>Diann Wears, of Toledo, said she was already fed up with winter as she stood along a slush-covered sidewalk while waiting for a bus.</p>
<p>"And it's just the beginning," she said Friday. "I'm sure it will get worse."</p>
<p>Frigid conditions in Boston took their toll on the nation's fifth-largest transit system.</p>
<p>The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority has spent heavily to winterize what's known as the "T'' since it was crippled by record-breaking snowfall in 2015. But the agency reported "severe delays" on one of its lines Friday, citing a broken piece of track and a disabled train, among other problems.</p>
<p>Several deaths have been linked to the wintry weather during the past week.</p>
<p>In South Dakota, an 83-year-old woman died from exposure to the cold after she crashed her car and then got out to look for help. Search crews found her body in a ditch on Sunday. Three people were found dead in a canal along Lake Erie earlier this week after their car slid off an icy road.</p>
<p>The National Weather Service predicts another blast of arctic air will chill much of the eastern two-thirds of the U.S. through the weekend and into 2018.</p>
<p>Temperatures could fall into the single digits as far south as Oklahoma and sink to zero or below Friday night in Nebraska and Iowa and remain there for at least three days.</p>
<p>"It's pretty unusual to get that long of a streak where it's completely below zero," said Iowa's State Climatologist Harry Hillaker. "Historically, that doesn't happen very often in Des Moines."</p>
<p>The Pacific Northwest and northern Rockies braced for storms forecasters warned could bring several feet of mountain snow and freezing rain.</p>
<p>With the bitter cold expected to stick around, many New Year's Eve plans are being scuttled.</p>
<p>Shore towns in New Jersey canceled plans for polar bear plunges in the Atlantic Ocean and organizers pulled the plug on the annual light bulb drop in Sunbury, Pennsylvania.</p>
<p>In Boston, organizers of the L Street Brownies plunge scoffed when asked if they were scared off by the weather.</p>
<p>"It's a go. It's always a go. We never give up," Dan Monahan told the Boston Herald about the event that attracts more than 600 swimmers each year and has gone on for more than a century. "We're stubborn people in Boston. We're about tradition."</p>
<p>Fireworks shows have been called off in Omaha and at Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey. And New York City's Coney Island says it will be too cold for free rides on the Wonder Wheel and Thunderbolt roller coaster.</p>
<p>Animal advocates urged people to protect their pets from the cold. Wild animals weren't immune from the dangers of winter, either.</p>
<p>In Ohio, wildlife officers mulled how to rescue a deer stuck on an ice-covered river. They managed to lasso the deer with a rope and pull it to shore Friday, but they had to euthanize the injured animal.</p> | Enduring cold snap creates headaches at home, on highways | false | https://apnews.com/amp/1ed80021763d4957b4378b2fa4063485 | 2017-12-30 | 2 |
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<p>AP/Jose Luis Magana</p>
<p>Wednesday’s unanimous Supreme Court decision affirming a robust Fourth Amendment protection for cellphone data is an enormously important victory for privacy rights in the digital age. It is also a reminder that support as well as opposition to civil liberty these days can come from unexpected quarters. Or maybe it is no longer much of a surprise that our constitutional-law-professor-turned-president cares so little for the protections enumerated in the Bill of Rights.</p>
<p>In an opinion endorsed by all factions on the court, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. summarily rejected the assertion of the Obama Justice Department and the liberal attorney general of California, defending that state’s top court’s view, that a warrantless search of the vast data contained on a cellphone is comparable to looking into a detainee’s cigarette pack or reading a few pages tucked into his pocket. Limited searches that the court has previously accepted as consistent with the Fourth Amendment.</p>
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<p>Instead of treating “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” as an irrelevant antiquity of the pre-computer age, Roberts turned the argument on its head insisting that a cellphone’s data requires greater constitutional protection because the personal information it contains is so vast. As Roberts wrote in dismissing the U.S Justice Department and California’s equation of cellphone data to previously acceptable incidental body searches:</p>
<p>“That is like saying a ride on horseback is materially indistinguishable from a flight to the moon. Both are ways of getting from point A to point B, but little else justifies lumping them together. Modern cell phones, as a category, implicate privacy concerns far beyond those implicated by the search of a cigarette pack, a wallet, or a purse. … Before cell phones, a search of a person was limited by physical realities and tended as a general matter to constitute only a narrow intrusion on privacy. … Today, by contrast, it is no exaggeration to say that many of the more than 90% of Americans who own a cell phone keep on their person a digital record of nearly every aspect of their lives—from the mundane to the intimate.”</p>
<p>The modern cellphone is a mobile file cabinet of all of the personal data once stored in a home that the Fourth Amendment was designed to protect. Writing of the cellphone Roberts argued for the unanimous majority: “They could just as easily be called cameras, video players, Rolodexes, calendars, tape recorders, libraries, diaries, albums, televisions, maps or newspapers.”</p>
<p>The implications of this pro-privacy ruling at a time of the exposure of a vast government surveillance regime centered at the NSA are obvious. All of that troubling cellphone data is a relatively small fraction of what the NSA scoops up employing precisely the general warrants that the Fourth Amendment was designed to prohibit. While it is certainly questionable whether Roberts will lead the court into applying that prohibition to the modern surveillance state, logical consistency would demand it.</p>
<p>What is truly radical about the court’s unanimous endorsement of Roberts’ opinion is that it asserts the primacy of privacy in the survival of the American political experiment in representative governance. Responding to the Obama administration’s suggestion that law enforcement agencies “develop protocols to address” privacy concerns raised by the vast amounts of private data stored on cloud computers, Roberts responded, “probably a good idea, but the founders did not fight a revolution to gain the right to government agency protocols.”</p>
<p>Presumably they also didn’t fight the revolution to transfer their rights to FISA courts whose judges Roberts appoints. Perhaps he trusts his own motives in such matters but the basic message of the Constitution is to fundamentally mistrust those in power. That much Roberts does recognize in his classic conclusion that is bound to resonate over time:</p>
<p>“Our cases have recognized that the Fourth Amendment was the founding generation’s response to the reviled ‘general warrants’ and ‘writs of assistance’ of the colonial era, which allowed British officers to rummage through homes in an unrestrained search for evidence of criminal activity. Opposition to such searches was in fact one of the driving forces behind the revolution itself. In 1761, the patriot James Otis delivered a speech in Boston denouncing the use of writs of assistance. A young John Adams was there, and he would later write that ‘every man of a crowded audience appeared to me to go away, as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance.’ According to Adams, Otis’s speech was ‘the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the child Independence was born.’&#160;”</p>
<p>Now, about the NSA and its rummaging, might Edward Snowden come to be viewed as the contemporary James Otis?</p> | One Court, Indivisible, Votes Liberty and Justice For All | true | https://truthdig.com/articles/one-court-indivisible-votes-liberty-and-justice-for-all/ | 2014-06-26 | 4 |
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<p>The day after what would have been the nation’s most restrictive abortion ban was <a href="http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=healthNews&amp;storyID=2006-11-08T151117Z_01_N07478972_RTRUKOC_0_US-USA-ELECTIONS-ABORTION.xml&amp;WTmodLoc=NewsArt-C2-NextArticle-1" type="external">defeated</a> by voters in South Dakota the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in two cases involving challenges to the 2003 federal ban on so-called <a href="http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d108:HR00760:" type="external">partial-birth abortion</a>. With four conservative justices certainly against and four liberal ones for the decision seems to ride on Justice Anthony Kennedy who sits in the center of the court on abortion issues.</p>
<p>Today the court heard two hours of arguments full of exacting, graphic descriptions of abortion procedures and according to <a href="http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/15963776.htm" type="external">reports</a>, throughout the session Kennedy appeared troubled by the potential implications of the law. Would it leave few legal alternatives in cases in which a pregnancy threatens a woman’s life? How frequently is a late-term procedure medically necessary? Would doctors be held criminally liable for performing emergency late-term abortions when they had no other choice? Kennedy pressed both sides in the case on those questions, and hinted that he thinks the federal law may be too restrictive, saying:</p>
<p>If a woman in need of a lifesaving, late-term abortion were to rely on a court’s quick action, she might be in serious trouble. I don’t know if you could just go to a district judge and say, `I need an order.’ The judge would take – would have to take – many hours to understand that.</p>
<p>The government says the law survives constitutional scrutiny because of Congress’ fact-finding and its interest in preventing “infanticide,” a word that came up several times during the hearings.</p>
<p /> | High Court Hears Partial-Birth Abortion Cases, Kennedy Says Women “Might be in Serious Trouble” | true | https://motherjones.com/politics/2006/11/high-court-hears-partial-birth-abortion-cases-kennedy-says-women-might-be-serious-troub/ | 2006-11-09 | 4 |
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<p>Jeremy Lopez Robledo, 25, of Las Cruces, was booked into the Dona Ana County Detention Center on a $10,000 bond, facing one count each of residential burglary and unlawful taking of a motor vehicle, police said.</p>
<p>Detectives learned that on Monday, two days after 21-year-old Jeremy Leshawn Davis was arrested, Robledo broke into Davis’ residence where he allegedly stole two laptop computers and other electronics and the keys to Davis’ 2000 Ford Crown Victoria, then drove off in the car, according to the release.</p>
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<p>Robledo was arrested shortly after he returned to Davis’ apartment on Monday, police said.</p>
<p>6:15am 11/20/12 — 3 Las Crucens Accused of Kidnapping</p>
<p>By ABQnews Staff</p>
<p>Las Cruces police arrested three men suspected of kidnapping a woman on Friday and holding her until Saturday because she allegedly stole money from the suspects, police said in a news release.</p>
<p>Jeremy Leshawn Davis, 21; Alonzo Deangelo “Synna” Cliatt, 23; and Benjamin Niko Deon Bradley, 23, each face one first-degree felony count each of kidnapping and conspiracy to commit kidnapping, and Davis also is facing two second-degree felony counts of criminal sexual penetration and one count of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, police said.</p>
<p>Jeremy Leshawn Davis</p>
<p>Police learned early Saturday that the three allegedly kidnapped a 19-year-old woman and were holding her against her will, reportedly because she owed them $300, according to the release.</p>
<p>Detectives said Davis sexually assaulted the woman twice Friday night or early Saturday and threatened her with a handgun.</p>
<p>Davis and the woman were found at a Las Cruces address early Saturday, and though Davis initially resisted officers, he was taken into custody, police said. Cliatt and Bradley were later located by officers and arrested.</p>
<p>The woman was taken to a local hospital for treatment of multiple, non-life-threatening injuries, according to police.</p> | UPDATED: ‘Friend’ Accused of Breaking Into Las Cruces Suspect’s Home | false | https://abqjournal.com/147907/updated-friend-breaks-into-suspects-home.html | 2012-11-21 | 2 |
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<p>Thomas Hawk / flickr</p>
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<p>A momentous court settlement has given new shape to California’s multi-year struggle with the courts over its criminal justice system, rolling back the state’s reliance on solitary confinement as a way of dealing with gangs and&#160;violence in prison. “Many such prisoners are left in solitary confinement indefinitely, with severe psychological effects,” The New York Times <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/02/us/solitary-confinement-california-prisons.html" type="external">observed</a>; “over the years, hundreds have spent more than a decade in isolation.”</p>
<p>The practice had come under special scrutiny as Gov. Jerry Brown ameliorated overcrowding through his controversial strategy of “realigning” inmates with lesser sentences to county jails. “Under the terms of the settlement, state authorities will only send inmates to solitary if they commit new and serious crimes in prison, like murders or violent assaults,” NPR <a href="http://www.npr.org/2015/09/01/436673728/california-prisons-to-limit-number-of-inmates-in-solitary-confinement" type="external">reported</a>. “California prison officials have a year to review files of inmates in isolation now. The process is designed to send many of those prisoners back into the general prison population.”</p>
<p>California’s secretary of corrections and rehabilitation Jeffrey Beard said&#160;that over&#160;1,000 inmates had been released from solitary, <a href="http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-california-will-move-thousands-of-inmates-out-of-solitary-20150901-story.html" type="external">telling</a> the Los Angeles Times that&#160;“the prison system was largely unable to make the case for change, and show solitary confinement could work, until dealing with overcrowding problems that had inmates sleeping in bunks set up in prison gyms and day rooms.”</p>
<p>Filed three years ago, the now-settled lawsuit took shape as a class action “brought on behalf of thousands of inmates who had filled the Pelican Bay State Prison isolation wing for alleged gang affiliation,” the Huffington Post <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/california-solitary-confinement_55e5df4fe4b0aec9f354a7c9" type="external">noted</a>. According to one of the plaintiffs, the Center for Constitutional Rights, over 500&#160;inmates “had spent more than a decade locked in solitary at the time the lawsuit was filed,” reported the Huffington Post, with 78 prisoners locked in the so-called Security Housing Unit for over two decades.</p>
<p>Solitary confinement has earned the ire of California’s criminal justice activists for years on end, and with the state’s legal woes surrounding its prison system, some in Sacramento took up the cause. In collaboration with the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, state Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, authored&#160;Senate Bill 124, focusing on the extension of solitary to state and county juvenile detention centers. The bill “would ban the use of solitary confinement for longer than four hours at a time,” East Bay Express <a href="http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/the-damage-of-youth-solitary-confinement-in-california/Content?oid=4472204" type="external">reported</a>, barring&#160;facilities from doling out stints in solitary to punish young offenders and&#160;authorizing the practice only&#160;“when juveniles pose an immediate, substantial risk to themselves or others.” Inmates whose mental illness factored into their behavior&#160;would also be safe from solitary confinement.</p>
<p>The Supreme Court, meanwhile, which had angrily mandated a reduction in California’s crowded state prison population, also seemed to be circling around the state’s use of solitary. Considering&#160;an appeal&#160;this summer from one of the state’s prisoners on death row, Justice Anthony Kennedy “had his law clerks dig up an 1890 case in which the Supreme Court had decided that even for those prisoners sentenced to death, solitary confinement contained a ‘particular terror and a peculiar mark of infamy,'” Benjamin Wallace-Wells <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/08/movement-against-solitary-confinement.html" type="external">noted</a> in New York magazine.</p>
<p>A spate of prisoner protests in California fueled a growing&#160;sense that&#160;solitary confinement had become too routine and too ineffective around the country. As the New York Times observed, “a number of corrections officials across the country have increasingly come to see locking up inmates for years at a time as ineffective. Some human rights groups have assailed it as torture, and tens of thousands of inmates across California have participated in hunger strikes since 2011 to protest the state’s use of solitary.”</p>
<p>Although the state’s agreement will remove gang affiliation from its list of offenses punishable by isolation, few have speculated what was likely to happen once thousands of formerly solitary inmates were returned to prisons’ general populations.</p> | CA settles prison suit, curbing solitary | false | https://calwatchdog.com/2015/09/03/ca-settles-prison-suit-curbing-solitary/ | 2018-09-20 | 3 |
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<p>Led by improvements in consumer confidence, the National Retail Federation is estimating that holiday sales this year will grow by 4.1% to $586.1 billion.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>That’s higher than the average 10-year holiday sales increase of 3.5% and puts sales on track to rise above the $462 billion recorded in 2011.</p>
<p>Retail industry groups across the board have been calling for higher 2012 sales during the most important shopping season of the year as consumer confidence improves.</p>
<p>While political and economic uncertainties related to the U.S. presidential election and fiscal cliff continue to weigh on demand, the confidence in retail sales’ potential this holiday season is a sign that retailers are gearing up for a rebound.</p>
<p>Retailers are hiring more in preparation for the uptick in demand and the NRF forecasts companies in total will hire 585,000 to 625,000 seasonal employees this year.</p>
<p>Kohl’s (NYSE:KSS) and Macy’s (NYSE:M) have already announced plans to increase holiday hiring in 2012, together looking to employee more than 132,700 from now through the end of December.</p>
<p>“This is the most optimistic forecast NRF has released since the recession,” NRF CEO Matthew Shay said in a statement. “In spite of the uncertainties that exist in our economy and among consumers, we believe &#160;we’ll see solid holiday sales growth this year.”</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Shop.org for the first time in its history released its 2012 online holiday sales forecast on Tuesday, expecting those sales to grow 12% over last year to as much as $96 billion as consumers continue to peruse websites for retailers' web-only discounts and default on the convenience of online shopping.</p>
<p>“Online retail has been a bright spot for years and we don’t expect that trend to change anytime soon, especially with the growth in mobile,” Shay said.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p> | NRF: Holiday Sales to Grow 4.1% This Year | true | http://foxbusiness.com/features/2012/10/02/nrf-holiday-sales-to-grow-41-this-year.html | 2016-01-26 | 0 |
<p>There has been plenty of speculation as to if and/or when Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) will bring the Apple Pencil accessory to the iPhone.</p>
<p>The Apple Pencil first made its debut with the iPad Pro back in late 2015, and it continues to be a key accessory for the iPad Pro product line, which saw a refresh back in June.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Rene Ritchie, analyst with iMore, recently penned an <a href="https://www.imore.com/apple-pencil-on-iphone" type="external">article Opens a New Window.</a> in which he explained why the iPhone currently doesn't support the Apple Pencil although "Apple has no doubt tested Pencil technology on iPhone."</p>
<p>"So, here's hoping Apple starts doing more than just testing Pencil on iPhone -- and starts shipping," Ritchie writes.</p>
<p>Here's one way I could see Apple bringing the Apple Pencil -- or, at least, some iPhone-specific version of it -- to iPhone.</p>
<p>I don't think the concept of a premium iPhone will be a <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/08/29/apple-inc-should-call-the-oled-iphone-the-iphone-e.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=1eab890a-8d22-11e7-938b-0050569d4be0&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">one-off Opens a New Window.</a>&#160;-- I expect Apple to release relatively high-priced iPhone models each year with features that are too costly, or that simply cannot yet be manufactured in high volumes, for the mainstream iPhone models at mainstream price points.</p>
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<p>I believe it's highly unlikely that the Apple Pencil will come to this year's premium iPhone. For one thing, Apple is already cramming that device so full of unique and <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/08/08/apple-incs-oled-iphone-8-display-tough-to-manufact.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=1eab890a-8d22-11e7-938b-0050569d4be0&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">difficult-to-build technologies Opens a New Window.</a>&#160;that trying to toss Apple Pencil support in there would simply be too much.</p>
<p>Furthermore, given that the new phone is expected to have a 5.8-inch display with approximately 5.2 inches of usable display area, I'm not convinced that the Apple Pencil (or, again, an iPhone-specific derivative) would be a particularly good experience on that device.</p>
<p>Next year, though, Apple is reportedly planning to launch <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/07/24/this-crazy-apple-inc-iphone-9-rumor-finally-makes.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=1eab890a-8d22-11e7-938b-0050569d4be0&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">three iPhone models in the coming iPhone cycle Opens a New Window.</a>. Another rumor <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/05/23/is-this-apple-inc-iphone-9-rumor-legitimate.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=1eab890a-8d22-11e7-938b-0050569d4be0&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">claims Opens a New Window.</a> that the 2018 iPhone lineup will include models with 5.28-inch and 6.46-inch displays.</p>
<p>I don't think Apple could get away with marketing the 6.46-inch model under the <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/08/29/apple-inc-should-call-the-oled-iphone-the-iphone-e.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=1eab890a-8d22-11e7-938b-0050569d4be0&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">same branding that this year's premium iPhone will get Opens a New Window.</a> if it doesn't add killer features to the device.</p>
<p>Support for an iPhone-specific Apple Pencil, an extra-large screen, as well as other interesting features, could make such a device well worthy of a premium price tag, though.</p>
<p>By adding Apple Pencil support to a premium iPhone, Apple could achieve two things:</p>
<p>Given that <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/08/14/apple-inc-ceo-tim-cook-talks-market-share-gains.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=1eab890a-8d22-11e7-938b-0050569d4be0&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">taking market share Opens a New Window.</a> will be critical for Apple to continue growing its iPhone business in the years ahead as the overall market slows, this sounds like a really good idea to me.</p>
<p>10 stocks we like better than AppleWhen investing geniuses David and Tom Gardner have a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, the newsletter they have run for over a decade, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has tripled the market.*</p>
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<p>*Stock Advisor returns as of August 1, 2017</p>
<p><a href="http://my.fool.com/profile/TMFChipFool/info.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=1eab890a-8d22-11e7-938b-0050569d4be0&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">Ashraf Eassa Opens a New Window.</a> has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Apple. The Motley Fool has a <a href="http://www.fool.com/Legal/fool-disclosure-policy.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;uuid=1eab890a-8d22-11e7-938b-0050569d4be0&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">disclosure policy Opens a New Window.</a>.</p> | 1 Amazing Feature to Expect in the Apple iPhone 9 | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/08/31/1-amazing-feature-to-expect-in-apple-iphone-9.html | 2017-08-31 | 0 |
<p>The Journal News A New York Times spokesman says Lisa Belkin's commitment to appear at a fund-raiser for <a href="http://www.chuckschorrlesnick.com/bio.htm" type="external">Chuck Schorr Lesnick</a>, a Democratic candidate for Yonkers mayor, "was made prior to (her) being made aware of The Times' new Code of Conduct policy," which all but prohibits its journalists from playing an active role in politics. Lesnick says he and Belkin met while attending Princeton University about 20 years ago and remained friends.</p> | NYT's Belkin cancels talk at Yonkers candidate's event | false | https://poynter.org/news/nyts-belkin-cancels-talk-yonkers-candidates-event | 2003-03-06 | 2 |
<p>Four days after Turkey’s failed coup, which left 300 dead and more than 1,400 injured, new details have emerged to suggest the putsch came closer to a successful overthrow of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan than many observers thought—and the operation could have a major impact on U.S.-Turkish military cooperation in the war against the so-called Islamic State just across Turkey’s borders in Syria and Iraq.</p>
<p>Aaron Stein at the Atlantic Council nails the core problem when he asks, “How can we credibly go to war with a NATO ally in coalition operations when that ally’s army is at war with itself?”</p>
<p>Turkey, remember, has the second biggest army in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, after the United States. In the Cold War years, its borders with the Soviet Union were vital to Western strategy. In the age of jihad, the fact that its territory abuts not only ISIS-land, but Iran, gives it enormous geopolitical importance.</p>
<p>The putschists, it now appears, relied heavily on a key NATO installation to carry out the aerial component of their daring plot, which was spearheaded by officers in the Turkish air force. And the enormous post-coup dragnet of suspected traitors already has snared high-ranking military officials who had been responsible for securing Turkey’s frontiers and carrying out coalition policy in Syria.</p>
<p>Had the coup not been detected in advance by Turkish intelligence, forcing the conspiracy to be moved up in the calendar, it might well have succeeded.</p>
<p>According to Asli Aydintasbas, a Turkey specialist at the European Council on Foreign Relations, the head of the National Intelligence Organization, or MIT, Hakan Fidan uncovered “‘unusual activity’ within army ranks on Friday afternoon and [visited] the Chief of Staff around 5 p.m. This led to precautions and an inquiry at the senior level, forcing the coup plot to be executed at an earlier time.” CNNTurk corroborated this story.</p>
<p>A Sikorsky attack helicopter and putschist commandos apparently were mobilized to attack MIT headquarters in Ankara and try to kidnap Fidan.</p>
<p>“I think these guys missed decapitating the government by about 30 minutes and we’d have woken up on Saturday with a dead president, a surrounded parliament, and a chief of general staff in custody,” said Stein, my colleague at the Atlantic Council.</p>
<p>Turkish ministers, held up at the prime ministry, certainly seemed to think they were about to die, judging from a careful tick-tock recount of the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/18/military-coup-was-well-planned-and-very-nearly-succeeded-say-turkish-officials" type="external">events</a> by the Guardian’s Kareem Shaheen. The putschist’s momentum was canceled by two developments.</p>
<p>The first was the Interior Minister Efkan Ala’s non-attendance of a sham security meeting arranged for him in Ankara and designed to trap him. Ala’s continued freedom throughout Friday night allowed him to form a crisis cell, based out of Esenboğa airport in the capital, from which he could mount counter-coup operations until the Turkish president’s return from his holiday venue at Marmaris.</p>
<p>The second development was Erdogan’s now-famous FaceTime call for demonstrations, broadcast via an iPhone on privately owned CNN Turk after the coup plotters had taken over the government controlled broadcast media. The president’s appeal galvanized not only partisans of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), but Turks of all ideological stripes, against the coup.</p>
<p>Next, consider how close Erdogan came to being blown up. As first <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-security-plot-insight-idUSKCN0ZX0Q9" type="external">reported by Reuters</a>, his Gulfstream IV, en route back to Istanbul, was targeted by “at least” two pro-coup F-16s, which locked onto the plane as well as two of its escort F-16s.</p>
<p>Start and finish your day with the top stories from The Daily Beast.</p>
<p>A speedy, smart summary of all the news you need to know (and nothing you don't).</p>
<p>Erdogan had just evaded a botched commando raid to capture him alive at his hotel in Marmaris, not assassinate him. Still, as The Daily Beast’s David Axe <a href="/content/dailybeast/articles/2016/07/19/how-fighter-jets-almost-killed-a-president.html" type="external">wrote</a>, “A burst of gunfire or a single Sidewinder missile is all it would have taken to shoot down the plane and kill Erdogan.” What saved him was his pilots’ switching the jet’s transponder to that of a commercial Turkish Airlines flight, which duped the enemy F-16s and ultimately allowed the president’s plane to land at Ataturk International Airport, once it was cleared of pro-coup soldiers.</p>
<p>How did the plotters launch fighter jets and keep them in the sky for so long? The answer is one that should cause U.S. policy and defense planners to temper their insistence that, in terms of bilateral cooperation, the coup won’t have lasting ramifications.</p>
<p>The Turkish press has reported that the alleged mastermind was Akin Ozturk, until 2015 the head of the Turkish Air Force, a <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/alleged-coup-leader-was-military-attache-to-israel/" type="external">former military attache to Israel</a>, and (until the cuffs were slapped on him) a member of the High Military Council, which was due to convene in August. (He was slated to retire after that meeting.) Ozturk was first quoted in the Anadolu state-run news agency as confessing to his role, but later <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36829574" type="external">denied</a> it in a statement to Turkish prosecutors. Still, the centrality of the air force in mounting this operation is as indisputable as it is scary.</p>
<p>NATO’s main airbase in Turkey, Incirlik, was not only the launch pad for up to four separate KC-135R mid-air refueling tankers used by as many as four pro-coup F-16s, but its commander, Gen. Bekir Ercan Van, along with 10 of his subordinates, have since been arrested on charges of treason.</p>
<p>According to Stein, it’s highly likely that these officers had a hand in implementing Turkish tactical coordination for the coalition’s hard-negotiated operation to liberate Minbij, an ISIS stronghold in Aleppo. The negotiations took place at Incirlik back in May, as the Wall Street Journal <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-compromises-won-turkeys-backing-for-kurdish-led-offensive-1468539313" type="external">reported</a> on Thursday, a day before the coup.</p>
<p>It is true that as of Sunday coalition missions against ISIS were being flown again from Incirlik after the Turks temporarily sealed the base and cut off its electricity from the commercial power grid. But there’s no getting around the fact that the facility was still vulnerable to penetration by hostile actors and that aircraft involved in the plot to topple a NATO government were co-located with U.S. planes on the same tarmac, and presumably gassed up alongside them.</p>
<p>Another Erdogan purge victim was the commander of Turkey’s Second Army, Gen. Adem Huduti, who was <a href="http://www.apple.com" type="external">arrested</a> at the weekend. The Second Army, based in Malatya, is in charge of all military activity at the Turkish border, meaning that Huduti was responsible for running the nation’s wars against both ISIS in Syria and the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, in Iraq’s Qandil mountains and southeastern Turkey.</p>
<p>Huduti is one of 6,000 military personnel—about 1 percent of the whole of the Turkish armed forces—taken into custody within 24 hours of the coup, preceding a roundup of 9,000 civil servants and 8,000 police officers. A full fifth of Turkey’s admirals and generals are now in prison, as are 26 of its 80 provincial governors.</p>
<p>The nation’s judiciary also has been hollowed out, with 3,000 judges and prosecutors detained, including from the Constitutional Court and the High Council of Judges and Prosecutors.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, all other active public servants have been barred from travel abroad. This apparently includes Turkish Defense Minister Minister Fikri Işık, who will <a href="" type="external">not attend</a> a coalition summit hosted by U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Wednesday.</p>
<p>Virtually everyone detained is accused of being a loyalist to Pennsylvania-based cleric Fethullah Gülen, <a href="/content/dailybeast/articles/2016/07/17/alleged-coup-mastermind-fethullah-g-len-loves-hillary-clinton.html" type="external">against whom</a> the Turkish Ministry of Justice is now apparently building an extradition case.</p>
<p>State Department spokesman John Kirby has ominously <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/kerry-warns-turkey-nato-membership-potentially-at-stake-in-crackdown/2016/07/18/f427ba8a-4850-11e6-8dac-0c6e4accc5b1_story.html" type="external">floated</a> the possibility that Turkey’s NATO membership may eventually be at risk if it goes too far with retribution. (The protocol for expelling an early member-state of the alliance for human rights violations or the derogation of due process is unclear because unprecedented.) Already there’s persuasive evidence many of those arrested have been tortured.</p>
<p>Another key figure in the fight against ISIS remained loyal to Erdogan’s government. Turkey’s head of counterterrorism operations against the so-called Islamic state fell into the trap set by the putschists on Friday night when he showed up for a bogus meeting at the Presidential Palace. The coup plotters bound him and then executed him with a bullet to the back of the neck.</p>
<p>These are the kinds of wounds to the integrity of Turkey’s military, and to the overall body politic, that will take a very long time to heal. And that question raised by Aaron Stein will remain: How can you count on an ally that’s at war with itself?</p> | Why the Failed Turkish Coup is Very Bad News for the War on ISIS | true | https://thedailybeast.com/why-the-failed-turkish-coup-is-very-bad-news-for-the-war-on-isis | 2018-10-04 | 4 |
<p>Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz undertook a full-fledged lobbying campaign in 1998 to get former President Bill Clinton to start a war with Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein’s regime claiming that the country posed a threat to the United States, according to documents obtained from a former Clinton aide.</p>
<p>This new information begs the question: what is really driving the Bush Administration’s desire to start a war with Iraq if two of Bush’s future top defense officials were already planting the seeds for an attack five years ago?</p>
<p>In 1998, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were working in the private sector. Both were involved with the right-wing think tank Project for a New American Century, which was established in 1997 by William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, to promote global leadership and dictate American foreign policy.</p>
<p>While Clinton was dealing with the worldwide threat from Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz wrote to Clinton urging him to use military force against Iraq and remove Hussein from power because the country posed a threat to the United States due to its alleged ability to develop weapons of mass destruction. The Jan 26, 1998 letter sent to Clinton from the Project for the New American Century said a war with Iraq should be initiated even if the United States could not muster support from its allies in the United Nations. Kristol also signed the letter.</p>
<p>“We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War,” says the letter. “In your upcoming State of the Union Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.”</p>
<p>“We urge you to turn your Administration’s attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam’s regime from power. This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts. Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater. We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council,” says the letter.</p>
<p>The full contents of the Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz letter can be viewed at <a href="http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm" type="external">http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm</a>.</p>
<p>Clinton rebuffed the advice from the future Bush Administration officials saying he was focusing his attention on dismantling Al-Qaeda cells, according to a copy of the response Clinton sent to Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Kristol.</p>
<p>Unsatisfied with Clinton’s response, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Kristol and others from the Project for the New American Century wrote another letter on May 29, 1998 to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Republican Majority Leader Trent Lott saying that the United States should “establish and maintain a strong U.S. military presence in the region, and be prepared to use that force to protect our vital interests in the Gulf – and, if necessary, to help remove Saddam from power.”</p>
<p>“We should take whatever steps are necessary to challenge Saddam Hussein’s claim to be Iraq’s legitimate ruler, including indicting him as a war criminal,” says the letter to Gingrich and Lott. “U.S. policy should have as its explicit goal removing Saddam Hussein’s regime from power and establishing a peaceful and democratic Iraq in its place. We recognize that this goal will not be achieved easily. But the alternative is to leave the initiative to Saddam, who will continue to strengthen his position at home and in the region. Only the U.S. can lead the way in demonstrating that his rule is not legitimate and that time is not on the side of his regime.”</p>
<p>The letter to Gingrich and Lott can be viewed at <a href="http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqletter1998.htm" type="external">http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqletter1998.htm</a>.</p>
<p>The White House would not comment on the letters or whether Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz possessed any intelligence information that suggested Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States at the time. The letters offered no hard evidence that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction.</p>
<p>The Clinton aide said the former President believed that the policy of “containing Saddam Hussein in a box” was successful and that the Iraqi regime did not pose any threat to U.S. interests at the time.</p>
<p>President Clinton “never considered war with Iraq an option,” the former aide said. “We were encouraged by the UN weapons inspectors and believed they had a good handle on the situation.”</p>
<p>Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Kristol, however, disagreed; saying the only way to deal with Hussein was by initiating a full-scale war.</p>
<p>“The policy of “containment” of Saddam Hussein has been steadily eroding over the past several months,” Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Kristol wrote in their letter to Clinton. “As recent events have demonstrated, we can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades UN inspections. It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course, the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard. The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power.”</p>
<p>Those alleged threats posed by Iraq and the advice Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol first offered the attention of the Clinton Administration five years ago have now become the blueprint for how the Bush Administration is dealing with the Iraq.</p>
<p>The existence of the Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz “war” letters is just another reason to question the Bush Administration’s desire to go to war with Iraq now instead of dealing with other pressing issues such as Al-Qaeda. Because the letters were written in 1998 it proves that this war was planned well before 9-11 and casts further doubt on the claims that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9-11 terrorist attacks.</p>
<p>JASON LEOPOLD can be reached at: <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p> | The 1998 Origins of the Bush Iraq War Drive | true | https://counterpunch.org/2003/02/19/the-1998-origins-of-the-bush-iraq-war-drive/ | 2003-02-19 | 4 |
<p>Maybe I’m getting carried away because it is the season to believe in miracles, but the tax-cut deal just might turn out to be a blessing in disguise.</p>
<p>Seriously.</p>
<p>I’ve never seen congressional Democrats, especially those in the House, so angry at the White House, and I can understand why. It’s galling that the Bush tax cuts will be in place throughout President Obama’s term. The arguments against letting the tax cuts expire on income more than $250,000 — or even $1 million — were bogus. Only a fraction of small businesses would have been affected. The economic recovery wouldn’t have been threatened.</p>
<p>Even more galling was Republicans’ willingness to hold the extension of unemployment benefits hostage to a deal on extending the upper-bracket tax cuts. Republicans insisted that the cost of unemployment benefits be paid for — while blithely willing to pile up trillions more in debt by extending the tax cuts.</p>
<p />
<p>And on the subject of galling: How could this have happened with Democrats in control of the White House and both houses of Congress? Waiting until after the election, with its predictably disastrous results for Democrats, left the administration bargaining from a position of weakness.</p>
<p>Some blessing, right?</p>
<p>It could be. If Obama makes the most of the opportunity it presents, the deal offers him a relatively painless way to wriggle out of his most irresponsible campaign promise: to permanently extend the so-called middle-class tax cuts, the middle in this case amounting to 98 percent of households. Making those cuts permanent, as the president and congressional Democrats wanted, would cost more than $2 trillion over the next decade.</p>
<p>Now and for the next few years, in the midst of a faltering economic recovery, extending the middle-class tax cuts makes sense. Over the longer term, those cuts — premised on the notion that a predicted surplus would be big enough to pay off the debt and lower everyone’s taxes — are simply unaffordable.</p>
<p>In addition, the downside of the deal is not the marginal cost — about $70 billion — of extending the upper-income tax cuts for another few years along with the middle-class ones. In terms of stimulating the economy, which could badly use a boost, this is a stupid use of a relatively small amount of money, and the administration secured some real stimulus — refundable tax credits and the payroll tax credit — as part of the bargain.</p>
<p>The real risk of extending all the tax cuts temporarily is that it increases the chance of extending all of them permanently. Smart people who viewed the extension of middle-class tax cuts as an exorbitant fait accompli at least wanted to make certain to avoid incurring the additional cost — $700 billion — of including the upper-bracket cuts.</p>
<p>That was a reasonable worry, but I think the deficit commission report could change the risk assessment. It put Republicans, even extraordinarily conservative Republicans such as Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, on record as being willing to raise tax revenue. And it illustrated the allure of a reformed tax code, with a broader base and fewer special-interest giveaways.</p>
<p>Hence, the potential blessing of extending the tax cuts for a few years. This is not the move I would have chosen, but it simultaneously creates space for a broader discussion of the tax system and forces action. The White House could seize the moment to shift the argument away from the stale question of whether rates should rise, and toward the more attractive playing field of how they can be lowered — and more revenue raised in the bargain.</p>
<p>It is easy to imagine the many ways in which such an effort could fall apart: over how much revenue to raise; over how much, and where, to cut spending alongside; over the thousands of imperiled tax breaks whose extinction would be fought by legions of interest groups.</p>
<p>It is fair to suspect that Republicans are more focused on defeating the president in 2012 than in crafting a bipartisan tax deal. It is fair to worry that tax history will repeat itself — that the White House will, in the heat of a re-election campaign, agree to another extension.</p>
<p>In politics as in religion, doubters do not lack for evidence to undergird their cynicism. But politicians might ask themselves: If you do not allow for the possibility of occasional legislative miracles, if your work is not aimed at achieving such transformational moments, then what’s the point, exactly, of being in this business?</p>
<p>Ruth Marcus’ e-mail address is marcusr(at symbol)washpost.com.</p>
<p>© 2010, Washington Post Writers Group</p> | Opportunity in a Tax Deal | true | https://truthdig.com/articles/opportunity-in-a-tax-deal/ | 2010-12-08 | 4 |
<p />
<p>The Bank of England is expected to cut interest rates for the first time since 2009 on Thursday as Britain's economy slips towards recession in the wake of June's vote to leave the European Union.</p>
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<p>The Bank wrong-footed financial experts three weeks ago by leaving rates unchanged, but it said most of its policymakers were likely to support action in August as post-referendum uncertainty depressed the economy.</p>
<p>Since then growth appears to have slowed sharply - an industry survey on Wednesday suggested the economy was in fact shrinking at the fastest pace since the BoE last lowered rates in 2009, as the country went through its worst recession since at least the 1930s.</p>
<p>Almost all economists now expect the BoE to cut rates by at least a quarter percentage point on Thursday to a record-low 0.25 percent. Many also think it may resume its multi-billion-pound program of government bond purchases.</p>
<p>"There is enough evidence on the negative shock to the economy that some easing is justified," Investec economist Philip Shaw said. But he viewed the scale of the slowdown as too unclear for the BoE to buy bonds on top of a rate cut.</p>
<p>The BoE's chief economist, Andy Haldane, has said he is willing to respond to weak growth by using "a sledgehammer to crack a nut." But another, Kristin Forbes, said last month she had not seen enough evidence to support a rate cut .</p>
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<p>Most business and consumer surveys have been pointing to a marked slowdown, although it is too early for any cast-iron official data on how output has been affected by June 23's Brexit vote.</p>
<p>Data on car registrations out on Thursday, however, hinted at a slowdown in consumer spending - a key pillar of economic growth recently - with private registrations dropping 6.1 percent year-on-year in July.</p>
<p>The BoE will announce its policy decision at 1100 GMT, and Governor Mark Carney will hold a news conference at 1130 GMT.</p>
<p>If the BoE does cut its Bank Rate to the lowest level in its 322-year history it will join the Bank of Japan and the Reserve Bank of Australia, which both undertook unprecedented stimulus in the past week.</p>
<p>Only the U.S. Federal Reserve among the world's main central banks is considering tighter policy this year.</p>
<p>RATE CUT IMPACT QUESTIONED</p>
<p>However, economists including former top BoE officials have doubts about how much good either rate cuts or more quantitative easing will do for the economy, with both official interest rates and government borrowing costs already at or near record lows.</p>
<p>Charles Bean, who stepped down as the BoE's deputy governor in 2014, said the Bank still had options, such as expanding the array of assets it buys beyond government bonds to include corporate debt or even equities. But that could put public money at risk and be politically difficult.</p>
<p>"If you go into buying equities, as the Bank of Japan has dabbled with ... that is taking the Bank into quite political territory. If there was a decision to go that way it should be in conjunction with the Treasury," Bean said on Tuesday.</p>
<p>Many economists also expect the BoE to revitalize its waning Funding for Lending Scheme or take other measures to tempt banks to lend at record-low rates.</p>
<p>Thirty-five academic economists said the BoE should finance infrastructure projects or use new money to direct cash transfers to households, in a letter published in the Guardian on Thursday, which argued that existing monetary policy tools were ineffective.</p>
<p>As well as its rate decision, the BoE will publish the first exchange of letters between Carney and new finance minister Philip Hammond, who last month replaced George Osborne, the man who plucked Carney from the Bank of Canada more than three years ago.</p>
<p>Carney must write to Hammond because annual inflation was just 0.5 percent in June, far below its 2 percent target.</p>
<p>This is unlikely to be a problem for long. Sterling's 12 percent slide against the dollar since the EU vote looks set to send inflation soaring above target.</p>
<p>But there will be a focus on any hint of extra government spending to support the economy, after Hammond said he may use a half-year budget statement in the autumn to reset fiscal policy.</p>
<p>(Editing by Larry King and Hugh Lawson)</p> | Bank of England Prepares to Cut Rates into New Territory | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2016/08/04/bank-england-prepares-to-cut-rates-into-new-territory.html | 2016-08-04 | 0 |
<p>What am I missing here? California is in a major long-term drought and Nestle didn't even have a valid permit for all the water it was taking.</p>
<p>Why on earth would they <a href="http://www.mercurynews.com/drought/ci_27898570/us-forest-service-investigates-expired-permit-nestle-uses?source=infinite" type="external">renew it now?</a></p>
<p>SAN BERNARDINO -- The U.S. Forest Service is investigating an expired permit that Nestle has been using to draw water out of a national forest in Southern California for its bottled water business.</p>
<p>An investigation by the Desert Sun found that Nestle Waters North America's permit to transport water across the San Bernardino National Forest expired in 1988. The water is piped across the national forest and loaded on trucks to a plant where it is bottled as Arrowhead 100 percent Mountain Spring Water.</p>
<p>"Since this issue was raised and I became aware of how long that permit has been expired, I have made it a priority to work on this reissuance project," San Bernardino National Forest Supervisor Jody Noiron told the newspaper ( <a href="http://desert.sn/1FxDKiB" type="external">http://desert.sn/1FxDKiB</a> ) Friday.</p>
<p>The process of renewing the permit requires an environmental review, which can take between 18 months to more than two years to complete.</p>
<p>Environmentalists have raised concerns about the expired permit and the lack of government oversight in tracking the water being tapped amid the state's ongoing drought.</p>
<p>Nestle, the largest producer of bottled water in the U.S., said it monitors its water use and the environment around the springs where water is drawn.</p>
<p>Nestle Water spokeswoman Jane Lazgin told the newspaper that the company will work with federal officials during the permit renewal process.</p> | US Forest Service Investigates Expired Permit Nestle Uses To Draw CA Water | true | http://crooksandliars.com/2015/04/us-forest-service-investigates-expired | 2015-04-13 | 4 |
<p>It’s a new day in Greece, as if someone has pressed the re-start button.</p>
<p>That’s how Athens-based reporter Christos Michaelides describes the fact that banks re-opened in Greece on Monday after being forced to close for three&#160;weeks to prevent a run on their cash machine, and that&#160;new taxes have gone into effect adding&#160;roughly 10 percent&#160;to the cost of just about everything, including transportation, sugar, cocoa, taxis&#160;and funerals.</p>
<p>The ability once again to withdraw cash is&#160;seen by some as a sign of confidence in a three-year,&#160;93 billion dollar&#160;bailout plan that will hopefully keep Greece from crashing out of the Euro&#160;zone. The new taxes are seen as austerity measures that will help pay for the Euro-loans.</p>
<p>Hardly anything, with the exception of fresh meat, vegetables and fruit, has been spared by the new tax laws.</p>
<p>Even one of Greece’s national drinks has come in for a new tax. But it’s controversial. Tsipouro is a traditional, often homemade spirit. Technically it’s a&#160;strong brandy&#160;that’s made from pomace&#160;(the residue of pressed grapes). It’s quintessentially Greek because it was first made by Greek Orthodox&#160;monks&#160;in the 14th century living on Mount Athos&#160;and it remains popular to this day.</p>
<p>“Tsipouro is Greek moonshine. It originates in Crete, it’s very, very strong, stronger than ouzo, it’s about 45 percent&#160;alcohol, and people like it very much, “says Michaelides.&#160;He explains that the stuff is usually sold in bulk at stores so customers typically refill their own bottles from a big barrel.</p>
<p>“You can walk into one of these traditional liquor shops with your own bottle and you can just tell them to fill it up. So you just open the tap and this drink goes into your bottle, and then you usually drink it very, very cold.”</p>
<p>Michaelides says the potent Greek moonshine “goes directly where it should go, straight to the head.”</p>
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<p><a href="https://twitter.com/onursal_nilufer" type="external">@onursal_nilufer</a> :) They are trying to take our tsipouro away now though... :'( <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/free_tsipouro?src=hash" type="external">#free_tsipouro</a> <a href="http://t.co/j4awgPjCG0" type="external">pic.twitter.com/j4awgPjCG0</a></p>
<p>— ΕπιεικώςΑπαγορευμένα (@apagoreumena) <a href="https://twitter.com/apagoreumena/status/622894205669650433" type="external">July 19, 2015</a></p>
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<p>But now the Greek government has&#160;found a way to tax consumption of Tsipouro. Up until now taxes were only imposed on packaged goods like Cokes, bottled beers, or canned tomatoes.</p>
<p>“Everything which is packaged is being taxed at a rate of 23 percent,” says Michaelides. As a result, many were hoping that Tsipouro would slip past the tax authorities or had been spared because it’s sold in bulk.</p>
<p>Some consumers had planned to stop buying bottled liquors, says Michaelides, and were instead going to turn to buying this moonshine straight from the barrel&#160;“in order to economize, to keep their money in their pockets, but the government soon caught on and came out with a special measure&#160;to say in effect, 'Oh no, you're not going to get away with this, we’re going to tax that as well.’ So that special tax on tsipouro has made people very angry on top of everything else,” says Michaelides.</p>
<p>If according to new deal, tsipouro is regulated, I fully expect my hometown to declare independence within the year. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/freetsipouro?src=hash" type="external">#freetsipouro</a></p>
<p>— Yiannis Βaboulias (@YiannisBab) <a href="https://twitter.com/YiannisBab/status/623122452592361472" type="external">July 20, 2015</a></p>
<p>Cheers.</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | Almost everything in sight in Greece to be taxed, including its 14th century moonshine | false | https://pri.org/stories/2015-07-20/almost-everything-sight-greece-be-taxed-including-its-14th-century-moonshine | 2015-07-20 | 3 |
<p>ABU DHABI, U.A.E. — Inhabitants of this oil-rich desert nation have developed a ravenous appetite for luxury and novelty.</p>
<p>They live in oversized villas on man-made islands shaped like palm fronds. They love gas-guzzling SUVs. They play golf on lush courses that can require up to 4 million gallons of water a day to stay green. And when summer temperatures soar over 100 degrees, they bundle up in their winter parkas and ski the snowy slopes of an indoor mountain.</p>
<p>As a result, the U.A.E. owns the distinction of producing the biggest carbon footprint, per-capita, of any country in the world, according to a recent survey by the World Wildlife Fund.</p>
<p>But there are signs of reform, or at least a vague recognition that someday either the oil will run out or the world will find an alternative source of energy.</p>
<p>Abu Dhabi’s response to this reality has been to put up $15 billion in seed money to develop the world’s first carbon neutral, zero-waste city.</p>
<p>First conceived in 2006, the ambitious plan for Masdar City is rapidly taking shape amid a forest of construction cranes on a sun-scorched desert plain about a 20 minute drive from the center of Abu Dhabi.</p>
<p>Masdar City will generate most of its energy from the sun, the wind, recycled waste and whatever else creative technology can come up with. Cars will be banned from its streets, which will be narrow and cooled by the shadows in the traditional manner of a desert habitat. To get around the two square miles of the city, people will rely on an underground system of personal rapid transit pods.</p>
<p>When the project is completed, 40,000 to 50,000 people are expected to live here. They will work for the high-tech energy companies that will be lured to the U.A.E. by the promise of zero taxes and an opportunity to develop their products in a living laboratory. A number of big names have expressed interest.</p>
<p>At the moment, the centerpiece of the project is the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, the Middle East’s first graduate research program dedicated to the development of alternative energy, environmental technologies and sustainability.</p>
<p>Marwan Khraisheh, dean of engineering, described the school as a “focused, research-driven institute” that aims to attract the best and brightest from around the world.</p>
<p>A partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has helped the Masdar Institute recruit an impressive faculty, and this fall the school drew from a pool of more than 1,200 applicants to select its inaugural class of 88 students. All of the students are on full scholarship.</p>
<p>The futuristic campus, designed by London’s Foster + Partners, is on schedule to open this fall. In the meantime, classes are being held at Abu Dhabi’s Petroleum Institute.</p>
<p>The U.A.E.’s commitment to renewable energy was acknowledged in June when the International Renewable Energy Agency, established earlier this year, selected Masdar City over Bonn and Vienna for its new headquarters.</p>
<p>But without a real effort on the part of the U.A.E. to change its consumption habits, is the Masdar project anything more than another showy gesture? Can the U.A.E. have Masdar City and the Tiger Woods Dubai, a gaudy new golf resort that will feature lushly landscaped palaces, mansions and luxury villas.</p>
<p>Khraisheh grimaced only slightly. “Maybe Masdar can come up with better technologies for treating water for golf courses,” he suggested.</p>
<p>He noted that the U.A.E. still relies heavily on the expertise of a large expat workforce, and that these expats “like to play golf.”</p>
<p>He also pointed out that Masdar is more of a developmental project than an attempt to right the environmental wrongs of the U.A.E.’s lifestyle.</p>
<p>“Abu Dhabi is a key player in the global energy market. To maintain this role, Abu Dhabi will have to develop renewable sources of energy and it will have to invest in the renewable energy sector,” he said. “I commend the vision of the leadership here. No other country has dared to try anything like this.”</p>
<p>The Masdar project has also won a nod of approval from the World Wildlife Fund, the same organization that singled out the U.A.E. for its supersize carbon footprint.</p>
<p>"It's the only major oil-producing country that has decided to use some of its petrodollars while it still has them to invest in trying to create a future which could be sustainable," WWF International's One Living Planet director Jean-Paul Jeanrenaud told reporters during a visit here last year.</p>
<p>The U.A.E.’s extravagant lifestyle was an eye-opener for some of the Masdar Institute’s new students, but for Ali Ashgar Poonawala, a graduate of England’s Nottingham University, it only reinforced his sense of purpose.</p>
<p>“Once we have our campus and we show people we can live with less energy, I think they will see the light,” said the 22-year-old from Karachi who is specializing in integrated photovoltaic solar energy at the Masdar Institute.</p>
<p>“And if we can show the U.A.E., then we can show the world that sustainable living is possible, he said.”</p>
<p>Editor's note:&#160;This story was updated to correct typos.</p> | UAE: Can gas-guzzing sheiks go green? | false | https://pri.org/stories/2009-11-22/uae-can-gas-guzzing-sheiks-go-green | 2009-11-22 | 3 |
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<p>Lately, the news has been filled with the abject horrors of natural disasters like hurricanes and wildfires, and the manmade disaster of the Las Vegas massacre. But while we are all not looking, behind closed doors in Washington, the investigation into the fictional Trump/Russia collusion continues unabated. The most recent development in this waste of taxpayer money occurred Friday, as government attorneys filed to stop the release of the so-called Comey memos. The memos had been requested under the Freedom Of Information Act, by several news organizations including CNN, USA Today and the Daily Caller.</p>
<p>But attorneys for the government claim that releasing them would be “detrimental” to the ongoing investigation. The memos in question were written by James Comey, the former FBI Director, fired by Trump last May. Comey testified that he had written them after his meetings with Trump. And apparently these news organizations believe there is something of interest to be found in them.</p>
<p>John Hawkins's book 101 Things All Young Adults Should Know is filled with lessons that newly minted adults need in order to get the most out of life. Gleaned from a lifetime of trial, error, and writing it down, Hawkins provides advice everyone can benefit from in short, digestible chapters.</p>
<p>In the government’s filing on Friday, the lawyers claimed that making the memos public would “reveal the scope and focus of the investigation and thereby harm the investigation” as well as potentially hinder prosecutions.</p>
<p>The attorneys said, “Publicly explaining in any greater detail why the release of the Comey Memos would be detrimental to the pending investigation would itself disclose law enforcement sensitive information that could interfere with the pending investigation.” They suggested an alternative; that an FBI employee come forward to explain how sensitive they are and why they should not be released.</p>
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<p>It’s a bit difficult to know which side to root for here. On the one hand, these government lawyers appear to be in favor of the illegitimate investigation into Trump/Russia. On the other hand, what are they afraid of if the memos are released? It almost seems that if these pro-Trump/Russia investigation attorneys want them kept secret, then it would be a good thing for them to be made public. Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, they are the personal memos of James Comey, written, he said, after his meetings with Trump. Under no circumstances would they contain actual evidence of anything. They are the personal ramblings of a guy who has been shown to be decidedly anti-Trump himself. A memo isn’t fact and it isn’t incontrovertible. It’s basically note taking with lots of room for error and bias. And Comey could have written anything in those memos, true or not. His allegiances shed doubt on how trustworthy these memos really are. He could have simply made it all up. And given that he is the one who made it known that they existed, he likely had an agenda behind it. He was and is out to sabotage Trump and his plans for this nation. Comey and his memos cannot be trusted. They are the ramblings of a man who hated his boss.</p>
<p>I live in Newark, DE, am married, and the mother of four children; Liam, Brenna, Keira and Erin. I am also a full time Bible teacher and have a Bachelor of Arts in Communication from West Chester University.</p> | Gov Lawyers Request Judge Block Release Of Comey Memos – Would Harm Investigation | true | http://rightwingnews.com/top-news/gov-lawyers-request-judge-block-release-comey-memos-harm-investigation/ | 2018-10-20 | 0 |
<p>The Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission (IRC) will be unable to fulfill its constitutional mandate if it does not receive supplementary funding. According to the commission’s executive director, Raymond Bladine, if no supplementary funds are allocated by the state legislature, the IRC will run out of funds next month.</p>
<p>For the current fiscal year, the IRC is seeking a minimum supplementary appropriation of $530,000 to complete its ongoing work in a timely fashion as well as another $600,000 to provide for a contingency fund to cover any additional legal fees and mapping costs. The commission projects that it will require $1.7 million for fiscal year 2013. Together with the $3.5 million that has already been appropriated for the commission’s work, the total cost for the taxpayers of Arizona will come to $6.33 million if all its funding requests are met.</p>
<p>These days, when it is not unusual to read of appropriations in the hundreds of billions, a $6.33 million investment to redraw a state’s political lines may not sound like a lot of money, but it is. Yet, a $6.33 million appropriation would not be very far off the constitutional mark set for the previous Independent Redistricting Commission.</p>
<p>The AZ Independent Redistricting Commission was established by the state’s voters in November of 2000 with the passage of Proposition 106, which amended the Arizona constitution to take the redistricting power out of the hands of sitting lawmakers. The constitutional amendment specifically allocated $6,000,000 to fund the IRC’s work.</p>
<p>“Upon approval of this amendment . . . The treasurer of the state shall make $6,000,000 available for the work of the independent redistricting commission pursuant to the year 2000 census,” <a href="http://www.azleg.gov/FormatDocument.asp?inDoc=/const/4/1.p2.htm" type="external">reads</a> the state’s amended constitution.</p>
<p>Even so, the state’s legislative leadership is skeptical of the commission’s request.</p>
<p>“I would imagine they should be embarrassed about having to ask for more money,” said House Speaker Andy Tobin, as <a href="http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/2012/02/24/20120224redistricting-commission-money-worries.html" type="external">quoted</a> in the Arizona Republic. “I would be happy to hold a hearing and ask them how they intend to spend their money,” he continued.</p>
<p>However, according to Raymond Bladine, the commission’s executive director, Tobin already knows how the commission intends to spend the money. In a letter to Speaker Tobin from earlier this month, Bladine stated:</p>
<p>“If you wished, I would be most happy to meet with you to explain the needs.”</p>
<p>He concluded:</p>
<p>“I am attaching an excel spreadsheet that displays the Commission’s costs to date, estimated expenditures, our supplemental request and information on the last commission’s expenses.”</p>
<p>A large portion of the commission’s funds have already been spent on legal fees fighting challenges from Speaker Tobin’s political allies in the executive branch, spurred on by the legislature’s politicization of the redistricting process.</p>
<p>In November, Governor Jan Brewer took the unprecedented step of removing the Commission’s chairperson, Colleen Mathis, from her position, alleging she had violated the state’s constitution. Mathis was re-instated after the State Supreme Court found that the governor’s allegations had no merit. The legal fees amounted to nearly $140,000. Last summer, three of the commission’s five members hired counsel to defend themselves against an investigation by Arizona Secretary of State Tom Horne. The case was settled in their favor, but is currently under appeal. Legal fees in that case already total over $400,000.</p>
<p>Regarding funding of the IRC, the Arizona Constitution states that:</p>
<p>“the legislature shall make the necessary appropriations by a majority vote,” but also provides that the commission “shall have standing in legal actions regarding the redistricting plan and the adequacy of resources provided for the operation of the independent redistricting commission.”</p>
<p>This seems to have created the possibility of a negative fiscal feedback loop.&#160; If the legislature chooses not to provide the requested funds, the Commission may very well sue to ensure it receives them, adding to its ballooning legal costs.</p> | The cost of partisanship in Arizona’s independent redistricting | false | https://ivn.us/2012/02/27/the-cost-of-partisanship-in-arizonas-independent-redistricting/ | 2012-02-27 | 2 |
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<p>On the occasion of the publication of his new book, “Between the World and Me,” written as a letter to his teenage son, Ta-Nehisi Coates, author and intellectual figure of the Black Lives Matter movement, delivered a stirring talk last summer at Baltimore’s historic Union Baptist Church on the unique violence, fear and difficulty in living suffered by black Americans.</p>
<p>“Democracy Now!” focuses on Coates, his speech and his work in the Nov. 27 broadcast, viewable above and below:</p>
<p>Today we spend the hour with Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of the explosive book about white supremacy and being black in America. Titled “Between the World and Me,” it is written as a letter to his teenage son, Samori. In July, Ta-Nehisi Coates launched the book in his hometown of Baltimore. He spoke at the historic Union Baptist Church. “It seems like there’s a kind of national conversation going on right now about those who are paid to protect us, who sometimes end up inflicting lethal harm upon us,” Coates said. “But for me, this conversation is old, and I’m sure for many of you the conversation is quite old. It’s the cameras that are new. It’s not the violence that’s new.”</p>
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<p>Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book, “Between the World and Me,” has been called “required reading” by Toni Morrison. “I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates,” Morrison said. “Between the World and Me” is written as a letter to Coates’ 15-year-old son, Samori, and has been compared to “the talk” parents have with their children to prepare them for facing police harassment and brutality. The book is a combination of memoir, history and analysis. In July, Coates came to the Democracy Now! studio to talk about the book and his upbringing in Baltimore.</p>
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<p>— Posted by <a href="" type="internal">Alexander Reed Kelly</a>.</p> | VIDEO: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Police Brutality: The Cameras Are New -- Not the Violence | true | https://truthdig.com/articles/video-ta-nehisi-coates-on-police-brutality-the-cameras-are-new-not-the-violence/ | 2015-11-27 | 4 |
<p>U.S. stocks ended higher on Thursday, helped by a jump in tech stocks and a reversal in surging global interest rates.</p>
<p>Strong quarterly results from Alibaba as well as speculation that consumer review website Yelp.com could be for sale drove technology stocks higher, with the S&amp;P tech index &lt;.SPLRCT&gt; up 0.87 percent.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits held near a 15-year low last week, suggesting positive momentum in the economy, but not so much as to change expectations for a September interest rate hike by the Federal Reserve.</p>
<p>A recent run-up in global interest rates that has worried Wall Street also showed signs of stabilizing, while a rally in oil prices snapped.</p>
<p>"That drastic, draconian move in bonds and violent updraft in oil are settling a little bit and that's helping us focus on stocks," said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at Wunderlich Securities in New York.</p>
<p>Investors are looking ahead to an April payroll report on Friday that will offer a fresh indication of the economy's health and could potentially affect when the Fed raises interest rates for the first time since 2006. Most of Wall Street's top banks see the Federal Reserve holding off until at least September before raising interest rates, based on Reuters' most recent poll.</p>
<p>"Tomorrow's report would have to be a monster month for us to believe June is back on the table," Hogan said.</p>
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<p>The Dow Jones industrial average &lt;.DJI&gt; rose 82.08 points, or 0.46 percent, to end at 17,924.06. The S&amp;P 500 &lt;.SPX&gt; gained 7.85 points, or 0.38 percent, to 2,088 and the Nasdaq Composite &lt;.IXIC&gt; added 25.90 points, or 0.53 percent, to 4,945.54.</p>
<p>After the bell, CBS Corp's first-quarter results exceeded expectations and its stock was up 1 percent in extended trade.</p>
<p>In Thursday's trading session, nine of the 10 S&amp;P 500 sectors were positive, led by technology and financial indices.</p>
<p>Alibaba's shares jumped 7.5 percent as the Chinese e-commerce giant reported a better-than-expected rise in quarterly revenue.</p>
<p>Yahoo , which holds a stake in Alibaba, ended up 5.3 percent.</p>
<p>Yelp soared 23 percent after the Wall Street Journal reported that the operator of consumer review website Yelp.com is exploring a sale.</p>
<p>Oil prices fell after touching their highest in 2015 on Wednesday, pushing the energy index &lt;.SPNY&gt; down 1.1 percent while lifting airline stocks.</p>
<p>Advancing issues outnumbered declining ones on the NYSE by 1,763 to 1,292, for a 1.36-to-1 ratio on the upside; on the Nasdaq, 1,528 issues rose and 1,207 fell for a 1.27-to-1 ratio favoring advancers. The benchmark S&amp;P 500 index was posting 7 new 52-week highs and 2 new lows; the Nasdaq Composite was recording 46 new highs and 60 new lows.</p>
<p>About 6.9 billion shares changed hands on U.S. exchanges, below the 7.1 billion daily average for the last five sessions, according to BATS Global Markets.</p>
<p>(By Noel Randewich; Additional reporting by Tanya Agrawal; Editing by Nick Zieminski)</p> | Wall Street Ends Stronger as Global Debt Worries Fade | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2015/05/07/us-equity-futures-drop-amid-global-selloff.html | 2016-03-06 | 0 |
<p>While Pat Robertson’s recent remarks on the Christian Broadcast Network’s The 700 Club that the United States should “take out” Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez certainly caught the media spotlight, the statement by the evangelical minister was only the latest episode in a long and troubled story. Since the 1970s Robertson has loyally served hawkish U.S. foreign policy objectives in Latin America and played a particularly pernicious role in the region. Christian organizations nation wide would do well to heed the history and to rigorously challenge Robertson on his record.</p>
<p>As a young man, Robertson dreamed about profitable business deals in Latin America. After graduating from college, he briefly worked for the W.R. Grace &amp; Co. in New York. Robertson was specifically assigned to Grace’s Foreign Service School to analyze South American economic conditions in South America. There, Robertson collaborated with the company’s chief executives of the company. According to one of Robertson’s biographers, “during the months he worked with the Grace company he viewed Latin America as the ‘land of opportunity’ where he would find some way to enrich himself. Though Robertson left the company after only about nine months, he later achieved his dream by extending Christian televangelism to Central America. By the 1980s, Pat Robertson’s program “The 700 Club,” reached 3.1 million viewers in Guatemala. Robertson took a personal interest in the strife torn Central American nation, developing warm ties to General Efrain Rios Montt, a born again evangelical Christian. When Rios Montt took power in a military coup d’etat in March of 1982, Robertson immediately flew to Guatemala, meeting with the incoming president a scant five days after he came to power. Later, Robertson aired an interview with Rios Montt on “The 700 Club” and extolled the new military government.</p>
<p>Robertson’s visit came at a particularly sensitive time. Guatemala’s dirt poor indigenous peoples, who made up half the country’s population, were suffering greatly at the hands of the U.S. funded military. The armed forces had taken over Indian lands that seemed fertile for cattle exporting or a promising site to drill for oil. Those Indians who dared to resist were massacred. Rios Montt, a staunch anti-Communist supported by U.S. president Reagan, was determined to wipe out the Marxist URNG, the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Union rebels. However, according to Amnesty International, thousands of people with no connection to the armed struggle were killed by the regime. Not surprisingly, many Indians turned to armed resistance. To deal with the ever worsening situation, Rios Montt proposed a so called “guns and beans” campaign. Rios Montt explained the plan very succinctly: “If you are with us, we’ll feed you, if not, we’ll kill you.” For Robertson, however, Rios Montt’s extermination policy was of little account. Astonishingly, the televangelist wrote “I found [Rios Montt] to be a man of humilityimpeccable personal integrity, and a deep faith in Jesus Christ.”</p>
<p>One reason that Rios Montt may have appealed to Robertson was the dictator’s dislike of Catholic priests. In the 1980s, they had become an obstacle to the expansion of evangelical Protestantism. Working within indigenous communities, Catholic priests had been driven out or murdered. Protestant sects, on the other hand, allied to the Guatemalan military. They preached individual conversion, the importance of obedience to military and political authority, the merits of capitalism, and the value of inequality. Rios Montt’s own Church of the Word went so far as to define priests and nuns as the enemy. According to Walter LaFeber, a historian of Central America, three priests were killed within a thirty-six month period in just one province. With the Catholic Church out of the way, Rios Montt conducted a scorched earth policy. His forces massacred as many as 15,000 Indians. Whole villages were leveled and the army set up “Civilian Self-Defense Patrols” which forced 900,000 villagers to “voluntarily” aid police in tracking down suspects. Rios Montt created “model” villages, similar to concentration camps, which housed Indian refugees. However, when 40,000 survivors sought safety in Mexico, Guatemalan helicopters machine gunned the camps. Rios Montt justified the genocidal policy by claiming that the Indians were suspected of cooperating with the URNG, the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Union, or “might” cooperate in future. Amnesty International noted that extra judicial killings carried out the by the military “were done in terrible ways: people of all ages were not only shot to death, they were burned alive, hacked to death, disemboweled, drowned, beheaded. Small children were smashed against rocks or bayoneted to death.”</p>
<p>Far from denouncing such practices, Robertson rushed to defend Rios Montt. “Little by little the miracle began to unfold,” he wrote of the regime. “The country was stabilized. Democratic processes, never a reality in Guatemala, began to be put into place.” Robertson also praised Rios Montt for eliminating death squads, despite recent estimates that tens of thousands were killed by death squads in the second half of 1982 and throughout 1983. Most damning of all, even as Rios Montt was carrying out the extermination of the Mayan population, Robertson held a fundraising telethon for the Guatemalan military. The televangelist urged donations for International Love Lift, Rios Montt’s relief program linked to Gospel Outreach, the dictator’s U.S. church. Meanwhile, Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network reportedly sponsored a campaign to provide money as well as agricultural and medical technicians to aid in the design of Rios Montt’s first model villages. Rios Montt was ultimately overthrown in another military coup d’etat in August 1983.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, Robertson’s involvement in Guatemalan politics did not discredit his career. He also led efforts to back the Nicaraguan contras in the 1980s, who sought to overthrow the Sandinista regime. More recently, he has been an important backer of President Bush and currently commands a captive audience of one million U.S. television viewers. Judging from his recent remarks, Robertson has not chosen to re-evaluate his hawkish views. The latest target drawing Robertson’s fire is Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Unlike General Rios Montt, who came to power in a military coup, Chavez enjoys significant popular support. He has won two presidential elections, in 1998 and 2000, defeated an opposition led recall referendum in August 2004 and according to recent polls, has an approval rating of 70%. Not surprisingly, he is favored to win re-election in 2006. But to Robertson, the will of the Venezuelan people is of no account. Chavez, unlike Rios Montt, has not been compliant with U.S. interests. Not only has Chavez had the audaciousness to criticize the U.S. war in Iraq, but he also questions the fairness of Bush initiatives like the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. The world’s fifth largest oil producer, Venezuela has significant political and economic clout in the region, and Chavez has poured oil proceeds into health and education programs. To the ire of Robertson, Chavez has pursued an independent course by providing oil to Cuba. In exchange, the island nation has sent thousands of doctors who have assisted the Venezuelan poor. Unfortunately for Bush and the Christian right, Chavez has not been easily dislodged from power. Though the U.S. provided material assistance to Venezuelan opposition figures seeking to topple Chavez, a coup d’etat in April of 2002 proved a miserable failure when popular protest led to Chavez’s reinstatement. Since that time, Chavez has consolidated power and has become a hemispheric leader. Robertson’s attack surely will not alter the political equation in Venezuela. Though the televangelist has a presence in Venezuela, broadcasting in Spanish over Venezuelan station Televen, Venezuelan Protestants only number 2% of the population and are by and large a working class Chavez constituency. Nevertheless, Robertson’s remark has cast a pall over U.S.-Venezuelan relations, which had in recent months already hit a record low.</p>
<p>Though some Protestant ministers have criticized Robertson, arguing that the televangelist has demeaned the faith, this trickle needs to turn into a torrent. By all reckoning, Robertson’s career should have been destroyed as a result of his support for genocidal dictator Rios Montt. Now, Protestants nation-wide have the opportunity to voice their dissent over Robertson’s most recent outburst. Hopefully, they will act soon or Robertson will continue to make un-Christian statements that contribute to ill will between the United States and its neighbors.</p>
<p>NIKOLAS KOZLOFF received his doctorate in Latin American history from Oxford University in 2002. His book, <a href="" type="internal">South America In Revolt: Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and The Politics of Hemispheric Unity</a>, is forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press.</p>
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<p>CLARIFICATION</p>
<p>ALEXANDER COCKBURN, JEFFREY ST CLAIR, BECKY GRANT AND THE INSTITUTE FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF JOURNALISTIC CLARITY, COUNTERPUNCH</p>
<p>We published an article entitled “A Saudiless Arabia” by Wayne Madsen dated October 22, 2002 (the “Article”), on the website of the Institute for the Advancement of Journalistic Clarity, CounterPunch, www.counterpunch.org (the “Website”).</p>
<p>Although it was not our intention, counsel for Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi has advised us the Article suggests, or could be read as suggesting, that Mr Al Amoudi has funded, supported, or is in some way associated with, the terrorist activities of Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda terrorist network.</p>
<p>We do not have any evidence connecting Mr Al Amoudi with terrorism.</p>
<p>As a result of an exchange of communications with Mr Al Amoudi’s lawyers, we have removed the Article from the Website.</p>
<p>We are pleased to clarify the position.</p>
<p>August 17, 2005</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | Rev. Pat Robertson and Gen. Rios Montt | true | https://counterpunch.org/2005/09/17/rev-pat-robertson-and-gen-rios-montt/ | 2005-09-17 | 4 |
<p>RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — A Palestinian family says it has killed one of its members after Gaza’s Hamas rulers said he aided Israel in killing three of the militant group’s commanders.</p>
<p>The family said in a statement that a relative shot Ahmed Barhoum dead Friday but did not say which family member pulled the trigger. It said they followed developments in the Hamas investigation and believed their son was guilty.</p>
<p>The family noted the relative was arrested and interrogated by the “resistance,” meaning he was detained outside the Palestinian litigation system. There was no immediate statement from Hamas, an Islamic militant group.</p>
<p>The Hamas commanders were killed near the end of the 50-day war in 2014 during an airstrike on a house.</p>
<p>Hamas has executed dozens of Palestinians since seizing Gaza in 2007.</p>
<p>RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — A Palestinian family says it has killed one of its members after Gaza’s Hamas rulers said he aided Israel in killing three of the militant group’s commanders.</p>
<p>The family said in a statement that a relative shot Ahmed Barhoum dead Friday but did not say which family member pulled the trigger. It said they followed developments in the Hamas investigation and believed their son was guilty.</p>
<p>The family noted the relative was arrested and interrogated by the “resistance,” meaning he was detained outside the Palestinian litigation system. There was no immediate statement from Hamas, an Islamic militant group.</p>
<p>The Hamas commanders were killed near the end of the 50-day war in 2014 during an airstrike on a house.</p>
<p>Hamas has executed dozens of Palestinians since seizing Gaza in 2007.</p> | Gaza family kills relative after Hamas says he aided Israel | false | https://apnews.com/298020982a714e0da5f26f16d1c55549 | 2018-01-19 | 2 |
<p>The only “mystery” surrounding erectile dysfunction drugs like Cialis and Viagra is why their creation wasn’t given priority over less-important drugs like penicillin. Otherwise, their mechanism is simple – they improve blood flow to, er, places that could benefit from improved blood flow. That’s good news for the&#160;one in 3,500 male babies who suffer from Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD): <a href="http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-05/cmc-csc050714.php" type="external">Researchers from Cedars-Sinai hospital</a>in LA have found that tadalafil and sildenafil also improve blood flow to muscles starved of oxygen by the disease.</p>
<p>“The effects were immediate and dramatic, raising the question: If a single dose restores blood flow to muscle while the drug is in the patient’s system, could ongoing tadalafil administration provide sustained benefits, possibly preserve muscle and slow disease progression? If so, this would offer a new therapeutic strategy for DMD, and we have launched a randomized Phase III clinical trial to find out,” said Ronald Victor, MD, director of the Cedars-Sinai Center for Hypertension, associate director of clinical research at the Heart Institute and the Burns and Allen Chair in Cardiology Research.</p>
<p>The underlying problem with DMD is dystrophin, a protein found in the membranes of muscle cells that the disease eliminates. Victor led a research team that in 2000 discovered that the blood flow abnormality in the muscles of children with DMD was caused by a loss of nitric oxide, a signaling chemical that normally tells blood vessels to relax during exercise, increasing blood flow and oxygenation.</p>
<p>It’s not surprising, then, that tadalafil and sildenafil appear to have a positive effect – nitric oxide is the same chemical that tells the muscles in the penis to relax and allow blood in, creating an erection. In patients with ED, the cause is often insufficient nitric oxide, hence the Viagra and/or Cialis prescription. Victor and his team first tested the drugs on mice with dystrophin, eventually moving to human trials and publishing results in 2012 showing that tadalafil restored blood flow for boys with Becker muscular dystrophy, a similar but less extreme disease.</p>
<p>For boys with DMD, gripping exercises were demonstrably easier after a single dose of tadalafil or sildenafil. The drug allowed the major artery of the arm and the blood vessels in muscles of the forearm to function normally, like those of healthy boys in the same age group.</p>
<p>“Steroids and cardiac-protective blood pressure medication are increasingly prescribed at early ages for patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy in an effort to delay by a few years the most devastating effects of the disease. But these treatments have no effect on the blood vessel dysfunction that prevents muscles from getting the oxygen they need,” said Victor. “In contrast, in our study, a single dose of tadalafil or sildenafil had an immediate effect. These are well-studied, well-tolerated drugs that are already on the market. If additional study confirms their benefits, repurposing the drugs for muscular dystrophy patients could quickly transform clinical practice.”</p>
<p /> | Penis pill helps treat deadly Duchenne muscular dystrophy | false | http://natmonitor.com/2014/05/08/penis-pill-helps-treat-deadly-duchenne-muscular-dystrophy/ | 2014-05-08 | 3 |
<p>RICHMOND, Va. (AP) _ These Virginia lotteries were drawn Saturday:</p>
<p>Bank a Million</p>
<p>02-18-24-26-27-36, Bonus: 9</p>
<p>(two, eighteen, twenty-four, twenty-six, twenty-seven, thirty-six; Bonus: nine)</p>
<p>Cash 5 Day</p>
<p>04-07-15-17-28</p>
<p>(four, seven, fifteen, seventeen, twenty-eight)</p>
<p>Cash 5 Night</p>
<p>02-05-10-29-31</p>
<p>(two, five, ten, twenty-nine, thirty-one)</p>
<p>Mega Millions</p>
<p>Estimated jackpot: $40 million</p>
<p>Pick 3 Day</p>
<p>5-3-9</p>
<p>(five, three, nine)</p>
<p>Pick 3 Night</p>
<p>2-8-5</p>
<p>(two, eight, five)</p>
<p>Pick 4 Day</p>
<p>6-1-4-1</p>
<p>(six, one, four, one)</p>
<p>Pick 4 Night</p>
<p>9-0-2-8</p>
<p>(nine, zero, two, eight)</p>
<p>Powerball</p>
<p>12-29-30-33-61, Powerball: 26, Power Play: 3</p>
<p>(twelve, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-three, sixty-one; Powerball: twenty-six; Power Play: three)</p>
<p>Estimated jackpot: $570 million</p>
<p>RICHMOND, Va. (AP) _ These Virginia lotteries were drawn Saturday:</p>
<p>Bank a Million</p>
<p>02-18-24-26-27-36, Bonus: 9</p>
<p>(two, eighteen, twenty-four, twenty-six, twenty-seven, thirty-six; Bonus: nine)</p>
<p>Cash 5 Day</p>
<p>04-07-15-17-28</p>
<p>(four, seven, fifteen, seventeen, twenty-eight)</p>
<p>Cash 5 Night</p>
<p>02-05-10-29-31</p>
<p>(two, five, ten, twenty-nine, thirty-one)</p>
<p>Mega Millions</p>
<p>Estimated jackpot: $40 million</p>
<p>Pick 3 Day</p>
<p>5-3-9</p>
<p>(five, three, nine)</p>
<p>Pick 3 Night</p>
<p>2-8-5</p>
<p>(two, eight, five)</p>
<p>Pick 4 Day</p>
<p>6-1-4-1</p>
<p>(six, one, four, one)</p>
<p>Pick 4 Night</p>
<p>9-0-2-8</p>
<p>(nine, zero, two, eight)</p>
<p>Powerball</p>
<p>12-29-30-33-61, Powerball: 26, Power Play: 3</p>
<p>(twelve, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-three, sixty-one; Powerball: twenty-six; Power Play: three)</p>
<p>Estimated jackpot: $570 million</p> | VA Lottery | false | https://apnews.com/amp/fe5a7602abc8450f9b260c54a85d989a | 2018-01-07 | 2 |
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<p>Residents must decide by mid-August whether they will accept terms of a bond-restructuring deal that would lower tax payments for most residents, the bondholders’ attorney Brian Crumbaker told the Mariposa East Public Improvement District board on Wednesday.</p>
<p>Under the proposed restructuring deal, PID payments would no longer be assessed according to the home’s value.</p>
<p>There would be a set amount based on the zoning of the property. Most property owners would see their PID payments reduced below levels they were paying in 2011.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>The PID board will hold a hearing in Rio Rancho City Council Chambers on Aug. 14 to hear residents’ input. The hearing time has not been set.</p>
<p>“Ninety percent of us love the (restructuring) deal,” Mariposa resident John Knipps said after the PID meeting this week.</p>
<p>But a lawsuit filed by a small group of residents against the developer could scotch the deal.</p>
<p>Crumbaker outlined the restructuring deal to residents at a meeting in April, saying it could only move forward if some aspects of the lawsuit filed were changed. He said he’s had “productive” discussions with Christopher Bauman, the attorney handling the Mariposa lawsuit, but would not comment further.</p>
<p>Staff at Bauman’s office said he was attending a trial out of town and not available for comment.</p>
<p>Tax information must be provided to the state Department of Finance Administration by Sept. 3.</p>
<p>PID board Chairman Tom Swisstack said they are requesting an extension of the deadline.</p>
<p>Mariposa resident Martha Greenleaf worries her annual PID taxes could increase by $12,000 if the restructuring deal falls through.</p>
<p>“I’m scared to death that they’re not going to get this resolved,” Greenleaf said in an interview on Thursday.</p>
<p>High Desert issued $16 million in bonds using the PID process, which allows a developer to sell bonds backed by payments from property owners to pay for community infrastructure. High Desert was helping to cover bond payments but stopped last summer, saying it could no longer afford to do so.</p>
<p>That left residents facing a ten-fold tax increase until bondholders agreed in late last August to forego demanding the full amount for one year.</p> | Clock ticks for Mariposa residents to accept bond restructuring | false | https://abqjournal.com/237225/clock-ticks-for-mariposa-residents-to-accept-bond-restructuring.html | 2013-07-31 | 2 |
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<p>Particularly vulnerable are families still suffering from the impact of last year’s “dzud” (pronounced ‘ZUHD), an extreme weather phenomenon unique to the country that is characterized by a summer drought and then a prolonged winter of heavy snow and temperatures of minus 40 to minus 50 Celsius (minus 40 to minus 59 Fahrenheit).</p>
<p>More than 40,000 cows and other livestock have already died this time, a figure that is expected to jump in the freezing months ahead and into spring when animals are still weak.</p>
<p>A dzud typically happens once every 12 years, but has struck for the second consecutive year this winter. The dzud last year killed more than 1 million livestock, which are the only source of food, transport and outside income for almost half of Mongolia’s population of 3 million.</p>
<p>Aid groups say the situation is compounded by last year’s harsh winter and a deep recession amid a market bust for the vast landlocked nation’s mineral exports.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Many herder families will lose their livestock and livelihoods “and will have no choice but to migrate to the slum areas on the outskirts of (the capital, Ulaanbaatar) and other urban centers where they will face great social and economic hardship,” said Gwendolyn Pang, head of the Beijing office of the International Federation of Red Cross.</p>
<p>The Red Cross said that 70 percent of the country is covered by snow and 157,000 people belonging to herder households in 17 of Mongolia’s 21 provinces are at risk.</p>
<p>The agency appealed for $650,000 to help 2,740 most at-risk families.</p> | Harsh Mongolian winter risks livelihoods of herder families | false | https://abqjournal.com/951097/harsh-mongolian-winter-risks-livelihoods-of-herder-families.html | 2017-02-16 | 2 |
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<p>From the title of the speech – “Failures of Liberal Progressivism” — right down to the rhetoric Ryan used throughout, this speech was quite clearly an attempt to press the “reset” button on the current political dialogue in the country. Ignore Trump, Ryan was saying. Here’s what I – and real conservatives – believe. And here’s what liberals believe. That’s what we need to focus on once the Trump train runs out of steam on Nov. 8.</p>
<p>“I know this election has taken some dark – sometimes very dark – turns,” Ryan said at one point. “Which is exactly why I think it is so important that we take a step back and reflect on what this election is ultimately about.”</p>
<p>At another moment, he offered this assessment: “Beneath all the ugliness lies a long-running debate between two governing philosophies: One that is in keeping with our nation’s founding principles – like freedom and equality – and another that seeks to replace them.”</p>
<p>Throughout the address, Ryan made the case that Clinton’s version of liberalism has failed the country before and will fail it again, largely because it assumes the ideal condition is a nanny government that is always trusted to know better and solve all problems. “In the America they want, the driving force is the state,” said Ryan. “It is a place where government is taken away from the people, and we are ruled by our betters . . . by a cold and unfeeling bureaucracy that replaces original thinking.”</p>
<p>This speech functions as both the logical extension of the parallel political campaign Ryan has been running since it became clear that Trump would be the Republican nominee and a ramping-up of his efforts to regain control of the party in advance of what increasingly looks like a big-league loss by Trump.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Ryan isn’t running for president – yet. What he is doing is trying to ensure that there is a party left to seek the nomination from if and when he does decide to run for president in 2020. To do so, Ryan believes he has to get the GOP out from under the damage being done to the brand by Trump and focus people’s attention not only on his vision of conservatism but also on the liberal one being offered by Clinton.</p>
<p>“There is far more at stake here than we realize,” Ryan said near the end of his speech, a line that could apply not only to the idea of giving over power in Washington to Clinton but also to allowing Trump to continue to run wild in the GOP.</p>
<p>The stakes are indeed high – both for Ryan’s future political prospects and the fate of the GOP in Washington and nationally. Ryan knows that he has to grab the wheel from Trump or watch as the party he wants to lead gets stuck in a ditch from which he won’t be able to extricate it. This speech is a lunge for that wheel.</p>
<p>ryan-gop</p> | Paul Ryan is already planning for what the Republican Party will look like after Trump loses | false | https://abqjournal.com/867735/paul-ryan-is-already-planning-for-what-the-republican-party-will-look-like-after-trump-loses.html | 2 |
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<p />
<p>Image source: Getty Images.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>While crude prices stumbled into 2016, they found their footing by mid-year and roared back to life, ending the year up about 42%. Those rising prices lifted most oil stocks. However, a handful of large-cap oil stocks rose above the crowd by outperforming crude's rally. Those top-tier performers wereContinental Resources (NYSE: CLR), Devon Energy (NYSE: DVN), Anadarko Petroleum (NYSE: APC), Pioneer Natural Resources (NYSE: PXD), and Cimarex Energy (NYSE: XEC):</p>
<p><a href="http://ycharts.com/companies/CLR" type="external">CLR</a> data by <a href="http://ycharts.com" type="external">YCharts Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
<p>Here's what made this quintet the best oil stocks of the year.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Bakken shale-focused driller Continental Resources was one of 2016's <a href="http://www.fool.com/investing/2016/12/27/the-oil-industrys-5-biggest-surprise-winners-of-20.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">biggest surprise performers in the oil patch Opens a New Window.</a>. That is partially due to an atrocious 2015, when the stock plunged more than 40%. However, Continental made back its losses from 2015, and then some, because of its impressive performance in 2016. After initially anticipating a double-digit production decline in 2016, the company now expects production to come in roughly flat thanks to stronger-than-anticipated well performance and higher oil prices. It also generated excess cash flow and sold non-core assets to pay down debt. The result is that Continental Resources is in a much stronger position at the end of 2016 than it was to start the year, which lifted a huge weight that had been holding down the stock.</p>
<p>Image source: Anadarko Petroleum.</p>
<p>Devon Energy is also coming off a rough performance in 2015 when its stock plummeted 47.5%. One of the drivers of that decline was the company's <a href="http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/12/07/devon-energy-corp-unveils-bold-moves-to-sharpen-it.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">decision Opens a New Window.</a> toward the end of the year to spend $2.6 billion to strengthen its core positions in the STACK play of Oklahoma and the Powder River Basin. The market worried that this hefty price tag was a bit much considering the crashing crude market, which could put unneeded pressure on the company's balance sheet. Devon, however, worked hard to alleviate those fears by selling more than $3.2 billion in non-core assets in 2016. Furthermore, the company turned its STACK asset into a growth engine, which has it positioned to deliver double-digit oil growth in 2017 as long as crude remains above $55 per barrel. That ability to restart its growth engine at much lower oil prices is one of the drivers behind Devon's strong showing in 2016.</p>
<p>Anadarko Petroleum also spent much of the past year repositioning its portfolio to grow at lower oil prices. The company announced several asset sales in 2016, totaling more than $5 billion in monetizations, which strengthened its balance sheet. In addition, it took advantage of an opportunity to acquire premier assets in the Gulf of Mexico at a bargain price. Because of these efforts, Anadarko Petroleum is now in the position to deliver 12% to 14% annual production growth in a $50 to $60 oil price environment while living within cash flows. That optimistic growth outlook had investors flocking to its stock in 2016.</p>
<p>Image source: Pioneer Natural Resources, Sands Weems.</p>
<p>Unlike most other oil companies, Pioneer Natural Resources did not skip a beat in 2016. From the get-go, the company expected to deliver double-digit production growth thanks to its prime position in the Permian Basin. However, due to impressivewell results, it outperformed its own expectations pushing its oil growth rate from an estimated 10% at the start of the year to a projected 14% year-over-year increase. Also, Pioneer Natural Resources believes that it can deliver 15% annual production growth along with 25% compound annual cash flow growth through 2020 while living within cash flow by 2018 in a $55 oil price environment. Given the company's past success and rock-solid balance sheet, investors are optimistic that Pioneer can outperform those lofty expectations.</p>
<p>All things considered, Cimerex Energy had a rather quiet 2016, only spending enough capital to keep its production roughly flat. Instead, what drove its stock price higher is the fact that it controls positions in two of the country's hottest shale plays: Permian Basin of Texas and the STACK/SCOOP plays of Oklahoma. These rising stars caught the industry's attention over the past year due to their low drilling costs and high hydrocarbon content, which combine to generate stellar well results at lower commodity prices.</p>
<p>Because of those exceptional returns, Cimerex Energy only needs to spend $600 million in capital during 2017 to deliver 11% year-over-year production growth. What's remarkable about that number is that it is the same spending level the company had in 2016, which was down 29% from 2015 and 47% from 2014. Investors see this capital efficiency as a game changer for Cimerex because it could grow even faster in the years ahead as it fine-tunes its techniques in these emerging oil growth plays.</p>
<p>While rising oil prices lifted most oil stocks in 2016, the best performers had one thing in common: These companies have either repositioned their portfolio or driven down their cost basis so they can thrive at lower oil prices. Because of this, these producers should deliver robust growth in 2017 and beyond, given the outlook that oil prices should be even higher than they were in 2016.</p>
<p>10 stocks we like better than Continental Resources When investing geniuses David and Tom Gardner have a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, the newsletter they have run for over a decade, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has tripled the market.*</p>
<p>David and Tom just revealed what they believe are the <a href="http://infotron.fool.com/infotrack/click?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fool.com%2Fmms%2Fmark%2Fe-foolcom-sa-bbn-dyn%3Faid%3D8867%26source%3Disaeditxt0010449%26ftm_cam%3Dsa-bbn-evergreen%26ftm_pit%3D6312%26ftm_veh%3Dbbn_article_pitch&amp;impression=cdc28faf-c925-4689-9f19-b307037cc3f4&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">10 best stocks Opens a New Window.</a> for investors to buy right now... and Continental Resources wasn't one of them! That's right -- they think these 10 stocks are even better buys.</p>
<p><a href="http://infotron.fool.com/infotrack/click?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fool.com%2Fmms%2Fmark%2Fe-foolcom-sa-bbn-dyn%3Faid%3D8867%26source%3Disaeditxt0010449%26ftm_cam%3Dsa-bbn-evergreen%26ftm_pit%3D6312%26ftm_veh%3Dbbn_article_pitch&amp;impression=cdc28faf-c925-4689-9f19-b307037cc3f4&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">Click here Opens a New Window.</a> to learn about these picks!</p>
<p>*Stock Advisor returns as of Nov. 7, 2016</p>
<p><a href="http://my.fool.com/profile/TMFmd19/info.aspx" type="external">Matt DiLallo Opens a New Window.</a> has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of Devon Energy. The Motley Fool has a <a href="http://www.fool.com/Legal/fool-disclosure-policy.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">disclosure policy Opens a New Window.</a>.</p> | The 5 Best Oil Stocks of 2016 | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2016/12/31/5-best-oil-stocks-2016.html | 2016-12-31 | 0 |
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