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<p>By Simon Johnson and Veronica Ek</p>
<p>STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - The administrator in charge of Saab's restructuring under court protection could pull the plug on the process as early as Tuesday, paving the way for declaring the auto maker bankrupt, daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet reported.</p>
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<p><a href="" type="internal">Saab</a> has struggled for months to stave off collapse, seeking new investors and selling off assets so it could pay suppliers and employees and resume production at its plant in Sweden.</p>
<p>But it has still not received a vital bridge loan of 70 million euros ($96 million) that was secured by Chinese car firm Youngman, money that is key to its short-term survival.</p>
<p>The paper said negotiations were ongoing in the Swedish capital with Youngman, but the court-appointed administrator could decide as early as Tuesday to ask a court to end Saab's period of protection from creditors.</p>
<p>The administrator, Guy Lofalk, could not immediately be reached for comment.</p>
<p>Saab spokeswoman Gunilla Gustavs said the car maker still expected to get the bridge loan.</p>
<p>"We are still expecting the Youngman loan to come in," Gustavs said. She had no comment on when the money was expected or how long Saab could last without the cash.</p>
<p>Saab won breathing space from creditors in late September, but still needs fresh money to pay wages and suppliers while it restructures.</p>
<p>If the restructuring process looks unlikely to succeed, Saab's creditors, the administrator or Saab itself could ask for creditor protection to be withdrawn, Cecilia Tisell, a judge at the local court told Reuters.</p>
<p>She said the court had not received any request of that kind.</p>
<p>"No, we have not heard anything like that at all from the Saab companies or Guy Lofalk," she said.</p>
<p>Saab-owner Swedish Automobile's chief executive Victor Muller declined to comment.</p>
<p>Swedish Automobile shares fell 7.2 percent by 1037 GMT.</p>
<p>Saab had hoped protection from creditors would allow it to survive until China's authorities approve a 245 million euro ($336 million) investment by car firms Zhejiang Youngman Lotus Automobile and Pangda &lt;601258.SS&gt;.</p>
<p>A decision by China's NDRC could come as early as Friday.</p>
<p>The paper also quoted Swedish Debt Office spokesman Daniel Barr, who rejected media reports the government could pay off Saab's debt to the <a href="" type="internal">European Investment Bank</a> and convert the security on the loan to shares in Saab.</p>
<p>"No, the Debt Office does not have any such mandate," he said.</p>
<p>($1 = 0.732 Euros)</p>
<p>(Editing by Helen Massy-Beresford)</p>
<p>Advertisement</p> | Decision on Saab's fate could be hours away: report | true | http://foxbusiness.com/features/2011/10/11/decision-on-saabs-fate-could-be-hours-away-report.html | 2016-01-29 | 0 |
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<p>ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Passengers at the Alvarado Transportation Center in Downtown Albuquerque will be treated to three separate flamenco performances Friday afternoon, thanks to Albuquerque’s National Institute of Flamenco, which is hosting the Festival Flamenco Internacional de Alburquerque in June, ABQ RIDE announced in a news release.</p>
<p>The performances will take place in the Alvarado center’s fountain area near the corner of 1st and Central SW, the release said.</p>
<p>Dancers and musicians with the Tierra Adentro Charter School will perform from noon to 1 p.m. Friday, followed by Alma Flamenca from 2 to 3 p.m. with dancers trained at UNM’s Flamenco Emphasis Program under the direction of Marisol Encinias.</p>
<p>Finally, from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m., Niños Flamencos — a child-based ensemble consisting of dancers from 6 to 14 years of age directed by Eva Encinias-Sandoval — will perform.</p>
<p>It’s just a taste of the National Institute of Flamenco’s Festival Flamenco that is expected to bring more than 5,500 students and patrons to Albuquerque June 10-15, according to the ABQ RIDE release.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> | Free flamenco at Alvarado Center Friday | false | https://abqjournal.com/202419/free-flamenco-at-alvarado-center-friday.html | 2 |
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<p>Last week, the U.S. Conference on AIDS (USCA) was <a href="http://www.hivplusmag.com/stigma/2015/09/11/trans-lives-matter-activists-storm-stage-usca" type="external">temporarily taken over</a> by a group of #TransLivesMatter activists. Led by the fierce trans Latina activist Bamby Salcedo, the group held the stage for nearly 20 minutes to demand that transgender people receive the consideration they deserve in HIV policy and outreach.</p>
<p>The moment for the protest was strategically considered; it was the plenary session of the conference and many top officials were in the room, including Douglas Brooks, Director of the Office of National AIDS Policy (ONAP). It was ONAP’s recent <a href="" type="internal">new plan to tackle the HIV epidemic</a> — ambitious as it is — that spurred the protest.</p>
<p>“In the previous HIV/AIDS strategy, the trans community was mentioned,” Salcedo told ThinkProgress. “Things were supposed to be implemented, but that never happened.” The new plan abandons the trans-specific strategies altogether, essentially erasing the unique experiences of transgender people with HIV, what Salcedo describes as “structural violence.”</p>
<p>That is why the protesters, a group of local D.C. activists and members of the <a href="http://www.translatinacoalition.org/" type="external">TransLatina Coalition</a>, chanted, “We are not gay men!” Under current plans and strategies, transgender women are lumped in with men who have sex with men (MSM).</p>
<p>The primary demand was thus to collect data specifically about the experience of transgender people with HIV.”We recommended collecting data on transgender people ten years ago,” Salcedo explained, noting that it still hasn’t happened. “We need to have ways of collecting data that are specific to our communities,” which continue to be marginalized. According to the 2011 <a href="http://endtransdiscrimination.org/PDFs/NTDS_Exec_Summary.pdf" type="external">National Transgender Discrimination Survey</a>, trans people reported HIV infection at four times the national average, with rates even higher for trans people of color.</p>
<p>“Unfortunately, we live in a society where we play the numbers game. Trans people and people of color, our community is non-existent [in the data]. There’s no way to prove the needs of people. Numbers should be collected about our existence and our needs.”</p>
<p>For example, there is little research available about the experiences of transgender men. Many of them identify as gay or bi and engage in some of the same behaviors as other MSM, exposing them to the same risks of HIV infection even though they have a very different perspective.</p>
<p>There have similarly not been sufficient studies about the interactions of hormone therapies and HIV medications. Thus, clinics might prescribe a patient with both, unaware of any complications that might arise from taking them both.</p>
<p>Without this research, there can be no evidence-based interventions specific to trans people. “We have to intentionally invest in the lives of transgender people,” Salcedo said. “If there’s no research, we’re nonexistent.”</p>
<p>This is particularly true, she explains, because of the way trans women are forced to live in certain neighborhoods because of their experiences with discrimination. These “hotspots” make it easier for transgender people to be “criminalized by who we are and where we live.” A simple trip to the convenience store could involved being stopped by police and even arrested, profiled on the assumption of being a sex worker. This assumption is based on the reality that many trans women resort to sex work for survival when they cannot find other stable work, which puts them at a higher risk of HIV infection.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.frontiersmedia.com/frontiers-blog/2015/09/13/bamby-salcedo-and-translivesmatter-storm-stage-at-aids-conference-welcomed/" type="external">protesters’ demands</a> of ONAP seek to lay a foundation for recognizing these disparities and helping support trans people’s unique needs:</p>
<p>Salcedo’s overarching demand is fairly simple: “HIV prevention programs need to be developed that look at the bigger picture.”</p> | Why Transgender Women Chanted ‘We Are Not Gay Men!’ At An AIDS Conference | true | http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2015/09/17/3701612/transgender-aids-protest/ | 2015-09-17 | 4 |
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<p>House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has set lawmakers toward another clash over increasing the debt ceiling, maintaining last summer’s Republican demand for the next request to increase the federal government’s borrowing limit.</p>
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<p>“When the time comes, I will again insist on my simple principle of cuts and reforms greater than the debt limit increase,” said Boehner, according to prepared remarks to be delivered in Washington Tuesday. “This is the only avenue I see right now to force the elected leadership of this country to solve our structural fiscal imbalance.”</p>
<p>Speaking earlier at the same event, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said, “We hope they do it this time without the drama and the pain and the damage they caused the country last July.”</p>
<p>Geithner said the Treasury Department can keep the federal government under the current debt limit until the early part of next year.</p>
<p>Aides in both parties have said they expect congressional leaders to hold off intense negotiations on the debt ceiling and trillions in expiring tax provisions until after the election, giving Congress about two months to address a massive schedule of pressing and politically difficult issues.</p>
<p>Boehner will also announce Tuesday afternoon the House’s intent to vote on a proposal “to stop the largest tax increase in American history” with the December 31 expiration of the 2001/2003 federal income tax rates. The bill will “establish an expedited process by which Congress would enact real tax reform in 2013 … (to create a) tax code that maintains progressivity, taxes income once, and creates a fairer, simpler code.”</p>
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<p>The House Speaker leaves the details of the tax overhaul to the House Ways and Means Committee and Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI).</p>
<p>The Obama Administration and congressional Democrats continue to insist that current temporary lower tax rates remain only for families earning less than $250,000 a year. For those earning more, Democrats are pushing to allow rates to revert to 2000 levels, with additional increases on taxpayers who itemize deductions.</p>
<p>During President Obama’s term, Congress has temporarily resolved these issues. In December of 2009, Democrats agreed to extend tax rates for all earners for two years in exchange for an extension of long-term unemployment insurance and a temporary cut in the payroll tax rate.</p>
<p>Last summer, only hours before the Treasury Department’s stated deadline, Congress agreed to increase the debt ceiling with a convoluted mechanism that including the creation of the “super committee.” That committee failed in its charge to identify about a $1 trillion in spending cuts, and the federal budget now faces automatic cuts of that amount over the next decade as a consequence.</p>
<p>The Department of Defense is the target of half of those automatic cuts. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called the across-the-board cuts “a stupid thing … put(ting) a gun to their (Congress’)heads and to the head of the country.”</p>
<p>After November’s elections, three years of temporary compromises, extensions and patchwork legislating come due, leaving an outgoing Congress to address it all.</p> | Boehner Stakes Out GOP Debt Ceiling Position | true | http://foxbusiness.com/politics/2012/05/15/boehner-stakes-out-gop-debt-ceiling-position.html | 2016-03-03 | 0 |
<p>Sign at Tea Party protest. Obviously a message about Republican deficit spending.</p>
<p>New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has a piece today ( <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/opinion/sunday/takin-it-to-the-streets.html?ref=todayspaper&amp;pagewanted=print" type="external">7/1/13</a>) about the revolts we’re seeing a number of countries–Turkey, Egypt (once again), Brazil. He gives his usual rap about globalization, the changing job market and the need to be a dynamic self-starter in order to make in today’s world.</p>
<p>But his reference to U.S. politics stuck out. He explains that “too many big political parties today are just vehicles for different coalitions to defend themselves against change,” and this is true here as well as around the world:</p>
<p>So people take to the streets, forming their own opposition.</p>
<p>In America, the Tea Party began as a protest against Republicans for being soft on deficits, and Occupy Wall Street as a protest against Democrats for being soft on bankers.</p>
<p>That is an odd characterization of&#160; Occupy, which most of the time tried to stress that the problem with banking interests controlling the political process was bipartisan. It’s not that he’s wrong, but the emphasis seems a little off.</p>
<p>But his characterization of the <a href="" type="internal">Tea Party</a> is wrong about the target of their anger, as well as the political motivations behind that anger. How many people watched the Tea Party protests and thought, “Boy, are they mad at the&#160; Republicans!”? Clearly the bulk of the energy behind that movement was directed at Democrats and the Obama White House.</p>
<p>CNBC‘s Rick Santelli</p>
<p>And was the political goal really to say something about deficits? Hardly. The main “spark” for the movement came via a rant by a February 2009 CNBC analyst Rick Santelli. He was mad about a mortgage bailout proposal that he thought would “subsidize the loser’s mortgages.” (CJR‘s Ryan Chittum wrote a great account of the rant and the politics of the Tea Party– <a href="http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/cnbc_editor_the_people_are_rev.php?page=all" type="external">2/19/09</a>.) Santelli was clear that he was representing the interests of bankers and financial analysts: “We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m going to start organizing it.”</p>
<p>And a short while later, the actual Tea Party protests began. That energy was soon transferred to the debate over healthcare, and opposition to the Obama administration’s plan as a Big Government plot.</p>
<p>And it was rather difficult not to notice that the protests were largely about Obama himself–raising all sorts of obvious questions about opposition to the first black president, who was depicted as radically left-wing, possibly Muslim and maybe not born in the United States. That’s not to say that this was what defined the Tea Party; but the intense animosity expressed towards Obama, some of it clearly racist, was not a coincidence.</p>
<p>Of course, some in the Tea Party movement were mindful enough to mention now and again that they were really upset about all that government spending–it’s just that somehow their protests never got off the ground during the Bush years, oddly enough. And somehow the main spokespeople for the movement were people like a far-right Republican politician (Michele Bachmann) and a far-right media personality (Glenn Beck).</p>
<p>Friedman’s not the first person to offer a baffling take on the Tea Party–Times columnist David Brooks ( <a href="" type="internal">6/14/11</a>; FAIR Blog, <a href="" type="internal">6/15/11</a>) wrote that it was about critiquing the “unholy alliance between business and government that is polluting the country.”</p>
<p>But Friedman’s garbled recollection of a major U.S. political movement is a reminder that someone who doesn’t understand the politics of his own country is probably not going to give you a lot of help understanding the politics of other people’s countries.</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | What Tea Party Did Tom Friedman Go To? | true | http://fair.org/blog/2013/07/01/what-tea-party-did-tom-friedman-go-to/ | 2013-07-01 | 4 |
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<p>FARMINGTON, N.M. (AP) — New Mexico State Police say they are investigating an officer-involved shooting in Farmington that landed a suspect in the hospital.</p>
<p>The suspect was taken to San Juan Regional Medical Center, but state police spokesman Tony Lynn said the person’s injuries were not life-threatening. Lynn did not release any other details about the suspect or the circumstances that led to Friday afternoon’s shooting.</p>
<p>The Daily Times reports ( <a href="http://bit.ly/10670cW" type="external">http://bit.ly/10670cW</a>) the incident happened near the intersection of Schofield Lane and East 15th Street. Several business owners say there has been more police activity in the area in recent weeks.</p>
<p>Farmington police officers have been involved in three shootings so far this year. The first two resulted in fatalities.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> | NM police investigate officer-involved shooting | false | https://abqjournal.com/181646/nm-police-investigate-officer-involved-shooting.html | 2 |
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<p>Rome in mid-October was awash with rumor-mongering and media speculation, what with the Pope’s silver jubilee, an extraordinary meeting of the College of Cardinals to review the pontificate’s accomplishments, and the creation of thirty new cardinals on October 21. The exemplary personal witness of a courageous, suffering John Paul II, touchingly manifest at Mother Teresa’s beatification on October 19, blunted some of this. But the Italian media being what it is, and people being what they are, I suppose it was impossible for many to concentrate on the magnificent achievements of the past quarter-century; the urge to speculate about the future proved, for some, an itch that was impossible not to scratch.</p>
<p>Anyone who tells you they have a good idea who the next pope will be is, by reason of saying that, not to be trusted. Still, some features of the next papal conclave are coming into focus, not least because of the recent expansion of the College of Cardinals.</p>
<p>It seems likely that the next conclave will be the most open and complex in modern history. That means it may also be one of the longer conclaves in recent decades. Why?</p>
<p>John Paul II has changed the Church’s expectations – and the world’s expectations– of what popes are for. The next pope may travel less extensively than John Paul. The next pope may take a more direct hand in the structure, staffing, and functioning of the Church’s central administrative apparatus in Rome. But will the next pope return to the managerial model of the papacy that shaped expectations during the twentieth century conclaves? It seems very unlikely. John Paul II has retrieved and renewed a more biblical image of the Office of Peter as primarily evangelical and pastoral rather than administrative; that has dramatically changed expectations of the papacy. And those changed expectations will help create an open conclave in which questions of nationality and race will matter little.</p>
<p>Several other factors suggest that the next conclave will be a complex one. As some cardinal-electors acknowledge privately, there is no leading candidate or small group of candidates at this juncture. That doesn’t mean that some cardinals don’t imagine themselves in white; it does mean that their imaginings are not broadly shared within the electorate.</p>
<p>Then there’s the fact that the electors really don’t know each other that well and will likely take some time to measure each other’s capacities. That thirty new cardinals have now been added to the pre-conclave discussion, and that the electorate is likely to be the largest ever, are two more factors pointing to a process that’s longer rather than shorter, at least by modern papal election standards. The weight of responsibility that the electors will feel also bears on this. Whatever Hans Kung thinks, the men responsible for electing John Paul II’s successor know very well that they are charged with finding an apt heir to the legacy of a gigantic figure in Christian history. They won’t rush to judgment.</p>
<p>The fact that the electors will be comfortable rather than miserable while “immured” in the conclave also suggests that they’ll take their time. Previous cardinal-electors lived in Spartan cubicles cut out of offices in the Apostolic Palace; the cubicles were furnished with iron beds and chamber pots. The electors in the next conclave will live in three-room suites in the new Vatican guest house, St. Martha’s House, built by John Paul II. Discomfort created pressures to get the job done quickly in conclaves past. Those pressures won’t be a factor in the next papal election.</p>
<p>Of course, the Holy Spirit could have an entirely different scenario in mind. One or even several of the cardinals could make such a strong impression during the pre-conclave discussions that a short list of serious candidates emerges quickly. Those are imponderables, however. Looking at the process in purely human terms, the expectations weighing on the electors, their diversity, their relative unfamiliarity with each other, and the more humane circumstances in which they will live all suggest an open, complex, and probably lengthy process.</p>
<p>Pre-conclave prognostications are notoriously dangerous for the prognosticator’s reputation. But this is how it looked to me – and to some cardinal-electors – in Rome last month.</p>
<p>George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. and holds EPPC’s William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.</p> | A long, complex, and open conclave | false | https://eppc.org/publications/a-long-complex-and-open-conclave/ | 1 |
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<p>I experimented with probably my most unpleasant, yet effective diet ever this week: The 4-Day Diet.</p>
<p>Inspired by a <a href="http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/22/4-days-11-pounds/?_php=true&amp;_type=blogs&amp;_r=0&amp;gwh=507E8F278802E0D80394AF775763BF0A&amp;gwt=pay&amp;assetType=nyt_now" type="external">recently published</a> randomized trial, I decided to test out the diet’s rather extreme prescription of all-day walking and near starvation.</p>
<p>Like the participants who lost an average of 11 pounds in a mere 4 days, I also rapidly lost fat: I dropped 1.3 percent body fat, which is about twice as fast as my previous diet (0.7 percent in a week). Even more extraordinary, like those in the research study, I keep shedding my waistline—two days after returning to my normal diet, I’ve lost another 0.5 percent in 2 days.</p>
<p>But, in addition to constant hunger, the 4-Day Diet had other unexpected side effects, like peeing blood, and blisters—in NC-17 rated places. Here’s how I managed through it, without taking a minute off work.</p>
<p>What’s the study this is based on?</p>
<p>A research team in Spain tracked 15 obese participants over a year, after they subjected themselves to a diet of about 360 calories a day while walking for eight hours. Imagine going from three big American-sized meals a day to a small salad. “We thought they would overeat and regain the weight lost,” Dr. Calbet told The New York Times , but after a month, many had lost even more weight.</p>
<p>Starvation diets are highly controversial, <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2183677/Why-starvation-diet-actually-good--make-live-longer.html" type="external">both</a> because people need food to live and because <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2183677/Why-starvation-diet-actually-good—make-live-longer.html" type="external">sometimes</a> the body can power-down its metabolism in response. Indeed, my body’s Borg-like adaptation to dieting is why I employ a strategy of systematic binging to ramp up my metabolism after my fat-loss plateaus (so-called “Ketogenic cycling”).</p>
<p>How did you modify it?</p>
<p>I’ve subjected myself to some <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/30/extreme-diet-hacking-how-cheesecake-made-me-leaner-and-stronger-with-carb-backloading/" type="external">weird diets</a> in the name of journalism, but I have a rule that I always try to eat real food and get plenty of high-intensity exercise. Though the participants were allowed a protein shake and a low-calorie Gatorade-type substance, I avoid experiments with anything that doesn’t involve at least some type of nutrition. Also, I have to work and can’t spend four days prancing around the Scandinavian countryside.</p>
<p>I ate a total of 220 calories (or 3.2 kcal/pound): 100 grams of local-caught wild Alaskan Salmon, 10 blueberries, a teaspoon of honey comb from the California Delta, and a half-pound of leafy greens (rotating spinach, kale, and mesclun mix on different days)</p>
<p>I walked: ~15 miles per day, half on a walking treadmill desk and the other half between meetings around San Francisco. Thank goodness for global warming. It was much easier to convince my meeting partners to trek San Francisco’s brutal hills under the crystal-clear skies. I also did one exercise a day.</p>
<p>I’m interested, what are the tricks you used?</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>A few things helped:</p>
<p>1. Green tea. The lightly caffeinated beverage tapered my appetite while ensuring I had some nutrition.</p>
<p>2. Lube. Chaffing is a novel thing to experience at the office. Repurposing lubricants offers a pleasant reprieve, and oddly necessary, reprieve from burning in places I will not describe without an age-verification question. At the end of the day, I rubbed blisters down with raw aloe leaf and then sealed with some good ol’ Vaseline.</p>
<p>3. Rumble roller. Even with my normal running shoes (Reebok, Crossfit, Nano), my knees still got achy after about four hours. Twice a day, I rolled out my legs on my spikey foam friend, the rumble roller. If you’re new to myofascial release, my go-to mobility guru is Kelly Starrett, who has a <a href="http://www.mobilitywod.com/about/kellystarrett/" type="external">ton of videos</a>. Warning: this hurts…a lot, but it did release my knee pain.</p>
<p>For productivity’s sake, I rolled out while on phone calls…and hoped that my colleagues chalked up the squeals of pain to a scratchy phone signal.</p>
<p>4. Upper-body workouts. The study had participants do a light “arm crank” exercise. However, I wanted to keep my normal muscle building routine without crushing my already exhausted legs. So, for 30 minutes a day, I’d do P90x3’s at-home boxing workout or ab routine. To give myself a little mental break, I watched the workout videos side-by-side with Star Wars: The Clone Wars on Netflix.</p>
<p>How unpleasant is it, really?</p>
<p>It’s not that bad, really. Most of the men “were surprised that it was easier than they thought it would be,” José Calbet told The New York Times . While I was hungry, it wasn’t any worse than I feel on a normal diet. I never experienced severe or even moderate hunger pangs.</p>
<p>Would you do this again?</p>
<p>Yes, I would. But, I’m not sure how often. After discovering blood in my urine on Day 2 and the pain from my increasingly weak knees, I don’t know how long this diet is sustainable for. While it’s not unusual for long-distance runners to experience urine <a href="http://www.livestrong.com/article/383806-what-causes-blood-to-be-in-urine-after-exercising/" type="external">Hematuria</a> it did freak me out a bit.</p>
<p>Calbet cautions: “People should not try to do this on their own. I strongly advise anyone trying to do this type of intervention to do it under medical control.”</p>
<p>Perhaps, for the future, I’ll try two days on, two days off, or some modification. I love the efficacy, but there has to be a less extreme way.</p> | Can You Live on a 220-Calorie-a-Day Diet? | true | https://thedailybeast.com/can-you-live-on-a-220-calorie-a-day-diet | 2018-10-06 | 4 |
<p>The news: With the launch of the iPad in April, Apple expanded the opportunities for wireless access beyond homes and smart phones.</p>
<p>Behind the news: Although Chicago is approaching “digital excellence,” many Chicagoans lag behind on Internet access and online literacy, according to a 2009 study of citywide technology use by the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Iowa. The study found that 25 percent of city residents were completely offline, and almost 40 percent faced some barrier to access. Income was the biggest factor determining whether people had home Internet access. Residents with annual incomes of $20,000 or less were 29 percent less likely to have access than those with incomes of $75,000 or more. Of people without home access, 37 percent of Latino and 30 percent of black respondents cited cost as the primary barrier, compared with 14 percent of white respondents.</p>
<p>A Chicago Reporter analysis found that a majority of residents in each of the nine community areas with the lowest range of access–” defined by the study as 52 percent or less–”were black or Latino. Meanwhile, all 15 majority-white community areas were in the highest range–”more than 65 percent–”of access.</p>
<p>Local officials and activists are trying to fill the digital gap. The Smart Communities Program, a collaboration between the city and the Chicago office of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, aims to increase access in five community areas by creating programs tailored to their specific needs, said Susana Vasquez, director of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation’s New Communities Program. “Every community is unique, so we want leaders to create nuanced content and make sure it goes to local institutions,” she said.</p> | Access denied in minority areas | false | http://chicagoreporter.com/access-denied-minority-areas/ | 2010-05-01 | 3 |
<p>The image of a little boy sometimes appears unbeckoned in my mind, disturbing otherwise innocuous musings. A few years ago, his father–a man of grave composure, perhaps beyond grief–accompanied his child when he appeared on the “Democracy Now” TV program. The boy, perhaps four years old, sat on his father’s knee, fidgeting and anxious—perhaps because his arms had been blown off and prostheses filled the sockets where his eyes used to be. A little child—horribly dismembered by U.S. soldiers occupying Iraq. Whereas moral outrage over such war crimes may dwindle over time, such images linger on in one’s mind, as if ceaselessly calling out for retributive justice like the Ghost of Hamlet’s father.</p>
<p>Try to visualize, if you can, many such children—can you picture in your mind ten or 20 or 200 or 2000 or 20,000 or 100,000 such boys and girls?–mutilated, burned, traumatized by bullets and fiery bombs? Now single out one of these children, a boy or girl, perhaps a child who reminds you of your own child or your own childhood. Try to “feel-into” this child’s emotions: terrified bewilderment, a shocked sense of deep hurt and betrayal, lacerating physical torment, a despair beyond anguish.</p>
<p>What do I mean when I issue a clarion call on behalf of such outraged innocence? Little children, like all little children–their idle play and gentle imaginings suddenly pulverized by weapons of senseless malevolence and fiendish cruelty. Little children, awakened into a world they could never have imagined, a world in which bad people suddenly appear, bad people who want to shoot them, burn them, dismember them. Little children, crushed by a deep sadness and despair which knows no consolation except death.</p>
<p>Now what, we may ask, is the mentality of these bad people, these perpetrators who invade the child’s world, bringing horrors and torment in their wake? We were given a psychological clue recently, when Gen. David Petraeus claimed that Afghan parents were deliberating burning their own children in order to bring discredit to the U.S. military. I was reminded of another claim, that of Gen. William Westmoreland, that a Vietnamese child terribly burned and disfigured by napalm had actually been burned by a hibachi. This is the mentality we are dealing with: first declare innocent little children your “enemy,” then torture them unceasingly with weapons devised by scientific sadists, then claim that those you so horribly tortured really did it to themselves.</p>
<p>Our UNCEASING DEMAND FOR JUSTICE will not perish so long as we are able to IDENTIFY WITH the innocent victims, particularly with the curious, hopeful world of these children—a world crushed and trampled in an instant when soldiers and bomber pilots “just following orders” and mindlessly (or intentionally) impose the tortures of hell upon them.</p>
<p>Some final images? Look at Google Images, type in “cluster bomb” or “napalm” or “white phosphorus.” Now examine the photos of children that you see, children lying on the ground in shock, children whose arms are now bandaged stumps, children who stare unbelievingly into the void. Now scrutinize their faces: zoom in as close as you can and try to “feel-into” their hearts. Now: what do YOU feel? And what do your feelings tell you to do?</p>
<p>WILLIAM MANSON previously taught social science at Columbia and Rutgers universities.</p>
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<p /> | Innocence Exhumed | true | https://counterpunch.org/2011/02/25/innocence-exhumed/ | 2011-02-25 | 4 |
<p>Oil prices fell after government data showed that crude supplies in the U.S. unexpectedly grew last week as exports declined and production increased.</p>
<p>The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that the amount of stored oil rose by 2.2 million barrels last week, compared with the 2.1 million barrel draw that analysts surveyed by The Wall Street Journal were expecting.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>U.S. crude futures fell 39 cents, or 0.68%, to $56.81 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Brent, the global benchmark, fell 20 cents, or 0.31%, to $63.49 a barrel on ICE Futures Europe.</p>
<p>Oil prices have been on the rise in recent weeks, trading at two-year highs on the back of strong demand, escalating tensions in the Middle East, and indications that supplies are becoming tighter following more than 10 months of production cuts by some of the world's largest producers and exporters.</p>
<p>But Wednesday's U.S. data included some worrying signs for oil bulls. Exports of U.S. crude dropped sharply, from a record of 2.1 million barrels a day to just 869,000 barrels a day. U.S. crude has been trading at a steep discount to the global benchmark, which has fueled a surge of shipments. If exports continue to slow, it could lead oil to start backing up in U.S. storage tanks again.</p>
<p>"For the bears, there's definitely some pickings -- there's something they can at least put their hat on for now," said Andy Lebow, senior partner at Commodity Research Group. "There hasn't been very much for them over the last few weeks."</p>
<p>U.S. oil output ramped up last week, in a possible sign that producers are prepared to shift into higher gear to take advantage of the stronger prices. U.S. production rose by 67,000 barrels a day to 9.62 million barrels a day -- the highest weekly figure on record in EIA data going back to 1983.</p>
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<p>"People have been wondering whether [higher prices] will bring new barrels on board. The proof is in the pudding here right now," said Bob Yawger, director of the futures division of Mizuho Securities USA.</p>
<p>Prices dropped after the data were released, falling by more than 1% before paring losses and at times flipping to gains. Gasoline and diesel supplies fell by more than analysts were expecting in the EIA data, and total stockpiles of crude and petroleum fell by 9.1 million barrels amid stronger demand.</p>
<p>"Product strength at this time of year is a little unusual to say the least. It's actually pretty good," Bill O'Grady, chief market strategist at Confluence Investment Management, said of the data.</p>
<p>But also weighing on the market were Chinese customs data released Wednesday morning that showed oil imports at roughly 7.3 million barrels a day in October, down from 9 million barrels a day the month prior -- the "weakest monthly imports seen since October 2016," according to Dutch bank ING Groep.</p>
<p>Giovanni Staunovo, a commodities analyst at UBS Wealth Management, called China's import contraction surprising.</p>
<p>"Considering that China was one of the countries removing excess production from the market, there is a concern if this trend continues," he said.</p>
<p>Gasoline futures rose 0.6 cent, or 0.33%, to $1.8213 a gallon. Diesel futures rose by 0.03 cent, or 0.02% to $1.9216 a gallon.</p>
<p>Write to Alison Sider at [email protected]</p>
<p>(END) Dow Jones Newswires</p>
<p>November 08, 2017 15:48 ET (20:48 GMT)</p> | Oil Prices Slide After EIA Report Shows Rise in U.S. Supplies | true | http://foxbusiness.com/features/2017/11/08/oil-prices-slide-after-eia-report-shows-rise-in-u-s-supplies.html | 2017-11-08 | 0 |
<p>The US mobile industry is rejoicing, after AT&amp;T's longstanding policy against unlocking iPhones came to an end.</p>
<p>A spokesman for AT&amp;T <a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/att-will-now-unlock-your-iphone-if-your-contract-has-expired/" type="external">told the New York Times</a>that the carrier would ease up its policies for customers whose accounts were in good standing and no longer had a long-term contract with AT&amp;T.&#160;</p>
<p>Most contracts last two years from the purchase of the phone.</p>
<p>Users in the middle of an iPhone service contract must pay an early termination fee in order to unlock the device, <a href="http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/04/06/att_will_allow_out_of_contract_customers_to_unlock_their_iphone.html" type="external">AppleInsider reports</a>.</p>
<p>iPhones can be unlocked at the AT&amp;T retail store, in an online chat with AT&amp;T or by dialing 611 on the phone, <a href="http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-unlock-iphone-20120409,0,4780796.story" type="external">the LA Times wrote</a>.</p>
<p>A user could complete the process by connecting the phone to a computer, opening iTunes and backing up data, and restoring the phone to factory settings.</p>
<p>Apple also already sells unlocked iPhones for $649.99.</p>
<p>More from GlobalPost: <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/germany/120405/solar-powered-helmet-charge-iphone-theres-a-hat-for-that" type="external">Charging your iPhone? Now there's a hat for that</a></p>
<p>Once their phones were unlocked, owners can use them on other GSM cell and data networks by using other SIM cards, a change that will mainly allow users to take advantage of cheaper service when traveling abroad.</p>
<p>The US mobile industry is not as well set up for contract-free iPhone use as other countries:&#160;In the U.S., the AT&amp;T iPhone is compatible only with T-Mobile SIM cards, as Verizon and Sprint use different, CDMA cellular technology, <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2012/04/att-iphone-owners-can-now-unlock-phones/" type="external">according to ABC News</a>.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, a spokesperson <a href="http://9to5mac.com/2012/04/09/t-mobile-makes-a-statement-on-atts-unlocking-bring-em-on-and-save-a-lot-of-money/" type="external">told 9to5Mac</a>that there were "more than 1 million unlocked iPhones running on our network,"&#160;even though T-Mobile doesn't sell any version of Apple's smartphones.</p>
<p>More from GlobalPost:&#160; <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/120306/australian-economy-wayne-swan-mining-billionaires" type="external">Tough times for Australian billionaires</a> &#160;</p> | AT&T allows some iPhone users to unlock | false | https://pri.org/stories/2012-04-10/att-allows-some-iphone-users-unlock | 2012-04-10 | 3 |
<p>I want to thank the Blade for the article “ <a href="" type="internal">Supreme Court set to consider LGBT rights case</a>.”&#160;I appreciate Lou Chibbaro’s shoe leather approach in reaching out to all sides to report fairly and balanced. Thank you for your insightful questions.</p>
<p>I failed to raise some points in the interview that your readers may find of interest:</p>
<p>1. This case is the type that the court, in my non-attorney understanding,&#160;likes to consider: clear constitutional and federal questions, opportunity to resolve conflicts between lower federal courts, importance to a very large group of people, and lack of factual disputes.</p>
<p>2. &#160;My case is “clean” (to use the&#160;court’s term&#160;it is&#160;a “good vehicle”) in that there are no significant factual disputes.&#160;At this point, all sides have acknowledged the discrimination likely occurred.</p>
<p>3. &#160;I explained the medical science affecting sexual orientation and gender identity in addition to the social issues, making it understandable as to why equal protection is appropriate.&#160;(My graduate studies are in medical sciences.)</p>
<p>4. &#160;My case addresses specific issues, along with broader questions of LGBT equality. At this point, it appears that it will be supported by the majority of SCOTUS justices (along with the American people.)</p>
<p>5. &#160;The lower courts’ decisions rested on narrow interpretation of Title IX, directly in conflict with a more recent determination in another federal court, and also in apparent conflict with key tenants of SCOTUS’ Obergefell decision last year.</p>
<p>6. &#160;The lower courts erred in their interpretation of&#160;“gay”&#160;as only relating to sexual orientation and not as the&#160;all-inclusive term for gender non-conformance it was in the early 1990s.</p>
<p>7. &#160;A decision on the merits could clean up the brewing mess in new anti-LGBT state laws and clear the pipeline of related cases.</p>
<p>8. &#160;It may be more politically palatable than some of the more heated restroom use cases, and still resolve those issues.</p>
<p>9. &#160;A decision in my favor will make schools, workplaces, and public accommodations safer for millions of people, literally positively affecting every American family.</p>
<p>10. The most significant points are already raised in my Petition, so the Court could simply resolve this and set precedent by granting standing, reversing the lower court decisions, and provisioning remedy. This could save everyone time and resources.</p>
<p>Of course, I have no information as to whom the two attorneys are that Chibbaro interviewed, but I thank them for their time in reviewing my petition and also thank them for their compliments.</p>
<p>In my interview, Chibbaro pointed out that North Carolina has made great progress in public support of the LGBT community. This was the case long before I moved to the state in 1990 and certainly in the decades after. North Carolina is home to several LGBT rights pioneers and hundreds of thousands of fair-minded citizens.&#160;I sincerely wish I had not been forced to sue the state over the actions of a few narrow-minded individuals.</p>
<p>To the Blade readers: Thank you for your interest and support. If granted a hearing, I hope to see you at the Supreme&#160;Court.</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Kirby v. North Carolina State University</a> <a href="" type="internal">LGBT</a> <a href="" type="internal">United States Supreme Court</a></p> | More on Kenda Kirby lawsuit at Supreme Court | false | http://washingtonblade.com/2016/09/06/kenda-kirby-lawsuit-supreme-court/ | 3 |
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<p>South Korea's Unification Ministry has never lacked efforts to reach out to North Korea even if its gestures are always rejected. Every day without fail, the Unification Ministry send officials to the border village of Panmunjom to call North Korea at 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. But for a year and a half running, the North hasn't picked up.</p>
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<p>The Unification Ministry has the goal of improving relations with the North to possibly work for eventual peaceful reunification. However, it is meeting serious challenges and even facing a crisis in light of North Korea's nuclear ambitions and continuous nuclear tests and threats.</p>
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<p>The ministry also used to be until not too long ago, one of Seoul's most powerful departments. It played a crucial role in engineering two historic summits between the leaders of the two Koreas and also launching joint economic projects in the 2000s. But all such previous efforts have been negated by the North's nuclear ambitions and aggression.</p>
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<p>It didn't help that the nuclear problem is not just contained between the two Koreas. Other countries in the region, and U.S. allies have also been involved. The world has also stepped up pressure against the North.</p>
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<p>Now the Unification Ministry is not as powerful, influential or even important anymore. The most important decisions South Korea undertakes related to the North come from the president's office and the defense and foreign ministries. The Unification Ministry has been practically reduced to issuing "boilerplate denouncements of Pyongyang's weapons tests and propaganda outbursts."</p>
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<p>Still, the ministry isn't about to give up or losing hope that relations will get better again between the two sides. The election of a liberal president in May, after years of being under conservative leadership, briefly raised hopes. But North Korea is back to rejecting the Unification Ministry's efforts including a proposal in July to hold inter-Korean military and Red Cross talks.</p>
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<p>The unification ministry gained more prominence and influence under President Roh Tae-woo's term starting in 1987. Roh made an effort to improve relations with Pyongyang following the fall of Berlin. He even elevated the unification board to the level of a vice prime ministerial department. The Koreas achieved a milestone by conducting the first ever prime ministers talks in 1990. Both countries even joined the United Nations at the same time in 1991.</p>
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<p>Two succeeding liberal presidents even allowed South Korea to meet with the North's leader in 2000 and 2007, Kim Jong-Il, the current leader's father. Relations have deteriorated under the son's regime as he conducted the country's four of six nuclear tests. Kim also does not seem to see any value at all in dealing with Seoul, making the work of the unification ministry very difficult, and its goals almost impossible now.</p>
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<p>South Korea has always expressed its opposition to the nuclear ambition of the North. Yet it remains critical now for the Unification Ministry to keep knocking on the North's door. A former unification minister who served during the terms of liberal presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun says Seoul just has to keep trying. He shares: "The ministry has to keep pestering Pyongyang over the military and the Red Cross talks. It has to keep placing calls on the Panmunjom telephone. The situation can quickly change and North Korea could feel the need for dialogue. When they do return, they will likely want to deal with the United States first, but let them try to accomplish anything in talks with Washington without the involvement of Seoul-it won't work."?</p>
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<p>As far as the Unification Ministry is concerned, it is to the interest of both Koreas that they try still try to talk, so the calls will continue to be made, and the other line will continue to ring even if the other side does not want to pick up for now.</p>
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<p>Source:</p>
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<p><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-03/north-korea-tension-sidelines-south-s-unification-ministry" type="external">bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-03/north-korea-tension-sidelines-south-s-unification-ministry</a></p> | South Korea Phones North Korea Every Day, Twice a Day - NK hasn't Answered for a Year and a Half | true | http://thegoldwater.com/news/9106-South-Korea-Phones-North-Korea-Every-Day-Twice-a-Day-NK-hasn-t-Answered-for-a-Year-and-a-Half | 2017-10-03 | 0 |
<p>GILBERT, W.Va. (BP) — In the wake of flash floods that washed away rural roads and even mountainsides over six southern West Virginia counties on Mother’s Day weekend, Virginia Baptists joined other&#160; Baptist disaster relief feeding units and mud-out crews on the scene.</p>
<p>Five inches of rain over two days triggered flash floods that destroyed 200 homes and caused major damage to another 120, reported Delton Beall, state director of missions and state disaster relief director for the West Virginia Convention of Southern Baptists.</p>
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<p>Mingo County was hardest hit, Beall said. Ninety-year-old local residents told Beall they had never witnessed such torrential rains and flooding during their long lifetimes.</p>
<p>After the floods hit, two feeding units — one in Gilbert staffed by the Virginia Baptist Mission Board and a second in Matewan manned by Tennessee Baptists — served some 4,000 hot meals a day.</p>
<p>The two units were located on opposite ends of West Virginia’s Horsepen Mountain.</p>
<p>The feeding unit at Gilbert operated through May 22, while the unit at Matewan operated until May 26, Beall said.</p>
<p>“We’ve had numbers of people come into one of the feeding locations and say, ‘Thank God for Southern Baptists being here to help,’ ” Beall said.</p>
<p>Some 100-140 disaster relief volunteers responded to the West Virginia floods — including the two feeding units and mud-out teams from West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Missouri, South Carolina, Ohio and New England.</p>
<p>“It’s been incredible how God has provided for us,” Beall said. “The county and city officials have been very gracious and grateful. I’ve been able to minister to the entire city council and leadership of Matewan, praying with them and encouraging them.”</p>
<p>In addition to the disaster relief crews, Beall cited other Southern Baptist “heroes” on the scene, such as pastor Brian Warden and members of Horsepen Southern Baptist Church near Gilbert, the small valley town flooded by rivers of rain rushing down local mountains and hills.</p>
<p>“Horsepen opened up its fellowship hall right after the flood and started cooking hot dogs and hamburgers,” Beall recounted. “I bet they’ve cooked 9,000 or 10,000 hot dogs and hamburgers — over and beyond what our disaster relief feeding units are doing.”</p>
<p>Horsepen Baptist’s quick-response feeding operation couldn’t have come too soon for hundreds of people unable to leave their homes until the rains stopped and the floodwaters subsided. Only then could they get out by four-wheelers — not cars — since local highways and roads had been washed away.</p>
<p>“Folks would come down to Horsepen Baptist on their four-wheelers and load up sacks of hamburgers and hot dogs to take back home where the people had no food and couldn’t get out,” Beall said.</p>
<p>Horsepen pastor Brian Warden said his church approached the 12,000 mark in the number of meals prepared since flooding began May 9.</p>
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<p>Virginia Baptist volunteers prepare the kitchen for meals.</p>
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<p>“We [were] averaging more than 1,000 meals a day,” Warden said. “We also helped feed the state police and National Guard."</p>
<p>Warden, who has led the church of 50 adults and 30 children only five months, said 35 to 40 members had worked around the clock to cook the simple meals of hot dogs and hamburgers.</p>
<p>The fact that the church just happened to have so much food on hand was a miracle in itself, the pastor said. When the rains came, Horsepen Baptist was gearing up for a mother-daughter banquet on Mother’s Day weekend.</p>
<p>“Our church changed from being just a church where people would come Sunday morning and Sunday night and maybe on Wednesday to people being there 24 hours a day,” Warden said. “We raised some dead Christians [spiritually] during this time, including me.</p>
<p>“It took a disaster to make it happen,” he said. “A lot of times we look at disasters and say they’re horrible and maybe they are. But God has something good to come out of every one of them. My advice is for churches not to let it come down to a flood before members start waking up and serving.</p>
<p>“Our entire church came together and that’s the only way churches can reach out to people. We have one amazing lady, Lake Hopson, 94 years old, who’s worked in the church kitchen every day since the floods came.</p>
<p>“I’ve told my people this is nothing but a God thing,” Warden said. “There was no way this church could have put this much food out without the Holy Spirit’s help. There’s no way we could have prepared this many meals and come up with the necessary supplies without the Lord’s help. My people have gone from being moderately happy Baptists to being ecstatically happy Christians because of [serving others through] this disaster.”</p>
<p>Horsepen Baptist itself suffered a major loss when floodwaters poured down the mountainside and washed its church van downstream. Full of water inside and under the hood, the van was unsalvageable.</p>
<p>No problem. Frank Carl, pastor of Genoa Baptist Church in Westerville, Ohio, heard of Horsepen’s plight, had one of his own church vans re-lettered and drove it to West Virginia, presenting fellow pastor Warden with the keys and title — no questions asked.</p>
<p>“You don’t have enough paper and space to tell all the miracles that have happened here since the flood,” Warden told one reporter.</p>
<p>Mickey Noah is a writer for the Southern Baptist North American Mission Board.</p> | Virginia Baptist disaster relief responds to flash floods in neighboring West Virginia | false | https://baptistnews.com/article/virginiabaptistdisasterreliefrespondstoflashfloodsinneighboringwestvirginia/ | 3 |
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<p>Every year at the Consumer Electronics Shows (CES), much of the attention goes to prototypes and ideas for products that may be the next big thing or may never even reach production. The 2017 show was no different. While most of the central exhibit hall's booths showed off established companies offering incremental changes to established products (like slightly thinner TVs), a few showed off fantastical ideas that are not yet commercially available. That included an army of robots, expensive virtual reality technology, and smart everything (including lots of items that might be practical, but not at the prices shown).</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>But just because CES devotes a lot of space to items that may never make it to market, does not mean that there were no exciting innovations on the show floor. The 2017 show had a number of future-facing products that can be bought, if not now, at least this year. These may not be quite as exciting as some of the prototype ideas, but the actual releases at the show went well beyond slightly faster PCs, more powerful phones, and smarter robot vacuums.</p>
<p>These three products may not be flying cars or robots that can babysit your kids, but they are real innovations nonetheless. Sometimes the best technology comes from companies working hard to solve actual problems even if they are ones we did not know we had.</p>
<p>CES showed off some technology (available now or soon) that can make your life easier and/or better. Image source: author.</p>
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<p>At CES 2015, DISH Network (NASDAQ: DISH) introduced Sling TV, a first-of-its-kind digital streaming service. At the time, many thought that being able to access a number of top cable channels (including ESPN, CNN, TBS, and TNT) would be enough to get consumers to cut the cord with traditional cable in big numbers.</p>
<p>That did not happen, at least in part because part of the cord-cutting package for many is using an HD antenna to pick up over-the-air (OTA) local stations. The problem is, that even if your market has a good selection of free TV channels for you to pick up, an antenna requires switching inputs away from Sling TV, and the channels you do get lack any sort of on-screen guide.</p>
<p>Sling has fixed that with AirPlay (introduced at CES 2017), a new box that integrates Sling TV and OTA stations while offering an on-screen guide for all channels available. It's a simple device that when combined with a Sling subscription and an HDTV antenna can create a very cable-like experience at a much lower cost.</p>
<p>AirTV has already begun shipping. It costs <a href="https://www.airtv.net/store/" type="external">$129.99 Opens a New Window.</a> for a bundle that includes an adapter that allows you to connect an HD antenna. That package also comes with a $50 Sling TV credit (though that offer is subject to change).</p>
<p>CES was filled with smart devices and to put it kindly most of them filled a very limited market. Moen, however, went smart with a device that can actually make a difference in people's personal comfort.</p>
<p>The U by Moen shower solves a small, but annoying problem. How often have you gotten into the shower and found it either too cold (annoying) or too hot (dangerous). U by Moen uses a digital valve that offers "precise, thermostatic temperature control, and enables the user to connect up to four shower devices (showerheads, handshowers, body sprays, etc.)," the company said in a <a href="http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170104005030/en/Next-Generation-Digital-Showering-Technology-Moen-Launches-Moen%E2%84%A2" type="external">press release Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
<p>It comes with a WiFi-connected controller that shows the user whether their shower is heating up or cooling down. "When the shower is ready, the screen will turn white and provide an on-screen notification and signal with a tone." Owners can control the U by Moen through an app which works on an iOS or Android smartphone.</p>
<p>The device starts shipping in March. At $1,160, it's not cheap on its own, but it would be a small cost when redoing an entire bathroom. That may also seem like a small price to pay when on a winter day you dial up a hot shower ready to step into before even getting out of bed.</p>
<p>While Anheuser-Busch (NASDAQOTH: AHBIF) announced plans during CES to release an in-home alcoholic drink system in conjunction with Keurig, PicoBrew actually showed one off. The company launched its at-home brewer on Kickstarter last fall, but at CES it introduced the ability for people to make their own beer recipes.</p>
<p>"The new FreeStyle PicoPak capability and the FreeStyle BrewCrafter tool gives customers the ability to create their own unique craft beers, while PicoBrew does the heavy lifting of sourcing ingredients, and producing a tidy compostable brewing package, making the whole homebrewing process easier and more precise," said PicoBrew CEO Bill Mitchell.</p>
<p>A beer-only device, PicoBrew caters to aficionados of the beverage. The just-announced Anheuser-Busch/Keurig product, if it actually comes to be, is expected to allow for making mixed drinks using the now-defunct Keurig Kold platform and technology.</p>
<p>PicoBrew offers PicoPaks from over 150 brewery partners and has 60 craft beer recipes to serve as a base for customer creations. The device costs $799, but it's easy to see how a beer snob who wants to be able to whip up a fresh brew (about 5 liters in just a few hours) would consider this life-changing technology.</p>
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<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 December 12, 2016The 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. He plans to try at least two of these (though the cost of the last two may make that not happen). 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;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">disclosure policy Opens a New Window.</a>.</p> | Forget the Future, These 2017 CES Products Are Here Now | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/01/11/forget-future-these-2017-ces-products-are-here-now.html | 2017-01-11 | 0 |
<p><a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/339119-obama-put-cyber-weapons-in-russian-infrastructure-that-trump-can" type="external">New reports</a> have surfaced stating that Obama was paying close to attention to the Russian interference with the election during the final weeks of his presidency. Back in August, the CIA sent Obama and three of his top aides a secret message.</p>
<p>The message detailed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plan to help Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton, and disrupt the entire election. Shortly before this, hacked Democratic National Committee e-mails were released causing embarrassing leaks for Clinton.</p>
<p>‘The Obama administration reportedly considered a number of responses to Putin, including cyberattacks on Russian infrastructure, releasing embarrassing intel about him and crippling sanctions.’</p>
<p>On Oct. 7, former President Obama <a href="http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/obama-wanted-to-plant-cyber-bombs-in-russias-infrastructure-report/article/2626892" type="external">went public</a> with the information about Russian hacking into the Democratic National Committee’s e-mails. In December, he began retaliation by expelling 35 Russian diplomats and closing two Russian compounds in the U.S.</p>
<p>According to the&#160;Washington Post,&#160;he took an even more <a href="http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/obama-wanted-to-plant-cyber-bombs-in-russias-infrastructure-report/article/2626892" type="external">profound action</a>:</p>
<p>‘Obama also approved a previously undisclosed covert measure that authorized planting cyber weapons in Russia’s infrastructure, the digital &#160; equivalent of bombs that could be detonated if the United States found itself in an escalating exchange with Moscow.’</p>
<p>However, Obama left it up to Trump’s administration to fully orchestrate the plan. Trump would need to decide whether to detonate this bomb, and penalize Putin and Russian officials for their hacking and interference in the U.S. election.</p>
<p>The American people know too well though that this <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/17/trump-russia-hacking-silence-democrats-239656" type="external">isn’t likely</a> to happen.</p>
<p>‘Democrats are uniting behind a simple message about Russian hacking during the 2016 election: Donald Trump doesn’t care.’</p>
<p>Trump recently tweeted this in regards to the investigation:</p>
<p>‘I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt.’</p>
<p>No one can reason with a president who becomes unhinged every time he logs into his Twitter account. Despite the fact that he has been advised to <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/16/trump-response-fbi-investigation-239637" type="external">be careful</a> about how he uses Twitter, he has decided he will do things his own way.</p>
<p>Clearly, President Trump isn’t detonating any high tech bombs on Russia anytime soon. The only bomb he is detonating is on the American public.</p>
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<p>Featured image is a screenshot from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqfj6ALn1dQ" type="external">MSNBC video</a>.</p> | Obama Set Out A Clear Path To Retaliating Against The Russians; Trump Ignored Everything | true | http://bipartisanreport.com/2017/06/23/report-details-obamas-final-action-against-russia-weeks-before-leaving-office/ | 2017-06-23 | 4 |
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<p>RIO RANCHO — The Cleveland Storm performed mostly off-Broadway in 2009.</p>
<p>They’ve been given a marquee of their own for 2010.</p>
<p>Cleveland comes in at No. 3 in the Journal’s countdown of the metro area’s top 10 football teams, and the consensus is unanimous everywhere you go: the Storm will be vastly improved in their second season at the varsity level.</p>
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<p>The mystery is to what degree Cleveland improves. Many project the Storm as a playoff team and a contender for the District 1-5A championship, but is that grounded in reality, or perception?</p>
<p>Count head coach Kirk Potter among those who believe this team is poised to break through.</p>
<p>“I think we can, but that’s the great unknown,” coach Kirk Potter said. “We don’t have a track record.”</p>
<p>The Storm managed a 5-5 record last year with nothing but underclassmen and showed promise. With virtually everyone back from last season, Cleveland — just as Volcano Vista before it — finds itself receiving glowing reviews in advance of season No. 2.</p>
<p>“We’ve got a really good athletic plan, so the ability from year to year to get better — I don’t think anybody can really outmatch us too much,” said Potter, who previoulsy has been a head coach at Carlsbad and Las Cruces High. “I felt like going into our first true offseason, we made terrific progress. The only problem is, there’s nobody in front of us showing us the way.”</p>
<p>Cleveland, Potter said, addressed a couple of issues in the offseason: the Storm bulked up, and improved its team speed. Perhaps most importantly, Cleveland’s a year older and wiser.</p>
<p>“We just needed more experience. That was our problem last year,” said senior defensive end Abram Holland. “We went out there and did pretty good for the most part, being that it was juniors and sophomores.”</p>
<p>The most accomplished of those juniors, tailback/cornerback Iseha Conklin, transferred out of Cleveland just before two-a-days. His absence will be felt, but a deeper Storm roster should be able to overcome.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>At last week’s scrimmage against Eldorado, Chris Petro and Thomas Knox shared the carries, and Potter expects that to continue into the regular-season opener Friday at El Paso Bel Air.</p>
<p>Cleveland will also have a new look under center. The incumbent quarterback, 6-foot-6 senior Travis Lonergan, is moving outside to play receiver. Meanwhile, 6-3 junior transfer Cole Gautsche, who moved in from south Texas last winter, takes over at QB. He was impressive in Cleveland’s scrimmage.</p>
<p>Gautsche gives Cleveland a viable throwing and running threat, which is the reason the Storm have installed more option looks for 2010, Potter said.</p>
<p>Also, almost the entire offensive line returns intact.</p>
<p>“We’re a lot more versatile,” Potter said, adding that Cleveland should be able to produce power football, or a leaner, finesse look.</p>
<p>“We were not good on the offensive line last year,” he said. “We will be significantly better.”</p>
<p>When the conversation turns to Cleveland’s four-man defensive line, Potter really beams.</p>
<p>“We’ve got a chance to be a dominant defensive front,” he said.</p>
<p>The Storm should be quicker at linebacker. And the secondary, which was under siege last year, should be improved despite the loss of Conklin.</p>
<p>That defense is going to face some tests, including matchups with El Paso Chapin, Clovis and Manzano, all at home.</p>
<p>“This team has to face adversity on its way to district,” Potter said. “How we handle it will determine how we do at district and beyond. But with our personnel, we’ll be in every game we play.”</p>
<p>Lonergan said Cleveland looks every bit the part of a playoff team.</p>
<p>“I definitely think we can handle anyone in our district,” he said.</p>
<p>But as with most teams, health is an issue.</p>
<p>“We’re not a deep team,” Potter said. “Our strength level is good through about 25 guys.”</p>
<p>Then he smiled and added this friendly warning:</p>
<p>“But we’ve got talent.”</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | Storm a Year Older and Wiser | false | https://abqjournal.com/232532/storm-a-year-older-and-wiser.html | 2 |
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<p />
<p>Stillwater's facilities at work. Image Source: Stillwater Mining Company</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>What: Stillwater Mining Company's shares lost 13% of their value last month. But this year has been something of a roller coaster ride. Through the first two weeks or so of January the stock fell around 30%. Then, between mid-January and late April, the stock basically doubled. Add in the May pull back and Stillwater's shares were up about 18% through the first five months of 2016.</p>
<p>So what: At the end of all the ups and downs, the one thing that should be pretty apparent is that Stillwater's stock is pretty volatile right now. And that's in large part because this platinum and palladium miner's fortunes are tied to the price of the metals it produces. There's not a whole lot anyone can do about that, though management has been working hard to control the things it can (keeping costs low, for example).</p>
<p>And the company's first quarter earnings, announced in early May, didn't help much, either. Although progress was made on the cost front, with all in sustaining costs down nearly 20% year over year, lower selling prices led to a loss of $0.08 a share. Although the news release noted the strength its two main metals had seen since mid-January, the May pullback obviously left investors wondering how much Stillwater would ultimately benefit going forward.But the big rally this year was driven by the commodity market upturn that took place. And the drop off in May was similarly driven by a commodity pullback. Specifically, platinum was off by 9% in May, with palladium down a more painful 13%. So it makes sense that Stillwater shares were lower last month.</p>
<p>Now what: Stillwater Mining is one of the few pure play platinum group options. And while it is losing money, management has been working hard to adjust the business to current market conditions. Moreover, it has more cash and short-term investments than it does long-term debt, so, financially speaking, Stillwater is on solid ground. If you like the platinum group space and can stomach volatile commodity prices, this is a miner worth looking into.</p>
<p>The article <a href="http://www.fool.com/investing/2016/06/09/why-stillwater-mining-company-shares-fell-13-in-ma.aspx" type="external">Why Stillwater Mining Company Shares Fell 13% in May Opens a New Window.</a> originally appeared on Fool.com.</p>
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<p><a href="http://my.fool.com/profile/ReubenGBrewer/info.aspx?source=eptfxblnk0000004" type="external">Reuben Brewer Opens a New Window.</a> has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services <a href="http://www.fool.com/shop/newsletters/index.aspx?source=eptfxblnk0000004" 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://wiki.fool.com/Motley?source=eptfxblnk0000004" 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?source=eptfxblnk0000004" type="external">disclosure policy Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
<p>Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a <a href="http://www.fool.com/help/index.htm?display=about02" type="external">disclosure policy Opens a New Window.</a>.</p> | Why Stillwater Mining Company Shares Fell 13% in May | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2016/06/09/why-stillwater-mining-company-shares-fell-13-in-may.html | 2016-06-09 | 0 |
<p>Recently a family visited our church from what they described as a more contemporary church in the community. When a person or family visits with us from another local church, I always thank them for visiting, commend their church, and try to encourage their continued participation there.</p>
<p>However, as I spoke with this family, the father said, “We love our church, but our children are at an age where we are looking for a church that has Sunday School and sings hymns.” He went on to elaborate that he and his wife were talking one day and realized that they both wanted their children to experience Sunday School and to worship in a church that sings both hymns and contemporary songs.</p>
<p>I think I understand where he is coming from. I have an appreciation for various styles of worship and diverse models of “doing” church. In my own experience, Sunday School was one of the most formative and influential forces in my upbringing. After talking with this visiting family, my mind turned to the many valuable life lessons I learned growing up in Sunday School. Interestingly, the lessons I learned instilled in me a love for the Bible, an emerging faith in God, a moral compass, and sense of social etiquette.</p>
<p>Thanks to many faithful Sunday School teachers like Polly Foote, Pearl Lloyd, Sue Harrelson, Mary Lester, and Judy Smith, here are a few basic lessons that I internalized and that I continue to try to practice:</p>
<p>• Read the Bible daily. • Confess your sins regularly and ask for God’s forgiveness. • Trust Jesus with all of your problems, the little ones and the big ones. • Be kind to everyone, especially strangers. • Give the first 10% to the Lord. • Pray for your family, friends, leaders, pastors, missionaries both at home and overseas, men and women in uniform at home and on foreign soil, and “all that is our duty to pray for.” • “Judge not that ye be not judged.” • Forgive others graciously, just as Christ has forgiven you. • Never call people names. • Serve God by serving others. • Aim to please God, not other people.</p>
<p>Nowadays, I believe the Sunday School experience continues to be remarkably transformational for children and adults. Whether you call it Sunday school, small groups, cell groups, life groups, Christian education, or Bible study, gathering with a small group of believers on a regular basis to study the Bible, pray together, care for one another, and share life together instills a spirituality that is deeper than superficial religion.</p>
<p>Faith isn’t forged overnight. Durable faith seems to be cultivated and nurtured over time among folks of all ages who gather in community groups that look a lot like Sunday school.</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | Life lessons I learned in Sunday school | false | https://baptistnews.com/article/life-lessons-i-learned-in-sunday-school/ | 3 |
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<p>BEIRUT (Reuters) - Lebanon must cut Iran-backed Hezbollah from the financial sector, a U.S. official on combating illicit finance said on Tuesday, two weeks after Washington began a new push to disrupt the militant group’s global financing routes.</p>
<p>On a two-day visit to Lebanon, the U.S. Treasury’s Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing Marshall Billingslea “urged Lebanon to take every possible measure to ensure (Hezbollah) is not part of the financial sector”.</p>
<p>Billingslea also “stressed the importance of countering Iranian malign activity in Lebanon,” a statement from the United States embassy in Lebanon said.</p>
<p>The Iran-backed, Shi’ite Hezbollah is classified as a terrorist group by Washington, but sits in Lebanon’s delicate national unity government.</p>
<p>U.S. officials say Hezbollah is funded not just by Iran but by global networks of people, businesses and money laundering operations.</p>
<p>The U.S. Hezbollah International Financing Prevention Acts of 2015 and 2017 aimed to sever the group’s funding routes and a number of people linked to Hezbollah are on sanctions lists.</p>
<p>The United States has had to balance its targeting of Hezbollah funding routes with the need to maintain Lebanon’s stability. Lebanese banking and political authorities have lobbied Washington to make sure its anti-Hezbollah measures do not destroy the banking system underpinning the economy.</p>
<p>In his meetings with President Michel Aoun, Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri and other banking and political figures, Billingslea said the U.S. government was committed to work with Lebanon to protect its financial system and support a “strong, stable, and prosperous Lebanon”.</p>
<p>Billingslea also said Washington would help Lebanon protect its financial system from Islamic State and other militants.</p>
<p>Two weeks ago, the Trump administration set up a team to reinvigorate U.S. investigations into Hezbollah-linked drug trafficking.</p>
<p>Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah last week denied any involvement in drug trafficking and said Hezbollah had a very clear religious and moral stance which forbids drugs and drug trading.</p>
<p>Reporting by Lisa Barrington; editing by Grant McCool</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. Navy destroyer carried out a “freedom of navigation” operation on Friday, coming within 12 nautical miles of an artificial island built by China in the South China Sea, U.S. officials told Reuters, a move likely to anger Beijing.</p> FILE PHOTO: The warship USS Mustin sails near the port in Sihanoukville, 223 km (139 miles) west of Phnom Penh, October 11, 2008. REUTERS/Stringer
<p>Friday’s operation was the latest attempt to counter what Washington sees as Beijing’s efforts to limit freedom of navigation in the strategic waters.</p>
<p>The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the USS Mustin traveled close to Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands and carried out maneuvering operations. China has territorial disputes with its neighbors over the area.</p>
<p>Neither China’s Foreign nor Defence Ministries immediately responded to a request for comment.</p>
<p>In the past, Beijing has reacted angrily to such moves, saying they are provocative.</p>
<p>The U.S. military has a longstanding position that its operations are carried out throughout the world, including in areas claimed by allies, and they are separate from political considerations.</p>
<p>However, the latest operation, the first since January, comes just a day after U.S. President Donald Trump lit a slow-burning fuse when he signed a presidential memorandum that will target up to $60 billion in Chinese goods with tariffs, but only after a 30-day consultation period that starts once a list is published.</p>
<p>The United States has criticized China’s construction of islands and build-up of military facilities in the sea, and is concerned they could be used to restrict free nautical movement.</p>
<p>China’s claims in the South China Sea, through which about $5 trillion in ship-borne trade passes each year, are contested by Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. The U.S. military put countering China and Russia at the center of a new national defense strategy recently unveiled.</p>
<p>China’s navy will carry out combat drills in the South China Sea, the military’s official newspaper said on Friday, describing the move as part of regular annual exercises.</p>
<p>Taiwan’s defense ministry said this week it had shadowed a Chinese aircraft carrier group traversing the Taiwan Strait in a southwesterly direction - meaning into the disputed South China Sea - in what Taiwan judged to be a drill.</p>
<p>The United States has been pushing allies to carry out freedom of navigation operations as well.</p>
<p>Earlier this year, Britain said one of its warships would pass through the South China Sea to assert freedom-of-navigation rights.</p>
<p>Reporting by Idrees Ali; Additional reporting to Ben Blanchard in Beijing; Editing by Larry King and Alison Williams</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Prime Minister Theresa May said on Friday Britain and the European Union had made significant progress in Brexit talks and that she was looking forward to talks on their future economic partnership.</p> Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May leaves a European Union leaders summit in Brussels, Belgium, March 23, 2018. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir
<p>At a summit in Brussels, May also welcomed a move by the United States to exempt the EU from steel tariffs and said she would work with the other 27 leaders to make the exemptions permanent.</p>
<p>“We’ve made good progress on withdrawal agreement but also I’m looking for a new dynamic in the next stage of the negotiations so that we can ensure that we do develop, that we work together to develop, a strong future economic and security partnership which I believe is in the interest of the UK and the European Union,” she told reporters.</p>
<p>Reporting by Jan Strupczewski, writing by Elizabeth Piper</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>HANOI (Reuters) - Vietnam’s state oil firm, PetroVietnam, has ordered Spanish energy firm Repsol to suspend its “Red Emperor” project off the country’s southeastern coast following pressure from China, the BBC said on Friday.</p> FILE PHOTO: A Repsol logo at a petrol station in Bormujos near the Andalusian capital of Seville, southern Spain March 3, 2016. REUTERS/Marcelo del Pozo/File Photo
<p>It would be the second time in less than a year that Vietnam has had to cancel a major oil development in the busy South China Sea waterway under pressure from China.</p>
<p>The move comes as Repsol was making final preparations for commercial drilling.</p>
<p>A rig, the Ensco 8504, was scheduled to depart from Singapore for the drill site on Thursday, the report said, citing an unnamed energy industry source.</p>
<p>The cancellation could cost Repsol and its partners $200 million in sunk investment, according to the BBC.</p>
<p>Repsol and PetroVietnam executives could not immediately be reached for comment. The Vietnamese foreign ministry did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.</p>
<p>Asked at a regular briefing if China had pressed either Vietnam or Repsol, Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said she did not know where such news had come from, but did not elaborate.</p>
<p>“We hope the relevant sides can work together to maintain the hard-earned positive situation in the South China Sea,” she said.</p>
<p>Red Emperor, known in Vietnamese as the Ca Rong Do field, is part of Block 07/03 in the Nam Con Son basin, 440 km (273 miles) off the coast of Vietnam’s southern city of Vung Tau.</p>
<p>The block lies near the U-shaped “nine-dash line” that marks the vast area that China claims in the sea and overlaps what it says are its own oil concessions.</p>
<p>The field can produce 25,000-30,000 barrels of oil and 60 million cubic meters of gas a day, Vietnamese news provider Cafef.vn reported last month.</p>
<p>Repsol spent around 33 million euros ($41 million) on exploration in Vietnam last year, according to the company’s 2017 profit and loss statement.</p>
<p>The Red Emperor site is considered by Repsol’s top management as one of the company’s future growth projects.</p>
<p>Repsol, which has a 51.75 percent stake in the project signed a 384 million euro rental contract for a rig to start work on a Vietnamese site in 2019, according to the statement.</p>
<p>Reporting by Khanh Vu in HANOI; Additional reporting by Jose Elias Rodriguez in MADRID and Christian Shepherd in Beijing; Editing by James Pearson and Clarence Fernandez</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro ordered a re-denomination of the ailing bolivar currency on Thursday, by knocking three zeroes off amid hyperinflation and a crippling economic crisis.</p> Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro speaks during a meeting with the ministers responsible for the economic sector at Miraflores Palace in Caracas, Venezuela March 22, 2018. REUTERS/Marco Bello
<p>The measure to divide the so-called bolivar fuerte - or “strong bolivar” - currency by 1,000 would take effect from June 4, the socialist leader said. It would not have any impact on the bolivar’s value.</p>
<p>The move illustrates the collapse of the bolivar, which has fallen 99.99 percent against the U.S. dollar on the black market since Maduro came to power in April 2013. A $100 purchase of bolivars then would now be worth just a single U.S. cent.</p>
<p>But Maduro, 55, presented the move as a positive development intended to protect Venezuela against currency speculators and a U.S.-led “economic war” against the OPEC member.</p>
<p>Critics said the currency measure was no panacea for Venezuela’s economic mess and just a psychological ploy to make Venezuelans forget the extent of the hyperinflation.</p>
<p>While the move sounds like a currency revaluation, economists consider it a currency re-denomination as the country is not changing the value of its official exchange rate.</p>
<p>Venezuelans will not need to turn in the currency now in their wallets but all new currency printed or minted will be in the new denominations.</p> Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro holds a sample of the new hundred bolivars note during a meeting with the ministers responsible for the economic sector at Miraflores Palace in Caracas, Venezuela March 22, 2018. Miraflores Palace/Handout via REUTERS
<p>Millions of Venezuelans are suffering from shortages of food and medicines during a fifth year of recession that critics blame on government incompetence and corruption, but Maduro says is due to Western hostility against him plus the fall of oil prices.</p>
<p>“Venezuela has been victim of a brutal, economic war,” said Maduro, whose government has been targeted by the United States, European Union and Canada for sanctions over allegations of abusing democracy and rights.</p>
<p>Maduro made the announcement during an event shown live on TV, flanked by aides and bankers, to discuss Venezuela’s new petro cryptocurrency.</p> Slideshow (4 Images)
<p>Venezuela’s government similarly re-denominated its currency by knocking off three zeroes a decade ago.</p>
<p>Prices in Venezuela rose 6,147 percent in the 12 months through February, according to estimates by the country’s opposition-led National Assembly, broadly in line with independent economists’ figures.</p>
<p>Maduro is running for re-election on May 20 in a vote critics say is rigged to extend the socialists’ rule.</p>
<p>The opposition coalition is boycotting the vote, though one leader Henri Falcon has broken ranks to run against Maduro. He is promising to dollarize Venezuela’s economy as a way to beat hyperinflation and regain investor confidence.</p>
<p>“Amid the biggest economic collapse in the history of Latin America, the government of Nicolas Maduro attempts to hide hyperinflation by knocking zeros off the currency,” said Francisco Rodriguez, a Venezuelan economist and Wall Street analyst working as Falcon’s chief economic adviser.</p>
<p>Reporting by Vivian Sequera and Corina Pons; Writing by Andrew Cawthorne and Girish Gupta; Editing by G Crosse, Toni Reinhold and Lisa Shumaker</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a> | U.S. stresses Lebanon must cut Hezbollah from financial system Exclusive: U.S. warship sails near disputed islands in South China Sea, officials say Britain, EU make significant progress in Brexit talks: May Vietnam scraps South China Sea oil drilling project under pressure from Beijing: BBC Venezuela knocks three zeros off ailing currency amid hyperinflation | false | https://reuters.com/article/lebanon-economy-hezbollah/us-stresses-lebanon-must-cut-hezbollah-from-financial-system-idUSL8N1PI5BY | 2018-01-23 | 2 |
<p>Published time: 25 Sep, 2017 11:37</p>
<p>Former British Prime Minister Edward Heath is accused of rape by seven alleged victims who police found to be “credible,” reports suggest.</p>
<p>A fresh investigation into the ex-Tory PM, who died in 2005 aged 89, will look into dozens of allegations of abuse spanning five decades.</p>
<p>Read more</p>
<p><a href="https://www.rt.com/uk/400520-ted-heath-child-sex/" type="external" /></p>
<p>Many accounts of alleged abuse by Heath, who was in Downing Street from 1970 to 1974, have been doubted – including from one accuser who was labeled a “fantasist.”</p>
<p>Reports have emerged that at least one person will be charged for wasting police time.</p>
<p>However, the investigation has unearthed reports which showed a frightening pattern of behavior, the Mail on Sunday reports.</p>
<p>Wiltshire Police would have enough evidence to warrant interviewing the former leader under caution, were he alive to face investigation.</p>
<p>If proven, the accounts would give weight to the inquiry led by Chief Constable Mike Veale after a raft of criticism from Heath’s friends and former colleagues.</p>
<p>[embedded content]</p>
<p>Officers have been accused of wasting £2 million (US$2.7 million) on a “fantasy.”</p>
<p>The Operation Conifer team, investigating Heath, is currently made up of more than 20 police officers.</p>
<p>MP for North Wiltshire James Gray said Wiltshire Police’s probe had been a “pretty pointless investigation,” according to the Daily Mail.</p>
<p>Findings from the operation looking into allegations against Heath will be published on October 5.</p> | ‘Credible’ rape claims made against former PM Ted Heath | false | https://newsline.com/credible-rape-claims-made-against-former-pm-ted-heath/ | 2017-09-25 | 1 |
<p>Groups planning to protest President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration next month monopolized the National Park Service permits to use public spaces around Washington during the event - until Bikers for Trump showed up.</p>
<p>Bikers for Trump founder Chris Cox said he had to negotiate with National Park Service officials to find space for the motorcyclists because anti-Trump groups had scooped up nearly every location for their "disruption" events surrounding the Jan. 20 inauguration.</p>
<p>Securing a designated area for the thousands of bikers expected to roll into Washington to watch Mr. Trump take the oath of office is crucial to avoiding clashes between the two sides, he said.</p>
<p>"We've already won. There's no reason for these guys to be going shoulder to shoulder against the Black Lives Matter and the rest of the [protesting] guys," Mr. Cox said. "This is a victory tour."</p>
<p>The bikers are accustomed to being outnumbered and face-to-face with protesters, having often set themselves up as buffers between demonstrators and supporters at Trump rallies.</p>
<p>Bikers for Trump became a political movement in its own right, as it held massive rallies and organized support for Mr. Trump across battleground states. It was one of just two pro-Trump groups and by far the largest pro-Trump organization to request permits, according to National Park Service records.</p>
<p>The other pro-Trump group, which identified itself as "Let America Hear Us, Roar for Trump!" on its permit application, requested use of a small park at Dupont Circle on Inauguration Day for 500 people to celebrate and call for a peaceful transition.</p>
<p>Mr. Cox, who requested a permit for 5,000 people but noted that as many as 10,000 bikers might attend, said he was discouraged from applying last week by the permit manager at the National Park Service Office in Washington.</p>
<p>"She was telling me that they had already given all the permits out to the anti-Trump movement - permits for maybe 100,000 or 200,000 people," Mr. Cox recalled. "I wasn't happy. I told her I had thousands and thousands of bikers coming into town, and if she didn't give me a spot, they were going to be just mingling around and would end up hanging out where all the Trump protesters are, and there's going to be big problems and then people are going to wonder why."</p>
<p>National Park Service spokesman Michael Litterst said the permitting decisions are made irrespective of a group's affiliation. However, he said the scarcity of available space is consistent with the agency's first-come, first-serve policy.</p>
<p>"I don't know the specifics of how the plans for the Bikers for Trump event have evolved or what their specific discussions have been with staff, but that scenario aligns with how our permitting process works in general," he said. "Permits are processed in the order in which they are received, and when there are conflicts for location and/or time, the first group to submit their application gets first use."</p>
<p>Mr. Cox said that he eventually was able to submit the request for use of John Marshal Park in the Judiciary Square neighborhood, not far from the U.S. Capitol and just off the inaugural parade route.</p>
<p>He said he also is negotiating with the Inaugural Committee for bikers to participate in the parade.</p>
<p>Bikers for Trump are expected to come from as far as California for the inauguration, including large contingents from Florida and Pennsylvania.</p>
<p>Still, their numbers are dwarfed by groups such as Progressive Independent Party, a liberal activist group that requested two permits for a total of 15,000 demonstrators to use of various parks around the city during for several days surrounding the inauguration.</p>
<p>The group's Facebook page displayed a banner with an image of the Capitol covered by a "occupy inauguration" logo.</p>
<p>The liberal protest-for-hire group DC Action Lab requested a permit for 10,000 people, Real Progressives requested space for 2,500 and People's Action requested space for another 2,000.</p>
<p>The largest organized event seeking permit is the Gathering for Justice's "Women's March on Washington" slated for Jan. 21, with an expected turnout of 200,000 demonstrators.</p>
<p>The permit application said the goal of the march was to "come together in solidarity to express to the new administration &amp; congress that women's rights are human rights and our power cannot be ignored."</p>
<p>Beyond those seeking permits, a host of anti-Trump groups are calling on followers to converge on the inauguration through the #DisruptJ20 campaign on social media.</p>
<p>The Facebook page "Protest at the Inauguration: Stand Against Trump, War, Racism and Inequality" had 33,000 people expressing interest in the page and 10,000 people pledging to attend the demonstrations.</p>
<p>Under a #DisruptJ20 banner, the website ItsGoingDown.Org called for a "bold mobilization" against the inauguration of Mr. Trump.</p>
<p>"Trump stands for tyranny, greed, and misogyny. He is the champion of neo-nazis and white Nationalists, of the police who kill the Black, Brown and poor on a daily basis, of racist border agents and sadistic prison guards, of the FBI and NSA who tap your phone and read your email," read the post. "The KKK, Vladimir Putin, Golden Dawn, and the Islamic State all cheered his victory. If we let his inauguration go unchallenged, we are opening the door to the future they envision."</p>
<p>Mr. Cox said he isn't fearful that the protests would turn violent, citing the experience with agitators during the campaign and at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, where Bikers for Trump provided unofficial crowd control at outdoor rallies.</p>
<p>"I'm confident the police have learned from Arizona, Chicago and a lot of other places where things got out of hand," he said, referring to violence at Trump rallies in those cities. "I think it will be a lot like Cleveland and they will have beaucoup police presence."</p>
<p>Copyright - 2018 The Washington Times, LLC. <a href="http://license.icopyright.net/3.7280?icx_id=/news/2016/dec/5/bikers-for-trump-secure-space-for-inauguration-ami/" type="external">Click here for reprint permission</a>.</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | Bikers for Trump secure space for inauguration amid several planned protests | true | http://washingtontimes.com/news/2016/dec/5/bikers-for-trump-secure-space-for-inauguration-ami/ | 2016-12-05 | 0 |
<p />
<p>Don't let bad credit be a weight on your life. Image: <a href="http://www.StockMonkeys.com" type="external">www.StockMonkeys.com. Opens a New Window.</a></p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>One of the worst financial mistakes you can possibly make is to destroy your credit. Unfortunately, more than two-thirds of Americans do just that by making a major credit-damaging error before their 30th birthday. Most end up rebuilding it eventually, but the best move is to take care of your credit from the start. Here's what gets young people into trouble, and some smart ways to take the opposite road and maximize your credit score while you're getting started.</p>
<p>The data is alarmingAccording to a survey by Credit Karma, 68% of Americans will make a major credit mistake before the age of 30. These mistakes include, but are not limited to:</p>
<p>Any of these can do serious damage to your credit, and this damage can linger for quite some time. Most negative information stays on a credit report for seven years, and some can remain for up to a decade. A single late credit card payment can initially drop your credit score by up to 110 points, according to Equifax, and can have a significant impact for years to come.</p>
<p>One of the biggest problems is that younger people often don't realize just how delicate their credit is, or how credit scoring works at all. In fact, 72% of respondents to the survey said they had no education about personal finance before college.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>How to build your credit in your 20sFirst, you need a basic knowledge of how your credit score works. The FICO scoring model is by far the most commonly used, and ranges from 300 to 850. While the specific FICO formula is a closely guarded secret, we do know the general composition:</p>
<p>One smart way to build credit while avoiding the potential pitfalls discussed earlier is with a <a href="http://www.fool.com/how-to-invest/personal-finance/credit/2015/04/21/what-is-a-secured-card.aspx?source=eptfxblnk0000004" type="external">secured credit card Opens a New Window.</a>. Secured cards work just like standard credit cards, look the same, and are reported to the credit bureaus in the same way, but with one major difference. In order to obtain the card, you need to make a security deposit that's typically equal to your credit limit ($300 or $500 seem to be popular starting amounts).</p>
<p>Secured cards generally offer competitive interest rates and reasonable fees, and will prevent you from spending money you don't have, while helping you build a strong payment history. Most major banks have secured card products, so shop around.</p>
<p>In addition, some other suggestions if you're just trying to get your credit history established:</p>
<p>Why it's so importantThe late 20s and early 30s are the time when many adults need to take on debt to buy a house or car, and are the last group of people who need the additional expense of a high interest rate.</p>
<p>According to MyFICO.com, the national average APR for a 30-year mortgage borrower with a 760 FICO score ( <a href="http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/06/17/what-is-a-good-credit-score-number-and-why-is-good.aspx?source=eptfxblnk0000004" type="external">considered to be "excellent" Opens a New Window.</a>) or above is 3.366% as of this writing. With a score in the 620-639 range (considered to be "fair" credit), the borrower can expect a rate of 4.955%.</p>
<p>On a $250,000 mortgage, this is the difference between monthly principal and interest payments of $1,104 and $1,335. From a long-term point of view, the lower payment translates to more than $83,000 in interest savings over the life of the loan.</p>
<p>Today's twenty- and thirtysomethings with record levels of student loan debt and a so-so job market don't need to be burdened with tens of thousands in unnecessary interest charges. That's why it's so important to take care of your credit while you're young.</p>
<p>The article <a href="http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/02/29/68-of-20-somethings-will-make-this-grave-financial.aspx" type="external">68% of Twentysomethings Will Make This Grave Financial Error Opens a New Window.</a> originally appeared on Fool.com.</p>
<p><a href="http://my.fool.com/profile/KWMatt82/info.aspx?source=eptfxblnk0000004" type="external">Matthew Frankel Opens a New Window.</a> has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services <a href="http://www.fool.com/shop/newsletters/index.aspx?source=eptfxblnk0000004" 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://wiki.fool.com/Motley?source=eptfxblnk0000004" 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?source=eptfxblnk0000004" type="external">disclosure policy Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
<p>Copyright 1995 - 2016 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a <a href="http://www.fool.com/help/index.htm?display=about02" type="external">disclosure policy Opens a New Window.</a>.</p> | 68% of Twentysomethings Will Make This Grave Financial Error | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2016/02/29/68-twentysomethings-will-make-this-grave-financial-error.html | 2016-03-27 | 0 |
<p>CAIRO (AP) — Egypt’s president has finally announced he will run for a second, four-year term in elections in March, expertly choosing to break the news and do some not-too-subtle vote-canvassing on live television before an adoring audience of government members, hardcore supporters and powerful media figures.</p>
<p>A general-turned-president with authoritarian practices, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi’s announcement confirmed what was long expected and paved the way for his virtually certain triumph in the March 26-28 vote.</p>
<p>The closing session of a three-day conference called to assess his performance in office offered el-Sissi a perfectly-timed opportunity to list what’s been touted as his achievements. He used the platform to reach out to voters with a mixture of affected humility and fear-mongering appeals to national interests.</p>
<p>His announcement came hours before another graduate of Egypt’s powerful military institution, former chief of staff Sami Annan, said he too would run, and immediately sniped at the incumbent.</p>
<p>“I call on the state’s civilian and military institutions to be neutral and not unconstitutionally biased in favor of a president who may leave his post within months,” he said in a video statement posted on his Facebook account.</p>
<p>A comfortable win for el-Sissi is all but certain given that no serious threat to his re-election is likely to come from any of the presidential hopefuls announced so far, Annan included. Moreover, el-Sissi has the vast resources of the state, including its media, at his disposal to promote himself and speak directly to voters. His rivals have had virtually no access to the media and are ruthlessly vilified or mocked by el-Sissi loyalists who dominate TV talk shows and newspapers.</p>
<p>“I find myself standing once again before my national conscience ... asking you to accept my candidacy for the position of president of the republic so I can win your trust for a second presidential term,” el-Sissi said late Friday to a standing ovation, cheers, women’s ululations and “long live Egypt!” — the president’s favorite chant.</p>
<p>“Don’t give your vote except to someone you trust to take care of your affairs,” he said, “You must choose very carefully because you will hand over to him (the winner) your future and the future of your children and grandchildren.”</p>
<p>He added that he would never allow anyone “corrupt” to take his place.</p>
<p>“Can I be aware that someone is a thief and silently allow him to sit on this chair?” a charged el-Sissi put to the crowd, “God will hold me accountable and ask me why I remained silent. Egypt is bigger, dearer, more honorable and dignified than to be ruled by bad people.”</p>
<p>His comment drew criticism by prominent rights lawyer Nasser Amin who warned in a Facebook post that it broke the law and breached the constitution. “The implications of this comment are dangerous and worrying and means that the election will be run according to the views of one candidate,” he wrote.</p>
<p>El-Sissi has often said he wants to establish a modern civil state in Egypt, but his policies have raised questions over whether he actually believes in universal democratic principles and freedoms. His public discourse has almost exclusively been focused on his efforts to revive an ailing economy and the infrastructure “mega projects” he has overseen.</p>
<p>As defense minister, el-Sissi led the military’s 2013 ouster of Egypt’s first freely elected leader, the Islamist Mohammed Morsi, whose one-year rule proved divisive. He has since overseen a harsh crackdown on the opposition, jailing thousands of Islamists along with hundreds of secular activists, including prominent figures from the 2011 uprising that toppled the regime of longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak.</p>
<p>Street protests have been effectively banned, human rights groups have been placed under severe restrictions and many critics in the media have been silenced, measures el-Sissi describes as necessary to restore stability, rebuild the economy after years of unrest and fight an Islamic State-led insurgency.</p>
<p>Fielding questions submitted online at the invitation of his office, el-Sissi on Friday night dodged one on human rights, and another on the exclusion of political parties, but instead repeated his signature argument that his view of human rights prioritizes the right to jobs, decent housing and reliable education and health services.</p>
<p>“There are many other rights whose violation is crueler than violating political rights,” he said.</p>
<p>But the president appeared more accommodating when he spoke of rights for women, whose support has been crucial for el-Sissi.</p>
<p>On Friday, he strongly admonished men who harass women, a widespread practice in Egypt that affects both homemakers and working women. He scolded harassers: “Shame on you!” He also praised women’s role in families and, as he has frequently done before, spoke compassionately about his late mother, boasting that he helped her with house chores while growing up in Cairo’s medieval quarter of al-Hussein.</p>
<p>“When we had people over for a meal, I prepared the table with her,” he said to a round of applause.</p>
<p>“Manliness is something totally different from what people know here in Egypt,” he said, alluding to the chauvinistic nature of Egyptian society and the common reluctance by men to help out at home.</p>
<p>El-Sissi appointed two more women to the Cabinet earlier this month, raising to an all-time high of six the number of women in his government.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Associated Press writer Menna Zaki contributed to this report.</p>
<p>CAIRO (AP) — Egypt’s president has finally announced he will run for a second, four-year term in elections in March, expertly choosing to break the news and do some not-too-subtle vote-canvassing on live television before an adoring audience of government members, hardcore supporters and powerful media figures.</p>
<p>A general-turned-president with authoritarian practices, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi’s announcement confirmed what was long expected and paved the way for his virtually certain triumph in the March 26-28 vote.</p>
<p>The closing session of a three-day conference called to assess his performance in office offered el-Sissi a perfectly-timed opportunity to list what’s been touted as his achievements. He used the platform to reach out to voters with a mixture of affected humility and fear-mongering appeals to national interests.</p>
<p>His announcement came hours before another graduate of Egypt’s powerful military institution, former chief of staff Sami Annan, said he too would run, and immediately sniped at the incumbent.</p>
<p>“I call on the state’s civilian and military institutions to be neutral and not unconstitutionally biased in favor of a president who may leave his post within months,” he said in a video statement posted on his Facebook account.</p>
<p>A comfortable win for el-Sissi is all but certain given that no serious threat to his re-election is likely to come from any of the presidential hopefuls announced so far, Annan included. Moreover, el-Sissi has the vast resources of the state, including its media, at his disposal to promote himself and speak directly to voters. His rivals have had virtually no access to the media and are ruthlessly vilified or mocked by el-Sissi loyalists who dominate TV talk shows and newspapers.</p>
<p>“I find myself standing once again before my national conscience ... asking you to accept my candidacy for the position of president of the republic so I can win your trust for a second presidential term,” el-Sissi said late Friday to a standing ovation, cheers, women’s ululations and “long live Egypt!” — the president’s favorite chant.</p>
<p>“Don’t give your vote except to someone you trust to take care of your affairs,” he said, “You must choose very carefully because you will hand over to him (the winner) your future and the future of your children and grandchildren.”</p>
<p>He added that he would never allow anyone “corrupt” to take his place.</p>
<p>“Can I be aware that someone is a thief and silently allow him to sit on this chair?” a charged el-Sissi put to the crowd, “God will hold me accountable and ask me why I remained silent. Egypt is bigger, dearer, more honorable and dignified than to be ruled by bad people.”</p>
<p>His comment drew criticism by prominent rights lawyer Nasser Amin who warned in a Facebook post that it broke the law and breached the constitution. “The implications of this comment are dangerous and worrying and means that the election will be run according to the views of one candidate,” he wrote.</p>
<p>El-Sissi has often said he wants to establish a modern civil state in Egypt, but his policies have raised questions over whether he actually believes in universal democratic principles and freedoms. His public discourse has almost exclusively been focused on his efforts to revive an ailing economy and the infrastructure “mega projects” he has overseen.</p>
<p>As defense minister, el-Sissi led the military’s 2013 ouster of Egypt’s first freely elected leader, the Islamist Mohammed Morsi, whose one-year rule proved divisive. He has since overseen a harsh crackdown on the opposition, jailing thousands of Islamists along with hundreds of secular activists, including prominent figures from the 2011 uprising that toppled the regime of longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak.</p>
<p>Street protests have been effectively banned, human rights groups have been placed under severe restrictions and many critics in the media have been silenced, measures el-Sissi describes as necessary to restore stability, rebuild the economy after years of unrest and fight an Islamic State-led insurgency.</p>
<p>Fielding questions submitted online at the invitation of his office, el-Sissi on Friday night dodged one on human rights, and another on the exclusion of political parties, but instead repeated his signature argument that his view of human rights prioritizes the right to jobs, decent housing and reliable education and health services.</p>
<p>“There are many other rights whose violation is crueler than violating political rights,” he said.</p>
<p>But the president appeared more accommodating when he spoke of rights for women, whose support has been crucial for el-Sissi.</p>
<p>On Friday, he strongly admonished men who harass women, a widespread practice in Egypt that affects both homemakers and working women. He scolded harassers: “Shame on you!” He also praised women’s role in families and, as he has frequently done before, spoke compassionately about his late mother, boasting that he helped her with house chores while growing up in Cairo’s medieval quarter of al-Hussein.</p>
<p>“When we had people over for a meal, I prepared the table with her,” he said to a round of applause.</p>
<p>“Manliness is something totally different from what people know here in Egypt,” he said, alluding to the chauvinistic nature of Egyptian society and the common reluctance by men to help out at home.</p>
<p>El-Sissi appointed two more women to the Cabinet earlier this month, raising to an all-time high of six the number of women in his government.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Associated Press writer Menna Zaki contributed to this report.</p> | Sure to win, Egypt’s president seeks re-election | false | https://apnews.com/9ea53b24cdab4cf6a5eae5c2e6bf625b | 2018-01-20 | 2 |
<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p>
<p />
<p>Coach Mike Bradbury delivered the unpleasant news Monday that starting guard Mykiel Burleson will miss the rest of the season because of a torn anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee. Burleson was injured during UNM’s 81-62 victory over Air Force on Wednesday.</p>
<p>Burleson, a 5-foot-11 freshman, averaged 9.7 points, 4.4 rebounds and 2.2 assists this season and is one of just four Lobos to appear in all 24 games. She started 22 of them.</p>
<p>Burleson is the third Lobo to suffer a torn ACL this season, joining sophomores Emily Lines and Jaisa Nunn, who were injured in January. Burleson, Lines and Nunn combined to average 23 points per game.</p>
<p>“It hurts,” Bradbury said. “We’ve lost three of our top eight (scorers) now, two of our top four. It definitely hurts, but we’ll do the best we can with the players we’ve got.”</p>
<p>Burleson limped off the Pit floor with some assistance after injuring her left knee on a fastbreak Wednesday, but the extent of the injury was not known until she underwent an MRI late Sunday.</p>
<p>“It was a little bit of a shock,” Bradbury said, “because the doctors and the trainers didn’t think it was (a torn ACL). Considering how things have gone for us, I just assumed it was.”</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Bradbury said UNM’s coaches and players addressed the injury issues prior to Monday’s practice. The Lobos (14-10, 9-4 Mountain West) will visit Boise State (16-7, 6-6) on Wednesday night.</p>
<p>Junior Laneah Bryan will start in Burleson’s place, leaving junior Jayda Bovero as the only available guard to come off the bench. Bryan scored a career-high 14 points in 30 minutes after taking over for Burleson against Air Force.</p>
<p>Freshmen Hannah Sjerven, who scored 18 points against Air Force, and Brittany Pannetti, who has played just 29 minutes all season, will be the other available substitutes.</p>
<p>Bradbury said the short bench will not significantly change UNM’s approach moving forward.</p>
<p>“We play very conservatively on defense already,” he said. “We don’t press anyone, so nothing really changes there. We just won’t substitute much and the starters will play more minutes. That’s how it has to be.”</p> | Lobo women lose another player to injury | false | https://abqjournal.com/949417/lobo-women-lose-another-player-to-injury.html | 2 |
|
<p>Seems that Trump fired HHS secretary Tom Price because he was mad at the negative publicity he generated while Trump was rolling out his tax cuts. I wonder how long it'll take him to figure out that Price was actually doing him a favor, distracting media coverage from his disastrous handling of Puerto Rico hurricane relief!</p>
<p>Like these tweets:</p>
<p>The people of Puerto Rico are also "working hard," Mr. Reality Show.</p>
<p>Joy Reid started her show this morning by comparing Bush's Katrina response to that of Trump's to Puerto Rico.</p>
<p>"On Friday the Washington Post reported on how Trump's time at his golf course last weekend contributed to the delays. This morning the White House press secretary called that story false. The mayor of San Juan added this on Friday," she said, playing the now famous interview clip with Carmen Yulin Cruz.</p>
<p>"If anybody out there is listening to us, we are dying. And you are killing us with the inefficiency. and the bureaucracy. So, Mr. Trump, I beg you to take charge and save lives. If not, the world will see how we are treated not as second class citizens, but as animals that can be disposed of."</p>
<p>Reid asked the mayor if things were any better today after her plea. "How is everything going?"</p>
<p>"Well, we got a big donation yesterday from Goya, 200,000 pounds of food. All together, from private donations. They keep coming after yesterday," Yulin Cruz said.</p>
<p>"We already have on site about 400,000 pounds of food and rather than getting one container of water and one container of food we got from FEMA, we got around six of them. so we are glad today. At 11:00 the production line of aid is going to begin and we will be able to put out a quantity of help for people. It's a good day, a good start. We're moving ahead. That's what it's all about. all about saving lives. Not about politics. Not about petty comments. It's about moving forward, putting boots on the ground and saving lives."</p>
<p>Reid then asked her about Trump's outrageous tweets. "Did anyone tell you to go out yesterday and to name Donald Trump as you were making your pleas for help?"</p>
<p>"Actually, I was asking for help," Yulin Cruz said. "I wasn't saying anything nasty about the president. but don't take my word for it. General Buchanan, a three star general, has said as one of the first comments he's made about the Puerto Rico situation that he doesn't have enough troops to get the situation under control.</p>
<p>"So, who am I? I'm just a little mayor from the capital city of San Juan. This is a three-star general telling the world right now he does not have the appropriate means and tools to take care of the situation. This is what we have, one goal. It is to save lives. I tweeted this morning that this is a time when everyone shows their true colors.</p>
<p>"I have no time for distractions. All I have is time for people to move forward, get help and what kind of a Puerto Rican, what kind of a human would I be if I know of other mayors that are getting no water and no food and I just look the other way and just had my city taken care of? So I will continue to do whatever I have to do, say whatever I have to say, compliment the people I need to compliment and call out the people I need to call out. this isn't about me.</p>
<p>"This isn't about anyone. This is about lives that are being lost. If things do not get done properly, real quickly."</p> | Trump Attacks 'Nasty,' Lazy Puerto Ricans For Not Saving Themselves | true | http://crooksandliars.com/2017/09/trump-attacks-nasty-lazy-puerto-ricans-not | 2017-09-30 | 4 |
<p><a href="http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/01/08/several-people-shot-at-arizona-store-police-official-says/?hpt=T1" type="external">CNN reports</a></p>
<p>that Jared Lee Loughner has been taken into custody as the suspected shooter who killed six people in Tucson Saturday. One of our readers pointed us to a YouTube account opened in October in that name.</p>
<p>There are five videos, the first of which was posted in November. They are embedded below in chronological order, starting with the oldest.</p>
<p>We cannot confirm that this is the YouTube account of the same person arrested in connection with the shooting, and we have asked YouTube to provide us with more information. We will keep you posted.</p>
<p />
<p>[Thanks to reader Aaron Ortiz.]</p>
<p><a href="http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/01/08/several-people-shot-at-arizona-store-police-official-says/?hpt=T1" type="external">Update:</a> <a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ghjeYdEW-1vnG6MhDVZNquM6PACg?docId=926d3194025a4d73a5f8add878077874" type="external">AP is reporting</a>that the YouTube account appears genuine. Loughner also had a MySpace page (which was taken down) on which he reportedly posted a note before the shooting asking his friends not to be mad at him.</p>
<p /> | Were These Bizarre Videos Made by the Arizona Shooter? (Update) | true | https://truthdig.com/articles/were-these-bizarre-videos-made-by-the-arizona-shooter-update/ | 2011-01-09 | 4 |
<p>UPDATE: On May 13, Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said his government planned to reject a request from the United States to prolong the International Space Station project beyong 2020. Moscow also plans to prevent the US from using Russian-made rockets to launch military satellites.</p>
<p>“We are very concerned about continuing to develop high-tech projects with such an unreliable partner as the United States, which politicizes everything,” Rogozin <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/agencia-efe/140513/russia-rebuffs-us-extending-life-space-station" type="external">said</a>.</p>
<p>BUZZARDS BAY, Mass. — Think Russia has no way to put pressure on the United States? Think again.</p>
<p>The US relies heavily on Russia to furnish the engines that power rockets that deliver both military and civil payloads into space.</p>
<p>This includes GPS systems in cars and cellphones, and even systems that allow ATMs to function. Weather satellites are launched into space via Russian-powered rockets, and military systems such as early missile detection also depend on our friends in Moscow.</p>
<p>In addition, since NASA scrapped the space shuttle program in 2011, the US has to rely on Russian Soyuz capsules to get its astronauts to the space station and to bring them back home.</p>
<p>As the crisis over Crimea deepens and tit-for-tat sanctions go into effect, conventional wisdom has held that the US is holding all the cards. Given the relatively small amount of <a href="http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c4621.html" type="external">trade the US conducts with Russia</a> each year, and its pre-eminent position as the world’s largest economy, Washington has projected confidence as it moves to isolate Moscow diplomatically and economically.</p>
<p>But Russia is unlikely to take it lying down. As Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5EogSf2G0k" type="external">warned</a> in a talk at Harvard recently, “They have ways of responding [to sanctions] that … we’re not going to like.”</p>
<p>One of the things Americans may dislike very much indeed is a possible ban on the sale of RD-180 engines to the US under a contract with Russian manufacturer NPO Energomash.</p>
<p>The RD-180 powers the Atlas V rocket, the main launch vehicle used to get US military and civil payloads into space.</p>
<p>“The Russian rocket engines are the best in the world,” said Royce Dalby, a space systems expert and managing director of Avascent, an aerospace and defense consulting firm in Washington, DC. “RD-180 provides the most efficient and least expensive means of getting our national security payloads into space.”</p>
<p>The dollar amounts are not great, relatively speaking: While the actual price paid for the engines is proprietary, experts estimate the cost from <a href="http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2384/1" type="external">$11 million to $15 million</a> per engine.</p>
<p>In an average year the US launches eight or nine satellites with the Atlas V.</p>
<p>But it gives the Russians a virtual stranglehold on the US space program, including systems vital for national security.</p>
<p>Over the next 24 months, according to Dalby, the Atlas V will be used to launch four classified spy satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), one unclassified imagery satellite, two weather satellites, four GPS satellites, three military communications satellites, two classified payloads for the Air Force and one NASA science satellite.</p>
<p>“[Losing the RD-180] would be a blow to our national security,” said John Logsdon, the founder and long-time director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. “The Atlas V is the primary vehicle we use to launch military and civil pay loads into space.”</p>
<p>The question of US dependence on Russian rockets has begun to worry the defense establishment as well.</p>
<p>Testifying at a budget hearing of the House Appropriations Committee in mid-March, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel indicated that the Pentagon was concerned about the RD-180 issue.</p>
<p>When asked by an Alabama congressman whether the crisis in Ukraine would prompt the Defense Department to move ahead with additional funding to develop domestic capabilities to manufacture rocket engines, Hagel responded that it certainly would.</p>
<p>“You’re obviously referring to the relationship with the Russians on the rocket motors,” the defense secretary <a href="http://www.spacepolitics.com/2014/03/14/hagel-defense-department-plans-review-of-dependence-on-rd-180/" type="external">said</a>. “Well, I think this is going to engage us in a review of that issue. I don’t think there’s any question about that.”</p>
<p>But developing a domestic capability will be a long and expensive process.</p>
<p>United Launch Alliance (ULA), the Lockheed Martin-Boeing joint venture that manufactures the Atlas V rocket, says it has the situation well in hand.</p>
<p>“Atlas V will continue to provide assured access to space for our nation’s national security satellites,” the Centennial, Colo.-based company said in a written reply to questions. “ULA maintains more than a two-year supply of RD-180 engines in the United States to minimize potential supply disruptions, and has developed significant engineering and manufacturing capability which ultimately demonstrated the capability to co-produce the RD-180 domestically.”</p>
<p>Company spokeswoman Jessica Rye, however, acknowledged that ULA does not at present have an alternative rocket engine in the pipeline.</p>
<p>“We have not pursued an alternative engine,” she said. “Any new engine development would be a four-to-five year process."</p>
<p>More from GlobalPost: <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/politics/140318/russia-us-tensions-ukraine-astronauts" type="external">In space, no one can hear you scream over Ukraine</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/politics/140318/russia-us-tensions-ukraine-astronauts" type="external" /> The united colors of outer space, at the International Space Station. (Bill Ingalls/NASA)</p>
<p>The history of US-Russian cooperation on space issues goes back to the chaotic 1990s, right after the collapse of the Soviet Union. With communism in retreat, US-backed companies and organizations poured billions into helping Russia get on its feet.</p>
<p>In science, especially space technology, Washington was intent on keeping Russian scientists peacefully engaged, to discourage them from selling their skills elsewhere.</p>
<p>Besides, there was world-class technology and know-how to pick up at bargain-basement prices.</p>
<p>“[The Russians] had accomplished a heck of a lot in space, and we knew we could learn from their capabilities,” said Dalby, who himself worked in Moscow in the 1990s.</p>
<p>But times change, and the heady promise of friendship and cooperation gave way to a frostier relationship once Vladimir Putin came to power on New Year’s Day, 2000.</p>
<p>Russia has threatened to pull the plug on the RD-180 before.</p>
<p>Last August, when President Barack Obama was contemplating military action against Syria over the use of chemical weapons, Russian media <a href="http://rt.com/news/russian-rocket-engine-ban-039/" type="external">reported</a> that the government was considering a halt in the RD-180 program.</p>
<p>According to Dalby, this produced a near panic in the space industry.</p>
<p>There may be alternatives on the horizon. Elon Musk, head of SpaceX, a company looking to unseat ULA as the Air Force’s go-to rocket builder, testified before Congress in mid-March.</p>
<p>“In light of Russia’s de facto annexation of the Ukraine’s Crimea region and the formal severing of military ties, the Atlas V cannot possibly be described as providing ‘assured access to space‘ for our nation when supply of the main engine depends on President Putin’s permission,” Musk <a href="http://www.spacex.com/press/2014/03/05/elon-musks-statement-us-senate-appropriations-subcommittee-defense" type="external">told</a> the committee.</p>
<p>Instead, he proposed his Falcon rockets, which he said could provide high reliability at a much lower cost.</p>
<p>But the Falcon would not be able to do the job without extensive, and expensive, tweaking, Dalby says.</p>
<p>“The Falcon rocket is smaller and can’t loft most of the military payloads that the Atlas tackles,” Dalby said. “Also, satellites are designed to fly on certain rockets from the outset, and it would take years to reconfigure, if it would even be possible.”</p>
<p>According to George Washington University’s Logsdon, the Delta IV engine, which is produced entirely in the US, could step in, but it might have to be adjusted a bit for the task.</p>
<p>There is also the possibility that Pratt &amp; Whitney, which has a joint venture with NPO Energomash, could take over production. According to Logsdon, the US contractors have access to the blueprints for the engine.</p>
<p>“But there is a fair degree of art as well as science here,” he said. “The Russians are extremely experienced in advanced metallurgy and design. You cannot just snap your fingers and make it happen.”</p>
<p>Then there is the space station — the US pays the Russians over $400 million a year to transport US astronauts there and back.</p>
<p>“And for that there is no alternative,” Logsdon said.</p>
<p>So for now the US is in a delicate balancing act — trying to combine strong censure of the Kremlin’s behavior with a cooperative relationship with Russia on space.</p>
<p>“For the record I still think cooperation with Russia is a good idea,” Dalby said. “The International Space Station program, especially, has been a tremendous platform for building trust and mutual understanding. Unfortunately, it can’t overshadow more terrestrial problems.”</p> | How Russia could strangle the US space program | false | https://pri.org/stories/2014-03-25/how-russia-could-strangle-us-space-program | 2014-03-25 | 3 |
<p>An Austin-based driller said this week that it's buying about 71,000 acres of land in the energy-rich Permian Basin for $2.8 billion, becoming the latest energy company to make a major investment in the region.</p>
<p>Parsley Energy said in a statement Tuesday that it's purchasing the land from a Fort Worth oil explorer, Double Eagle Energy Permian. The move will bring Parsley's holdings in the region to 227,000 acres.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>The deal comes just a few weeks after Exxon Mobil Corp. announced it was buying the Permian Basin holdings of the Bass family, of Fort Worth, in a more than $6 billion stock and cash deal that doubles its presence in the basin.</p>
<p>Energy companies have been investing heavily in West Texas and parts of New Mexico, as oil prices recover from a downturn that saw the energy sector hemorrhage jobs and curtail production.</p>
<p>"Right now the Permian Basin is hot and it's hot because, No. 1, there are all these pay zones, it's like a layer cake," said Bernard Weinstein, associate director of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.</p>
<p>A lone field can yield one layer of natural gas and another containing vast amounts of oil, and the advent of horizontal drilling and other technologies makes access to the hydrocarbons easier and cheaper, Weinstein said.</p>
<p>A barrel of oil currently sells for about $53, which is well above the break-even oil price of $30 to $40. Prices are expected to remain above $50 for the next five years, he said.</p>
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<p>Weinstein said that big players like Exxon Mobil and Chevron Corp. determined in the 1980s that shale drilling wasn't lucrative enough so they went offshore and invested in deepwater drilling. But now they're seeing greater returns on the Permian and other land basins.</p>
<p>"There's been a kind of rethink on the part of the majors," Weinstein said, "and that's a big shift."</p>
<p>The Permian is comprised of a series of basins and other geologic formations in West Texas and southern New Mexico. It's one of the most productive oil and gas regions in the U.S.</p>
<p>The energy industry spent billions of dollars buying land in West Texas last year, which is far more than it spent there the year before. Companies that have sold or leased their holdings are generally smaller entities looking to benefit from sales on higher land prices rather than invest in drilling operations, analysts say.</p>
<p>The region's fortunes were further buoyed in November with a report by the U.S. Geological Survey that a vast field of shale rock could yield 20 billion barrels of oil, making it the largest source of shale oil the agency has ever assessed. The Wolfcamp Shale geologic formation in the Midland area also contains an estimated 16 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 1.6 billion barrels of natural gas liquids, according to the agency.</p>
<p>The discovery is nearly three times larger than the shale oil found in 2013 in the Bakken and Three Forks formations in the Dakotas and Montana.</p>
<p>Ken Medlock, director of an energy-studies program at Rice University in Houston, said at the time that it seems "likely that we're seeing the birth of a new Permian Basin."</p>
<p>"The revival of the Permian Basin is going to last a couple of decades," he added.</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Follow David Warren on Twitter at https://twitter.com/WarrenJourno</p> | $2.8B deal latest land acquisition in energy-rich Permian | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/02/08/28b-deal-latest-land-acquisition-in-energy-rich-permian.html | 2017-02-08 | 0 |
<p>POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y. (AP) — The record-cold temperatures late last week resulted in a New York state utility setting a record for natural gas use.</p>
<p>Central Hudson Gas &amp; Electric Corp. said customers in the eight eastern New York counties it serves used a record amount of natural gas last Friday. Then customers broke that day-old record on Saturday by using 141,183 thousand cubic feet of gas.</p>
<p>Temperatures around New York state stayed below zero late last week with wind chill values in the minus teens and twenties.</p>
<p>POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y. (AP) — The record-cold temperatures late last week resulted in a New York state utility setting a record for natural gas use.</p>
<p>Central Hudson Gas &amp; Electric Corp. said customers in the eight eastern New York counties it serves used a record amount of natural gas last Friday. Then customers broke that day-old record on Saturday by using 141,183 thousand cubic feet of gas.</p>
<p>Temperatures around New York state stayed below zero late last week with wind chill values in the minus teens and twenties.</p> | Record cold result in record gas usage for NY utility | false | https://apnews.com/amp/ef5c8abd3a664ad8b0d638f49c21ca5c | 2018-01-09 | 2 |
<p>NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — With Gov. Chris Christie back full time in New Jersey, the political gamesmanship between him and Democrats around the state is heating up. He’s tussled over charter schools with the mayor of the state’s largest city, while the mayor of its second largest city launched a website calling for him to resign because of his support for Donald Trump.</p>
<p />
<p>But it’s a fight with a fellow Republican causing Christie the most immediate concern.</p>
<p>Atlantic City Mayor Don Guardian warned this week that the resort town’s collapsing finances will force a weekslong shutdown of nonessential government services next month if it doesn’t get state aid. Christie demands that a takeover measure already passed by New Jersey’s upper house be approved by the Assembly.</p>
<p>“They are unwilling and incapable of fixing the problem,” Christie said this week. “I am no longer going to allow the taxpayers of New Jersey to be responsible.”</p>
<p>Atlantic City’s tax revenues have plunged as a result of the steep decline of the casino industry over the last decade, including the closing of four of 12 gambling halls, leaving a large hole in the municipal budget. A key sticking point in the takeover plan is whether the state should be able to tear up the city’s contracts with its municipal unions.</p>
<p>Since ending his Republican presidential bid last month, Christie is once again making appearances to push his agenda and taking questions from the state’s press corps. His return has also meant an increase in sniping from Democratic politicians who watched him fail and are now jockeying to replace him in 2017.</p>
<p>Seven newspapers and Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop called for him to resign because of trips out of state to campaign for Trump. He was slammed by the state trooper’s union for campaigning for Trump instead of attending a trooper’s funeral.</p>
<p>He has also mixed it up with Newark Mayor Ras Baraka over charter school expansion. Responding to Christie’s comment that the state will “run over” Baraka to open more charters, Baraka shot back with a reference to the bridge lane closure case that enveloped Christie’s administration.</p>
<p>“This is Newark, not Fort Lee. You can’t just stop traffic here without repercussions,” Baraka said.</p>
<p>Brigid Harrison, a political science professor at Montclair State University, said she thinks Christie has handled the controversies well. But she said the reality of Christie going from a Republican presidential favorite to dropping out after New Hampshire has created a new dynamic in New Jersey.</p>
<p>“The reality is three years ago now, these kinds of actions would have been unheard of,” Harrison said. “I think clearly he doesn’t have the clout that he once has. And people know that so they can treat him that way.”</p>
<p>The sniping has once again cast a light on the outsized role Christie plays in New Jersey politics. But it’s the crisis in Atlantic City that is most pressing, and puts him in the middle of a fight between the state’s top two Democrats and a fellow Republican.</p>
<p>Guardian says the shutdown can be avoided if the state comes through with aid. But Christie says the state Assembly needs to get behind a pair of measures already passed in the Senate that would strip Atlantic City of most of its power and would give the state the right to break contracts, dissolve agencies and sell off city assets and land. A separate measure would let the casinos make payments in lieu of taxes in return for not filing tax appeals with the city.</p>
<p>Christie appeared with Democratic Senate President Steve Sweeney and Guardian to announce the plan last month, but Guardian’s tentative support quickly disappeared. Guardian and Assembly Speaker Vincent Prieto, a Democrat, say the takeover bill goes too far in wresting control from city officials.</p>
<p>“They seem to think that playing public sector union politics will change my mind,” Christie said Thursday on WPGG-AM. The state needs “authority to be able to balance the budget and make Atlantic City fiscally responsible. I’m not going to do this with one hand behind my back. … They should not play chicken or test me.</p>
<p>“In this end, this isn’t about personal rivalries. It’s about getting the job done in the right way.”</p>
<p>Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.</p> | Back In New Jersey, Christie Gets Into It With Fed-Up State Politicians | true | http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/christie-wont-bail-atlantic-city-out | 4 |
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<p>What happens when the police go on strike? Over the past two weeks, the New York Police Department (NYPD) has done its part to answer that question. Officers have been on a particular kind of strike called a slowdown: they come to work, but don’t do their job as quickly or fully as usual.</p>
<p>While police union officials <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/no-slowdown-on-nypd-enforcement-union-says-1420574516" type="external">have denied</a> officers are working at a slower pace, arrests in all categories are down more than 50 percent. The decline in traffic violations and minor incidents, like public urination, has been especially pronounced: where <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/06/nyregion/decrease-in-new-york-police-arrests-continues-for-a-second-week.html" type="external">arrests for major felonies</a>&#160;have&#160;dropped by about 20 percent, <a href="mailto:http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/tickets-drop-92-week-apparent-nypd-slowdwon-article-1.2066763" type="external">summonses</a> for low-level crimes and parking and moving violations have decreased by more than 90 percent.</p>
<p>According to a&#160; <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/06/nyregion/decrease-in-new-york-police-arrests-continues-for-a-second-week.html" type="external">New York Times</a> article this past week, “In Coney Island, the precinct covering that neighborhood did not record a single parking ticket, traffic summons or ticket for a low-level crime like public urination or drinking, the statistics showed.” This decline in arrests and summons has spilled over <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/08/nyregion/quiet-in-the-court-drop-in-arrests-slows-new-yorks-busy-legal-system.html" type="external">into the courtroom</a>:</p>
<p>One arraignment courtroom instead of two. Clerks watching “Batman” on their computer screens and playing with their cellphones as they wait for something to happen. And Manhattan’s night court shutting down an hour early because there are no more cases to call.</p>
<p>Those were scenes from the city’s arraignment courts in the third week of a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/07/nyregion/life-in-new-york-city-where-arrests-are-down-and-tickets-are-rarities.html?ref=nyregion" type="external">precipitous drop in arrests</a>&#160;by the&#160; <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/new_york_city_police_department/index.html?inline=nyt-org" type="external">New York Police Department</a>. The usual chaotic bustle of the courts — the odd mix of transgressors, from murderers to fare-beaters — has given way to unusual scenes of tranquil inactivity.</p>
<p>The NYPD has effectively suspended its notorious “broken windows” policy, characterized by heavy policing of small-time misdemeanors and minor infractions in the name of preventing more serious crimes. The effect of this practice, under normal conditions, is the over-policing of poor, especially minority, neighborhoods. The <a href="http://time.com/3618279/eric-garner-chokehold-crime-staten-island-daniel-pantaleo/" type="external">homicide of Eric Garner</a> began with police accosting him for illegally selling a few loose cigarettes.</p>
<p>Normally the point of a strike is to halt production to&#160;show society, or at least your employers, that they need you. Stopping work imposes costs on others — lowering employers’ profits, reducing politicians’ legitimacy, increasing consumers’ needs — but it only does so because the work that workers do is essential. The work cannot be done without them. This is why employers hire replacement workers, or seek court injunctions to force employees back to work.</p>
<p>It is also why strikers risk becoming unpopular with the public — the absence of the goods they are producing or the services they provide can become a serious inconvenience. And it is why workers often take care to build public support for their strike, with the hopes that the public attributes those inconveniences to the causes of the stoppage instead of to the strikers themselves.</p>
<p>A perfect example is the 2012&#160; <a href="http://www.versobooks.com/books/1569-strike-for-america" type="external">Chicago Teachers Union strike</a>, which shut down the first days of school. This caused some headaches for working families and their children, but because of the union’s pre-strike community organizing, those families largely supported the teachers against city government. The strike proved how important the teachers were, and why they deserved more respect than they received.</p>
<p>The irony of the NYPD strike is that it has demonstrated the opposite. When police do not do their jobs, at least as defined under current policy, the costs are low. There is no dramatic damage to public safety. Relative to the precipitous drop in policing, there have been very <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/06/nyregion/decrease-in-new-york-police-arrests-continues-for-a-second-week.html" type="external">minor increases</a> in violent crime. Nor are the other costs, such as the decline in revenue from fines and tickets, particularly significant. Meanwhile, the benefits to (formerly) over-policed neighborhoods is large.</p>
<p>With their slowdown, New York police officers have shown that most of their activities are inessential. Society is better off when they are not engaging in broken windows, quality-of-life harassment of poor neighborhoods. The next logical step is to simply normalize the present. In the infamous words of one former vice president, this should be the “new normal.”</p> | The Sound of the Police | true | https://jacobinmag.com/2015/01/the-sound-of-the-police/ | 2018-10-03 | 4 |
<p>On Monday, New Jersey casino regulators told a bankruptcy court it can't transfer the license of Atlantic City's former Revel casino to new owner Glenn Straub. Here are some of the other problems the Florida developer is wrestling with in his quest to re-open the star-crossed casino resort:</p>
<p>THE POWER STRUGGLE</p>
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<p>Right now, Revel is a cold, dark building, without electricity, heat or water. That's because utility company ACR Energy Partners cut off service to the building on April 9 — two days after Straub bought it — in the absence of a contract for future service there. Both sides have agreed to a temporary two-week deal to restore power to the building, which is needed because of fines.</p>
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<p>THE FINES</p>
<p>The City of Atlantic City is fining Straub $5,000 a day for each day that fire detection and suppression systems are inoperative, which began the day ACR cut off power. The Fire department says that without water in the pipes and electricity to carry firefighters to the upper floors, battling a fire in the 47-story building could be next to impossible. The 710-foot Revel is the second-tallest building in new Jersey, after the Goldman Sachs building in Jersey City. Resolution of the power situation also directly impacts former Showboat casino.</p>
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<p>THE SHOWBOAT</p>
<p>Straub has a deal to buy the former Showboat casino and lease it to Stockton University as a satellite campus. But that deal is mired in legal limbo, and the university president has already announced his resignation. Straub is considering using the Showboat as an alternate source of electricity for Revel if he cannot agree to terms with ACR.</p>
<p>____</p>
<p>THE TENANTS</p>
<p>Although a bankruptcy judge let Straub take over Revel, she punted on the issue of whether the building's former business tenants have the right to continue to operate there when Straub re-opens Revel, or whether he can reject their leases. Expect those disputes to wind up in state court soon unless an unexpected resolution is reached.</p>
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<p>THE PERMITS</p>
<p>Atlantic City officials say they have yet to receive any applications from Straub to do construction work at Revel.</p> | New owner of Atlantic City's Revel casino may not have 99 problems, but it sure seems like it | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2015/04/27/new-owner-atlantic-city-revel-casino-may-not-have-problems-but-it-sure-seems.html | 2016-03-05 | 0 |
<p>Discussion Paper - Environment and Natural Resources Program, Belfer Center</p>
<p />
<p>Any international proposal for reducing carbon emissions will require active Russian participation. Russia is the fourth largest emitter of carbon in the world. Its resource base of natural gas is unmatched by any other country, and its energy sector and industry are significant consumers of fossil fuels, and thus major emitters of carbon. For most of this decade, Russian emissions are likely to remain below their 1990 levels, due to the havoc created by the economic crisis within the Russian industrial sector. While the administration of Russian President Vladimir Putin is making strides to revitalize the economy, it will take time to restructure and rebuild. This may provide Russia with a unique opportunity to benefit from emissions trading.</p>
<p>The United States, Japan, Canada, and Australia have advocated the establishment of "flexibility mechanisms" within any international agreement to reduce carbon emissions. These mechanisms include those that allow entities with high abatement costs to purchase carbon emissions reduction credits from entities with low abatement costs. Credits could be generated, for example, if a high-cost country (or a firm within a high-cost country) invests in a project that will reduce emissions in a low-cost country. The flexibility mechanisms, like joint implementation and emissions trading, could create substantial new markets and investment opportunities.</p>
<p>As one of the world's largest greenhouse gas (GHG) emitters, Russia offers numerous opportunities for cost-effective reductions and straightforward emissions trading. This is because the costs of carbon emissions reductions in Russia&#160;–&#160;a country with an antiquated and energy-inefficient industrial base&#160;–are likely to be significantly lower than in economies already using more efficient fossil fuel-burning technology, such as Japan or the United States. The financial benefits of carbon trading for Russia's cash-strapped economy could be, according to one estimate, as high as $25 billion in the period 2008-2012.</p>
<p>Establishing an internationally sanctioned carbon trading regime within Russia will be a daunting challenge. The economic and institutional chaos that has enveloped the country since the devolution of Soviet authority has made it difficult to construct a broad Russian response to climate change and, more specifically, to establish a reliable and well-functioning greenhouse gas emissions reduction regime. The problem is not that the Russians are not interested in carbon reductions or credit trading; rather it is that the cost of the first trade&#160;– that is, the cost of establishing the institutional foundation, the rules, regulations, and human capitalis&#160;– is very high.</p>
<p>This reality has led many observers to focus on certain large and reasonably well-organized sectors, rather than on Russia's economy as whole. One of the most obvious candidates has been the energy sector, which accounts for the lion's share of Russia's carbon emissions and is the country's principal economic dynamo. Among Russia's energy producers, the electric power sector arguably offers the greatest potential for emissions reductions. According to various estimates, it presently emits approximately 515-550 million tons of CO2, or 30-35 percent of Russia's annual CO2 emissions.</p>
<p>As the country's largest single emitter of carbon and one of its most influential industries, the electric power sector will be integral to any domestic or international emissions abatement system. Detailed understanding of Russia's electricity industry&#160;– its physical structure, its markets, its investment climate, and the regulatory regime that oversees it&#160;– is therefore crucial to any serious plan aiming to draw Russia into global carbon emissions markets.</p>
<p>The first section of this paper reviews the physical, corporate, and regulatory structures of the electricity sector, describes the evolution of this sector during the first decade of Russia's stormy economic transition, and identifies the factors that will affect both its future growth and its carbon emissions. Part II discusses the opportunities for carbon emissions reductions. Part III identifies the obstacles that stand in the way of involving the Russian power sector in carbon trading. Part IV is a case study examining the Russian Far East, one of Russia''s seven "electricity zones," to illustrate the problems and opportunities that apply, to a greater or lesser degree, throughout Russia, as well as factors unique to the region.</p>
<p /> | Entering Russia's Power Sector | false | http://belfercenter.org/publication/entering-russias-power-sector | 2 |
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<p>The ill-fated Indonesian airbus, AirAsia Flight 8501, may have been incapacitated by ice damage to the vehicle’s systems, according to an official government report.</p>
<p>“The most probable weather phenomenon is that icing caused the plane engines to be damaged,” reads the document from Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency. “This is, however, just one analysis of what likely happened based on available meteorological data, and is not the final determination on the cause of the incident.”</p>
<p>Tiny grains of ice located in the clouds 8501 passed through may have played a part in the crash.</p>
<p>The flight originally went missing on Dec. 28, over the Java Sea. Around thirty bodies have been found, alongside various pieces of debris. The location of the black box, containing information that will likely clarify the cause of the crash, remains a mystery.</p>
<p>Further, the plane transporting 162 people from Surabaya to Singapore was not cleared to fly its route at the time of the accident. Indonesia has since frozen AirAsia’s permit to use these airways until the investigation is complete.</p>
<p>Prior to losing contact, the pilots requested to raise the altitude of the airbus, and decided to change their course by a few miles.</p>
<p>Yet, Greg Waldron of Flightglobal tells <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/airasia-flight-8501-crash-possibly-caused-by-icing-indonesian-report-says-1420298553" type="external">The Wall Street Journal</a> that “You can’t jump to conclusions based only on the weather reports.”</p>
<p>Of the wreckage, the largest piece of debris found is thought to be a part of the fuselage, according to The Guardian. An anonymous source also <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/03/airasia-flight-qz8501-airline-was-not-allowed-to-fly-route-says-indonesia" type="external">told</a> the publication that the 8501 made an incredibly steep climb prior to the incident.</p>
<p>The unnamed source says, “So far, the numbers taken by the radar are unbelievably high. This rate of climb is very high, too high. It appears to be beyond the performance envelope of the aircraft.”</p>
<p>The search for debris and potential survivors was originally stunted by <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/01/air-asia-crash-divers-prepare-to-search-sunken-wreck-of-plane" type="external">bad weather</a>.</p>
<p>This is Indonesia’s second such airplane disappearance, coming hot off the heels of the still-missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370.</p>
<p>MH370 was lost in May of 2014 and remains a mystery to the international community. None of the theories that have emerged since then have proved viable.</p>
<p /> | AirAsia Flight 8501 Early Crash Report Blames Icing | false | http://natmonitor.com/2015/01/04/airasia-flight-8501-early-crash-report-blames-icing/ | 2015-01-04 | 3 |
<p>A collapse of the Euro would be dramatic and cataclysmic, but it would not be entirely unprecedented. NPR's Planet Money <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/11/10/142217235/leaving-the-euro-is-hard-to-do" type="external">reports</a> on the last time a currency union broke up: when the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed and the newly formed nations began printing their own currencies.</p>
<p>The transition was <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/11/10/142217235/leaving-the-euro-is-hard-to-do" type="external">anything but smooth</a>:</p>
<p>After World War I, the region broke up. All of a sudden there were lots of countries wanting to switch to their own currencies.</p>
<p>At the beginning, they used a simple system: Countries simply stamped existing Austro-Hungarian currency with particular markings to turn it into new, domestic currency. Some countries used ornate samps; Romania's stamp was just a cross.</p>
<p>This quickly led to chaos. Everyone wanted to get their money stamped in the country they thought would have the strongest currency. Countries sealed their borders, but it was no use.</p>
<p>"You had boxcar loads of currency" moving across borders, says Michael Spencer, an economist who has written about this period.</p>
<p>...</p>
<p>Spencer says after the breakup in 1918, it was unclear for a while what the new currencies were even worth. Countries sometimes resorted to bartering. It took years for things to stabilize.</p> | Get Ready to Barter Like it's 1919 | true | https://thedailybeast.com/get-ready-to-barter-like-its-1919 | 2018-10-03 | 4 |
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<p />
<p /> PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Washington.
<p />
<p />Repression of democracy protesters in Bahrain continues. And now joining us from Bahrain to describe today's events is Reem Khalifa. She's a Bahraini, and she writes for the AP and contributes op-eds to various publications in the Middle East. Thanks for joining us, Reem.
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<p />REEM KHALIFA, BAHRAINI JOURNALIST: Thank you.
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<p />JAY: What happened today? You've just come from a protest. What was it about, and what happened?
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<p />KHALIFA: It actually was, at the beginning, a funeral—ten thousands of people who participated in this funeral, opposition, human rights activists, and all level of classes who participated in this funeral, actually, for a person called Ahmed Ismail, 22-years-old citizen journalist who was killed by a gun, a live-bullet gun, two weeks ago. There was an argument to collect his body between his family and the authorities. It's just because the authorities refused to say that the cause of death was a live bullet. The family decided to collect it today after fighting a case against the authorities for that. The person also was one of the volunteer organizers who used to participate in Formula One events every year. Ismail was very much popular in the social media among his friends and colleagues, and also among his colleagues in Formula One.
<p />
<p />JAY: Now, the Formula One is an issue right now because there's a F1 race to take place soon in Bahrain. Last year's was canceled, and there was a big debate whether to cancel it again this year. But they've decided to go ahead with it this year. What do people think of that decision?
<p />
<p />KHALIFA: Well, today, seeing them, you know, we saw the feedback coming out from a couple of activists [incompr.] complaining and criticizing why it's happening in Bahrain and giving an example of Ismail, that this symbolized how, you know, he was killed with a cold blood. And also you see after this event classes have started between protesters who seek for democracy and freedom and between police forces who used—fired, sorry, tear gas and shotgun.
<p />
<p />I have to highlight that the shotgun was not used for about six months, but they are back using it massively, and we witnessed that. Many protesters were wounded today, and some were trying to have treatment inside houses in the area of Salmabad, which is the located in middle of Bahrain Island.
<p />
<p />JAY: Now, you say he was a 22-year-old citizen journalist. What kind of journalism did he do? And do they think he was in any way specifically targeted?
<p />
<p />KHALIFA: Yeah, he was targeted as his colleagues were filming. When he was trying to film the protests and the clashes where—. Literally, in Bahrain there is daily clashes in various areas. So Ismail was one among the young Bahrainis who was very much passionate with, you know, camera and filming. And he was just filming the clashes. And what—according to the opposition, Al Wefaq, and other human rights activists, in their statement issued, they said that he was—you know, what—they pointed directly to him because he was carrying a camera, filming the clashes and the event, and they didn't want that.
<p />
<p />And also one more thing. There was a couple of press releases in solidarity issued with Ismail, like CPJ and RSF.
<p />
<p />JAY: And the authorities have been trying to hide or cover up the fact live ammunition is being used. But you saw it being used today. Is that correct?
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<p />KHALIFA: Yeah, that's correct, yeah, a lot.
<p />
<p />JAY: A lot. And what are they shooting? These are live bullets?
<p />
<p />KHALIFA: They were shooting the—they were shooting shotguns, the birdshot guns.
<p />
<p />JAY: With birdshot.
<p />
<p />KHALIFA: Not live bullets. Birdshot guns. Yeah. They were using birdshot guns, which is like a small-circle middle type of bullet which insert immediately to the body. It was a lot, and it was quite scary to report in this environment.
<p />
<p />JAY: Now, there's a sort of a—the Bahraini government—and to some extent a lot of the international media have kind of moved on from Bahrain. The government is sort of suggesting, oh, things have died down, there's not really that much protest anymore. And most of the international media, I would say—you know, you're one of the exceptions—have kind of—not covering much of the Bahrain story anymore. But the conflict continues quite intensely, does it?
<p />
<p />KHALIFA: Yeah, every day. For example, yesterday, north and northwest Bahrain was under siege with armored vehicles, which were deployed in [bə'deɪjə] Highway, and clashes were nonstop clashes between the police and the protesters. Many areas were under siege. And many vigilantes were trying to set checkpoints in some of the areas. Even today in the funeral there were police and people in several clots—they were blocking people to prevent them to attend the funeral, and the rally as well.
<p />
<p />JAY: Now, you know, in Syria, perhaps the level of repression is more violent. The conflict has gotten more violent. But even early on, before it reached such a state, the United States and the West were very, very critical of the Assad regime, but not so much about Bahrain. And, certainly, Saudi Arabia, which is, you know, leading the charge about the issues in Syria, as we all know, helped the Bahraini government suppress protesters. What reaction is there to, I guess, what most people would call a double standard? What do the Bahrainis think of all this?
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<p />KHALIFA: Well, today, for example, people of Bahrain, or in the demo, they feel very much that there is a kind of double standard when it comes to the U.S. policy, when it comes to Bahrain issue. And they were—like, not just today, but in the past few days they started to chant and say U.S. slogans beside the antigovernment slogans. That's a new thing. And we—a couple of weeks ago, some of them were trying to have an American intervention to release the hunger strike human rights activist Abdulhadi al-Khawaja. Main demand is to call for the release of the political prisoners which are in detention still. They have, like, between 600 to 800, according to the opposition and human rights activists.
<p />
<p />The fact-finding committee which—they issued a very important report last November [incompr.] recommendations according to the NGOs and opposition, that the governmental of Bahrain didn't really implement these recommendations. So still there is a struggle and battle going on in the street. And also, Bahrain, according to the opposition, violated the international covenant when it comes to the political rights and civil rights which Bahrain ratified in 2006.
<p />
<p />So all these things—they consider Bahrain violated human rights and violated the rights to access for the people to express themselves. And what happened a year ago, it was Bahrainis were punished for, basically, expressing their views and their rights for freedom and democracy. And that's why you see until now there is trials going on for doctors, for journalists, for teachers, especially doctors and journalists, who—they basically witnessed many crimes happened by the regime. So basically [incompr.] they were doing their job, but in the same time, they were punished and arrested and detained and tortured in different ways.
<p />
<p />JAY: The White House press secretary a few days ago issued a statement on Bahrain. What did people think of that statement?
<p />
<p />KHALIFA: It differs from [one] group to another, because what—there are, like—you know, the opposition didn't really comment much on the statement; we didn't see any feedback. But in the social media you will find two different kind of people: people with and people against and people in between. What they call themselves, the group the Fourteenth Fifth movement or coalition, who—they always announce things in the social media, and then they set up their demos and protest against security forces around the island—they issued today a statement saying that, you know, the White House and the U.S. policy is all moving towards pleasing the government of Bahrain, and also by standing aside [to] one side to protect their own interests, while they didn't really issue one single statement about the killing that's happening every day, including Ahmed Ismail, who was killed by a live bullet. So, basically this is what they were saying today in their statement. And they criticize also why F1 should go ahead on time in Bahrain while still the clashes and the killing going on. And the government doesn't want to admit that.
<p />
<p />So, yeah, this is how they feel. They feel they are voiceless and they feel no one really standing beside what they are demanding and calling for. And that's why yesterday there was a couple of explosions in a couple of areas, like, you know, gas cylinders and an attempt to set fire on tires. And they tried to do just a kind of—things just to pay attention to the people, and probably to the people who's coming to Bahrain, to see that there is a political problem.
<p />
<p />JAY: And just finally, we're seeing in the press more—we have almost from the beginning, but even more so now—it's being portrayed as the struggle in Bahrain is simply a proxy war with Iran, it's all Sunni-Shia. But are Sunnis in fact participating in these protests?
<p />
<p />KHALIFA: There are. Like, the society-wide society is a mix of Shia and Sunni, the liberal ones, yes. But there are—like, the categories like the Sunni Islamist societies are the pro-government societies in the island, so they will participate in the government rallies. And that's why you see now, the opposition, all the pro-democracy rallies are more like with the opposition human rights Shia side—and mixed with Sunni as well, but majority are Shia, yes, because Bahrain is majority Shia, and obviously you will find they are the one who's moving the things in the streets. And this is how we see as an observer, and how when we are reporting. So there's two type rallies: rally which is with the government, and a rally which is with the opposition. So basically with and against.
<p />
<p />JAY: But part of the rationale here, I think, both with American media and American politicians, is that because they're trying to portray this as Sunni-Shia, but really Iran versus Gulf Cooperation Council countries, and they're kind of in that way delegitimatizing the protest, that they're not really democracy protests, it's not really a Bahraini phenomenon, it's somehow an extension of Iran. What do you make of that?
<p />
<p />KHALIFA: Well, according to [incompr.] report, which was issued on November 2011, he made a very clear statement in the report, saying that there was no—any Iranian involvement or conspiracy when it comes to the movement that happened in Bahrain a year ago. So this is a very important and a clear statement that came out from a fact-finding committee was recognized internationally.
<p />
<p />What's actually, in Bahrain, going through the things and reporting things [incompr.] this is actually a very old demand for Bahrainis. It goes back to the '50s. And it just developed by time. And probably because with the Arab Spring that happened last year and now, we are witnessing awakening of a sort of movement spreading around the Arab world. So probably it might happen, more development, the way how they address their demands. And what—if you ask or talk to the opposition or to the activists, they will keep saying that Bahrain, it doesn't differ from another country or different country from—in the Arab world; it's just all Arab world are the same; but it could differ in the size or the number of the population.
<p />
<p />JAY: I guess it also differs, from an American point of view, that there's the Fifth Fleet there and there's a major U.S. naval base, and that makes it different for them. Any rate, thanks very much for joining us, Reem.
<p />
<p />KHALIFA: Thank you.
<p />
<p />JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
<p />
<p />End
<p />
<p />DISCLAIMER: Please note that transcripts for The Real News Network are typed from a recording of the program. TRNN cannot guarantee their complete accuracy. | Bahrain Protestors Clash with Police at Citizen Journalist's Funeral | true | http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option%3Dcom_content%26task%3Dview%26id%3D31%26Itemid%3D74%26jumival%3D8201 | 2012-04-15 | 4 |
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<p>Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, right, speaks with Prince William and wife Kate as they arrive with their son, Prince George, at the Chapel Royal in St. James’s Palace on Wednesday.John Stillwell/The Associated Press</p>
<p>LONDON – Dressed in a lace and satin gown designed in the 1840s, Britain’s 3-month-old future monarch, Prince George, was christened Wednesday with water from the River Jordan at a rare gathering of four generations of the royal family.</p>
<p>The occasion had historic overtones: the presence of Britain’s 87-year-old monarch and three future kings, Princes Charles, William and, of course, little George.</p>
<p>Queen Elizabeth II, usually the center of attention, quietly ceded the spotlight to her rosy-cheeked great-grandson, who seemed to wave at her when he arrived – an illusion created by his father, Prince William, playfully moving the infant’s arm.</p>
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<p>The private affair at the Chapel Royal at St. James’s Palace was also attended by Prince Charles, next in line to the throne, and the queen’s 92-year-old husband, Prince Philip, who has shown remarkable stamina since returning to the public eye after a two-month convalescence following serious abdominal surgery.</p>
<p>All told, it was an exceptional day for a monarchy that seems to be basking in public affection since the 2011 wedding of William and Kate Middleton and the maturing of Prince Harry, who appears to have put his playboy days behind him.</p>
<p>George, who was born on July 22, wore a replica of an intricate christening gown made for Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter and first used in 1841.</p>
<p>When William was christened in 1982, he wore the original gown – by then well over a century old – but the garment has become so fragile that a replica was made.</p>
<p>The infant, who will head the Church of England when he becomes king, was christened with water from the River Jordan by Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby.</p>
<p>He arrived at the chapel in his father’s arms with his mother by their side.</p>
<p>Kate, smiling broadly on her way into the chapel, wore a cream-colored Alexander McQueen dress and hat by milliner Jane Taylor, with her long hair brushed to the side. William wore his customary dark suit and tie as he proudly carried their first child.</p>
<p>Kate’s parents, Michael and Carole Middleton, and her sister, Pippa, and brother, James, were also at the ceremony.</p>
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<p>Pippa Middleton read from the Gospel of St. Luke, and Prince Harry read from the Gospel of St. John. The two hymns were “Breathe on Me, Breath of God” and “Be Thou My Vision.”</p>
<p>The chapel has a strong connection to William’s mother, the late Princess Diana, whose coffin was laid before the chapel’s altar for her family to pay their last respects in private before her 1997 funeral.</p>
<p>Baby George has seven godparents, among them William’s cousin, Zara Phillips, daughter of Princess Anne and a close friend of the couple.</p>
<p>They also include Oliver Baker, a friend from William and Kate’s days at St. Andrews University; Emilia Jardine-Paterson, who went to the exclusive Marlborough College high school with Kate; Hugh Grosvenor, the son of the Duke of Westminster; Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, a former private secretary to the couple; Julia Samuel, a close friend of Princess Diana; and William van Cutsem, a childhood friend of William’s.</p>
<p>Palace officials said water from the River Jordan – where Christians believe Jesus Christ was baptized – was used for the christening.</p>
<p />
<p /> | 3-month-old Prince George christened in London | false | https://abqjournal.com/287518/3monthold-prince-george-christened-in-london.html | 2013-10-24 | 2 |
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<p>WASHINGTON — Even as they praised him, Senate Democrats said Tuesday that Donald Trump’s pick to represent the U.S. in trade negotiations needs a waiver from Congress to legally hold the job because of his previous work for foreign clients.</p>
<p>Republicans disagree but the dispute could slow the confirmation of Robert Lighthizer to become the U.S trade representative.</p>
<p>Lighthizer is an experienced trade official who, in private practice, represented “a small number of foreign clients in the late 1980s and early 1990s,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.</p>
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<p>A 1995 law prohibits anyone who has represented a foreign entity in trade negotiations with the U.S. from being the nation’s top trade representative. Nevertheless, Hatch said the Justice Department does not believe Lighthizer requires a waiver.</p>
<p>Several Democrats disagreed at Lighthizer’s Senate confirmation hearing Tuesday.</p>
<p>“As a legal matter, Mr. Lighthizer’s previous work for foreign governments makes him ineligible to be appointed as the United States trade representative,” said Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Finance Committee.</p>
<p>Wyden said Democrats are willing to pass a waiver for Lighthizer but only if Republicans pass an unrelated bill to protect retired coal miners’ pension and health care benefits. The miners’ pension plan is headed toward insolvency.</p>
<p>Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ken., has introduced legislation to maintain the miners’ benefits. But Democrats complain that the Senate is not moving fast enough.</p>
<p>“This kind of legislative hostage-taking certainly is not unheard of in the Senate, but in the context of consideration of a nominee for the Office of U.S. Trade Representative, it is totally unprecedented,” Hatch said.</p>
<p>Aside from the waiver dispute, Democrats were generally supportive of Lighthizer. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, praised Lighthizer’s work on behalf of U.S. steel manufacturers.</p>
<p>Brown said Lighthizer “understands the kind of trade policy we need.”</p>
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<p>Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., said she hopes that a bipartisan solution can be reached on the waiver dispute.</p>
<p>Lighthizer has criticized some Republicans for being too pro-free trade. He told the Senate panel that the U.S. should have an “America first trade policy.”</p>
<p>“We can do better in negotiating our trade agreements and stronger in enforcing our trade laws,” he said.</p>
<p>Trump has broken with most Republicans in his criticism of free trade agreements. He pulled the U.S. out of the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership pact and has said he will renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico.</p>
<p>NAFTA was negotiated by President Bill Clinton. It was ratified by the Senate with broad Republican support.</p>
<p>Trump has said he would ink one-on-one trade deals with individual countries.</p>
<p>Lighthizer served as deputy U.S. trade representative under President Ronald Reagan. He was the staff director of the Finance Committee when Sen. Bob Dole was its chairman. The former senator from Kansas introduced Lighthizer at Tuesday’s hearing, calling him “a bull dog when it comes to getting things done.”</p>
<p>Lighthizer has more recently worked on trade issues as a lawyer, representing manufacturing, agricultural and high-tech companies, according to his law firm biography. Lighthizer’s bio also states that he focused on “market-opening trade actions on behalf of U.S. companies seeking access to foreign markets.”</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Follow Stephen Ohlemacher on Twitter at: <a href="http://twitter.com/stephenatap" type="external">http://twitter.com/stephenatap</a></p> | Democrats say Trump’s pick for trade post needs waiver | false | https://abqjournal.com/968716/trump-pick-for-trade-post-heads-to-senate-for-hearing.html | 2017-03-14 | 2 |
<p />
<p>The D.C. Center for the LGBT Community co-sponsored a panel on the 2016 International AIDS Conference that took place on Aug. 8, 2016.</p>
<p />
<p>The event was held at the Human Rights Campaign in D.C. and it was co-sponsored by Center Global and the HIV Working Group, both programs of the D.C. Center for the LGBT community.</p>
<p>The panel of experts and activists included Temi Oke, a Nigerian asylee and HIV prevention worker in Nigeria and D.C.; Thomas La Salvia, deputy coordinator of affected populations and civil society leadership at the State Department; Jose Zuniga, president of the International Association of Providers of AIDS Care; and A. Toni Young, executive director of Community Education Group.</p>
<p>Jamieson Brill, chair of the HIV Working Group and overnight hotline supervisor of Community Crisis Services, Inc., moderated the panel.</p>
<p>The International AIDS Conference is a biennial forum sponsored by the International AIDS Society that brings together the world’s top scientists, activists and policy makers to discuss ways to eradicate HIV/AIDS.</p>
<p>The panel discussion aimed to address the developments put forth during the International AIDS Conference from a LGBT perspective.</p>
<p>The event was well received by the panelists and attendees in that it provided an opportunity to discuss strategies to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS locally and globally.</p>
<p>“Overall, we were very pleased to hear the breadth of information that the conference attendees gained from participating in the IAC and their opportunity to learn about innovative programs in other parts of the world,” Eric Scharf of the D.C. Center.</p>
<p>“The Center Global-D.C. Center forum was extremely encouraging for me in that we were able to translate the global progress announced at the 21st International AIDS Conference and place it within a local context,” added Zuniga.</p>
<p>“Repealing punitive laws against against whole groups of people or for perceived HIV exposure, eliminating stigma, getting more people tested and linked to care, including preexposure prophylaxis (PrEP) and antiretroviral therapy, and providing psychosocial and other support are critical to attaining the United Nations goal of ending AIDS as a public health threat by 2030, “ he said.</p>
<p>Zuniga also emphasized the importance of the data available to target communities most affected by the HIV virus.</p>
<p>“We cannot afford to leave anyone behind,” he said. “Thus the use of data to map where and among whom the greatest need lies in relation to HIV testing, prevention, care, treatment, and support is extremely important both strategically and financially. We are therefore pleased that the District of Columbia, as a Fast-Track City, has embraced the open use of data for both decision-making and remaining accountable to local stakeholders, notably HIV-affected communities.”</p>
<p>Although no new information was revealed on prevention or treatment, some experts used the platform to highlight the importance of HIV/AIDS as a global health crisis and AIDS-related illnesses.</p>
<p>“I think that people who are doing work in HIV and people living with HIV don’t always get the intersectionality of HIV internationality and domestically,” Young told the Blade during a telephone interview.</p>
<p>“I’m really focused on work around Hepatitis C and Achalasia. Most people don’t even know there is an epidemic of Hepatitis C and Achalasia,” she added. “People don’t know think of West Virginia as a place where there is an Hepatitis C outbreak or crisis. Nor do they see that as a place where we can definitely learn from the telemedicine, distance learning and legacy carrier activities that have been going in Africa and South Africa.”</p>
<p>Some suggest the success of the fight against the eradication of HIV/AIDS is ultimately dependent on actions taken by policy makers and political leaders.</p>
<p>“So much of our AIDS response is reliant upon political will,” said Zuniga. “Therefore, elections matter and we must evaluate the positions and stances taken by those who are seeking elected office and determine whether these are in the best interest of people living with and affected by HIV/AIDS.”</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">A. Toni Young</a> <a href="" type="internal">Community Crisis Services</a> <a href="" type="internal">Community Education Group</a> <a href="" type="internal">D.C. Center for the LGBT Community</a> <a href="" type="internal">Eric Scharf</a> <a href="" type="internal">Human Rights Campaign</a> <a href="" type="internal">International AIDS Conference</a> <a href="" type="internal">International AIDS Society</a> <a href="" type="internal">International Association of Providers of AIDS Care</a> <a href="" type="internal">Jamieson Brill</a> <a href="" type="internal">Jose Zuniga</a> <a href="" type="internal">Nigeria</a> <a href="" type="internal">South Africa</a> <a href="" type="internal">State Department</a> <a href="" type="internal">Temi Oke</a> <a href="" type="internal">Thomas La Salvia</a></p> | D.C. Center holds post-International AIDS Conference panel | false | http://washingtonblade.com/2016/08/10/d-c-center-holds-post-international-aids-conference-panel/ | 3 |
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<p>Tesla gains after Nomura's upbeat take, while Mylan gets a big lift from an FDA OK</p>
<p>U.S. stocks advanced modestly on Wednesday, building on the recent streak of gains that's taken all major benchmarks to all-time highs.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>What stock benchmarks are doing</p>
<p>The S&amp;P 500 was up by 4 points, or 0.3%, to 2,538, with ten of its 11 main sectors trading higher. Consumer discretionary, consumer staples and health-care shares were leading the gains, while technology stocks were under pressure. The benchmark index is on track for a seventh straight session of gains.</p>
<p>The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 35 points, or 0.2%, to 22,677, on track to post a sixth consecutive gain. Caterpillar Inc. (CAT) and Nike Inc. (NKE) were leading gains, up about 1%.</p>
<p>The Nasdaq Composite Index , meanwhile, advanced 6 points, or 0.1%, to 6,536, as gains were limited by a slide in shares of iPhone maker Apple Inc. (AAPL).</p>
<p>What could drive markets?</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Private-sector employment slowed in September as firms added 135,000 jobs. The report comes ahead of the government's monthly release on nonfarm payrolls that is scheduled for Friday.</p>
<p>Markit's September figure for its services purchasing managers index dipped to 55.3 in September from 56 in August.</p>
<p>The comparable ISM report for the same month rose to 59.8, compared with 55.3 in the prior period and marking its highest level since mid-2005. A reading of 50 or greater indicates expansion.</p>
<p>Check out:MarketWatch's Economic Calendar (http://www.marketwatch.com/economy-politics/calendars/economic)</p>
<p>On the Federal Reserve front, Fed chief Janet Yellen is due to give brief opening remarks at a conference on community banking at the St. Louis Fed at 3:15 p.m. Eastern Time, and her second-in-command Stanley Fischer took part in a TV interview ahead of the open, saying the pace of interest-rate hikes was "OK." (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/feds-fischer-says-he-expects-inflation-to-pick-up-2017-10-04-71032756)</p>
<p>What are strategists saying?</p>
<p>--"Markets are back in positive territory on speculation that Jerome Powell may have a lead to get the chairmanship of the Fed. He is more or less aligned with the current chair Yellen and markets would like to keep that status quo," said Quincy Krosby, chief market strategist, at Prudential Financial.</p>
<p>--"The S&amp;P 500 posted its sixth consecutive day of gains [on Tuesday], continuing to benefit from positive short-term momentum. The breakout from September's consolidation phase refreshed the uptrend, and should help stave off a pullback until later this month," said Katie Stockton, chief technical strategist at BTIG.</p>
<p>Read:Why stocks may be 'on verge' of a melt-up (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-stocks-may-be-on-verge-of-a-melt-up-2017-10-04)</p>
<p>Which stocks are in focus?</p>
<p>Shares in electric-car maker Tesla Inc.(TSLA) rose 1.3% to around $352 after Nomura analysts initiated coverage with a buy rating and price target of $500 (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/teslatstock-gains-after-nomura-initiates-with-street-high-500-price-target-2017-10-03).</p>
<p>Shares in Mylan NV(MYL) surged 17% after the maker of generic drugs late Tuesday announced (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mylan-announces-us-fda-approval-of-first-generic-for-copaxone-40-mgml-3-times-a-week-and-may-be-eligible-for-180-day-exclusivity-300530551.html) that the Food and Drug Administration had approved its generic versions for Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd.'s Copaxone, a drug for people with relapsing forms of multiple sclerosis. Teva's stock (TEVA) fell 12%.</p>
<p>Shares in PepsiCo Inc.(PEP) dropped 2% after the drinks heavyweight posted better-than-expected profit but weaker-than-anticipated revenue (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/pepsis-stock-gains-after-profit-beat-offsets-sales-miss-2017-10-04). Seeds and pesticides giant Monsanto Co.(MON) shares rose after the agriculture products company reported a surprise fiscal fourth-quarter profit and sales growth.</p>
<p>Amazon.com Inc.'s stock (AMZN) was little changed after a European Union regulator ordered the e-commerce giant to pay about $300 million in back taxes (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/eu-orders-amazon-to-pay-250-million-in-back-taxes-to-luxembourg-2017-10-04) to Luxembourg. The order had been expected to come this week.</p>
<p>Office Depot Inc.(ODP) plunged 18% after the retailer late Tuesday said it's lowering its 2017 profit guidance and plans to pay $1 billion (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/office-depot-to-buy-compucom-for-1-billion-lowers-guidance-2017-10-03) for IT company CompuCom Systems Inc.</p>
<p>Shares in Verizon Communications Inc.(VZ) were little changed after the telecom announced late Tuesday that every Yahoo account was affected by a 2013 hack (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/every-yahoo-account-was-affected-by-2013-hack-verizon-now-says-2017-10-03). Verizon completed its acquisition (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/marissa-mayer-steps-down-as-verizon-acquisition-of-yahoo-is-complete-2017-06-13) of ailing internet pioneer Yahoo in June.</p>
<p>What other assets are doing</p>
<p>European stocks (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/spanish-stocks-lead-europe-lower-as-catalonia-dispute-intensifies-2017-10-04) traded lower, with Spain's IBEX benchmark among the biggest losers after Catalonia's leaders reiterated their pledge to declare independence while King Felipe VI said they have "undermined harmony." (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/spains-king-says-catalan-separatists-have-undermined-harmony-2017-10-03)</p>
<p>Asian markets largely closed with gains (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/hong-kong-stocks-flirt-with-10-year-high-2017-10-03), as Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index flirted with a 10-year high but then pared gains.</p>
<p>Oil futures and the ICE U.S. Dollar Index pulled back, while gold futures advanced.</p>
<p>(END) Dow Jones Newswires</p>
<p>October 04, 2017 13:03 ET (17:03 GMT)</p> | MARKET SNAPSHOT: Stock Market Hits Records, Poised To Extend Win Streak | true | http://foxbusiness.com/features/2017/10/04/market-snapshot-stock-market-hits-records-poised-to-extend-win-streak.html | 2017-10-04 | 0 |
<p />
<p>The Dow is supposed to be the living breathing pulse of the financial markets, signaling panic, euphoria and everything in between.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>But the rise of computer-programmed trading has increasingly thrown that thinking into doubt, causing some to believe this sophisticated way of executing orders clouds the ability to accurately gauge market sentiment on a daily basis.</p>
<p>“They’re beginning to outweigh that conscious decision-making process where people used to go into a room and decide” on whether to buy shares or not, said Marc Pado, chief market strategist at investment advisory DowBull.&#160;Computer-programmed trading “reflects the technical aspects of the market solely,” he added.</p>
<p>If this is true, it means retail investors watching the markets on a day-by-day basis may be putting too much weight into major market moves in one direction or the other because the price action is being driven by momentum caused by computer calculations, not human sentiment.</p>
<p>“Computerized trading probably exacerbates the direction of the sentiment. It’s usually following the market’s sentiment, not leading it,” said Michael James, managing director of equity trading at Wedbush Securities.</p>
<p>Program Trading Takes Off</p>
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<p>While definitions vary, computer programmed trading typically refers to large trades executed at rapid speed by sophisticated computers largely based on predetermined conditions.</p>
<p>Estimates differ on how prevalent computer program trading is, but what’s clear is that it’s on the rise.</p>
<p>The New York Stock Exchange, which is owned by NYSE Euronext (NYSE:NYX), said program trading generated 29.8% of the Big Board’s average daily volume of 1.59 billion shares last week.</p>
<p>The proportion of trading volume on the NYSE trading floor compared with the overall composite tumbled below 25% in January, down from above 55% five years earlier.</p>
<p>With this thinking in mind, The New York Times recently included the following disclosure in a daily market story:</p>
<p>“With the majority of equity trading now generated by the computer programs of big banks and investment funds, analysts caution against reading too much into daily stock moves as a reflection of market sentiment.”</p>
<p>Fundamentals Still Matter</p>
<p>But others believe these concerns about the impact of program trading on daily market action are overblown.</p>
<p>“Stocks still trade on valuation, on earnings and largely on the backdrop of the larger trends,” said Peter Kenny, managing director at Knight Capital (NYSE:KCG). “I honestly believe being in the business for 30 years, that both technical and fundamental analysis play key, central, undeniable roles in the attractiveness or lack of attractiveness of the asset class generally or specifically.”</p>
<p>To support his point, Kenny pointed to earnings season, which often triggers healthy and logical responses in share prices.</p>
<p>For example, shares of Ciena (NASDAQ:CIEN) jumped 6% Thursday morning after the communications network equipment provider revealed stronger-than-expected earnings on solid sales growth.</p>
<p>Shares “don’t just trade in this computerized vacuum,” said Kenny. “Yes, there is a greater degree of non-human trading generally speaking,” but direction and opportunity are “predicated upon valuations.”</p>
<p>Investing or Trading?</p>
<p>On the other hand, Joe Saluzzi, co author of soon-to-be-released Broken Markets, believes computer programmed trading has “artificially distorted” price action.</p>
<p>“Is it based on fundamentals? No. The fundamental guys were drowned out by the momentum guys,” said Saluzzi, co-head of trading at Themis Trading. “They don't care who the CEO is. They’re just looking to flip for a penny or two.”</p>
<p>Pado echoes that sentiment, saying, “The term ‘investment’ has gotten lost with this program trading. It’s one of my biggest frustrations with this industry: We’ve found ways to make money just for the sake of money.”</p>
<p>He also noted that a lot of technical analysis is based on volume action at a certain price. That means&#160; heavy volume caused by momentum moves in programmed trading can distort the ability to evaluate stocks by technicals.</p>
<p>Still, Saluzzi said this doesn’t mean the daily market action should be discounted simply due to the influence of momentum traders.</p>
<p>“A buy order is a buy order and a sell order us a sell order, whether it’s from a computer or a human,” said Saluzzi.</p> | Man vs. Machine: Who's Really Running These Markets? | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2012/06/01/whos-running-these-markets-man-or-machines.html | 2016-03-03 | 0 |
<p />
<p>The proposed merger between <a href="/science/2007/03/whole_foods_good_name.html" type="external">Whole Foods</a> and Wild Oats is back on the table. The Federal Trade Commission’s recent injunction to stop the <a href="/mojoblog/archives/2007/02/3637_whole_foods_sme.html" type="external">merger</a> under anti-monopoly laws was <a href="http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/investor/pr07_08-16.html" type="external">denied today</a>, and the merger may take place as early as Monday, August 20. That is, if the FTC does not file a stay for an appeal by then. Stay tuned for more Whole Foods news Monday. Until then, though, you can browse Michael Pollan’s <a href="/news/feature/2006/05/no_bar_code.html" type="external">feature</a> on why eating organic isn’t necessarily sustainable.</p>
<p /> | Court Denies FTC Injunction Against Whole Foods Merger | true | https://motherjones.com/politics/2007/08/court-denies-ftc-injunction-against-whole-foods-merger/ | 2007-08-16 | 4 |
<p><a href="" type="external" /> 16 MORE DAYS!!!!</p>
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<p><a href="" type="internal">Hillary Clinton on Saturday cast blame for her surprise election loss on the ann...</a>November 13, 2016In "Conservative Blogs"</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Every day the job of President-Elect seems to become more danger-filled for Dona...</a>December 14, 2016In "Conservative Blogs"</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">(Infowars) - Hillary Clinton, now suffering from depression and borderline alcoh...</a>December 2, 2016In "Conservative Blogs"</p> | 16 MORE DAYS!!!! | true | http://libertyfederation.org/16-more-days/ | 2017-01-04 | 0 |
<p />
<p>MasterCard, the world's second-biggest payments processor, reported a higher-than-expected 6.7 percent rise in quarterly profit as consumers spent more on cards using its network.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>U.S. consumer spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of economic activity in the country, rose for a second straight month in May on increased demand for automobiles and other goods. Data for June has not been released yet.</p>
<p>MasterCard's shares were up 1.8 percent at $95.45 in premarket trading on Thursday.</p>
<p>Worldwide purchase volume rose 9 percent to $897 billion on a local currency basis in the second quarter.</p>
<p>MasterCard's net income rose to $983 million, or 89 cents per share, in the quarter ended June 30, from $921 million, or 81 cents per share, a year earlier.</p>
<p>Excluding a charge, the company earned 96 cents per share.</p>
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<p>Revenue jumped 12.7 percent to $2.69 billion.</p>
<p>Analysts on average had expected earnings of 90 cents per share and revenue of $2.59 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.</p>
<p>Visa Inc reported a higher-than-expected quarterly profit this month, driven by a 10.2 percent rise in payments volume.</p>
<p>(Reporting By Sudarshan Varadhan in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel)</p> | MasterCard Shares Rise as Profit Beats Estimates | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2016/07/28/mastercard-shares-rise-as-profit-beats-estimates.html | 2016-07-28 | 0 |
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<p />
<p>The fourth season of "Homeland"&#160;takes place in Pakistan and Afghanistan.&#160;But as Pakistani author Bina Shah watched the first episode from her home in Karachi,&#160; <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/16/opinion/bina-shah-a-homeland-we-pakistanis-dont-recognize.html?ref=opinion&amp;_r=0" type="external">she couldn't recognize</a>&#160;what was allegedly her home country.</p>
<p>As she&#160;wrote for&#160;the New York Times on Wednesday,&#160;the Pakistan that's portrayed in the series is nothing like the one she knows.&#160;"Islamabad is a very well-planned, beautiful and small city.&#160;It doesn't have huge crowds thronging in streets," Shah says. "It doesn't have your traditional tea shops and buses plying the streets the way it's being portrayed in Homeland."</p>
<p>Shah says she prepared herself mentally before watching the series.&#160;She's&#160;used to Pakistan being portrayed as a country with filled with chaos&#160;and&#160;security issues, yet she was still surprised by the number of things that the series&#160;got wrong.</p>
<p>She points out one&#160;scene in which protesters gather in front of the US embassy,&#160;waving&#160;Pakistani flags and chanting anti-American slogans. It's in response to the action that unfolds in the first two episodes, in which Claire Danes' character, CIA officer&#160;Carrie Mathison, orders a drone strike that kills several people at a wedding party.</p>
<p>"There is no way that protesters could stand right outside [the embassy's] gates. It's hidden way deep inside a diplomatic enclave, heavily protected," Shah&#160;explains.</p>
<p>The main Pakistani charachter is another misrepresentation, she argues.&#160;He is a young&#160;Pakistani&#160;medical student whose family is&#160;killed in the&#160;strike.&#160;"They have him immediately looking up at the camera while Carrie is looking at him&#160;and ...&#160;the connection is made now — he's going to be the terrorist," Shah says.</p>
<p>She's far from alone: Other writers have piled on,&#160; <a href="http://theweek.com/article/index/269979/3-horrific-inaccuracies-in-homelands-depiction-of-islamabad" type="external">pointing out mistakes</a>&#160;in the show's version of Pakistan.</p>
<p>Shah thinks that getting details wrong can&#160;have major consequences.&#160;"Homeland" may be&#160;entertainment, but it does influence perception and could, as she argues, stoke&#160;fear and misunderstandings.</p>
<p>"Pakistanis have suffered tremendously in the war on terror," she says. "We've had thousands of people killed, maimed and injured. All Pakistanis do not go on to become terrorists."</p> | The Pakistan in 'Homeland' is unrecognizable to this Pakistani author | false | https://pri.org/stories/2014-10-16/pakistan-homeland-unrecognizable-pakistani-author | 2014-10-16 | 3 |
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<p>Well-established technology company Garmin (NASDAQ: GRMN) and newer upstart Fitbit (NYSE: FIT) are betting that the Internet of Things, specifically wearable devices, can propel their businesses higher. With the two companies in very different financial situations, though, one is a better bet than the other for investors.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Garmin got its start in the 1980's helping various businesses and later individuals put the new Global Positioning System to use in their lives. While this is still the company's bread-and-butter with tech designed for transportation, the automotive industry has increasingly accounted for less of overall revenue.</p>
<p>Automotive is slowly being replaced by the fitness and outdoor division, wearable devices for active consumers that still feature the legacy GPS that has become Garmin's hallmark. The unit designs and sells everything from fitness trackers to action cameras.</p>
<p>The Garmin Vivoactive GPS smartwatch. Image source: Garmin.</p>
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<p>As of the end of 2015, the company's fitness division accounted for 24% of total revenue, up from 14% in 2013. In contrast, auto dropped to 37% of revenue down from 49% in 2013. Despite a strong showing from new business, overall revenue fell 2% in 2015.</p>
<p>That trend is reversing so far in 2016. Through the first six months of the year, sales are up 6%, led by double-digit advances from the fitness and outdoor wearable technology division. Automotive continues to drag and is down 16% year-to-date, but as an older and better-established segment,it carries a higher profit margin than the newer wearables units.</p>
<p>Garmin continues to invest into the wearable market and sees that as the main driver in the foreseeable future. That didn't pay off in 2015, but the company expects it will start to this year. The updated outlook through the end of 2016 is for revenue to be up 3% from last year. While earnings per share is now expected to come in flat from last year, the previous guidance from management was for an 11% year over year decrease.</p>
<p>Fitbit is also using the popularity of wearable devices among the active consumer demographic. The company designs and sells connected activity trackers and smart watches, but lacks the diversified business that Garmin has.</p>
<p>The new Fitbit Blaze fitness watch. Image source: Fitbit.</p>
<p>The newer company is growing very quickly, though. Sales during the last quarter topped $586 million, a 46% increase over last year. Through the first six months of the year, revenue was $1.1 billion, a 48% increase over the first six months of 2015 as total number of devices sold increased 27% in that period.</p>
<p>This explosive growth has eaten into profitability, however. Last year's profit of $0.29 has been trimmed to a meager $0.07 through the end of June. The reason is the increasing cost of research and development, topping $152 million this year versus the $53 million last year; and a doubling of sales and marketing expenses to $225 million so far this year.</p>
<p>The good news is that this increased spending is equating to continued growth. The most recent outlook issued by management is that revenue will come in between $2.5 and $2.6 billion, a 35% increase over 2015. The profit picture is also expected to improve from the big drop seen so far this year. Fitbit sees profits ending up roughly flat from last year, implying strong business performance to finish out 2016.</p>
<p>Both companies are growing wearable connected device sales, but I think only one is positioned to see business, profitability, and share price growth: Fitbit.</p>
<p>After losing more than half of its lofty IPO debut price, Fitbit trades at a more reasonable but still steep28 price-to-earnings ratio based. This compares with Garmin's near 40% rise in the last year, giving it a steep P/E ratio of nearly 18 -- high for a company that sees no profitability growth in the near-term.</p>
<p>Data by <a href="http://ycharts.com" type="external">YCharts</a>.</p>
<p>However, when considering expected profits in the next year, Garmin's P/E ratio doesn't change much. Fitbit, on the other hand, drops to 14, implying expectations for profitability to more than double as the company continues to grow.</p>
<p>Free cash flow, or money left over after normal operations and expansion efforts are paid for, is also increasing for both companies in the last year. However, Fitbit has been able to accomplish this while still expanding. Garmin, which saw long-term stable cash flow dip as it has ramped up wearable efforts, is spending extra cash to only put out an expected low single-digit growth rate this year.</p>
<p>Data by <a href="http://ycharts.com" type="external">YCharts</a>.</p>
<p>Considering these things, I like Fitbit's chances at growing its business using the wearable technology revolution. Garmin is a stable business, but the IoT and wearables division so far is just helping offset lost sales from its older business.</p>
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<p><a href="http://my.fool.com/profile/nrossolillo/info.aspx" type="external">Nicholas Rossolillo Opens a New Window.</a> has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Fitbit. 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> | Better Wearables Buy: Garmin vs. Fitbit | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2016/10/04/better-wearables-buy-garmin-vs-fitbit.html | 2016-10-04 | 0 |
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<p>Which may be why you had no idea there is a Miss World.</p>
<p>Let alone that the global pageant – which is considered more prestigious than Miss Universe – is happening right now, on the Maryland fringe of the nation’s capital, with a crowning Sunday at the new MGM National Harbor casino.</p>
<p>That’s why 117 women from around the world were gathered in the decidedly unglamorous Prince George’s Sports and Learning complex on Monday, in French braids and various shades of athleisure and face paint. There may be no bikini contest for Miss World – but there is a 60-meter dash.</p>
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<p>They had already competed in a preliminary fitness test, and the top 24 were facing off in a series of physical challenges – running, long jump, shot put – to earn a berth in the pageant finals.</p>
<p>A starting gun cracked. Miss Malta crossed the finish line, arms raised in triumph – and then promptly tripped over the raised edge of the track.</p>
<p>In any other country, the moment would have been captured by dozens of cameras and posted on Twitter – the Internet loves a good beauty queen blooper. But aside from some Chinese pageant bloggers, barely anyone was there.</p>
<p>Compare to a year ago, when the 2015 Miss World America found herself living the life of an A-list celebrity in Sanya, a resort town in southern China, where she competed in last year’s pageant.</p>
<p>Imagine, said Victoria Mendoza, what it’s like to be a member of One Direction or another red-hot pop group, where “people are banging on their tour bus screaming and crying and taking pictures. That was what it was.</p>
<p>“I had people taking pictures of me in the elevator at midnight,” she said. “You can’t understand anything they’re saying – women and children, crying. Men crying!”</p>
<p>Our planet, you see, can be roughly divided into Miss World turf and Miss Universe turf. The United States and Latin America? That’s where Miss Universe reigns. Donald Trump famously owned that 64-year-old pageant, before selling it at the messy start of his presidential campaign. It’s headquartered in New York, along with Miss USA, the stateside qualifying pageant. Both are broadcast live in the United States.</p>
<p>The 65-year-old Miss World is a British export. It’s hard to find in the United States – this year’s show will air Christmas Day, tape-delayed, on the E! cable channel. For years, its American contestant wasn’t even chosen through a pageant, but handpicked by a modeling agency.</p>
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<p>Miss World has produced few celebrities of any renown in the United States – compared with, say, Miss America, which brought us Gretchen Carlson and Vanessa Williams. True, Halle Berry and Lynda Carter passed through the Miss World system – but you didn’t know that, did you? The most recent American to win Miss World was Alexandria Mills in 2010. Name ring a bell? No?</p>
<p>But in parts of Europe and especially Asia, Miss World is everything.</p>
<p>“If you come from a pageant-crazy country like the Philippines, you’re a big deal. She’s set for life,” said Jeff Lee, a pageant coach who mostly works with Miss Universe contestants but coached Miss World Mexico this year. “The Chinese Miss World from 2007 did really well. You can see her as the face of Swarovski in every airport in China.” Miss World’s greatest success story is Aishwarya Rai, a Miss India who won the global pageant in 1992 and became a Bollywood superstar.</p>
<p>The competition is steeper for Miss World. Miss Universe only features about 80 women. But Miss World accepts contestants from 140 countries – Wales, for example, gets its own slot – and micro-states such as Guadeloupe and the Cook Islands.</p>
<p>“Miss World is a really unpredictable pageant,” said Lee. In 2009, it “had a winner from Gibraltar. Gibraltar!”</p>
<p>Julia Morley, the pageant’s chief executive and widow of founder Eric Morley, eliminated the swimsuit competition in 2014 and has tried to emphasize Miss World’s charitable mission. She said she is looking for contestants who are equally at ease doing a telethon in Iowa, charming donors at a cocktail party, and trekking to a mountaintop orphanage.</p>
<p>“We need girls who are going to be not too spoiled,” she said.</p>
<p>The winners “tend to be more demure, they tend to be more classically elegant,” said Lee. Where Miss Universe has “a lot of aggressive stage presence . . . a lot more slits, a lot more figure-hugging,” Miss World is more of a big ol’ ball gown type of pageant. “I send most of my girls [to Miss World] in bedazzled” dresses, he said.</p>
<p>Lee summed it up: “Universe is that modern sushi that you get at Nobu. Miss World is filet of sole.”</p>
<p>Miss World even eschews the stump-the-beauty-queen interview questions that generate so much buzz-worthy humiliation at other pageants. “They ask every year why you want to be Miss World,” Mendoza said. “That’s the million-dollar question.”</p>
<p>The contestants show the judges videos highlighting their charity work – beauty and misery to the tunes of melancholy piano concertos. Miss Côte d’Ivoire worked to prevent grim-looking skin rashes in rural villages. Miss Brazil helped lepers. Miss Indonesia helped a village of trash scavengers build a new school.</p>
<p>“This is quite a very tough one to take,” Morley said of Miss Kenya’s video about female genital mutilation, a topic championed by four contestants. “So if anyone can’t take it, I understand.”</p>
<p>But for a pageant that aims to be more compassionate, Miss World keeps getting tangled up in geopolitical strife.</p>
<p>In 2002, a Nigerian company offered to sponsor the pageant for $8 million, so Morley took the show to Abuja. The scantily-clad women arrived during Ramadan, enraging local Muslims and triggering a massive riot that killed 250.</p>
<p>This year’s controversy has centered around Miss Canada 2015, Anastasia Lin, who was denied a visa to the Sanya pageant because of her advocacy work for Chinese political prisoners. The pageant gave her a second chance this year, but she squabbled with organizers over whether they were trying to prevent her from attending a D.C. screening of a movie she stars in, which dramatizes Chinese human rights abuses.</p>
<p>Lin ultimately was allowed to attend the screening, and Morley chalked up the dispute to a misunderstanding – and not pressure from the Chinese sponsors of last year’s pageant. “She’s been treated kindly and well,” Morley said. “I don’t really want to whinge about her. It’s a shame that she feels some kind of anguish.”</p>
<p>This year, the pageant is “self-financed,” said Morley, who estimates it costs between $5 million and $6 million, largely funded by fees from license holders for the qualifying pageants. The new Miss World will win $100,000. Paperwork filed with the U.K.’s Charity Commission last year indicated that Miss World’s separate “Beauty With a Purpose” charity brought in roughly $250,000 and spent $86,000 on causes, but Morley said that doesn’t include the contestants’ individual fundraising and giving.</p>
<p>Morley decided to bring the pageant to Washington because, she said, the city exemplified “something more achievable for a woman to be able to realize more for herself.”</p>
<p>Getting more exposure for Miss World in the United States was a goal, too. But in an era when beauty pageants have lost their cultural relevance, that could be a challenge.</p>
<p>Jory Rivera, a pageant blogger from the Philippines, said he was “quite surprised” by how dead things seemed at the Gaylord Hotel, which is housing the contestants. A health convention down the hall seemed livelier than the pageant media day, which drew a handful of news outlets, mostly foreign.</p>
<p>Still, he had work to do. “The minute you publish a photo of Miss Philippines, you go viral,” he said. An instant later, Catriona Gray, Miss Philippines herself, appeared in the hallway wearing an Audrey Hepburn-esque pink cocktail dress.</p>
<p>“Cat!” he yelled.</p>
<p>“Hi, Jory. I’ll see you later,” said Gray.</p>
<p>“Oh my God, I have to take a photo of that dress,” he said as she vanished into a conference room.</p>
<p>Drawing somewhat less attention than Gray was Audra Mari – our very own Miss World America 2016. The North Dakota native admitted she knew little about Miss World before she entered. While her official platform is Habitat for Humanity, she’s now burning up with another cause: “I want, no matter what happens, for Miss World to have more of a name here,” she said.</p>
<p>If this were the interview competition, she would have nailed it.</p>
<p>“I don’t think that Miss World is a pageant,” she went on. “I feel like it really represents the modern woman.” A quick hug for the reporter, and then she dashed off. She had a relay race to run.</p>
<p>miss-world</p> | Miss World is the biggest beauty pageant you’ve never heard of. What’s it doing in Washington? | false | https://abqjournal.com/910701/miss-world-is-the-biggest-beauty-pageant-youve-never-heard-of-whats-it-doing-in-washington.html | 2016-12-16 | 2 |
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<p>Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday harshly criticized Israeli settlements in the West Bank, saying that their growth threatens to destroy the viability of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and that the United States was obliged to allow passage of a U.N. resolution condemning the activity in order to preserve the possibility of peace.</p>
<p>Kerry noted that the number of Israelis living in settlements has grown significantly and that their outposts are extending farther into the West Bank – “in the middle of what, by any reasonable definition, would be the future Palestinian state.”</p>
<p>“No one thinking seriously about peace can ignore the reality of what the settlements pose to that peace,” he said.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Kerry, in the hour-long speech delivered at the State Department, also condemned Palestinian incitement to violence as a barrier to direct negotiations. But his focus was on defending President Barack Obama’s administration’s policies and highlighting Israel’s actions at a moment of high tension between the two governments, following the passage of the U.N. resolution.</p>
<p>“Regrettably, some seem to believe that the U.S. friendship means the U.S. must accept any policy, regardless of our own interests, our own positions, our own words, our own principles – even after urging again and again that the policy must change,” he said. “Friends need to tell each other the hard truths, and friendships require mutual respect.”</p>
<p>He said the vote at the United Nations was about “Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state, living side by side in peace and security with its neighbors. That’s what we are trying to preserve, for our sake and for theirs.”</p>
<p>Saying the two-state solution was in “serious jeopardy,” Kerry said Israel would never improve its relations with Arab countries if it precludes the possibility of a separate state for Palestinians.</p>
<p>“If the choice is one state, Israel can either be Jewish or democratic,” he said. “It cannot be both.”</p>
<p>Some Israeli politicians applauded Kerry’s speech. Former prime minister Ehud Barak tweeted: “Powerful, lucid speech. World &amp; majority in Israel think the same.”</p>
<p>But most Israeli leaders and the political right immediately took umbrage, accusing Kerry of trying to dictate policy to an elected government. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the speech “a big disappointment.”</p>
<p>“He deals obsessively with the settlements; he fails to deal with the Palestinian failure to recognize a Jewish state,” Netanyahu said, adding, “If he put the same emphasis on Palestinian incitement and terror that he did on settlements, then maybe we will be on the way to peace.”</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Kerry acknowledged that his vision is not shared by President-elect Donald Trump.</p>
<p>“President Obama and I know that the incoming administration has signaled that they may take a different path, and even suggested breaking from the long-standing U.S. policies on settlements, Jerusalem – and possibly the two-state solution,” Kerry said. “That is for them to decide – that’s how we work. But we cannot, in good conscience, do nothing, and say nothing, when we see the hope of peace slipping away. This is a time to stand up for what is right.”</p>
<p>Trump has said that he will move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, a move freighted with political significance in advance of any peace agreement, and his nominee to be ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, has said Jewish settlements in the West Bank are legal.</p>
<p>About two hours before Kerry started speaking, Trump tweeted his criticism of the Obama administration: “We cannot continue to let Israel be treated with such total disdain and disrespect. They used to have a great friend in the U.S., but . . . not anymore. The beginning of the end was the horrible Iran deal, and now this (U.N.)! Stay strong Israel, January 20th is fast approaching!”</p>
<p>Later in the day, Trump told reporters: “When do you see the United Nations solving problems? They don’t. They cause problems, so if it lives up to its potential, it’s a great thing. If it doesn’t, it’s a waste of time.”</p>
<p>Netanyahu, in turn, promptly tweeted his gratitude: “President-elect Trump, thank you for your warm friendship and your clear-cut support for Israel!”</p>
<p>Although he did not mention Netanyahu by name, Kerry addressed head-on the Israeli leader’s assertions that the United States had “colluded” in and “orchestrated” last week’s U.N. resolution affirming that settlement activity in the West Bank and East Jerusalem has “no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-state solution.”</p>
<p>Kerry denied that the United States drafted or promoted the resolution. But he acknowledged that the United States took part in preliminary discussions, as is routine. Kerry said the diplomats told other Security Council members they would oppose a resolution that did not condemn Palestinian incitement to violence. They also said that if the text were more “balanced,” it was “possible” the United States would not block it.</p>
<p>Kerry called the current Israeli governing coalition the most right-wing in country’s history and said it is driven by an extremist settler agenda inimical to a two-state agreement.</p>
<p>“The result is that policies of this government, which the prime minister himself just described as ‘more committed to settlements than any in Israel’s history,’ are leading in the opposite direction,” Kerry said. “They’re leading towards one state.”</p>
<p>“The vote in the United Nations was about preserving the two-state solution,” he added. “That’s what we were standing up for.”</p>
<p>Kerry offered six principles that he said would satisfy Israeli security needs and Palestinian aspirations for a homeland. Most have been proven sticking points in previous negotiations – among them, Jerusalem as a mutual capital for two states; normalized relations with Arab states in the region; and financial compensation for Palestinian refugees, along with acknowledgment of their suffering.</p>
<p>Kerry returned from vacation to give his speech, which was being worked on until a few minutes before he walked on stage in the Dean Acheson Auditorium. It was a sign that the administration was still struggling to deal with the political firestorm ignited by the resolution vote. The outrage in the Israeli government has been matched among some members of Congress.</p>
<p>Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called Kerry’s speech “at best a pointless tirade in the waning days of an outgoing administration.”</p>
<p>The U.S. abstention has been condemned by several Democrats as well, including Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), who is the party’s incoming leader.</p>
<p>But for Kerry it was a speech that captured the pent-up frustration that has grown in the two years since his nine-month effort to broker a peace agreement collapsed, and his attempts to tamp down Palestinian violence came to nothing.</p>
<p>And Kerry, famous for always sounding a hopeful note, was clearly pessimistic about whether his words would make any difference.</p>
<p>“We can only encourage them to take this path,” he said. “We cannot walk down it for them.”</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>Eglash reported from Jerusalem. Anne Gearan in Washington contributed to this report.</p>
<p>israel-2ndld-writethru</p> | Kerry condemns growth of Israeli settlements | false | https://abqjournal.com/916715/israel-postpones-approval-of-new-settlement-construction-amid-spat-with-u-s.html | 2016-12-28 | 2 |
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<p />
<p>There are plenty of questions surrounding the Albuquerque High School student who paid $200 to a charter school so he could retake senior English over a weekend and graduate on time.</p>
<p>How you can cram a semester’s worth of work into four days online and call it a state-approved public education is at the top of the list. So it is incumbent on the New Mexico Department of Education to find out:</p>
<p>♦ How the senior was allowed to enroll in, complete and get credit for a semester-long course through Southwest Secondary charter school in the last week of the school year.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>♦ Whether this insta-credit is an isolated error, as Southwest Secondary head administrator Scott Glasrud says, or a routine practice, say among high school jocks who need to regain academic eligibility, as Eldorado principal Martin Sandoval says.</p>
<p>Glasrud says he had a deal with APS not to accept kids after March 31 to avoid just what happened here.</p>
<p>It also is important that APS follow up on Superintendent Winston Brooks’ vow to find out whether the AHS counselor who told the student about the Southwest Secondary class knew how fast it could be done. “If the counselor said, ‘there is a quick and dirty way that you can do this over the weekend,’ then that’s wrong, and we will deal with it,” Brooks said.</p>
<p>This year, 289 APS students took 387 classes from Southwest Secondary, which is a state-chartered school. As such, APS must accept its credits.</p>
<p>New Mexico is in the middle of adopting serious reforms to improve the quality of the K-12 public education that taxpayers fund and students receive.</p>
<p>To honor the time students and teachers put into classroom instruction, to justify the testing students go through, to validate the measurements on proficiency as well as letter grades on schools, there can’t be escape routes where students can skirt the rigors demanded of them by their teachers.</p>
<p>For the system and the reforms to have any credibility, APS and PED must “deal with it” and answer these questions openly, and sooner rather than later.</p>
<p>One question not high on the list is Brooks’ concern over whether the arrangement is unfair to low-income students who can’t afford to shell out $200. That might sound politically correct, but it’s worrying about the wrong thing.</p>
<p>This editorial first appeared in the Albuquerque Journal. It was written by members of the editorial board and is unsigned as it represents the opinion of the newspaper rather than the writers.</p> | Editorial: $200 Insta-Credit Case Hurts School Reforms | false | https://abqjournal.com/107886/200-instacredit-case-hurts-school-reforms.html | 2012-05-21 | 2 |
<p><a href="" type="internal" />June 15, 2012</p>
<p>By Joseph Perkins</p>
<p>After repeatedly failing over the years to get a law passed by the California Legislature requiring the labeling of genetically modified foods, the state’s food Luddites succeeded this week in qualifying a <a href="http://ag.ca.gov/cms_attachments/initiatives/pdfs/i1044_11-0099_(genetically_engineered_food_v2).pdf?" type="external">food labeling initiative</a> for the November ballot.</p>
<p>The measure, fronted by a group calling itself <a href="http://carighttoknow.org/" type="external">California Right to Know</a>, proposes that all GM foods be labeled either “Partially Produced with Genetic Engineering” or “May Be Partially Produced with Genetic Engineering.”</p>
<p>It would apply to roughly 70 percent of food currently found on supermarket shelves — processed foods, mainly, which contain harmless ingredients derived from genetically engineered corn and soybeans.</p>
<p>“People have the right to know what’s in the food we eat and feed to our children,” said Stacy Malkan, spokeswoman for California Right to Know.</p>
<p>Many, if not most, Californian consumers probably consider that a reasonable proposition. &#160;After all, food labeling already is commonplace.</p>
<p>But the labeling California Right to Know proposes is far from benign. It is not meant simply to inform consumers, as Malkin deceptively suggested, but to scare them away from GM foods.</p>
<p>That’s why much of the financial backing and support for the GM labeling proposition has come from out-of-state interests which have declared war on biotechnology, which aim to rid not only the Golden State, but the entire United States, of any food other than “natural” or “organic.”</p>
<p>“If we pass this initiative,” Ronnie Cummins, director of the Minnesota-based&#160; <a href="http://www.organicconsumers.org/" type="external">Organic Consumers Association</a>, wrote in a fund-raising appeal for support of the California ballot measure, “we will be well on our way to getting GM-tainted foods out of our nation’s food supply for good.”</p>
<p>Indeed, he continued, while food activists have gotten no traction in their efforts to get a federal law mandating labels on GM foods, a win in California“will have the same impact as a national labeling law.”</p>
<p>The farming community, food producers and biotech industry agree. If California Right to Know’s ballot initiative is approved by the voters, and de facto warning labels are required on all GM foods, it will send a tacit message to the state’s consumers that such foods are unsafe.</p>
<p>But that myth, promulgated by California Right to Know, the Organic Consumers Association and other groups that seek to ban genetically improved foods, has been contradicted by the World Health Organization, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Medical Association.</p>
<p>Because the overwhelming body of scientific research has found foods containing genetically engineered ingredients perfectly safe and no different, materially, from putative “natural” foods, the federal Food and Drug Administration has not required GM foods to be labeled.</p>
<p>The agency is rightly concerned that warning labels proposed by California Right to Know, which would be the equivalent to placing a skull and crossbones on GM food products, would serve only to confuse and needlessly frighten the consuming public.</p>
<p>That’s precisely what the Luddites behind the so-called California Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act want. By fomenting public fear of “unnatural” or “non-organic” foods, they can accomplish their insidious goal of getting GM foods out of the food supply.</p> | Latest Salvo in War on GM Foods | false | https://calwatchdog.com/2012/06/15/latest-salvo-in-war-on-gm-foods/ | 2018-06-20 | 3 |
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<p />
<p>So maybe it’s no surprise that her vision for this year’s Circus Luminous by Wise Fool New Mexico addresses how a soul can survive and thrive in an increasingly technological world.</p>
<p>Large puppets are operated by humans on stilts in this year’s Circus Luminous. (Photo by Heather Sparrow)</p>
<p>“It’s definitely a big concept to jump into,” acknowledged the director of this year’s show, “Soul’s Wind,” which will be performed through the weekend at the Lensic.</p>
<p>A member and performer with Wise Fool for a dozen years, Breeze said she’s paving new ground with this presentation, which she co-wrote with her partner, poet and novelist Zhenzan Dao. One of the new aspects is that Dao wrote and published an epic poem based on the show, “The Cantos of Soul’s Wind,” which will be available for sale at the performances.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>But the overall approach also has been different, according to Breeze, who said performers in the past auditioned acts they already had created, with the successful ones woven together into a loose storyline.</p>
<p>Deirdre Morris, left, and Andrea Bear King rehearse a scene for this year’s Circus Luminous. Because of a family emergency, Morris will not be able to perform in the shows this weekend. (Photo by Heather Sparrow)</p>
<p>This time, she said, she came up with the concept and a script ahead of time, and auditioned performers to fill specific roles. That process of choosing the 20-member cast, which includes dancers, acrobats, aerialists and more, happened back in June, instead of the usual October time frame.</p>
<p>In submitting her proposal last year to direct the show – this is her first time taking on that job for Circus Luminous, an annual and popular post-Thanksgiving event in Santa Fe – Breeze said she tried to think of the most pressing issue that affects everyone, crossing gender, racial, ethnic and other lines. After all, she said, Wise Fool’s mission is to be a social circus, addressing issues of our time.</p>
<p>“Technology was the very first pick for me,” she said. Even though she is a digital media artist and teaches the subject at Taos Academy, Breeze said she has been observing how digital media is sucking up more and more of people’s – especially young people’s – time and attention.</p>
<p>“That caused me to stop and say, ‘What are we missing?’,” she said.</p>
<p>In surveying other people, she heard them say that we are missing silence and solitude. We are missing face-to-face human connection and time in natural settings. Our senses are so flooded with images that we are losing the ability to “create original ideas and have a wondrous imagination.” And we are losing oral history, the kind of storytelling when kids sit down with their grandparents and listen to their tales.</p>
<p>“These are the things that are going extinct in the human soul,” Breeze said.</p>
<p>But rather than shame the audience with a performance railing against the negative aspects of technology, she decided to show the value of those things that humans are missing.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>“I wanted to show connection, humans touching, wonder and magic,” she said.</p>
<p>So she developed the story of a young woman, played by 16-year-old Taos actress Kima Nelson, who journeys from the world of technology, symbolized by glowing white tubes, to discover the spiritual beings, “invisible forces who are working to patch up the holes we are making in the soul,” she said. “She is learning from them, even how to become one herself.”</p>
<p>From left, Gibraltar Farrell, Noquisi Christian-Smith and Oriana Farrell travel in a boat down a river of memory in “Soul’s Wind.” (Photo by Heather Sparrow)</p>
<p>The importance of storytelling will be expressed through people talking intently in a boat that periodically will travel down a river, representing “keepers of memory,” she said.</p>
<p>“I’m super-excited about it,” said Breeze, who also is the mother of an 11-year-old and a 14-year-old, teaches yoga and qi gong, and is studying at the University of New Mexico for a degree in psychology and integrative medicine.</p>
<p>“This is the first time ever the majority of cast members are people of color or transgender,” she added. “The company wants to represent the whole of the community.”</p>
<p>Original music was composed by Jeremy Bleich and will be performed by a live orchestra.</p>
<p />
<p>WHERE: Lensic Performing Arts Center, 211 W. San Francisco St.</p>
<p>HOW MUCH: $10-$45</p>
<p>FOR TICKETS: <a href="http://www.ticketssantafe.org" type="external">www.ticketssantafe.org</a>, 988-1234</p>
<p /> | Soul work | false | https://abqjournal.com/895646/soul-3.html | 2 |
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<p>The New York Daily News <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/gorka-holocaust-analogy-north-korea-nukes-trump-stalls-article-1.3400349" type="external">reports</a>:</p>
<p>Trump’s Deputy Assistant Sebastian Gorka continued the administration’s tradition of Holocaust talk Thursday while apparently pushing for Trump to take action against Kim Jong Un’s rogue nuclear state.</p>
<p>Gorka — who has family ties to a Nazi-affiliated Hungarian nationalist group — gave an interview to BBC’s Radio 4 in which he recalled a conversation he said he had with a Holocaust survivor who lost his entire family in concentration camps.</p>
<p>“What is your one take-home? What is your one lesson learned from the horrors of the millions killed?” Gorka said he asked the unnamed survivor. “And he said, ‘It’s very simple. When a group of people repeatedly says they want to kill you, sooner or later you should take them seriously.’”</p>
<p /> | Sebastian Gorka Invokes The Holocaust: When People Often Say They Want To Kill You, Take Them Seriously | true | http://joemygod.com/2017/08/10/sebastian-gorka-invokes-holocaust-people-often-say-want-kill-take-seriously/ | 2017-08-10 | 4 |
<p>Out of sight of the international press pack, a bid to resolve the Gaza crisis, involving a dialogue between a Jewish religious leader and Hamas representatives, is ongoing and well advanced.</p>
<p>“I’m talking to Hamas representatives every day,” a weary sounding Menachem Froman told me by telephone from the West Bank settlement of Tekoa, where he lives and works as a rabbi. “We have had a lot of meetings and I have just spoken to an aide of my prime minister about this.”</p>
<p>But Tel Aviv’s interest in a negotiated end to the standoff is far from assured.</p>
<p>The day before the tanks rolled into Gaza, Froman had been due to launch an extraordinary peace initiative at a news conference in Jerusalem with Muhamed Abu Tir, the Hamas MP, Khaled Abu Arafa, the Palestinian minister for Jerusalem, and three Israeli rabbis.</p>
<p>The panel was to have made a collective call for the release of Corporal Gilad Shalit, the beginning of a process to release all Palestinian prisoners and the immediate start of negotiations with Hamas on the framework for a peace deal based on 1967 borders.</p>
<p>They would also have announced that Jewish and Muslim religious leaders could achieve peace where Israel’s politicians had failed.</p>
<p>But the response from Israel’s security establishment was crushing.</p>
<p>Hours before the meeting was due to start, the Shin Bet detained Abu Tir and Abu Arafa and warned them not to attend the meeting. The news conference,s organisers were forced to contact the other rabbis – who were already on the road to Jerusalem – and tell them not to come.</p>
<p>Instead of a triumphant statement of mutual respect and dialogue, a subdued and gently defiant three-man panel fended off aggressive questioning from an unruly Israeli press pack.</p>
<p>As Yitzhak Frankenthal, whose son was killed by Hamas in 1994, said that the Palestinians had been pushed into the kidnapping by an inhuman occupation, one journalist jumped up and down shouting: “Should someone who murdered your son be freed?”</p>
<p>Frankenthal responded with dignity. “It would be the easiest thing in the world for me to say that they are terrorists and we must fight them.</p>
<p>“But in the eyes of the Palestinians, they are liberators. We need to understand that it is the obligation of the Palestinians, as it is the obligation of every other nation, to fight for their liberation. The time has come for reconciliation, and the only way to achieve that is to talk.”</p>
<p>Talking, however, requires a partner.</p>
<p>Two days after the news conference, Abu Tir and Abu Arafa were kidnapped by Israeli forces, along with a third of the Hamas cabinet. Four days later, Israel revoked both men’s citizenship and residency rights in Jerusalem. As the Jerusalem Post headline put it: ‘Shin Bet foils Hamas-Jewish meeting’.</p>
<p>An even more accurate headline might have been the one Israel National Radio’s Arutz Sheva website ran a few days later, pertaining to another story: ‘The peace process is a bigger danger than Hamas’.</p>
<p>In this opinion piece, Ted Belman argued that “the threat of rockets raining down on Israel from Gaza isn’t nearly the threat that the peace process was and is” because peace talks would require Israeli concessions.</p>
<p>“To avoid this fate, the violence in the territories would have to continue at tolerable levels, but that doesn’t solve the problem” Belman wrote. His conclusion was that the Palestinians needed to be provoked.</p>
<p>Some believe that Israel’s re-invasion of Gaza was a similar provocation aimed at bringing down the Hamas government and preventing a unified Palestinian negotiating stance based on the prisoners’ document.</p>
<p>Having ruled out the only possible solutions that could have bought a temporary peace, Olmert and Peretz are now the proud owners of a Sharonist policy which, almost by definition, strengthens Hamas in the occupied territories and far-right forces at home. American and British support for it traps them further within a dynamic that heats the pot of bloodshed, even as they dishonestly promise their people disengagement, convergence and peace.</p>
<p>The daring raid on Kerem Shalom by Palestinian guerillas has shone a spotlight on the Israeli government’s Scylla and Charybdis. But could Froman’s efforts offer them a way out?</p>
<p>Precedent suggests it would be foolish to hold out hopes. But try telling that to Froman. The rabbi is currently “neither eating nor sleeping” as he engages in round-the-clock talks with Hamas representatives, building on his meetings with Mahmoud al-Zahar earlier this year.</p>
<p>Froman may be an eccentric, but he has a formidable track record. A co-founder of the messianic Gush Khatif settlers movement, Froman split from the group after Baruch Goldstein’s Hebron massacre.</p>
<p>He became a religious adviser to the Knesset and brokered the release from prison of Hamas’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. He also brokered Yassin’s subsequent announcement of a ceasefire, which Israel refused to accept and Yassin subsequently withdrew.</p>
<p>Yasser Arafat considered him a brother. A peace plan the two men were working on was reaching a culmination point in Arafat’s final days. It involved Arafat signing off on an independent Palestinian state and permanent religious ceasefire, the latter with the support of key Israeli civic and religious leaders.</p>
<p>It was scuppered by an inconvenient phone call from the then-interior minister, Gideon Ezra, and a deterioration in Arafat’s health which, by the following day, had rendered him unable to take visitors.</p>
<p>Ironies abound in the history of Froman’s peace efforts. His uncle was killed in the 1930s by Ezzedine al-Qassam, the militant Palestinian cleric whose name was later adopted by Hamas’s armed wing. Yet Froman is on record as saying he has more in common with “my brothers and sisters in Hamas” than with secular Israelis.</p>
<p>His motivations stem from a deep commitment to the once-integral universal tradition in Jewish thought, best summarised by Rabbi Hillel’s “do unto others” maxim. He believes that while the land of Israel is holy, sovereignty over it is not and so aspires to live as a Palestinian Jew in a Palestinian state. For the past two years, however, he has been living under police protection because of death threats from other settlers.</p>
<p>Should his peace efforts bear fruit, perhaps his national-religious neighbours will be reminded that in the messianic age, according to Isaiah, the wolf is supposed to lie down with the lamb.</p>
<p>ARTHUR NESLEN is a journalist working in Tel Aviv. His first book, <a href="" type="internal">Occupied Minds: A journey through the Israeli psyche</a>, was recently published by Pluto Press.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | A Way Out of the Gaza Crisis? | true | https://counterpunch.org/2006/07/05/a-way-out-of-the-gaza-crisis/ | 2006-07-05 | 4 |
<p>(Screenshot via YouTube.)</p>
<p>Amy Poehler will executive produce “Family Style,” a gay romantic comedy sitcom, for ABC.</p>
<p>According to <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/gay-odd-couple-comedy-amy-poehler-claudia-lonow-set-at-abc-944247" type="external">The Hollywood Reporter</a>, “Family Style” will be a multi-generational comedy about two men from different cultures who fall for each other while working at a Miami restaurant.</p>
<p>The show is inspired by “Difficult People” showrunner Scott King’s real life experience. King will co-write the show along with Claudia Lonow, whose writing credits include “Crowded,” “How to Live With Your Parents” and “Friends with Benefits.”</p>
<p>King and Lonow&#160;will also executive produce along with Poehler.</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">ABC</a> <a href="" type="internal">Amy Poehler</a> <a href="" type="internal">Claudia Lonow</a> <a href="" type="internal">Family Style</a> <a href="" type="internal">Scott King</a> <a href="" type="internal">the Hollywood Reporter</a></p> | Amy Poehler to produce gay rom-com for ABC | false | http://washingtonblade.com/2016/11/07/amy-poehler-produce-gay-rom-com-sitcom-abc/ | 3 |
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<p><a href="" type="internal" />Rush Limbaugh recently said America is in the midst of a coup d’état by the Obama regime.</p>
<p>Indeed, every day brings more confirmation that we are no longer living in America, land of the free. Without a peep, our country has morphed into a dystopia like Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia.</p>
<p>President Lucifer’s Secret Service Gestapo paid a visit to an ordinary law-abiding American named&#160;Tom Francois&#160;who, the SS agents themselves admit, had never threatened to do harm to Obama.</p>
<p>The SS goons paid Francois a visit for this simple reason: Francois had tweeted criticisms of Obama and made cartoons making fun of The One, like the one below.</p>
<p>~Eowyn</p>
<p><a href="http://fellowshipofminds.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/tom-francois-obama-cartoon1.jpg" type="external" /></p>
<p><a href="http://www.examiner.com/article/secret-service-visits-outspoken-critic-of-obama-because-of-twitter" type="external">Harriet Baldwin reports for the Examiner</a>, June 11, 2013:</p>
<p>After you read this- you will wonder what country we are in.</p>
<p>Tom Francois is an outspoken critic of Barack Hussein Obama- and has a robust Twitter presence. He also likes to dabble with his “paint” program to create funny cartoons. He has never threatened the President in any way, manner or form.</p>
<p>On April 11, 2013, he heard relentless pounding on his door shouts of “Police!” The officers introduced themselves as members of The&#160; <a href="http://www.examiner.com/topic/secret-service" type="external">Secret Service</a>&#160;and asked if they could “take a look around.”</p>
<p>Since Tom had nothing to hide (and he didn’t want any return visits) – he complied fully with their request. He even signed a consent to search his premises AND an “Authorization To Review Medical and Mental Health Records!”</p>
<p>They asked Tom if he ever left his state or traveled to Washington, D.C.</p>
<p>One Agent asked Tom if he has any intentions of “whacking” the President.” To which Tom replied- “Of course not. I wish him no harm. I disagree with his policies and actions and I make no bones about it. It’s my First Amendment Right and I intend to exercise it.”</p>
<p>When I spoke to Tom he said, “Yes, I am EXTREMELY critical of Obama in my posts, but I never cross the line and threaten his being. EVER. It’s just the idea of Obama’s Secret Service intruding on my life when they knew I wasn’t really a threat.”</p>
<p>The Secret Service had a thick FBI file- filled with screenshots of hundreds of posts.&#160;Said Tom, “I flat out told them ‘I have NEVER threatened Obama’s life! Yes, I despise him as you can plainly see, but I have that right!’They actually ADMITTED and agreed with me that I hadn’t threatened Obama.”</p>
<p>They had run a background check and discovered that Tom legally owned two guns- and they asked to see them. Tom showed them his firearms. They asked, “Are they loaded?” Tom replied in the affirmative. “What good are guns if they aren’t loaded?”</p>
<p>So why harass Tom? “The Secret Service officers claimed that “they were concerned that since I have a large&#160; <a href="http://www.twitter.com/" type="external">Twitter</a>&#160;following, and the things I said could be acted upon by some nut case out there!&#160;What the hell? They turned my life upside down for THAT?”</p>
<p>Tom didn’t refuse the search because they just would have gone and gotten a warrant. “They would have proceeded to tear my house apart. No thanks. I have nothing to hide. They left empty-handed and my house is still intact.”</p>
<p>When they left Tom’s house,&#160;one Secret Service Agent ‘advised’-&#160;“Keep in mind, if you step over the line, we’ll come back for your guns.”</p>
<p>After the “visit” to Tom, the Secret Service also visited Tom’s 22 year old daughter- terrifying her&#160;and making her fear for her father’s safety. She asked them what they were going to do with the information about her Dad.&#160;They said they were going to “turn it over to Eric Holder- he has the last word on what to do, if anything.”</p>
<p>Should anyone have any doubt about the veracity of this report, Mr. Francois had the presence of mind to make copies of the Consent To Search (which expressly included computers, hardware, software, recording devices, cell phones, data storage, etc). It also states: “I understand that any contraband or evidence may be used against me in a court of law.”</p>
<p>The “Consent To Search” and the “Authorization To Review Medical and Mental Health Records” signed and dated by the special agents of the Secret Service- were furnished to this reporter.</p>
<p>Wake up, America.</p>
<p>This administration is spying on Americans, via the NSA and targeting Tea Party and religious groups for voter suppression via the IRS. Now- Obama’s Secret Service is paying personal “visits”- on law abiding citizens? This is TYRANNY!</p>
<p>Keep in mind, dear readers-&#160;this raid upon Tom Francois and his home – took place just 4 days before The Boston Bombing. Was this a good use of manpower?</p>
<p>Everyone should be outraged by this story. Republican, Democrat, Independent, Libertarian- EVERYONE!</p>
<p>This kind of intimidation and strong arm tactics CANNOT stand.</p>
<p>Just because a thin-skinned president doesn’t like what a private citizen posts (as his First Amendment Right) on the internet?</p>
<p>-Eowyn</p>
<p>Dr. Eowyn is the Editor of <a href="http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/" type="external">Fellowship of the Minds</a> and a regular contributor to The D.C. Clothesline.</p>
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<p /> | President Lucifer’s SS “visits” a no-name anti-Obama critic | true | http://dcclothesline.com/2013/06/13/president-lucifers-ss-visits-a-no-name-anti-obama-critic/?fb_source%3Dpubv1 | 2013-06-13 | 0 |
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<p>“Cruising San Mateo I” by artist Barbara Grygutis caused quite a stir when it was erected in 1991 as part of Albuquerque’s public art program. Locals called it “Chevy on a Stick.” (Greg Sorber/Albuquerque Journal)</p>
<p>ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A man walking his dog one morning noticed me gazing at the cantaloupe-like copper chunks of metal arching from the earth – public art on San Mateo near Hannett NE – and offered his thoughts.</p>
<p>“I didn’t like it, either,” he said, though I hadn’t realized my gaze suggested disdain. “But it grows on you.”</p>
<p>He told me the piece, “Dawn Light” by artist Ed Vega, had become an accepted, even appreciated, part of the neighborhood over the years.</p>
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<p>“Albuquerque has a lot of public art,” he noted. “Some good, some not. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I guess.”</p>
<p>Yup.</p>
<p>I was out perusing public art after hearing of Mayor Richard Berry’s plan to plunk down $300,000 for an “iconic” piece of art for Downtown, a landmark, indicative of the city’s unique personality, charm and culture, the kind of art that becomes as emblematic of our city as the statue of a giant golden peanut is to Dothan, Ala., or a row of half-buried Cadillacs are to Amarillo, Texas, but better.</p>
<p>Much, much better.</p>
<p>Or not. Albuquerque, as rich in artistry as it is, has a hit-or-miss record when it comes to pleasing the public with public art. When it works, we get the whimsical brilliance of mosaic tile work by Cassandra Reid and others along the exterior of the Convention Center; the gorgeous neon gateways by Terry Conrad over Nob Hill; the cute bronze bear and her cub by Reynaldo Rivera at Bear Canyon Arroyo.</p>
<p>When it doesn’t, we get “Suspense” by Michael Metcalf, a steel and stone sculpture resembling a skewered meatball in front of the Jeanne Bellamah Community Center; or “Almond Blossom/Astronomy” by David Anderson on Osuna at Interstate 25 that I affectionately call the “giant roll of toilet paper in a tree.”</p>
<p>Such is the nature of art, no? You either love it, or you love to argue over it.</p>
<p>We Albuquerqueans, it should be noted, apparently love our public art, which is a good thing, considering the city has more than 800 pieces in the collection. A survey conducted in 2012 by the city’s Public Art Program found that more than 90 percent of those who responded believe that public art is a good use of our public dollar. (Not asked was what else might be good use of our public dollar.)</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Berry spokeswoman Erin Kinnard Thompson said the mayor’s iconic Albuquerque art project, funded by the 1 percent for the arts ordinance, is in the early stages and input is being sought from the community – particularly, she added, the millennials.</p>
<p>“Crossroads” is the title of the aluminum sculpture by Jerry Peart at University and Coal SE. It’s one of more than 800 pieces of public art funded by the city’s 1 percent for the arts ordinance. (Greg Sorber/Albuquerque Journal)</p>
<p>Because, you know, millennials are more hip than we old folks to the arts and Downtown scenes, and they don’t use words like “hip.”</p>
<p>(Side note: In a survey of these youngsters by the Downtown ABQ Millennial Project on what they would most like to see in a revitalized Downtown, their top answer by far was “free parking on the weekends.” How hip.)</p>
<p>So let’s get cracking, kiddos. What should this art look like? Hot-air balloon? Roadrunner? Chile, red and green?</p>
<p>Too clichéd. Think cantaloupe slices rising from the earth. Shiny aluminum yucca leaves. Meatballs, even.</p>
<p>Perhaps something more recognizable. Minneapolis’ iconic artwork is a bronze likeness of Mary Tyler Moore tossing her beret into the air à la her 1970s TV sitcom. Salem, Mass., has its bronze rendition of “Bewitched” actress Elizabeth Montgomery on a broom.</p>
<p>So why not a “Breaking Bad” homage? A sculpture of Walter White, say. Neon-lighted blue crystals. It’s art, yo.</p>
<p>Perhaps something provocative. Something with guns. Or Tasers. An empty mayoral suit, perhaps. Maybe another “Chevy on a Stick.”</p>
<p>You remember that one, yes? For you millennials, that was the disparaging nickname for a piece of public art – a 1954 Chevrolet covered in blue and turquoise tiles and welded to a similarly tiled 22-foot concrete arch – erected in 1991 at San Mateo and Gibson SE.</p>
<p>The work, by Tucson artist Barbara Grygutis, was called “Cruising San Mateo I” and was supposed to symbolize the revitalization of the neighboring business community.</p>
<p>Instead, it was criticized as crazy, ugly, a waste of money and a waste of a classic car.</p>
<p />
<p>Memorial services for Wolff will be July 11 at Queen of Heaven Catholic Church, 5311 Phoenix NE. Rosary begins at 9:30 a.m. Mass follows.</p>
<p>Wolff’s story was featured in this column June 14.</p>
<p>Gradually, the furor died down. “Cruising” became a curious attraction. The owner of a Mexican restaurant behind the sculpture painted his building to match the tiles.</p>
<p>I stopped by the Chevy sculpture during my recent tour of public art. Other than half a tile broken off from the arch, the art had withstood the controversy and more than two decades of wind, rain and unforgiving sun.</p>
<p>The neighborhoods around the Chevy? Not so much. The Mexican restaurant is boarded up now and painted a garish orange. Many businesses along San Mateo and Gibson are gone. Buildings are peeling, rotted. Here, there seems little to celebrate.</p>
<p>It’s a reminder that while public art is pretty to look at – or at least pretty interesting – city officials mustn’t lose sight of the needs of the crumbling communities that surround it, the needs of community members dying to share their input with the mayor on issues less aesthetic.</p>
<p>UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Joline at 823-3603, <a href="" type="internal">[email protected]</a> or follow her on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/jolinegkg" type="external">@jolinegkg</a>. Go to <a href="" type="internal">ABQjournal.com/letters/new</a> to submit a letter to the editor.</p>
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<p /> | Albuquerque’s art and soul | false | https://abqjournal.com/422131/albuquerque-seeks-ideas-for-iconic-downtown-display.html | 2 |
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<p>The Syrian armed forces are close to capturing the remaining rebel-held districts in the enclave of east <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/aleppo" type="external">Aleppo</a>, bringing them their biggest victory in five years of war. The insurgent armed forces, that were originally estimated to number between 8,000 and 10,000 fighters, have been retreating or giving up more readily than had been expected. It is still possible that a hard core will hold out in the ruins, but President Bashar al-Assad will be eager to crush any remaining resistance so he can present the fall of east Aleppo as a decisive turning point in the conflict.</p>
<p>Will this be true? There are so many players with such diverse agendas in the Syrian civil war that past “turning points” have turned out to be no such thing. But what is truly important about what we have just seen in Aleppo is that the outside allies of the armed opposition to Assad – Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and, in a somewhat different category, the US – have not come to the rescue of the rebels whom they have previously supported.</p>
<p>Over the last five years it has been foreign powers and not domestic parties in Syria who have dictated who is winning or losing at any particular moment. When Assad was losing he went to the Russians, Iranians, Iraqis and Hezbollah and asked for more support. Likewise, the insurgents looked to their external allies when they were on the retreat. This time round this has not happened. The Russian military intervention in September 2015 finally and permanently tipped the balance of power Assad’s favour.</p>
<p>Turkey, unsupported by any foreign power and enmeshed in its struggle with the Kurds and Islamic State, has been largely mute about the fate of east Aleppo. Its main concern is the de facto Syrian Kurdish state that stretches across northern Syria just south of its frontier. The failed military coup of 15 July and the consequent purge makes it dubious how far President Recep Tayyip Erdogan can effectively intervene at this stage in the war.</p>
<p>Saudi Arabia took over in 2013 from Qatar as the biggest Arab ally of the insurgency. Until quite late in the day, the Saudis and the Arab Gulf states remained convinced that Assad would be defeated and overthrown like Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in 2011. They exaggerated the likelihood of US military intervention against Assad though President Obama had made clear his wish not to be sucked into another quagmire in the Middle East after the US experience in Iraq and Afghanistan.</p>
<p>In reality, Assad was always likely to stay in power because the upper ranks of his regime were united, he had a powerful army but, above all, because Russia and Iran were always more committed to his survival than Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the US were to regime change.</p>
<p>But there are limits to Assad’s military success. This has been underlined by the recapture of the ancient city of Palmyra by Isis fighters who are once again executing captured Syrian soldiers in the streets of the modern city. The Syrian army, like all other combatants in the Iraq-Syrian civil war, is short of troops to replace casualties. This is one reason why men of military age leaving east Aleppo are being conscripted straight into the army.</p>
<p>The conflict was and remains a civil war, primarily sectarian between Sunni and the rest but with ethnic and social aspects. The Syrian security forces may have taken the poorest and most religious part of Aleppo, but the countryside around Aleppo is largely Sunni. Better off urban areas tended to support the government, while the rural Sunni districts are the bed rock of the revolution.</p>
<p>These districts are likely to fight on, particularly when government forces move against Idlib province to the west of Aleppo city. These are heavily populated Sunni areas close to the Turkish border and will probably still be able to get supplies from Turkey. The more territory the Syrian army takes, the more it will have to hold and defend. Its enemies hope it will be vulnerable to guerrilla war and will never be able to reassert its hold over all of Syria. They may be right – much depends on the attitude of foreign powers – but many Syrians have always said that the struggle for Aleppo would decide the war. They may well be right.</p> | If Assad Takes Eastern Aleppo He Will Think He’s Won the War | true | https://counterpunch.org/2016/12/14/if-assad-takes-eastern-aleppo-he-will-think-hes-won-the-war/ | 2016-12-14 | 4 |
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<p>Before tax credits that work like an upfront discount for most consumers, sticker-price premiums for a mid-range benchmark plan will average $328 a month nationally for an individual, comparable to payments for a new car.</p>
<p>The overview of premiums and plan choices, released today by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, comes as the White House swings into full campaign mode to promote the benefits of the Affordable Care Act to a skeptical public. Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, refuse to abandon their quest to derail Obamacare and flirt with a government shutdown to force the issue.</p>
<p>Sebelius stressed the positive in a preview call with reporters. Consumers will be able to choose from an average of 53 plan options when the new markets open Oct. 1 for people who don’t have health care on the job.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>A report by her department estimated that about 95 percent of consumers will have two or more insurers to choose from. And the administration says premiums will generally be lower than what congressional budget experts estimated when the legislation was being debated. About one-fourth of the insurers participating are new to the individual coverage market, a sign that could be good for competition.</p>
<p>But averages can be misleading. When it comes to the new health care law, individuals can get dramatically different results based on their particular circumstances.</p>
<p>Where you live, the plan you pick, family size, age, tax credits based on your income, and even tobacco use will all impact the bottom line. All those variables could make the system hard to navigate.</p>
<p>For example, the average individual premium for a policy known as the “second-lowest cost silver plan” ranges from a low of $192 in Minnesota to a high of $516 in Wyoming. That’s the sticker price, before tax credits.</p>
<p>In the three states with the highest uninsured population, the benchmark plan will average $373 in California, $305 in Texas, and $328 in Florida. Differences between states can be due to the number of insurers competing and other factors.</p>
<p>The second-lowest-cost silver plan is important because tax credits are keyed to its cost in local areas.</p>
<p>But consumers don’t have to take silver. They can pick from four levels of coverage, from bronze to platinum. All the plans cover the same benefits and cap annual out-of-pocket expenses at $6,350 for an individual, $12,700 for families.</p>
<p>The administration report found that factoring in tax credits, a 27-year-old making $25,000 a year would see the premium for the benchmark silver plan drop to $145 in nearly every state. But if that hypothetical young adult used the tax credit to buy the cheapest bronze plan, he or she could cut the monthly premium to $74 in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, $102 in Orlando, and $119 in Pittsburgh.</p>
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<p /> | Health care law premiums unveiled | false | https://abqjournal.com/268620/health-care-law-premiums-unveiled.html | 2013-09-25 | 2 |
<p><a href="https://opportunityagenda.org/" type="external">The Opportunity Agenda</a> is a social justice communications lab working to promote greater opportunity in America. They've been around for ten years and have recently started a campaign to change the dialogue in mass media regarding race, immigration, gender, and the economy.</p>
<p>In comic book based videos the heroine "Helvetika Bold" battles "The Mindset," a locked blockhead who supresses the poor, women, and minorities in media and advertising.</p>
<p>"Reality Chex" cereal contains the decoder rings that help young people reframe images presented to them that oppress, changing them to messages that empower.</p>
<p>The campaign for "Helvetika Bold vs. The Mindset" debuts <a href="http://www.netrootsnation.org/nn_events/nn-16/wielding-your-racism-decoder-ring-discovering-the-power-of-values-based-messaging/" type="external">at Netroots Nation</a> this weekend:</p>
<p>Using the power of the Racism Decoder Ring to identify and decode racial stereotypes in the media, social justice superhero Helvetika Bold will demonstrate the transformative power of a values-based messaging strategy. This election cycle perfectly demonstrates what our research and experience have long taught us: that people’s underlying beliefs will trump facts every time. So how do we speak about racism across ideology? Join Helvetika Bold, that moxiest maven of media messaging, to learn how to build a messaging strategy that has the power to change hearts, minds and policy. Together, we can not only decode, but dismantle racist messages in the media and build a positive vision for racial justice that appeals to a broad audience. Although we use racial justice as a starting point, this workshop will develop core communications strategy principles that can be used for any issue.</p>
<p />
<p>So great to see a group using humor and lively, relate-able narratives to communicate an important message for kids and adults alike.</p>
<p>You can read more about <a href="http://toolkit.opportunityagenda.org/" type="external">Helvetika Bold and Opportunity Agenda here.</a></p> | Time To Put On Your Anti-Racism Decoder Ring! | true | http://crooksandliars.com/2016/07/time-put-your-anti-racism-decoder-ring | 2016-07-14 | 4 |
<p>LONDON, U.K. — Ever since the fraudulent election last summer that kept President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power, the Iranian regime has taken extraordinary measures to hide the real situation in the country from the outside world, and even from its own citizens.</p>
<p>Local journalists have been harassed and imprisoned. Foreign journalists have been expelled and banned from the country. Some of them now report on events in Iran from neighboring countries, working the telephones, tracking Iranian blogs and trying to read between the lines of the tightly controlled domestic Iranian media reports.</p>
<p>The picture the world gets these days is necessarily incomplete and even to a certain extent misleading.</p>
<p>Media reports give the impression that Ahmadinejad's government and the hard line conservatives who now control most of the levers of power in Iran have strengthened their hold on the country. The image the regime presents is rudely defiant. Iran sticks a finger in the eye of the world, declaring that it not only refuses to stop its unauthorized program of enriching uranium, but will also build 10 more enrichment plants. A fist is their response to President Obama's outstretched hand.</p>
<p>With the United States hard pressed on so many fronts — from the economic and financial crisis to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the challenges of a touchy Russia and a rising China — Iran seems to be in a position of strength.</p>
<p>But the real picture is quite different. How do I know?</p>
<p>Short of being there yourself, the best way to learn the real state of affairs in Iran is to talk with an Iranian who still lives there, is well connected, and knows the complicated Iranian political scene inside and out. I have just spent a day talking with such a person during his brief visit to another country. I will not identify him, but I trust his judgment and believe what he tells me. We have known each other for several decades. I will call him Mr. X.</p>
<p>This is what X says: The Iranian regime is weak. It has lost all credibility with the great majority of its citizens, and even with the higher clergy. All but one of the Ayatollahs in the holy city of Qom refuse to endorse the results of election. That's the reason the regime is over-reacting, talking tough, locking up citizens who dare to protest that it stole the election and defying the world. In reality, the regime has never been weaker.</p>
<p>X knows the scale of the fraud. He had access to exits polls on election day. There is no question that the leading challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, won by a landslide. In some cases, provincial mayors were told by the regime what results to report before the ballots were even counted.</p>
<p>Initially, the public was shocked by the scale of the fraud. There were massive demonstrations in the streets of Tehran and other Iranian cities. Now in the past few months, as the government cracks down on all forms of dissent, the shock has hardened into anger.</p>
<p>And here's the real news. A year ago, if you had asked Iranians (as I did) how they would react if the United States attacked their country, most would have said without reservation that they would come to the defense of the regime. Now Mr. X tells me most would welcome the Americans. That's an almost unbelievable change.</p>
<p>One of the reasons the Obama administration has been careful about publicly supporting Iran's protest movement — the new “green revolution” — is to avoid giving the regime an excuse to label them as traitors and puppets of the United States. But Mr. X says many Iranians complain that President Obama is siding with a government in power that is against the people. They cannot understand why he does not support their cause, since they are campaigning for democracy.</p>
<p>Mr. X was an activist and supporter of the Islamic Revolution from its very beginnings in 1979. Now he despises President Ahmadinejad, the all-powerful Revolutionary Guards who are the strong arm of the regime, and even the country's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. He says there are millions like him.</p>
<p>By the way, one of the slogans the anti-regime demonstrators now use is, “Obama, are you with them or us?” (The actual slogan in Persian involves a play on words. Ou ba ma means "He with us.")</p>
<p>If there were more reporting of the real situation inside Iran, perhaps the Obama administration would be less cautious.</p> | Opinion: Iran is all smoke and mirrors | false | https://pri.org/stories/2009-12-07/opinion-iran-all-smoke-and-mirrors | 2009-12-07 | 3 |
<p>Original Article By <a href="http://www.alternet.org/media/owner-washington-post-doing-business-cia-while-keeping-his-readers-dark#.WKXthOe4-4Q.facebook" type="external">Norman Solomon at AlterNet</a>Posted February 21, 2017</p>
<p>News media should illuminate conflicts of interest, not embody them. But the owner of the&#160;Washington Post&#160;is now doing big business with the Central Intelligence Agency, while readers of the newspaper’s CIA coverage are left in the dark.</p>
<p>The&#160;Post’s new owner, Jeff Bezos, is the founder and CEO of Amazon — which recently landed a&#160;$600 million contract with the CIA. But the&#160;Post’s articles about the CIA are not disclosing that the newspaper’s sole owner is the main owner of CIA business partner Amazon.</p>
<p>Even for a multi-billionaire like Bezos, a $600 million contract is a big deal. That’s more than twice as much as Bezos paid to buy the&#160;Post&#160;four months ago.</p>
<p>And there’s likely to be plenty more where that CIA largesse came from. Amazon’s offer wasn’t the low bid, but it won the CIA contract anyway by offering advanced high-tech “cloud” infrastructure.</p>
<p>Bezos personally and publicly touts Amazon Web Services, and it’s evident that Amazon will be seeking more CIA contracts. Last month, Amazon issued a statement saying, “We look forward to a successful relationship with the CIA.”</p>
<p>As Amazon’s majority owner and the&#160;Post’s only owner, Bezos stands to gain a lot more if his newspaper does less ruffling and more soothing of CIA feathers.</p>
<p>Amazon has a bad history of currying favor with the U.S. government’s “national security” establishment. The media watch group FAIR&#160; <a href="http://www.fair.org/blog/2013/08/06/amazon-wilkileaks-the-washington-post-and-the-cia/" type="external">pointed out</a>&#160;what happened after WikiLeaks published State Department cables: “WikiLeaks was booted from Amazon’s webhosting service AWS. So at the height of public interest in what WikiLeaks was publishing, readers were unable to access the WikiLeaks website.”</p>
<p>How’s that for a commitment to the public’s right to know?</p>
<p>Days ago, my colleagues at RootsAction.org launched a&#160; <a href="http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=8979" type="external">petition</a>&#160;that says: “The&#160;Washington Post’s coverage of the CIA should include full disclosure that the sole owner of the&#160;Post&#160;is also the main owner of Amazon — and Amazon is now gaining huge profits directly from the CIA.” More than 15,000 people have signed the petition so far this week, with many posting comments that underscore widespread belief in journalistic principles.</p>
<p>While the&#160;Post&#160;functions as a powerhouse media outlet in the Nation’s Capital, it’s also a national and global entity — read every day by millions of people who never hold its newsprint edition in their hands. Hundreds of daily papers reprint the&#160;Post’s news articles and opinion pieces, while online readership spans the world.</p>
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<p>Propaganda largely depends on patterns of omission and repetition. If, in its coverage of the CIA, the&#160;Washington Post&#160;were willing to fully disclose the financial ties that bind its owner to the CIA, such candor would shed some light on how top-down power actually works in our society.</p>
<p>“The&#160;Post&#160;is unquestionably the political paper of record in the United States, and how it covers governance sets the agenda for the balance of the news media,” journalism scholar Robert W. McChesney points out. “Citizens need to know about this conflict of interest in the columns of the&#160;Post&#160;itself.”</p>
<p>In a statement just released by the Institute for Public Accuracy, McChesney added: “If some official enemy of the United States had a comparable situation — say the owner of the dominant newspaper in Caracas was getting $600 million in secretive contracts from the Maduro government — the&#160;Post&#160;itself would lead the howling chorus impaling that newspaper and that government for making a mockery of a free press. It is time for the&#160;Post&#160;to take a dose of its own medicine.”</p>
<p>From&#160;the Institute, we also contacted other media and intelligence analysts to ask for assessments;&#160; <a href="http://www.accuracy.org/release/cia-cloud-over-jeff-bezoss-washington-post/" type="external">their comments</a>&#160;are unlikely to ever appear in the&#160;Washington Post.</p>
<p>“What emerges now is what, in intelligence parlance, is called an ‘agent of influence’ owning the&#160;Post&#160;— with a huge financial interest in playing nice with the CIA,” said former CIA official Ray McGovern. “In other words, two main players nourishing the national security state in undisguised collaboration.”</p>
<p>A former reporter for&#160;the&#160;Washington Post&#160;and many other news organizations, John Hanrahan, said: “It’s all so basic. Readers of the&#160;Washington Post, which reports frequently on the CIA, are entitled to know — and to be reminded on a regular basis in stories and editorials in the newspaper and online — that the&#160;Post‘s new owner Jeff Bezos stands to benefit substantially from Amazon’s $600 million contract with the CIA. Even with such disclosure, the public should not feel assured they are getting tough-minded reporting on the CIA. One thing is certain:&#160;Post&#160;reporters and editors are aware that Bezos, as majority owner of Amazon, has a financial stake in maintaining good relations with the CIA — and this sends a clear message to even the hardest-nosed journalist that making the CIA look bad might not be a good career move.”</p>
<p>The rich and powerful blow hard against the flame of truly independent journalism. If we want the lantern carried high, we’re going to have to do it ourselves.</p>
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<p>Original Article By <a href="http://www.alternet.org/media/owner-washington-post-doing-business-cia-while-keeping-his-readers-dark#.WKXthOe4-4Q.facebook" type="external">Norman Solomon at AlterNet</a>Posted February 21, 2017</p> | Why is The Washington Post Hushing Up Its CIA Ties? | true | https://americauncensored.com/washington-post-hushing-cia-ties/ | 0 |
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<p>Whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought to reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.</p>
<p>New Hampshire Constitution Bill of Rights, Article 10</p>
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<p>“The message to the community is we will not tolerate acts of violence to affect public debate.”</p>
<p>— Federal Judge Ann Aiken</p>
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<p>With the hectoring tone of a petty hall monitor, Clinton Judge Ann Aiken let out what the <a href="" type="internal">Operation Backfire/Green Scare</a> prosecutions are really about. In an era of state-sponsored terrorism as “liberation,” where the United States has over 700 military bases in over 140 countries, a US judge actually deems the minor league violence of a handful of young, misguided idealists “terrorism” and scolds the larger, non-indicted community those activists came from this truly belongs to Orwell, Kafka, Cheney or Gonzales.</p>
<p>Just what “Community” is the judge chastising/profiling? The Eugene, Oregon community of radical environmentalists in particular, eco-activists in general and/or anyone who ever justified destroying the property of those who they viewed as oppressors. We’re not even talking about those like Golda Meir or Osama bin Laden who justified not just property destruction, but attacks on the persons of their enemies. All that ever happened in the Operation Backfire cases is property damage. Not a single person was hurt in any of the arsons.</p>
<p>The SUV-driving, suburban soccer mom-with-six kids judge has made a number of strange comments from the bench. She’s gone so far as to tout Al Gore as an alternative model of activism! She told folks who burned a feral horse slaughtering plant that they “should have started a fund and bought and fed the horses.” She told defendants that once they serve their time, they cannot join animal protection or other activist groupsbut, the Sierra Club or Audubon Society would get an exception!</p>
<p>But, none is more telling than her pronouncement putting “the community” on trial. She’s even warned that “Civil Disobedience has no place in a Democracy.” Tell it to the Founders. Traitors or Freedom Fighters?</p>
<p>Speaking of the Founders, don’t we all come grade school get fed the righteous story of the 1773 Boston Tea Party, the most famous case of property damage in an attempt to “affect public debate?” (At least the Green Scare defendants didn’t disguise themselves as an oppressed/occupied minority like Sam Adams and gang.) Yet, a couple centuries later, we now have judges mirroring the Tea Party’s target, King George III, whose response presaged another mad leader named George, “I desire what is good. Therefore, everyone who does not agree with me is a traitor.”</p>
<p>But lecturing “the community” on just what the power structure will “tolerate” is but one, and not the most important one, of Judge Aiken’s prejudicial notions. The most important is her determination that ecosabotage constitutes “Terrorism.” The determination allows for “upward enhancement” sentences to be handed down. While a simple arson with no personal injuries usually merits a median sentence of 43 months in Federal cases, the “terrorism” determination allows for “enhancement” additions of up to 20+ years! It also means harsher prison conditions for those sentenced. Ex post facto and bad bargains</p>
<p>Another analogy to the US Revolution is that one of the reasons for the revolt was the use of ex post facto laws by the British. An ex post facto (“from something done afterward”) law is one that retroactively changes the legal consequences of acts committed before enactment of the law. Article 1, Sections 9 and 10 of the US Constitution bans retroactive consequences in criminal cases, as does the Fourteenth Amendment.</p>
<p>Yet, the upward enhancement penalties the defendants are sentenced with under the sentencing code found in U.S.S.G. 3A1.4 did not exist when the crimes were committed. Originally, only crimes related to “international terrorism” qualified for the enhancements under the Clinton-signed law. In 2001, the guidelines were adjusted to allow for enhancements if convicted of the “federal crime of terrorism.” None of the offenses the defendants have been found guilty of under 18 U.S.C.§§ 844(f)(1), 844(i), and 1366(a) are explicitly “federal crimes of terrorism,” nor did they occur after the 2001 amendments.</p>
<p>By the common standard dating back to the landmark case Calder v. Bull, Judge Aiken and the Federal Prosecutors have violated ex post facto as at the time of the arson, these penalties did not yet exist nor was property damage defined as a “federal crime of terrorism.” Thus, it qualifies with Justice Chase’s four points defining prohibited ex post facto:</p>
<p>“I will state what laws I consider ex post facto laws, within the words and the intent of the prohibition.</p>
<p>1st. Every law that makes an action , done before the passing of the law, and which was innocent when done, criminal; and punishes such action.</p>
<p>2nd. Every law that aggravates a crime, or makes it greater than it was, when committed.</p>
<p>3rd. Every law that changes the punishment, and inflicts a greater punishment, than the law annexed to the crime, when committed.</p>
<p>4th. Every law that alters the legal rules of evidence, and receives less, or different, testimony, than the law required at the time of the commission of the offence, in order to convict the offender. All these, and similar laws, are manifestly unjust and oppressive.”</p>
<p>— Justice Samuel Chase, Calder v. Bull 1798</p>
<p>“The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power, and it issues the coins itself.”</p>
<p>— Ursula K. Le Guin “The Dispossessed”</p>
<p>The first two defendants to be sentenced by Aiken both got “terrorism enhancements” even though both had cooperated with authorities and named their comrades. Stan Meyerhoff, who participated in many of the arsons, including the burning of SUVs at a dealership, a minor fire at a police substation and a fire at a genetic-engineered tree farm was handed down a 13 year sentence — 30 months less than the “reward” the Feds offered for his snitching, but with the added “enhancement,” about 10 years more than the typical arson case.</p>
<p>As a defined “terrorist,” Meyerhoff will spend his time in a special high-security prison, where he is likely to face attacks as a first offender and “snitch,” — a prospect acknowledged, yet dismissed by the judge who told those in the courtroom to write their legislators and “we all have to become prison reform activists.” Some activists, on the other hand, angrily noted, “Stan deserves it,” referring to his cooperation.</p>
<p>The second to be sentenced, Kevin Tubbs, received 12 years and seven months — again reduced because he informed on others. Tubbs pleaded guilty to 53 counts of arson and two attempted arsons. Judge Aiken completely dismissed Tubbs’ claim that he acted in urgent desperation given the fate of animals and the environment.</p>
<p>In contrast, Michael Fortier, who participated in the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people, served ten years and is now in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Fortier was ironically released in January 2006 on the same day that many of the eco-sabotage defendants were indicted.</p>
<p>Sentencing will come one by one for the rest of the Eugene informant defendants and the non-cooperating four next week. Out of the 22 charged; one is dead, four on the run and one, top informant Jacob “Jake” Ferguson is free and without any charges, though he participated in more arsons than any of the others.</p>
<p>One major informant, Lacey Phillabaum has begun serving her sentence, the length of which has been left undetermined pending the outcome of her pro-prosecution testimony at the trial of Briana Waters, the sole defendant to fiercely claim innocence and demand a trial. Waters’ trial is the single remaining chance of exposing the government’s shady provocateuring in the case. One of the main reasons for the huge sentences faced is to prevent just such an exposure. Government Agents and Keystone Terrorists</p>
<p>As one who knows some of the defendants, including some of the informants, I cannot write about this case without expressing my personal feelings or speaking to my experience during those days. Though I find the arsons wrong-headed and extremely counter-productive, I truly believe that the fingerprints of government agents are all over this. I was there when one person who is not amongst the defendants and who has disappeared completely was agitating for ever more violent actions. He, a friend of Ferguson, even claimed many such actions himself–though, all such claims have failed to stand up to any scrutiny. I warned some of the very folks charged to “not get talked into anything stupid.” I obviously failed.</p>
<p>That the first ELF action in the US was the arson at the Detroit Ranger Station, in my backyard, where we had already won has always concerned me. At Detroit’s Opal Creek and Breitenbush, the decades-long sustained effort to protect the Ancient Forests there had paid off. Same with the 48-hour-later arson at the Oakridge Ranger Station where activists had just won the battle over logging at Warner Creek. My questions for Ferguson would be “Why were these targets chosen? And, who pointed you towards them?” (Sadly, I believe I already know the answers.)</p>
<p>The bottom line on all this is:</p>
<p>* the forest protection movement which suffered a previous deadly blow on April 2, 1993, has for all practical purposes been finished off;</p>
<p>* same with Earth First! (which is now more concerned with the issues of transsexuals than any eco-issue–I’m not kidding – check their website!);</p>
<p>* “terrorism” has been redefined so as to be meaningless other than as a hammer to smash dissent;</p>
<p>* and, all progressive movements have to now be even more cautious and suspicious within their own ranks–a mind-set that preordains failure.</p>
<p>The Feds say that all these folks are “terrorists,” yet can you imagine the Feds cutting the same deal with Muhammad Atta that they did with Jake Ferguson? No charges and an estimated $150,000 in payments to implicate his fellow jihadis? Can you imagine real terrorists (or even a Tony Soprano) allowing a paid informant to walk free in their hometown like Ferguson is in Eugene? Unlike Fortier, Ferguson doesn’t even have to hide out in a protection program. He’s calmly walking the streets. These facts alone should lay to rest the terrorist claims and the on-going insult to all who have suffered at the hands of real terrorists–state-sponsored or otherwise.</p>
<p>Some “terrorists!” Unlike, say the Weather Underground, who hid out (underground, of course) for decades and never snitched on their comrades or silently took their sentences; these folks come off looking, as one of Leonard Peltier’s former attorneys noted to me recently, like “a college club” with no internal discipline, much less incontrovertible basic values.</p>
<p>I understand the frustrations of these folks. I understand their fear for the planet we all love. I’m sure most everyone reading this can understand the underlying sense of desperation. Even so, their actions really made little sense to me–then or now in the case of the informants, given the enhanced sentencing even for those who snitch. But, I can certainly make sense of the Government’s heavy-handed response and their agent provocateuring in the first place.</p>
<p>MICHAEL DONNELLY has long been involved in Forest protection efforts. He has always opposed property damage or personal assaults as means to further the cause. He can be reached at <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
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<p>&#160;</p> | Green Sabotage as "Terrorism" | true | https://counterpunch.org/2007/05/26/green-sabotage-as-quot-terrorism-quot/ | 2007-05-26 | 4 |
<p>The Environmental Protection Agency has released a list of toxic chemicals that will be the first reviewed under a recently enacted law that gives regulators increased authority to ban substances shown to endanger human health.</p>
<p>The EPA on Tuesday named 10 chemicals that will be reviewed under an amendment to the Toxic Substances Control Act that passed Congress earlier this year with bipartisan support. The list includes such common chemicals as asbestos and trichloroethylene that have for decades been known to be hazardous, yet EPA lacked the legal authority necessary to ban their manufacture or use.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Over the next three years EPA will study whether the listed chemicals present an unreasonable risk to humans and the environment. EPA will have another two years to mitigate that risk through new regulations.</p> | EPA begins process to regulate toxic, widely used chemicals | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2016/11/29/epa-begins-process-to-regulate-toxic-widely-used-chemicals.html | 2016-11-29 | 0 |
<p>It’s tough being a killer whale, especially for the group known as J-pod, whales found in southern Canadian waters who became endangered in 2005. After a two-year lull with no new births, they welcomed a new member, known as J50, on or about December 20. After weeks of speculation as to the nature of the birth and whether or not the calf would survive, scientists at the Center for Whale Research in Washington state <a href="http://www.whaleresearch.com/#!j50/c1n41" type="external">have confirmed that J50 is a baby girl</a>.</p>
<p>“We are working in coordination with researchers from Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) to obtain facts and photographs that will help solve the matrilineal situation, but the sex of J50 is now confirmed to be female,” the Center said in a release.</p>
<p>The specifics surrounding her birth are a but mysterious. For starters, she may have been birthed by a 42 year old whale named J16 – an outlier in terms of age for producing offspring. J50 also appears to have some tooth-shaped markings on her dorsal fin, which indicate that the birth may have been difficult and another whale may have helped pull her out (who knew whales could do that?).</p>
<p>Despite the peculiarities, J50 appears to be healthy and energetic.</p>
<p>It’s also possible that J50 is the daughter of J36, herself the 16 year old daughter of J16. That would make a lot more sense in terms of breeding age, and scientists have hoped that she would produce a calf soon. Identifying exact parentage can be tricky with whales, they say.</p>
<p>“Sometimes it takes a few encounters and some time to sort these things out because these whales are very caring for one another, and baby-sitting is not unusual, especially with grandmothers,” the Center for Whale Research said in the release.</p>
<p>One concern is that calves typically spend their first two months without leaving their mothers’ side. And yet, J36 has not been seen since J50 was noticed in the pod. The worst-case scenario would be that J36 died giving birth, and J50 is being raised by her grandmother, who likely cannot produce milk.</p>
<p>Any growth for the endangered J-pod is a welcome sight. J50 brings their numbers up to 78, but that still represents a 30-year low. 2014 was a rocky year for J-pod, and the successful birth is something of a relief. They lost one male and two females, one of whom was carrying a near-full term calf.</p>
<p /> | It’s official: Killer whale calf J50 is a girl | false | http://natmonitor.com/2015/01/08/its-official-killer-whale-calf-j-50-is-a-girl/ | 2015-01-08 | 3 |
<p>Despite the fact that the gun store from which Stephen Paddock bought his firearms passed all background checks without any red flags, the store and its employees are now getting threats over the incident.</p>
<p>Over the course of several decades, Paddock reportedly purchased quite a few firearms in several different states. Each time, he passed the required background checks, and every firearm he purchased was completely legal.</p>
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<p>On the shop’s Facebook page, owner David M. Famiglietti posted a letter sending condolences to the victims and their families following the tragic attack.</p>
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<p>Breaking news updates and daily headlines from a news source you can trust.</p>
<p>He declined to speak to the media at this time, but stated that if anyone has questions regarding the story they can email him and he will try to respond in a timely fashion. He specifically requested that other employees not be bothered about the incident, and that people only deal directly with him.</p>
<p>Customers poured out support for the business below the posted letter.</p>
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<p>Joshua Briseno: Well said. Great business. Missing being a patron of NFA since I’ve moved away from Vegas. Its unfortunate when someone takes our hobby/sport and twist is into something evil AND then tries to find blame in anything and/or anyone else.</p>
<p>Matt Ostrin: As a current costumer, I have nothing but positive thing to say about your company. Very professional and friendly as well. You will continue to have my business. Thank you and God bless.</p>
<p>Neal Savage: This is a great company excellent product and customer service. Always doing things in a law-abiding way. Unfortunately there are bad people in this world Who buy guns cars anything they can get their hands on and will do harm with them. People that harass employees of this company are also very bad people.</p>
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<p>Behind the scenes, though, the business has received hate, vitriol, and threats from their haters, Guns.com is <a href="http://www.guns.com/2017/10/05/gun-shop-that-sold-guns-to-las-vegas-shooter-gets-hate-mail-and-threats/" type="external">reporting</a>:</p>
<p>He also stated the store had followed all regulations when selling firearms to Stephen Paddock, the man responsible for the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history, and that the necessary background checks were conducted.</p>
<p>“My entire staff takes their job very seriously and if there were any ‘red flags’ during this transaction, like any other, it would have been halted immediately,” Famiglietti said. “The firearms that he purchased did not leave our store capable of what we’ve seen and heard in the video without modification. They were not fully automatic firearms, nor were they modified in any way (legally or illegally) when they were purchased from us.”</p>
<p>Famiglietti went on to say that since it was made public New Frontier Armory was one of the stores that sold firearms to Paddock, he and his employees had been receiving threatening phone calls, hate mail, and other threats. People have also been leaving fake negative reviews on the company’s various online platforms.</p>
<p>“Even though to us this is not important at the moment, we ask that people funnel their anger where it belongs instead of threatening and hurting others,” Famiglietti stated.</p>
<p>“We obviously did not sell him these firearms with the intent that he would use them to hurt anyone in anyway if it does end up that he used these specific firearms in this horrific crime. It’s no different than blaming Mandalay Bay for booking his hotel room, The State of Nevada DPS or the FBI for giving us the authority to transfer the weapon–it obviously wasn’t done with malicious intent.”</p>
<p>Understandably, people are outraged and horrified by what happened, but that certainly doesn’t justify attacking people who were not the ones carrying out the attack.</p>
<p>What do you think? Scroll down to comment below.</p> | Las Vegas Gun Shop That Sold Shooter Weapons Gets Hate Mail and Threats | true | http://thefederalistpapers.org/second-amendment-2/las-vegas-gun-shop-sold-shooter-weapons-gets-hate-mail-threats | 0 |
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<p>Donald Trump recently paid a <a href="http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/donald-trump-congratulates-narendra-modi-for-up-elections-win/article17687291.ece" type="external">congratulations call</a> to his buddy Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and the reason is just as depressing as you might guess.Modi’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose pro-capitalist and anti-Muslim platform is just as charming as Trump’s own, recently <a href="http://indianexpress.com/elections/uttar-pradesh-assembly-elections-2017/" type="external">swept</a> midterm elections in key states, particularly the major state of Uttar Pradesh (UP).</p>
<p>The election results are predictably galling to opponents of the Modi government, and&#160;have brought with them several rapid <a href="http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/meat-sellers-in-up-to-go-on-strike-from-tomorrow-against-crackdown-1673705" type="external">changes</a>. In UP, this has included the implementation of “Anti-Romeo squads,” groups of police officers ostensibly dedicated to cracking down on male street harassers. While higher-level government officials <a href="https://www.thequint.com/politics/2017/03/27/yogi-adityananath-up-anti-romeo-squads-for-harassers-or-couples-meerut-ground-report" type="external">claim</a> that these squads exist only to protect women from harassment and not to morally police, lower-level police officials have been quoted as saying that the squads’ express purpose is to target and separate young couples. As Indian media sources have been reporting, “Anti-Romeo squads” have spent much of the past week harassing consensual couples in the name of public morality.</p>
<p>The squads have combed <a href="http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/up-s-anti-romeo-squads-strike-terror-a-quiet-gloomy-sunday-at-ghaziabad-s-biggest-park/story-s0oLyrFPCu5ua2bUkO0tFO.html" type="external">public parks</a> and waited outside of colleges, demanding that lone men justify their presence in public space and even demanding that young couples call their parents to inform them of their activities. While some women have said they appreciate the police targeting men who loiter to sexually harass women, others find the targeting of couples a <a href="https://www.thequint.com/politics/2017/03/27/yogi-adityananath-up-anti-romeo-squads-for-harassers-or-couples-meerut-ground-report" type="external">serious infringement</a> of their freedoms.&#160;</p>
<p>Anti-Romeo squads and feminist response to them shouldn’t be dismissed as an example of the “conservative” sexual morality of a country far away from the United Sates. Rather, they give us insight into the way in which ethnocentric governments — like the current American regime — fundamentally rely on the policing of women’s bodies, and use women’s issues as an excuse to impose repressive agendas.</p>
<p>Freedom Without Fear</p>
<p>On one hand, cutting down on street harassment is a worthy goal, and some women are happy that Anti-Romeo squads have taken up the task.</p>
<p>The Quint <a href="https://www.thequint.com/politics/2017/03/27/yogi-adityananath-up-anti-romeo-squads-for-harassers-or-couples-meerut-ground-report" type="external">quotes</a> one college student who says that the reduction in street harassment thanks to Anti-Romeo squads have enabled her to pursue her education:</p>
<p>There were lots of boys who stood outside our college gate at all times. The moment we left the campus, we would be subjected to harassment, jeering and lewd comments. It was so bad that I once had to reconsider whether I should even come to college anymore. Both parents and students are happy that this is being put to an end by the anti-Romeo squads.</p>
<p>This student also supports the squads’ policing of couples, since she believes that young women should not be in relationships and should rather focus on their studies.</p>
<p>On the other hand, several women students objected to the squads’ harassment&#160;of couples and felt it was an infringement on their rights.</p>
<p>This echoes a longstanding argument of Indian feminists, which we’ve particularly seen articulated since the December 16, 2012&#160; <a href="http://www.news18.com/news/india/delhi-gangrape-what-happened-on-december-16-2012-and-status-of-the-case-730141.html" type="external">rape</a> of Jyoti Singh. The resulting movement&#160;demanded that the government take concrete measures to keep women safe and to provide justice in cases of sexual violence. Yet the attack also led to a redoubling of the rhetoric of “women’s protection” — the idea that women, particularly young women, must be restricted for their own good. These restrictions range from familial diktats&#160;against going out of the house to university dormitory curfews for college students.</p>
<p>These restrictions have also&#160;been the target for Indian feminists demanding, not protection, but <a href="" type="internal">freedom without fear</a>— cultural and structural change of rape culture and misogyny, not regulation of women’s bodies, mobility, and choices.</p>
<p>As communist feminist activist Kavita Krishnan <a href="http://www.tehelka.com/2012/12/freedom-without-fear-is-what-we-need-to-protect-to-guard-and-respect/" type="external">demanded</a> during the 16th December movement, “We will be adventurous. We will be reckless. We will be rash. We will do nothing for our safety. Don’t you dare tell us how to dress, when to go out at night, in the day, or how to walk or how many escorts we need!”</p>
<p>This is the spirit against moral policing and for women’s autonomy which has animated campaigns like Pinjra Tod (“Break the cages”) a national feminist <a href="https://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2015/09/pinjra-tod-campaign/" type="external">movement</a> against accommodation curfews for women in universities. The campaign seeks to abolish curfews&#160;as part of a movement for comprehensive justice against a patriarchal system which oppresses women along the lines of class, caste, sexuality, and religion, and which restrains them rather than giving them justice.</p>
<p>For feminist critics, then, Anti-Romeo Squads are merely an old logic in a new package, policing and regulating women’s freedom and mobility under the guise of their protection.</p>
<p>“Love Jihad”</p>
<p>The new Chief Minister of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath, is an unsavory character, to say the least.&#160;</p>
<p>The founder of the ultra-right Hindu Yuva Vahini, a militant <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/05/economist-explains-8" type="external">Hindu nationalist</a> organization, he and his associates have a long <a href="https://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2017/03/yogi-adityanath-on-muslim-women-lgbtq/" type="external">record</a>&#160;of incendiary anti-Muslim, anti-woman, and anti-LGBT hate speech. His ascension to power in UP is like if Richard Spencer became governor of Texas.</p>
<p>Aditynanath himself has threatened to <a href="https://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2017/03/yogi-adityanath-on-muslim-women-lgbtq/" type="external">kill Muslims</a> (“If they kill one Hindu, we will kill 100 Muslims”) and to convert Muslim women (“If they convert one Hindu girl, we will convert 100 Muslim girls!”). In a profoundly sickening comment from several years ago, one of his associates <a href="https://www.scoopwhoop.com/news/hate-speech-once-more/#.0lm20goxm" type="external">threatened</a> to disinter and rape dead Muslim women.&#160;</p>
<p>So how do anti-Romeo squads play into this history of Islamophobia? According to some members of Adityanath’s organization, anti-Romeo squads don’t just exist to target sexual harassers, or even couples — they specifically exist to eliminate the fictitious problem of “love jihad.” <a href="https://www.thequint.com/politics/2017/03/27/yogi-adityananath-up-anti-romeo-squads-for-harassers-or-couples-meerut-ground-report" type="external">Says Sachin Mittal</a>, a member of Adityanath’s Hindu Yuva Vahini,</p>
<p>The Yogi Adityanath government has formed these anti-Romeo squads with the intention of fighting love jihad. It is a huge problem in these parts. Whenever the police spot a couple, they must call the parents of both the boy and the girl. What if the girl is being trapped by a deshdrohi [nation-hater], an anti-national, a terrorist? The girl’s life can then be saved. This moral policing is much needed.</p>
<p>“Love jihad” is a paranoid figment of the Indian right-wing’s imagination, an alleged attempt by Muslim boys to romance, seduce, and finally convert Hindu girls, in order to threaten the Hindu majority.</p>
<p>While there is no proof that “love jihad” exists, there is a lot of proof of gender being used as an excuse for anti-Muslim and caste violence. Much of what we hear of as honor killings, for example, are instances of families murdering couples for forming relationships outside of their <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/ahmedabad/in-times-of-love-jihad-inter-faith-couple-found-dead-in-jungle/articleshow/57834262.cms" type="external">religion</a>&#160;or <a href="http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/Of-love-and-honour-killings/article14160134.ece" type="external">caste</a>. We can thus view the allegation of “love jihad” as an attempt by the right to spread anxiety about the possibility of love and marriage across religious boundaries.</p>
<p>In a country with a bloody history of religious nationalist violence, gender and the notion of women’s safety and honor has long been used as an excuse for horrific attacks—including violence against&#160;women. Adityanath’s hate speech against Muslims evokes the horror of the 2002 <a href="https://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/india/India0402-03.htm" type="external">Gujarat riots</a>, in which Muslim women were subjected to extreme sexual and physical violence.</p>
<p>While some might welcome Romeo Squads for reducing harassment of women, it’s also important to listen to the other, darker purpose intimated by people like Mittal, above. When “women’s safety” is used as an excuse for sexist and Islamophobic violence, what does safety actually mean?</p>
<p>What about the U.S.?</p>
<p>American feminists often hear about issues like anti-Romeo squads, moral policing, and honor killings, and dismiss them as uniquely Indian, South Asian, or Third World problems — problems endemic to “conservative” countries, in stark contrast to the United States.</p>
<p>While it’s doubtful that the Trump government is about to establish squads to morally police women in public places, the policing and coercion of women’s bodies has already proven a major plank of the Trump platform. It has also long been a major goal&#160;of the American right. Now, not only do we have a Commander in Chief who has been <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/election-trump-vote/507140/" type="external">accused of sexual assault</a> by at least a dozen women—we also find ourselves facing an active attempt to&#160;dismantle the legal protections&#160;sexual assault survivors currently <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/01/sexual-assault-time-trump-170124124914906.html" type="external">receive</a>.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Trump presides over a party hellbent on policing women’s bodies through the denial of basic reproductive healthcare and the imposition of <a href="https://www.guttmacher.org/state-policy/explore/overview-abortion-laws" type="external">invasive</a>, <a href="https://theintercept.com/2016/12/27/19-states-passed-60-new-abortion-restrictions-in-2016/" type="external">morally-policing</a>&#160;abortion <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/06/01/14-states-have-passed-laws-making-it-harder-to-get-an-abortion-already-this-year/?utm_term=.5f2b1d3761bb" type="external">restrictions</a>. These are all justified by a supposed concern for women. Yet aren’t medically unnecessary <a href="https://rewire.news/article/2013/03/01/challenges-in-the-trans-vaginal-ultrasound-debate/" type="external">vaginal probes</a>&#160;and <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/how-politicians-force-doctors-to-lie-to-women-w472618" type="external">permitting doctors to lie</a> to patients about their medical care all strategies to coerce&#160;women to bow to the morality of the state?</p>
<p>And like its Indian counterpart, the American right-wing’s rhetoric about women reveals a racist reality. While liberal feminists may discuss honor killings like a distant “third world” problem, the history of American racial violence tells us otherwise. Violence in the name of “women’s protection” was a fixture of the Jim Crow South and of the regime of racial apartheid across the United States, in which black men were often targeted, imprisoned and lynched for <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/122110/i-dont-want-be-excuse-racist-violence-charleston" type="external">perceived sleights</a> against white women. Black women, meanwhile, were and are often subjected to <a href="http://www.racismreview.com/blog/2009/10/11/the-rape-of-black-women-by-white-men-systemic-racism-again/" type="external">sexual violence</a> at the hands of white men. This legacy continues in the mass violence against and incarceration of black communities today.</p>
<p>With a rise in Islamophobic rhetoric and <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/20161129/ten-days-after-harassment-and-intimidation-aftermath-election" type="external">hate crimes</a>&#160;following Trump’s campaign (and indeed, since 9/11), American hatemongers often employ rhetoric involving the&#160;perceived threat Muslim men pose to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/22/this-isnt-feminism-its-islamophobia" type="external">white femininity</a>. We can see, then, that these histories are not things of the past —nor are they merely the current realities of far-off places.</p>
<p>Now more than ever, we must remain vigilant of the ways in which supposed concern for women is used to oppress us. And privileged women especially need to fight the way in which we are used to justify — and ourselves enable — violence against oppressed communities.</p>
<p>As feminists, it’s our responsibility to fight fascism by resisting violence committed in our names.</p>
<p>Image Credit: <a href="http://indianexpress.com/article/trending/trending-in-india/donald-trump-time-person-of-the-year-2016-narendra-modi-is-popular-choice-twitter-reactions-4415678/" type="external">Indian Express</a></p> | What India’s “Anti-Romeo” Squads Can Teach Us About Moral Policing Under Facism | true | http://feministing.com/2017/03/28/what-indias-anti-romeo-squads-can-teach-us-about-moral-policing-under-facism/ | 4 |
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<p>The New Mexico Lobos, out-blocked, outrun and out-tackled most of the evening, had just driven 75 yards for a touchdown behind redshirt freshman quarterback Lamar Jordan. Teriyon Gipson’s 1-yard scoring run had cut San Diego State’s lead to just three points with 4 minutes, 59 seconds left in the third quarter.</p>
<p>Better still, an illegal-block penalty on the ensuing kickoff had pinned the Aztecs on their own 7-yard line. A three-and-out and …</p>
<p>But, no.</p>
<p>Not at all.</p>
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<p>On San Diego State’s second play from scrimmage after Gipson’s touchdown, Aztecs running back Donnel Pumphrey got textbook blocks at the point of attack by left guard Niko Siragusa on Lobo inside linebacker Dakota Cox and by fullback Dakota Gordon on UNM outside linebacker Tevin Newman.</p>
<p>Pumphrey juked cornerback Cranston Jones – it appeared Jones, who had a clean shot, never touched him – and outran the rest of the New Mexico defense to the end zone for a 93-yard touchdown.</p>
<p>The Aztecs led 24-14, and the Lobos, though they might not have known it, were done.</p>
<p>“It takes the wind out of everybody’s sails,” UNM coach Bob Davie said after the game, referring to big plays by the other guys in general and to Pumphrey’s run specifically. “… It takes you to your knees, giving up big plays like that. It really does. It just takes all your energy out and all your confidence.”</p>
<p>The Lobos certainly didn’t play like a confident team, at least on offense, thereafter. Their final five possessions of the game produced a total of minus-4 yards on 16 plays.</p>
<p>The loss dropped New Mexico to 2-4 on the season, 0-2 in Mountain West play. Since Davie took over the program in 2012, the Lobos are 2-16 in conference games.</p>
<p>The offense and defense essentially were equal partners in Friday’s defeat. The Lobos allowed Pumphrey &amp; Co. 397 yards rushing. New Mexico, which ranked fourth nationally in rushing entering the game, managed just 152 yards rushing against the Aztecs.</p>
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<p>Davie, Pumphrey’s crushing 93-yarder notwithstanding, talked mostly about the UNM offense after the game. A yield of 24 points was the defense’s second-best yield of the season, after all. And throughout Davie’s tenure, it generally has been the offense’s job to outscore the other guy if the Lobos were to have a chance to win.</p>
<p>San Diego State, under former UNM head coach Rocky Long, crossed up the Lobos Friday by abandoning Long’s trademark, blitzing 3-3-5 defense and playing a conservative four-man front.</p>
<p>Conservative, but highly effective. The Lobos’ trademark triple option was rendered almost useless, with halting yardage gained on the dive and almost none on the keep or the pitch.</p>
<p>In the fourth quarter, the defense gave the ball back to the offense with turnovers – two interceptions, two fumble recoveries – on four consecutive SDSU possessions.</p>
<p>The UNM offense could do nothing with those gifts.</p>
<p>Davie said he was surprised by SDSU’s defensive look but disappointed that his offense couldn’t solve it, since it was similar to what they’ve seen most of the past season-and-a-half.</p>
<p>“They really lined up and played us almost exactly like most teams have played us,” he said. “That was the disappointing thing.</p>
<p>“You don’t come out of there feeling like there was anything that you hadn’t seen before, or there was anything where they just really forced the issue, as much as just making us execute. And we didn’t execute.”</p>
<p>Junior Cole Gautsche started at quarterback for UNM but was pulled in favor of Jordan in the second quarter with the Lobos down 10-0. Jordan produced immediate results, scrambling for 27 yards before hitting slot receiver Carlos Wiggins with a 45-yard touchdown pass. And, on the third-quarter touchdown drive, Jordan was 4-of-5 passing.</p>
<p>Thereafter, he was 1-of-7 for 5 yards with an interception – though he did have a 20-yard completion to Dameon Gamblin called back on a holding penalty.</p>
<p>“I kept expecting us to play better,” Davie said. “We just never did.”</p>
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<p /> | Pumphrey, Long, Aztecs extend Lobos’ MWC woes | false | https://abqjournal.com/478558/aztecs-4man-front-caught-unm-offense-off-guard.html | 2 |
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<p>The Senate voted after midnight, 64-35, to send the package to the White House. The House approved the measure two days earlier by a similarly comfortable 266-167 margin, and Obama plans to sign it Monday.</p>
<p>New Mexico Sens. Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich, both Democrats, voted for the measure.</p>
<p>The Republicans who run Congress opposed the legislation by a 2-1 edge in each chamber, telegraphing challenges ahead for Obama, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and their new governing partner, House Speaker Paul Ryan.</p>
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<p>There's an extra $50 billion this year and $30 billion next year for spending, split between defense and domestic programs. That's moderately more than the $1.1 trillion annually the government already planned to spend.</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal" />There will be no huge increase in Medicare premiums for doctor's care that would have hit 15 million people, or cuts in 11 million disabled workers? Social Security disability benefits.</p>
<p>Savings include trimming future Medicare reimbursements to some health care providers, selling oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and boosting some employers' costs for insuring workers' pensions.</p>
<p>Most importantly, the extra dollars make it likely Congress will fund the government after Dec. 11, when agencies otherwise would run out of money and would have to close. And the Treasury Department was given authority to borrow money until March 2017 - avoiding a first-ever federal default next week, which economists warn could badly wound the economy.</p>
<p>Yet the deal underscores the boundaries on how far the two parties can get these days.</p>
<p>Its major achievement was to avoid a shutdown or default, which most in Washington were desperate to avoid. Its contents are modest, falling shy of the bigger spending boosts Democrats would love to win and lacking far larger savings Republicans would love to wring from giant entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.</p>
<p>Lawmakers still must approve additional legislation by Dec. 11 detailing how much money each agency will get, and for which programs.</p>
<p>Initial versions of those bills contain GOP-written provisions that Obama and Democrats consider nonstarters. That includes language to block federal funds for Planned Parenthood, curb enforcement of clean air and water rules, hinder Obama's efforts to expand trade with Cuba, undo controls over financial institutions enacted after the Great Recession and undermine the president's health care overhaul.</p>
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<p>In a statement Friday praising the budget pact, Obama signaled confrontations ahead, warning Republicans against "getting sidetracked by ideological provisions."</p>
<p>This week's votes showed the juggling facing McConnell, R-Ky., and Ryan, R-Wis., when it comes to winning GOP votes for bills Obama would sign.</p>
<p>Not that getting his signature is always a priority. Approaching the 2016 election year, Republicans would be happy to push bills through Congress highlighting GOP priorities if they can, even though Obama wouldn't let them become law.</p>
<p>But when it comes to cutting deals with the president that GOP leaders think will benefit their party - like avoiding a shutdown or default - plenty of Republicans have little motivation to cooperate, especially when they know others will provide the votes to get the bills through.</p>
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<p /> | Budget deal passes Senate, goes to Obama | false | https://abqjournal.com/668482/budget-deal-passes-senate-goes-to-obama.html | 2 |
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<p>TAOS, N.M. (AP) — A fledgling Taos police officer four weeks away from completing the police academy has been fired because he was arrested for alleged drunken-driving following a high-speed chase at speeds in excess of 100 mph.</p>
<p>Officials say 26-year-old Steven Lucero was arrested Nov. 15 following the 27-mile chase that started in Rio Arriba County and that ended in Taos County.</p>
<p>Officers laid out spike strips but Lucero’s car didn’t stop until its tires were shredded and its wheels were digging into the asphalt.</p>
<p>Lucero was arrested on charges of fleeing an officer, aggravated DWI and reckless driving. It was not immediately known whether he has a lawyer.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> | Taos police officer fired after chase, DWI arrest | false | https://abqjournal.com/306583/taos-police-officer-fired-after-chase-dwi-arrest.html | 2 |
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<p>When it comes to Republican hypocrisies, I could write an entire book centered around how <a href="" type="internal">what they say and what they do</a> are often in complete contradiction of&#160;one another. After all, this is the party that claims it represents “fiscal responsibility” yet we haven’t seen&#160;a Republican president balance the budget since the 1950’s. It’s also the same party that claims to want a “small, Constitutional government,” while constantly trying to pass laws that force their religious views on millions of Americans.</p>
<p>Though I don’t even need to get that in-depth to expose the outrageous hypocrisy we’ve seen from the Republican Party since the rise of Donald Trump among their ranks.</p>
<p>The list of things Trump has said and done since launching his campaign over two years ago that Republicans would never <a href="" type="internal">let a Democrat get away with</a> is practically endless. From belittling POWs, to repeatedly undermining the credibility of U.S. intelligence officials, the party that once threw a fit because Barack Obama put his feet on the desk in the Oval Office would be coming unglued if any Democrat had even a fraction of the controversies swirling around them as Trump’s had both during his campaign and after being sworn into office.</p>
<p>It’s an absolute joke that many of the same people who spent years trying to play up Benghazi as the worst terrorist attack since 9/11, while also acting as if Hillary Clinton’s emails were&#160;the biggest scandal since Watergate, are now <a href="" type="internal">mostly tucking their tail</a> between their legs when it comes&#160;to standing up to Donald Trump.</p>
<p>If Hillary Clinton had fired the head of the FBI&#160;citing&#160;an on-going investigation into her campaign as the primary reason why she got rid of him — then that recently fired&#160;FBI director went on to testify, under oath, that she tried to obstruct justice weeks before he was let go.</p>
<p>All. Hell. Would. Be. Breaking. Loose.</p>
<p>Yet that’s only one of many things Trump’s done over the last few weeks that the majority of the Republican Party — as well as the conservative media — has done their best to downplay as nothing more than a “witch hunt by the fake news media out to get Trump.”</p>
<p>However, of everything else we’ve seen up until this point,&#160;nothing&#160;has been as damning <a href="" type="internal">as the recent revelation</a> that Trump’s oldest son, his son-in-law, and then-campaign manager all met with a Kremlin-backed lawyer on June 9th with the sole hope of obtaining “dirt” on Hillary Clinton that was clearly being offered to them by Russia’s government&#160;in an effort to help Donald Trump “win” the election.</p>
<p>Another way to put it is two very close members of Trump’s family, as well as his top campaign official, met with a foreign agent who had promised them information that could be damaging to an American presidential candidate, information they clearly said was from the Russian government hoping to help influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election in their favor — and they eagerly agreed to that meeting hoping to obtain that “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.</p>
<p>This from the people who, for a year now, have emphatically denied any allegations that Trump’s campaign colluded with the Russian government. Except, as this meeting proves, there was at least a&#160;willingness&#160;to collude. Whether or not they were ever personally given information to use against Clinton has yet to be determined, but it’s abundantly clear what their&#160;intentions&#160;going into this meeting were.</p>
<p>Yet most members of the Republican Party have been silent about all of this, with several publicly defending this meeting and Trump Jr. concealing the fact that it took place for over a year — a year where, on quite a few occasions, he mocked any report alleging that Russia was trying to help his father’s campaign.</p>
<p>The <a href="" type="internal">hypocrisy of today’s Republican Party</a>&#160;is astounding.</p>
<p>I still remember when they tried making a huge deal out of Obama wearing a tan suit. Literally, Rep. Peter King said there was “no excuse” for him to wear a light-colored suit.</p>
<p>As I’ve said countless times before, <a href="" type="internal">you can’t make this stuff up</a>.</p>
<p>But I’d like everyone reading to take a moment and think about&#160;this scenario and what Republicans might say if this is what we were dealing with instead of Trump’s scandals:</p>
<p>Imagine if Fox News broke a story linking Clinton’s daughter, son-in-law, and campaign manager to a meeting with a North Korean/Chinese-backed lawyer offering dirt on Donald Trump which was gained from a cyber attack — with an email confirming&#160;that this individual made it clear during their request for that meeting that North Korea/China was actively trying to help Hillary’s campaign.</p>
<p>Does anyone reading this think there would be a single Republican in Congress trying to downplay that story or pass it off as a “nothingburger” as so many on the right have done since Sunday?</p>
<p>Feel free to <a href="https://www.twitter.com/allen_clifton" type="external">follow me on Twitter</a> or <a href="https://www.facebook.com/allencliftonroc" type="external">Facebook</a> and let me know.</p>
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<p><a href="" type="internal">Here's How Donald Trump Has Proven That Real Republicans No Longer Exist</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Think Donald Trump is Unpopular with Women? A New Poll Might Surprise You</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Latest Move by Koch Brothers Proves What Spineless Cowards the Billionaires Really Are</a></p>
<p>21 Facebook comments</p> | I’ve Had Enough of the Outrageous Republican Hypocrisy Concerning Donald Trump | true | https://forwardprogressives.com/ive-enough-outrageous-republican-hypocrisy-concerning-donald-trump/ | 2017-07-12 | 4 |
<p>The titans of the Web–Facebook, Google, eBay and Amazon–have joined forces to make their voices heard in Washington, forming a powerful lobbying group called the Internet Association. The companies already collectively spend millions to lobby regulators and legislators on a variety of issues, but as a unified group they’re hoping to become major players in shaping legislation.</p>
<p>Hopefully, the members of the association will keep to Google’s unofficial slogan of “Don’t Be Evil,” and fight for user privacy and security against government intrusion. If these companies become entrenched parts of the political system, however, and yield to government demands for release of private data, Internet users around the world could be in for a lot of trouble.</p>
<p>–Posted by Christian Neumeister</p>
<p>Al-Jazeera:</p>
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<p>Web giants Google, Amazon, eBay and Facebook will form a lobbying organisation with other online companies to shape political and regulatory issues in Washington DC, according to the Reuters news agency.</p>
<p>The organisation, to be called the Internet Association, will open its doors in September and will act as a unified voice for major internet companies, Michael Beckerman, the association’s president, said on Wednesday.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2012/07/2012726151231720932.html" type="external">Read more</a></p> | Internet Heavyweights Band Together | true | https://truthdig.com/articles/internet-heavyweights-band-together/ | 2012-07-26 | 4 |
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<p>Every parent knows it’s important to save for college, but it’s hard to know where to start. But as the cost of a college education continues to rise with no end in sight, creating and sticking to a savings plan is crucial to avoid crippling student loan debt.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>According to Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FastWeb.com and FinAid.org, over a 17-year period, the cost of college increases by about a factor of three. That means children born today will pay three times the current cost for a degree when they are ready to go off to college.</p>
<p>“Every dollar saved is a dollar less you are going to have to borrow,” says Kantrowitz. “Every dollar you borrow will cost you $2 by the time you pay back the loan.”</p>
<p>According to Frank Fantozzi, CEO of Planned Financial Services, before parents decide what financial vehicle to house the savings in, they must calculate how much they can realistically set aside from the household budget without hurting their own retirement prospects.</p>
<p>“You have to determine what you have to save to retire at a decent age,” says Fantozzi. “If there’s not enough money to go around it puts parents in a difficult situation.” Financial experts say figuring out the cost of college and retirement simultaneously provides parents a savings goal as well as provides children with what they are expected to contribute.</p>
<p>“College costs are becoming so absorbent parents get pulled in to fund more money than they should,” says Fantozzi.</p>
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<p>Parents can get a sense of what kind of school their child might be interested in attending by evaluating their interests and activities. “What they are strong in [as teenagers] will give you a good sense of what industry they are going to be majoring in,” says Kantrowitz.</p>
<p>“You’re not really going to know until the kids get to junior high or high school what kind of student they are or what kind of career they will go after. Understand that the career dictates where they go to school.”</p>
<p>With that said, he suggests parents have children take a career aptitude and have their natural behaviors measured to identify any potential career paths. “Investing the money to profile children to see what kind of environment they would be good in is a worthwhile endeavor.”</p>
<p>In addition to putting money into financial vehicles like a 529 college savings plan, parents can also try to curb tuition costs through scholarships—and it’s never too early to start looking. According to Kantrowitz, there are a plethora of scholarships for children under the age of 13 and upwards.</p>
<p>“The sooner you start saving and searching for scholarships the better off you can be,” he says.</p> | Saving for College: Where to Start | true | http://foxbusiness.com/features/2013/05/02/saving-for-college-where-to-start.html | 2016-03-04 | 0 |
<p>The true reasons why the Saud regime has designated Hezbollah as a “terrorist organization”.</p>
<p>Condemned, ignored, ostracized and uninvited. These are the obvious desires behind the recent Saudi-dominated Gulf Corporation Council (GCC) and Arab League (AL) declarations that Lebanon’s pre-eminent politico-military force, Hezbollah, be classed as a ‘Terrorist Organization’.</p>
<p>The first of the declarations, made recently by ministers representing the six oil-rich Arab Kingdoms of the Persian Gulf, was made against a backdrop of worsening tensions between the Iran and Saudi Arabia’s House of Saud vis-à-vis the spiraling conflicts in Iraq, Syria and the Yemen.</p>
<p>According to a <a href="dohanews.co/gcc-designates-hezbollah-a-terrorist-organization" type="external">statement</a> issued by the GCC Secretary General, the decision to declare the popular Hezbollah movement as a terrorist entity was made specifically because of it “recruiting youths of the GCC countries to carry out terrorist acts, smuggling of arms and explosives, inciting sedition and provoking chaos.”</p>
<p>In plain English, it was to say the Lebanese movement had instrumentally placed its fingers in too many regional pies—particularly those that involved coming to the aid of people under the threat of Daesh (a.k.a. the Islamic State or ISIS) and Saudi-sponsored armed campaigns in <a href="http://www.bbcnews.com/news/world-middle-east-19874256" type="external">Syria</a> and the <a href="http://www.arabnews.com/decisivestorm" type="external">Yemen</a>.</p>
<p>As a result, the <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/articles/2012/10/15-arab-monarchies-gause-yom/15-arab-monarchies-gause-yom.pdf" type="external">absolute-ruling monarchs of the GCC</a> decided to stave of what they perceive as long term threats to the perpetuity of their own rule by punishing Hezbollah in a half-baked attempt at taming its behavior to a point of benignity.</p>
<p>As interesting as it may have been in scripting, it still, for want of a better expression, came out wrong in the wash.</p>
<p>That’s because the GCC declaration and the lurking House of Saud hand behind it appeared, if anything, as a circuitous way of saying ‘we’re terrifyingly insecure.’</p>
<p>In only the last year, the self-appointed custodians of Islam’s two holiest mosques have had to agonizingly witness their plans for an Arab world where they would rule the roost and become the ultimate arbiters in all matters of importance, gradually turn into a state of disarray.</p>
<p>It began with a deathblow to its hopes for an internationally sponsored consensus to forcibly overthrow Bashar Al-Assad, a reality that would have allowed it to repulse what it sees as Iranian machinations in the Arab world.</p>
<p>Then there was the continually disastrous strategy pursued by its goons in Iraq and the Yemen, the frightful string of setbacks faced by its mercenaries in Syria following increased Hezbollah and Russian intervention and the resurgence of Islamic Iran as a sanction-free and regionally-influencing rival.</p>
<p>Initially, the sense of insecurity felt by the House of Saud was manifest by its ending of the ceasefire in Yemen, the execution of forty-seven people at home including a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/02/sheikh-nimr-al-nimr-shia-cleric-thorn-saudi-regime-side" type="external">revered Shiite cleric</a>, and the breaking of diplomatic ties with Iran.</p>
<p>The insecurity itself derives from a perturbation that if Iran, mainly through its Hezbollah protégé, manages to create a model for assisting the politically and religiously oppressed of the region, it would ultimately serve as a model for revolt amongst its own disgruntled population and sway allied governments into making concessions that benefit its Iranian nemesis.</p>
<p>And so, in a desperate measure designed to convey ‘some’ semblance of their remaining influence, they decided that it was prudent to isolate the most indispensible conduit assisting those they vehemently oppose in the region: Lebanese Hezbollah.</p>
<p>It started with what can only be described as an attempt at undermining the heavily indebted and fragile economy, in addition to the consociation-based political climate, that volatilely prevails in today’s Lebanon.</p>
<p>They arbitrarily reneged on a much-hyped $3 billion ‘brotherly aid package’ to the Lebanese Army, advised their nationals to refrain from visiting the country and expelled Lebanese workers—many of them Shiite Muslims—from both the kingdom and GCC countries on the grounds of Hezbollah affiliation.</p>
<p>The idea would have been to play Lebanese institutions against Hezbollah so that it’s seen as being culpable for any economic uncertainty that could follow on from its activities in the region.</p>
<p>In Lebanon, this is a particularly sensitive issue considering gulf deposits to its central bank, expatriate remittances and inbound tourist receipts to the country were <a href="http://www.blog.euromonitor.com/2016/03/new-era-for-gulf-lebanese-relations.html" type="external">$860 million, $4.5 billion</a> and the bulk of an estimated <a href="http://www.themiddleeastmagazine.com/wp/mideastmag-live/2015/05/05/exclusive-to-the-middle-east-online-lebanon-banking-on-regional-demand-for-tourism-sector-revival/" type="external">$6.4 billion</a> alone in 2015.</p>
<p>Finally, it sent a vociferous message to the world that its new designation for Hezbollah had real political leverage because it was sanctioned with a ‘regional consensus’ in the form of its GCC brainchild and now Arab League rubber stamp of the world’s most democratically elected leaders!</p>
<p>But like most things auspicated by the House of Saud, the practical intent behind their latest endeavor is very unlikely to come to any fruition as maligning Hezbollah for the raw hand they’ve been dealt with in Syria will do little to deter it.</p>
<p>The regions most powerful non-state military force is at the forefront of an existential threat by a vicious and nihilistic cult.</p>
<p>Like it or loath it, are ‘terrorist’ labels really going to discourage it from confronting an evil ideology that buys and sells thousands of minority women for sex exchanges? Destroys mosques and seminaries and publically cuts out and eats organs of the dead before dropping to the ground and yelling ‘God is the Greatest’?</p>
<p>Considering the depth of blood, tears and material resources it has sacrificed in order to diminish the Daesh phenomenon, and not to forget the impact on its home front with being recipients of multiple suicide car bombings on its constituent areas, is it really going to flinch over mere adversarial designations?</p>
<p>If anything, the movement has long history of paying scant disregard to western ‘terrorist’ labels and has in fact flourished to its pinnacle whilst being painted under the banner of such.</p>
<p>As for its major involvement in Iraq and Syria, the world like Hezbollah is well aware that events in those countries have long surpassed the stage where they were witnessing battles for democracy.</p>
<p>They are witnessing armed conflicts between governments and foreign-backed mercenaries trying to murder their way into the centers of power.</p>
<p>They are countries where consortiums of killers were given safe passage to bomb, rape and threaten others whilst utilizing autonomous areas to spread their tentacles in almost every capital of the free world.</p>
<p>As long as there is a cry for help from persecuted Islamic minorities, from people banished and dispossessed of their lands and from benign governments under the threat of regional coercion and infiltration on the premise of sectarianism, Hezbollah is likely to continue obliging with fighters, arms and technical know-how indefinitely.</p>
<p>Perhaps with this in mind, the House of Saud could do with being reminded that in the end not even the language of blacklisting and force is likely to buy them and their GCC allies extra time for the inevitable and lingering threat to number one: the penchant for absolute-rule at home.</p> | On the Saudi “Terrorist” Designation for Hezbollah | false | http://foreignpolicyjournal.com/2016/03/22/on-the-saudi-terrorist-designation-for-hezbollah/ | 2016-03-22 | 1 |
<p><a href="http://wp.me/p3bwni-9rL" type="external">21st Century Wire</a>says…</p>
<p>In Washington, the&#160;propaganda is so bad, even the propagandists are getting sick of reading it.</p>
<p>The latest gaffe by President Obama’s ‘C Team’ in the flailing US State Department saw a rare moment of brevity by none other than Jen Psaki, who went into meltdown after having to read one of the worst pieces of propaganda generated yet by Psaki’s script writers…</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal" />CHEERLEADER: Psaki was picked to lead the White House cheerleading squad for regime change in Ukraine.</p>
<p>Psaki was told by her information ministers to read this meaningless platitude regarding the fate of ex-President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt:&#160;“Generally, we continue to believe that upholding impartial standards of accountability will advance the political consensus on which Egypt’s long-term stability and economic growth depends”.&#160;&#160;</p>
<p>As if to say, ‘Ahh, I can’t do this anymore!’, like an&#160;ingénue&#160;storming off stage after another actor stepped on her line – Paski can be heard&#160;at the very end of this video saying, “That Egypt line is ridiculous.”…&#160;</p>
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<p>Watch one of her many epic meltdowns here:</p>
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<p>Meanwhile, Washington propagandists continue to provide window dressing in&#160;an all-out push towards a newly polarized, world at war. This week’s US Congressional <a href="" type="internal">pre-declaration of war against Russia</a> only proves this thesis.</p>
<p>The sooner this ‘C Team’ exits from power, the better off we’ll be…</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal" /></p>
<p><a href="http://rt.com/usa/211871-psaki-hot-mic-egypt/" type="external">RT.com</a></p>
<p>US State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki has been caught on a hot mic calling one of her prepared statements about the acquittal of Egypt’s ex-leader Hosni Mubarak “ridiculous.”</p>
<p>During a press briefing on Monday, AP journalist Matt Lee asked Psaki to comment on an Egyptian court’s decision to acquit former President Hosni Mubarak of murder.</p>
<p><a href="http://rt.com/usa/162608-jen-psaki-fails-grilling/" type="external">READ MORE: State Dept Sideshow: Jen Psaki’s most entertaining grillings (VIDEO)</a></p>
<p>The State Department spokesperson attempted to dodge the question with a convoluted platitude.</p>
<p>“Generally, we continue to believe that upholding impartial standards of accountability will advance the political consensus on which Egypt’s long-term stability and economic growth depends,”&#160;she said on camera.</p>
<p>Reporters, including Lee, did not find that satisfying, but Psaki evaded their questions, saying she would not comment further.</p>
<p>“What does that mean?”&#160;a flummoxed voice can be heard asking.</p>
<p>“Wow. I don’t understand that at all,”&#160;the bemused Lee pushes.&#160;“What you said says nothing. It’s like saying ‘We support the right of people to breathe.’ That’s great, but if you can’t breathe.”</p>
<p>As the conference comes to an end and the lights dim, Psaki — seemingly unaware that her microphone is still on — suddenly goes off script…</p>
<p><a href="http://rt.com/usa/211871-psaki-hot-mic-egypt/" type="external">Continue this story at RT.com</a></p>
<p>READ MORE PROPAGANDA NEWS AT: <a href="" type="internal">21st Century Wire Propaganda Files</a></p>
<p>–</p> | Hot Mic: Jen Psaki loses it after her State Dept propaganda gaffe | true | http://21stcenturywire.com/2014/12/06/hot-mic-jen-psaki-loses-it-after-her-state-dept-propaganda-gaffe/ | 2014-12-06 | 4 |
<p>Only days after more than 1 million people demonstrated April 24 in support of Mexico City Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, President Vicente Fox pulled the plug on a politically motivated prosecution against López Obrador.</p>
<p>Hard-line Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha, a former general who had led the charge against López Obrador, resigned. And Fox pledged to find a way to end the prosecution.</p>
<p>For Fox and Mexico’s political establishment–which is dominated by Fox’s right-wing National Action Party (PAN), as well as the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that ruled Mexico for 70 years before Fox won the presidency in 2000–this was a major defeat.</p>
<p>For López Obrador, it is a triumph that will boost his chances to become Mexico’s president in next year’s elections. When he addressed the crowd on April 24, López Obrador sounded more like the president already, rather than a candidate for the office, according to news reports.</p>
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<p>FOX’S CLIMBDOWN brought to an end a political crisis that some observers had worried would lead to ungovernability in the heart of the country. Macedo de la Concha and government prosecutor Carlos Javier Vega Memije, both Fox loyalists, had been preparing to indict López Obrador on a trumped-up charge of ignoring a 2002 court order barring construction of a road to a hospital.</p>
<p>Although Fox tried to pass off responsibility on Macedo de la Concha, few Mexicans were fooled. Most knew that the April 7 vote in the Chamber of Deputies (Mexico’s Congress) to strip López Obrador of his immunity to being charged with a crime–known in Spanish as a “desafuero”–was arranged at the highest levels of the PAN and PRI.</p>
<p>Under Mexican law, a person charged with a crime loses his political rights. López Obrador stepped down temporarily as Mexico City mayor. If he had still been under threat of trial–or convicted–by January 2006, the deadline for presidential candidates to file their intention to run, he would have been disqualified from the presidential race.</p>
<p>The PAN and PRI knew exactly what they were doing–eliminating a rival who, according to current opinion polls, is leading any PRI or PAN candidate by 10 to 20 points.</p>
<p>After the PRI-PAN bloc in Congress approved the desafuero, Fox and his cronies like Interior Minister Santiago Creel and PRI leader Roberto Madrazo traveled around Mexico giving speeches about how prosecuting López Obrador would uphold the rule of law. But few believed them.</p>
<p>Opinion polls showed that López Obrador’s popularity actually increased–and Fox’s declined–after the desafuero. Whatever they thought of the charges against AMLO (as López Obrador is popularly known, by his initials), more than two-thirds of Mexicans believed they should still have a right to vote for him.</p>
<p>This could be seen in the crowd that attended the “March in Silence” on April 24. People of all ages–including thousands of the elderly who receive a pension that was one of AMLO’s reforms–marched.</p>
<p>While earlier crowds in López Obrador’s defense had been largely organized by and confined to members of the PRD, the March in Silence reached far more widely. The PAN and PRI had to notice that many of those rallying to AMLO’s defense were their own supporters. For weeks, leading PAN and PRI politicians, including Fox himself, had been dogged at public appearances by protesters accusing them of selling out democracy. * * *</p>
<p>THE OUTPOURING of outrage against the attacks on López Obrador captures the widespread disillusion in Fox’s rule.</p>
<p>After promising “change” from seven decades of authoritarian PRI rule, Fox has supported more of the same free-market policies that his PRI predecessors pushed. Last year, the PRI-PAN bloc in Congress approved drastic cuts in the country’s social security system for retirees.</p>
<p>Fox had pledged to find a solution–in “15 minutes”–to the oppression of indigenous people in Chiapas that led to the 1994 Zapatista uprising. But he stood by while the Congress voted down a Zapatista-supported plan for autonomy in Chiapas in 2001.</p>
<p>The targeting of López Obrador also exposed the hypocrisy of politicians whose parties were convicted of laundering millions from foreign capitalists and stealing from the state-run oil company PEMEX to their finance their presidential campaigns in 2000.</p>
<p>But support for AMLO goes beyond mere disappointment with Fox. It is another aspect of the revolt against free-market dogma that has spread across Latin America.</p>
<p>AMLO is popular because he has supported certain reforms, like universal pensions and jobs programs, in Mexico City. Although a long-time politician, he took part in protests against oil drilling in his home state of Tabasco. His personal style is modest–driving his own car and not hobnobbing with the rich.</p>
<p>He also calls for the prosecution of banks that swindled billions from the country during the 1995 peso collapse and a re-negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. And he opposes the privatization of Mexico’s oil industry. His main campaign slogan calls for “putting the poor first.”</p>
<p>These are the real crimes for which Mexico’s ruling parties want to keep López Obrador out of Los Pinos–Mexico’s White House. Romulo O’Farrell, the 88-year-old billionaire publisher with close ties to Washington, summoned leading Mexican capitalists to his mansion to tell them that AMLO must be prevented from becoming president at all costs, according to journalist John Ross.</p>
<p>The U.S. embassy, so ready to squawk about “democracy” in Lebanon or Ukraine, was silent about the PRI-PAN’s disregard for it in the case of the desafuero. But that’s because the extremists in Washington think López Obrador is a populist akin to Washington’s new bogeyman in Latin America, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.</p>
<p>This is nonsense. Even López Obrador rejects the comparison with Chávez. “On a sliding scale, [López Obrador’s] danger to U.S. hegemony in the Americas is probably at Lula-level, a notch below the return of Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega,” wrote Ross.</p>
<p>Ross is right. Despite his populist rhetoric and policies, López Obrador is no radical. Among his chief advisers is Manuel Camacho Solis, a former ally of right-wing President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. In 2000, he paid more than $4 million in city funds to the consulting firm of Republican Rudolph Giuliani to bring a U.S.-style “war on crime” to Mexico City.</p>
<p>His election manifesto is full of generalities, but it supports the idea of “taking advantage of globalization, and not just suffering from it.” As China has developed by exporting its labor power, he argues, Mexico can develop by exporting its energy resources. He promises more social reform and completion of the San Andrés Accords with the Zapatistas, but none of his proposals challenges private capitalism.</p>
<p>Left-wing commentator Alejandro Nadal, writing in La Jornada, worried that AMLO’s election manifesto–and the presence of advisers like Camacho Solis–signals that a number of “corrupt politicians, opportunists and architects of national pacts” are already lining up to jump on López Obrador’s bandwagon.</p>
<p>Zapatista leader Subcommander Marcos urged his supporters to oppose the desafuero, but withheld support from López Obrador and the PRD–which, after all, voted with the PRI and PAN to reject proposals for autonomy for indigenous people in Chiapas in 2001.</p>
<p>As Mexican socialist Adolfo Gilly wrote April 30: “Without opposing or remaining on the sidelines of the popular movement that is fighting for democracy, rights and national sovereignty–and without tailing or becoming its uncritical supporters–the autonomous left that is independent of the institutions, advisers and parties of this crisis-ridden regime needs today once again to put forth its own ideas, defending the present and planning for the future.”</p>
<p>LANCE SELFA writes for the <a href="http://www.socialistworker.org/" type="external">Socialist Worker</a>.</p>
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<p>&#160;</p> | Uprising in Mexico City | true | https://counterpunch.org/2005/05/07/uprising-in-mexico-city/ | 2005-05-07 | 4 |
<p>Eliot Engel, the ranking member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and the U.S. Representative for New York's 16th congressional district, decided to create some drama on Tuesday, announcing that for the first time in 29 years he would not take his customary seat on the aisle during the State of the Union address by so he could avoid shaking President Trump’s hand.</p>
<p>Engel <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/28/politics/eliot-engel-trump-address-congress/" type="external">stated</a>, "Unfortunately since January 20 the new administration has shown no interest in working with the Congress on both sides to tackle problems including Russian' unlawful interference in last year's presidential election.”</p>
<p>Engel also <a href="http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/house-democrat-says-he-will-refuse-to-shake-trumps-hand-at-joint-session/article/2615996" type="external">asserted</a>, "I have deep respect for the presidency and I will attend the joint session, but that respect between branches must be mutual. This goes beyond ideological and political differences."</p>
<p>Engel’s partisanship has not been in evidence in his dealings at the Foreign Affairs Committee with House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Ed Royce, who is a Republican; they have collaborated frequently. Engel said of Royce, "I could take his speech and read it he could take mine and read it and we'd all agree with it.”</p>
<p>New York Rep. Joe Crowley, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, told the Washington Examiner:</p>
<p>I don't anticipate organized protests, that I'm aware of. I think that each member needs to be mindful of their own actions, that they are representatives of the House of Representatives and representatives of their constituency. As much as we have nothing in common with the president, we do respect the office of the presidency. I respect the office of the presidency itself, and keeping that in mind we will be polite, but we'll show very little, if any enthusiasm at all for what I anticipate his speech will be about.</p>
<p>"This goes beyond ideological and political differences."</p>
<p>Eliot Engel</p>
<p>Engel may be joined by Texas Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, whose spokeswoman stated, "At this hour, the congresswoman is not sure if she'll reserve an aisle seat. Still playing things by ear." Rep. Maxine Waters has already said she won’t attend the speech.</p>
<p>Engel has <a href="http://time.com/4670677/democrats-demand-donald-trump-russia-investigation/" type="external">called for an investigation</a> into President Trump’s ties with Russia, saying there are "far too many questions unanswered about this administration's ties to Russia."</p> | Top Dem Will Not Shake Trump's Hand At SOTU | true | https://dailywire.com/news/13955/top-dem-will-not-shake-trumps-hand-sotu-hank-berrien | 2017-02-28 | 0 |
<p>Embattled German Chancellor Angela Merkel is calling for a ban on full Islamic face veils “wherever legally possible” in an attempt to consolidate disillusioned German voters before the 2017 federal election. As the leader of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Merkel has long staked out a position to the left of her own party.</p>
<p>No more. In a speech to CDU members, Merkel declared that she would support a nationwide ban on both the niqab and the burka.</p>
<p>"The full-face veil is not acceptable in our country," she <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/germany-burqa-burka-ban-veils-angela-merkel-cdu-muslims-speech-refugee-crisis-elections-term-vote-a7458536.html" type="external">told</a> a CDU audience in in Essen. "It should be banned, wherever it is legally possible.”</p>
<p>Merkel’s unexpected pronouncement was met with loud, unified applause.</p>
<p>“The German chancellor’s CDU party is expected this week to pass a motion proposing a ban on the full-face veil in some areas of public life such as courts, schools and universities, as well as in road traffic and during police checks,” <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/06/angela-merkel-cdu-partial-ban-burqa-niqab-german" type="external">reports</a> The Guardian. “A full ban, as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/mar/03/niqab-ban-france-muslim-veil" type="external">introduced in France in 2011</a>, is seen as incompatible with Germany’s basic laws.”</p>
<p>Explaining the basis of her policy prescription, the German chancellor continued:</p>
<p>Our law takes precedence over codes of honour, tribal or family rules, and over sharia law – that has to be spelled out clearly. This also means that it is important to show face when people communicate.</p>
<p>Labeled the last defender of multi-cultural liberal democracy by left-wing commentators, Merkel’s decision to back a prohibition on the full Islamic face veil is largely seen as a concession meant to hold off far-right populist parties from galvanizing refugee-wary Germans.</p>
<p>Already, Germany’s anti-immigrant, Islam-suspicious tough-talkers have begun taking voters away from the mainstream parties, including Merkel’s CDU.</p>
<p>Campaigning on a referendum against Merkel’s lax immigration policies, the far-right Alternative for Germany party pulled ahead of CDU for the first time in German history, placing Merkel’s party in third place in the September 4 regional elections that saw the underclass, poor working class Germans from the poverty-stricken northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern hold the country’s ruling elite accountable for its reckless open-borders cheerleading.</p>
<p>“The far-right Alternative for Germany party now has seats in nine of the country’s 16 state legislatures and seems likely to win more when the city-state of Berlin votes on Sunday,” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/12/world/europe/angela-merkel-germany-european-union-migrants.html?_r=0&amp;mtrref=undefined&amp;gwh=818C7C664DF8CA2D81E5690F138FE081&amp;gwt=pay" type="external">reports</a> The New York Times. “That the result came a year to the day after she threw open the country’s borders to admit migrants trapped in Hungary, and that it occurred in her political home state, which shelters very few refugees, accentuated the loss.”</p>
<p>The election was a deafening clarion call for change, forcing Merkel to head “toward national elections next year more politically vulnerable than at any time since her early days in office, with implications that extend far beyond Germany’s borders,” according to the Times. “Her continued defense of her decision to admit more than a million migrants to Germany last year has left her increasingly isolated from other leaders coping with anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim sentiment in their electorates, especially after terrorist attacks.”</p>
<p>Even members of Merkel’s own party are now turning on her, condemning the German Chancellor as weak and naive.</p>
<p>As the de facto leader of the European Union, Merkel’s immigration policy has been forced down the throats of other member states with surprising bureaucratic ease. Hungary, Poland and other states located in the eastern bloc of the EU have already fought back, pushing through strongman authoritarian politicians to challenge Brussels’ open-borders machinations.</p>
<p>But now voters are finally voicing their outrage at the ballot box in Merkel’s own backyard and demanding decisive change. Merkel’s immigration policy is collapsing quickly. If she loses next year’s national election, then expect the next German Chancellor to reverse course and tear her immigration policy to shreds.</p>
<p>As a result, Merkel’s burqa and niqab ban may be a last-ditch effort to convince Germans that she understands their fears and concerns. Will it work? We’ll have to wait for voters to cast their ballots in next year’s federal election to find out.</p> | Merkel Turns: We Need Burqa and Niqab Bans ‘Wherever Legally Possible’ | true | https://dailywire.com/news/11466/merkel-turns-we-need-burqa-and-niqab-bans-wherever-michael-qazvini | 2016-12-08 | 0 |
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<p>Losing a job is a frightening&#160;prospect, but staying decisive and proactive can prevent&#160;you from entering a financial tailspin. Here are important five steps to take if you lose your job:</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Know where you stand. Take a good, honest&#160;look at your finances, and identify your debts and assets. Try to price assets according to current market prices–not by&#160;how much you first paid. For example, gold jewelry may have gone up in value, while real estate might have depreciated due to a dip in the market.&#160;By subtracting your debts from your assets, you can calculate your net worth. Understanding your net worth helps you see your financial situation clearly. When you know where you currently stand financially, you can prioritize&#160;any debts and&#160;plan&#160;for your&#160;future.</p>
<p>Rethink your budget. Now that you understand the big picture, you need to sit down and figure out how to adjust&#160;your day-to-day spending. Lauren Foster, CPA and member of the AICPA’s National Financial Literacy Commission, says that reduced spending is one of the hardest adjustments after losing a job. &#160;Start by analyzing your current spending habits. With the help of your credit card bills and bank statements, record how much you have been spending every month, and assess exactly where your money goes. Decide where you may be able to cut the fat — then trim down your monthly spending as much as possible.</p>
<p>When figuring out&#160;your new&#160;monthly budget, keep in mind that your emergency funds should last for at least six months, while you look for another job. “This fund needs to contemplate bills that come due less frequently than monthly,” says Foster,&#160;”such as bi-annual insurance payments and life insurance premiums.” You should keep a financial&#160;cushion for&#160;all your future expenses, including health care and emergency car or maintenance costs.</p>
<p>Follow any legal recourse. Many employee rights are regulated by state law. For example, your state may or may not require employers to&#160;administer your final paycheck immediately. State laws determine who qualifies for unemployment benefits, so check with your state unemployment office.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>On a federal level, the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA) may help you obtain health insurance after job loss. If you think your employer has violated any anti-discrimination laws or failed to comply to&#160;a contractual agreement&#160;when firing you, you might be able to take legal action, according to the <a href="http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/termination/index.htm" type="external">Department of Labor Opens a New Window.</a>. Note that severance pay is not required under the Fair Labor Standards Act, but you are entitled to any severance benefits stipulated by company contract.</p>
<p>Apply for a new job. Remember that your current unemployment is only temporary so stay positive and proactive. Ask for personal references as&#160;early as possible, particularly while you still have&#160;close connections to your current job.</p>
<p>You may be eligible for your state government’s&#160;Dislocated Workers Program, which provides assistance for job transitions, including résumé preparation and interview skills.&#160;On the financial end, you might even be able to <a href="" type="internal">deduct your job hunt expenses</a> from your taxes.&#160;While looking for full time employment&#160;can feel like a full-time job all on its own, just stay out there and stay optimistic.</p> | Decision Points: Financial Steps to Take When Losing a Job | true | http://foxbusiness.com/features/2012/03/08/decision-points-financial-steps-to-take-when-losing-job.html | 2016-03-04 | 0 |
<p>TRIPOLI, Libya (AP) — The Libyan navy said on Wednesday that some 100 migrants are missing at sea and feared dead while the coast guard rescued at least 279 others off the coast of Libya.</p>
<p>The migrants, mostly Africans, had embarked on the perilous trip across the Mediterranean onboard several vessels and the survivors were found on Tuesday. Those missing were all from a single rubber boat that capsized while at sea. Its remnants were found off the western city of Khoms, the navy said.</p>
<p>The other migrants were found off the city of Zawiya, also in western Libya.</p>
<p>Rescue and search efforts went on for more than 12 hours despite the rough sea and limited resources, the navy said. All the survivors, including 19 women and 17 children, were taken to a naval base in the capital, Tripoli, and were later handed over to Libya’s anti-migration authority.</p>
<p>On Sunday, the Libyan navy said it rescued 272 migrants who were attempting to reach southern Europe.</p>
<p>The U.N. migration agency said that over 3,100 migrants died in the Mediterranean Sea in 2017.</p>
<p>Libya descended into chaos following the 2011 uprising that toppled and killed longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi. It has since become a frequently used route to Europe for those fleeing poverty and conflict.</p>
<p>The vast North African country is home to competing governments and parliaments, with real power held by an array of militias, many of which make money from trafficking and packing hundreds of desperate migrants in unseaworthy boats to make the dangerous voyage across the Mediterranean.</p>
<p>Libyan authorities, pressured by Italy, which gets the lion share of migrants, have recently stepped up efforts to stem their flow into Europe.</p>
<p>The massive flood of migrants across the Mediterranean over the past few years prompted the European Union to take measures, including training and equipping Libya’s coast guard to stop boats attempting the dangerous sea crossing. Such measures brought the numbers of migrants crossing to Europe down by more than half in 2017, compared to the year before.</p>
<p>But rights groups fear that the measures could also leave tens of thousands of migrants stranded in restive Libya. Survivors have recounted starving in Libyan detention centers and other abuses.</p>
<p>The high death rate among the migrants is often blamed on small dinghies and poor vessels used by the smugglers, who also appear still willing to brave the choppy winter sea.</p>
<p>The International Organization of Migration estimates that over 171,300 migrants entered Europe in 2017, compared to a little over 363,500 in 2016.</p>
<p>TRIPOLI, Libya (AP) — The Libyan navy said on Wednesday that some 100 migrants are missing at sea and feared dead while the coast guard rescued at least 279 others off the coast of Libya.</p>
<p>The migrants, mostly Africans, had embarked on the perilous trip across the Mediterranean onboard several vessels and the survivors were found on Tuesday. Those missing were all from a single rubber boat that capsized while at sea. Its remnants were found off the western city of Khoms, the navy said.</p>
<p>The other migrants were found off the city of Zawiya, also in western Libya.</p>
<p>Rescue and search efforts went on for more than 12 hours despite the rough sea and limited resources, the navy said. All the survivors, including 19 women and 17 children, were taken to a naval base in the capital, Tripoli, and were later handed over to Libya’s anti-migration authority.</p>
<p>On Sunday, the Libyan navy said it rescued 272 migrants who were attempting to reach southern Europe.</p>
<p>The U.N. migration agency said that over 3,100 migrants died in the Mediterranean Sea in 2017.</p>
<p>Libya descended into chaos following the 2011 uprising that toppled and killed longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi. It has since become a frequently used route to Europe for those fleeing poverty and conflict.</p>
<p>The vast North African country is home to competing governments and parliaments, with real power held by an array of militias, many of which make money from trafficking and packing hundreds of desperate migrants in unseaworthy boats to make the dangerous voyage across the Mediterranean.</p>
<p>Libyan authorities, pressured by Italy, which gets the lion share of migrants, have recently stepped up efforts to stem their flow into Europe.</p>
<p>The massive flood of migrants across the Mediterranean over the past few years prompted the European Union to take measures, including training and equipping Libya’s coast guard to stop boats attempting the dangerous sea crossing. Such measures brought the numbers of migrants crossing to Europe down by more than half in 2017, compared to the year before.</p>
<p>But rights groups fear that the measures could also leave tens of thousands of migrants stranded in restive Libya. Survivors have recounted starving in Libyan detention centers and other abuses.</p>
<p>The high death rate among the migrants is often blamed on small dinghies and poor vessels used by the smugglers, who also appear still willing to brave the choppy winter sea.</p>
<p>The International Organization of Migration estimates that over 171,300 migrants entered Europe in 2017, compared to a little over 363,500 in 2016.</p> | Libyan navy says some 100 migrants believed missing at sea | false | https://apnews.com/663136de255343818972e8d6ecf04517 | 2018-01-10 | 2 |
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<p>SANTA FE, N.M. — State District Judge Michael Vigil closed out a judicial career of 18 years and some 10,000 cases when he moved on to retirement after overseeing the end of his final trial on Friday.</p>
<p>He’ll be missed — as a workhorse in handling the manic pace of the First Judicial District’s criminal docket and as a temperate, humanitarian jurist. Vigil has said he still hopes to be active in public life, so his role as a community leader fortunately should continue.</p>
<p>“Judge Mike” closed out his tenure on the bench with something of a bang — a scathing decision against a payday loan company last week that, if it holds up on appeal, will require refunds of as much as $10 million to borrowers who paid ridiculous amounts for their loans.</p>
<p>He was judge for some of Santa Fe’s most high-profile criminal cases. Those included the vehicular homicide trials of lawyer/lobbyist Carlos Fierro, who was convicted, and Scott Owens, acquitted although he was drunk when his Jeep Cherokee struck a car in which four teens died.</p>
<p>Vigil also has been a champion for his drug court program, an effort to steer addicts toward recovery and away from the road to self-destruction, more crime and the dark world of prison.</p>
<p>But he may be best known to courthouse regulars for his personal, human touch on more mundane, low-profile cases that brought a stream of people from every walk of life before him on a daily basis.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>He called repeat offenders by their first names, knew their backgrounds and often lectured them like a stern uncle who thought they’d turn out better. For many such defendants, it seemed like the words of chastisement and disappointment from this obviously decent judge stung worse than the prospect of more time behind bars.</p>
<p>Vigil could mete out punishment — a sex abuser of young boys recently got the maximum 15 years of prison time, even after a year of treatment.</p>
<p>Vigil also took criticism from law enforcement — and yes, on these pages, too — over the years for lenient sentencing in some burglary cases and other matters.</p>
<p>But anyone who ever heard Vigil trying to pull the best out of a convict, despite the fact he or she had hit bottom and possibly damaged others, knew that his judicial philosophy came straight from the heart.</p>
<p>A public reception to honor Vigil will be held from 5-8 p.m. Thursday at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center. There will likely be a huge crowd of VIPs and folks from the legal community. And let’s hope that some of those who got fair treatment from Vigil during their time as defendants in his courtroom will show up, too.</p> | ‘Judge Mike’ Will Be Missed | false | https://abqjournal.com/135187/judge-mike-will-be-missed.html | 2012-10-03 | 2 |
<p>&#160; &#160; Members of Fed Up demonstrate outside a Federal Reserve building. (Fed Up)</p>
<p>Black and Latino working-class activists attempted to hold leading U.S. economic policymakers accountable to communities of color by posing tough questions to 10 Federal Reserve presidents and governors at the institution’s annual Jackson Hole Policy Symposium on Thursday.</p>
<p>The nonprofit <a href="https://populardemocracy.org" type="external">Center for Popular Democracy</a>, home to the <a href="http://whatrecovery.org" type="external">Fed Up</a> campaign, explained the reason for the confrontation in advance of the meeting: “As the Fed weighs up whether to raise interest rates in September — a move that would make it harder for our communities to find jobs and win higher wages — over 100 low-wage workers from communities of color will be there to make sure the Fed hears from people who are still struggling in this economy.”</p>
<p>Huffington Post reporter Daniel Marans <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/federal-reserve-fed-up-jackson-hole_us_57bf7095e4b02673444f65b5" type="external">writes</a> that Fed Up has “met individually with the governors and regional bank presidents before; they spoke with some Fed officials less formally at the past two Jackson Hole gatherings.” This was the first year, however, that members of the group were granted a scheduled audience face to face.</p>
<p />
<p>The progressive campaign is calling for the central bank to wait for the economic recovery to reach more broadly across America before raising its benchmark interest rate again, a move that slows the pace of economic growth to head off price inflation.</p>
<p>It has also criticized the Fed for the lack of racial, gender and professional background diversity among its senior officials, arguing that only a central bank that looks like America can craft policy in the best interests of all citizens.</p>
<p>The Fed officials at the meeting were Esther George, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, which hosts the annual symposium; New York Fed president William Dudley; Dallas Fed president Robert Kaplan; Minneapolis Fed president Neel Kashkari; Cleveland Fed president Loretta Mester; Boston Fed president Eric Rosengren; San Francisco Fed president John Williams; Richmond Fed president Jeffrey Lacker, and Fed governors Stanley Fischer and Lael Brainard.</p>
<p>How did it go? Little in the way of a record of the exchanges appears to have made it out of the meeting. But Marans got reactions from Fed Up campaign manager Jordan Haedtler and a spokesman for the Kansas City Fed.</p>
<p>“They were really impressed with how well prepared we were,” said Haedtler after the meeting. “They were heartened by the discussion.”</p>
<p>“We’ll see how things go in September,” he added, referring to the next opportunity for an interest rate hike.</p>
<p>Bill Medley, a spokesman for the Kansas City Fed, also gave positive feedback about the meeting.</p>
<p>“It was a productive dialogue, as it always is, and we look forward to continuing the conversation,” Medley said.</p>
<p>The campaign has met with some success. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton indicated support for the basic premises of the campaign in May after weeks of private discussion with group representatives.</p>
<p>“Secretary Clinton believes that the Fed needs to be more representative of America as a whole as well as that commonsense reforms—like getting bankers off the boards of regional Federal Reserve banks—are long overdue,” said a Clinton spokesman at the time.</p>
<p>But Clinton stopped short of signing on to a bolder reform proposal&#160;that Fed Up rolled out in April, which would turn the central bank system into an entirely public institution. The Federal Reserve Board of Governors is already a federal agency, whose top officials are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. But the 12 regional banks it supervises are owned by the private financial institutions they serve. (Fed Up released a more detailed version of its idea on Monday.)</p>
<p>The private nature of these banks is a major reason why they are run overwhelmingly by white men with backgrounds in finance, Fed Up argues.&#160;There has never been a black or Latino president of one of the regional banks, the group notes in its reform proposal, and one-third of the current bank heads are alumni of Wall Street power player Goldman Sachs.</p>
<p>Earlier this month, whether Fed Up would have the opportunity to challenge the Fed was cast into doubt when the group was informed that a computer glitch, as they were told, canceled over a dozen of their room reservations at the Jackson Lake Lodge. After complaining to the U.S. Department of Justice that perhaps they were being targeted, members of Congress sympathetic to their cause sent Fed Chair Janet Yellen a letter asking for an explanation.</p>
<p>In an apparent gesture of detente, George, the Kansas City Fed president, offered Fed Up the big meeting, and the campaign withdrew its objections to the lodging snafu.</p>
<p>Fed Up agreed also to limit its presence in the lodge’s halls during a scheduled cocktail hour. In the past, activists have clustered inside the hotel to confront Fed officials in person. The group held a press conference-cum-rally outside the lodge before Thursday’s meeting. It also plans to run teach-in seminars and to canvass the city’s low-income neighborhoods to spread the word about Fed reform.</p>
<p>But Haedtler, Fed Up’s campaign manager, wanted to focus on Thursday’s meeting. It is evidence, he said, that his fledgling movement’s priorities have made it into the mainstream.</p>
<p>Truthdig intended to cover the confrontation Thursday night via an advertised live stream that never materialized.</p>
<p>—Posted by <a href="" type="internal">Alexander Reed Kelly</a>.</p> | Minority-Led 'Fed Up' Coalition Challenges Federal Reserve Officials | true | https://truthdig.com/articles/minority-led-fed-up-coalition-challenges-federal-reserve-officials/ | 2016-08-26 | 4 |
<p>ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) _ These New Mexico lotteries were drawn Thursday:</p>
<p>Mega Millions</p>
<p>Estimated jackpot: $55 million</p>
<p>Pick 3 Day</p>
<p>1-7-5</p>
<p>(one, seven, five)</p>
<p>Pick 3 Evening</p>
<p>4-0-8</p>
<p>(four, zero, eight)</p>
<p>Powerball</p>
<p>Estimated jackpot: $78 million</p>
<p>Roadrunner Cash</p>
<p>02-04-13-26-35</p>
<p>(two, four, thirteen, twenty-six, thirty-five)</p>
<p>Estimated jackpot: $37,000</p>
<p>ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) _ These New Mexico lotteries were drawn Thursday:</p>
<p>Mega Millions</p>
<p>Estimated jackpot: $55 million</p>
<p>Pick 3 Day</p>
<p>1-7-5</p>
<p>(one, seven, five)</p>
<p>Pick 3 Evening</p>
<p>4-0-8</p>
<p>(four, zero, eight)</p>
<p>Powerball</p>
<p>Estimated jackpot: $78 million</p>
<p>Roadrunner Cash</p>
<p>02-04-13-26-35</p>
<p>(two, four, thirteen, twenty-six, thirty-five)</p>
<p>Estimated jackpot: $37,000</p> | NM Lottery | false | https://apnews.com/amp/a0a119e979c849bdb5ce401f3c24d2ec | 2018-01-19 | 2 |
<p />
<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Historic_Everglades_Regions.jpg" type="external" /> The state of Florida has pledged to buy up sugarcane farms to help restore the flow of the Everglades. For a bargain $1.75 billion, US Sugar will relinquish 300 square miles of its holdings south of Lake Okeechobee over the next six years.</p>
<p>Great news for the people of Florida, as well as for birds, alligators, crocodiles, and manatees. The agreement comes between Republican Governor Charlie Crist and US Sugar, reports the <a href="http://www.miamiherald.com/457/story/580786.html" type="external">Miami Herald</a>. It’s at least partially the result of the South Florida Water Management District board voting seven months ago against the practice of <a href="http://www.earthjustice.org/library/factsheets/lake-okeechobee-backpumping-fact-sheet.pdf" type="external">backpumping (pdf)</a> dirty farm runoff into Lake Okeechobee, which then flows south into the Everglades.</p>
<p>That vote was the result of a 2007 <a href="http://www.earthjustice.org/news/press/007/pumping-polluted-water-into-lake-okeechobee-ruled-illegal.html" type="external">court victory</a> by Earthjustice, when a federal judge ruled that backpumping violated the Clean Water Act.</p>
<p>The buy-out of US Sugar will not end the Everglades’ troubles. Another 500 square miles of sugarcane farms owned by other companies remain in production. Yet the deal marks a revival of the <a href="http://www.evergladesplan.org/index.aspx" type="external">Everglades restoration effort</a>, the largest of its kind in the world, aimed at undoing flood-control projects that have been killing the Everglades for decades.</p>
<p />
<p>I spent a lot of years, years ago, in the Everglades making a documentary for Nature. Once this lush ecosystem flowed like a river, the aptly-named <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Everglades:_River_of_Grass" type="external">River of Grass</a>. If the Crist-US Sugar deal is actually signed in September, the clock will roll backwards 100 years, giving many <a href="http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fish/SouthFlorida/everglades/endangeredglades.html" type="external">endangered species</a> the first hope of survival in as many years. US Sugar’s 1,700 employees, meanwhile, have been <a href="http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hwwsvNZPeVERE_DtCJ5Y4x5xfiYQD91GN0N01" type="external">promised retraining</a> by the state of Florida.</p>
<p>It should be noted, however, that the <a href="http://www.reefrelief.org/scientificstudies/02242004article.html%0A" type="external">impact</a> of increased flows is less clear for ecosystems further downstream, in Florida Bay and the Florida Keys. The Everglades flow is being monitored mostly for phosphorus levels. The seawater end of the system needs equal monitoring for nitrogen levels. If not, expect a bigger <a href="/news/feature/2006/03/the_fate_of_the_ocean-9.html" type="external">dead zone</a> to develop. The lesson: we need to clean all waters of more crap.</p>
<p><a href="http://julia.whitty.googlepages.com/home" type="external">Julia Whitty</a> is Mother Jones’ environmental correspondent, <a href="http://julia.whitty.googlepages.com/juliawhittylectures" type="external">lecturer</a>, and 2008 winner of the <a href="http://www.kiriyamaprize.org/pressroom/2008/pr_040108.html" type="external">Kiriyama Prize</a> and the <a href="http://www.research.amnh.org/burroughs/medal_award_list.html" type="external">John Burroughs Medal Award</a>.</p>
<p /> | Everglades Wins Big | true | https://motherjones.com/politics/2008/06/everglades-wins-big/ | 2008-06-25 | 4 |
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<p>ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — In the beginning, serious bookkeeping and budgets were words seldom heard in the counting rooms of Las Vegas, Nev., casinos.</p>
<p>Those glittering hotel-resorts were operated by groups of men dropped into the desert community from eastern villages like Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago and one or two of the boroughs of New York City. Profit and loss statements were simple to compose and comprehend: We took in this much money and we spent this much money.</p>
<p>As long as what was coming in was larger than what was going out, everybody kept their job; and in some cases their head. Bills were paid out of one treasure chest, casino games. From slots to keno to craps, blackjack and roulette, the gaming floor picked up the tab.</p>
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<p>Bosses didn’t expect nor did they care if the restaurants didn’t turn a profit. Feeding the players at break-even or below cost was “good business.” This was before “good P.R.” was the buzz phrase.</p>
<p>The hotel property was in the red; it was because the cost of laundering sheets, pillow cases, towels, etc., etc., was getting out of hand.</p>
<p>Well, said the bosses, build a laundry in the basement. And soon, all the hotels had their own laundries.</p>
<p>It was the same chorus within casino ad departments: printing costs were out of sight, so the wise guys brought in their own graphic artists and printing equipment. Problem solved.</p>
<p>Entertainment was a top priority: You got to entertain the patron; keep ’em fed, keep ’em laughing, keep ’em happy. Again, “back in the day,” Sinatra was working the Copa Room at The Sands. It was packed.</p>
<p>Did Frank bump the action on the floor? Did his appearance add “heavy coin” to the bottom line? Yes and no. The place was pulsing anyway; stuffed with players.</p>
<p>And the bosses would say, “Listen, as long as more is coming in, than what is going out, who cares?”</p>
<p>And so it was. Then, Howard Hughes flew in, and bought Las Vegas. That changed everything.</p>
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<p>Each department was to turn a profit or at least break even. Each department must submit a budget. How much will it cost to run the hotel, the steak house for a year, six months? Do good, or goodbye.</p>
<p>The guys from back East faded into the distance, replaced by skilled craftsmen and women from Utah and Colorado, Tennessee and Oklahoma, each carrying degrees in hotel management, in accounting, in culinary arts.</p>
<p>Which brings us to today, and to understand what happened in Las Vegas, you see, does not stay in Las Vegas. What all casino bosses across the land know and understand is each department will not or cannot turn a profit. So, with all the MBAs on staff, along with black-bonneted chefs rattling pots and pans and entertainers of note reaching every note, not much has changed.</p>
<p>Entertainers and exquisitely prepared dinners and fluffy oversized pillows are really, down deep, not expected to drop buckets of added money into the casino’s bottom barrel. But to offer all that is “good business.” As long as what is coming in is larger than what is going out, it’s all good to go.</p>
<p>CASINOS’ IMAGES: Checking in at our area casinos, what is the image, the peg they hang their hat upon?</p>
<p>Sandia’s never-ending monthly promotions of handing out several hundred thousand in dollars and free play every month is top of mind.</p>
<p>Laguna’s Route 66 is consistent in pushing dining, its Route 66 Buffet along with its Thunder Road Steakhouse &amp; Cantina. And 66 casino chiefs place a lot of loot in booking top-flight entertainment in their Legends Theater.</p>
<p>Isleta, in the process of shedding the Hard Rock brand, appears to be targeting dining as a star attraction: The opening of the top-floor Embers Steakhouse has garnered a standing ovation. Add to that the impressive debut of the Italian-styled Bow Tie Bistro.</p>
<p>It seems Isleta is finding its marketing legs. Remember what the late and great Benny Binion said, “Gamblers bring big appetites. Feed them.”</p>
<p>Hollywood Casino puts a lot of faith and money in entertainment. Its Celebrity Showroom is a perfect setting for small to medium-sized packages. It can seat comfortably 800 to 1,200 and yes, every seat’s a good resting place, and the sound system is on target.</p>
<p>Up north, Buffalo Thunder sends out two strong enticements to visitors: The Hilton Hotel flag, like a gilt-edged guarantee of comfort and contentment. The second carrot is the Thunder’s bouquet of dining spots, from its Painted Parrot Buffet to the Red Sage (this one is top-shelf) to the Mica Restaurant and finally, Turquoise Trail, which I look at as kind of a pub.</p>
<p>All recommended without question.</p> | It’s all about ‘good business’ at casinos | false | https://abqjournal.com/185134/its-all-about-good-business-at-casinos.html | 2013-04-05 | 2 |
<p />
<p>Know a good bronze sculptor?</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>How ‘bout a skilled glassblower?</p>
<p>There’s a reason you probably don’t – but one website is trying to change that.</p>
<p>The site is called <a href="http://www.custommade.com/" type="external">CustomMade.com Opens a New Window.</a> and its goal is to make it easier for people to commission customized big-ticket items such as dining room tables, china cabinets and engagement rings.</p>
<p>College friends Michael Salguero and Seth Rosen started the company in 2009, leaving their jobs in real estate to pursue their vision of a marketplace where consumers and artisans of all kinds could easily connect. Call it an Etsy-meets-eBay, of sorts.</p>
<p>They launched the site that year under a subscription model, charging product makers an annual fee to be listed on the site. Last year, after raising $2.1 million in funding from Google Ventures and other investors, they instead decided to charge makers 7% to 10% per transaction. They expect to do $10 million in transactions this year.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Salguero says much of the momentum for custom-made goods stems from a broader trend of consumers wanting to know “the story” behind the items they buy. It’s the same trend that’s shown itself in the food world, where people have become more interested in community-supported agriculture, environmental responsibility and buying organic, he says.</p>
<p>“The idea of buying something from Asia and spending tons on the fuel to get it here and having no relationship with the person who made it – people don’t want that anymore,” he says.</p>
<p>On CustomMade, people describe the kind of piece they want made and interested product makers respond with proposals on how they’ll make it. The spectrum of products runs the gamut – a user named Courtney from Wentzville, Mo., is looking for someone to <a href="http://www.custommade.com/make/butcher-block-countertop-for-island/25303/" type="external">make her a striped wooden butcher block countertop Opens a New Window.</a> for a kitchen island in the range of $100 to $500. A user named Susan from Houston is looking for someone to <a href="http://www.custommade.com/make/engagement-ring-with-matching-wedding-band/25296/" type="external">create an engagement ring Opens a New Window.</a> similar to something she saw online – but with some tweaks – and is willing to spend $7,500 for it.</p>
<p>The most expensive transaction in the site’s history was a bathroom project commissioned for a casino to the tune of $250,000. The average transaction is about $1,300, says Salguero.</p>
<p>Users can choose whether or not they want their product to be made by a local producer or anyone in the U.S. &#160;All communication and details of the transaction occur between the buyer and maker through the website, and progress of the project is tracked through sketches, photos and messages posted by the maker.</p>
<p>“The site provides a way to have a relationship with the person who’s making it,” says Salguero. “You really co-build this thing with the makers.”</p>
<p>While it may seem like a big risk to commission top-dollar projects through a website, Salguero says the company puts its vendors through a 10-step vetting process to make sure they’re of professional caliber. The company, which has 30 employees and is based in Cambridge, Mass., also has a maker curation team that handpicks makers through groups like the Society of North American Goldsmiths.</p>
<p>CustomMade guarantees each of the projects on its site, protecting customers against fraud and intervenes when a project fails to meet its agreed-upon expectations (i.e. – a piece is finished in nickel instead of bronze, etc.). The company does not protect against delivery problems, but requires that all makers insure the shipping of the item.</p>
<p>Salguero says the site has allowed small businesses and independent artisans to flourish by making them more visible to customers who have traditionally relied on personal referrals and the Yellow Pages for these sorts of projects.</p>
<p>Some makers have even landed pretty high-profile gigs. The team behind the George W. Bush Presidential Center, set to open next year in Dallas, commissioned two makers on CustomMade to create picture frames and busts of former presidents for the complex’s full-scale replica of the Oval Office.</p>
<p>While much of the site’s offerings fall into the furniture and jewelry categories, Salguero says the sky’s the limit in terms of the kinds of products it will offer in the future.</p>
<p>“Our stated goal is to be custom-made for everything,” he says.</p> | There's a Designer for That | true | http://foxbusiness.com/features/2012/11/01/there-designer-for-that.html | 2016-03-04 | 0 |
<p>Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell continues to advance President Barack Obama’s agenda, stating that the <a href="" type="internal">$1.15 trillion omnibus bill</a> was the best compromise he could secure in the absence of a Republican president. Republican majorities in the House and Senate <a href="" type="internal">were not leveraged</a> towards integrating conservative policies to counter Obama’s policies.</p>
<p>Joining CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday, McConnell said, “We had to work with a Democratic president who wanted to spend more on the domestic side. If it’d been left up to me, we wouldn’t have added that much back, but nobody is a dictator here. We can’t do things, one party only, in a time of divided government.”</p>
<p>Deftly avoiding an mention of the omnibus bill’s cost, Tapper invited McConnell to respond to Representative Nancy Pelosi <a href="http://www.sfchronicle.com/nation/article/Pelosi-GOP-gave-away-the-store-in-spending-6708715.php" type="external">saying</a> Republicans “gave away the store” in order lift a ban on exporting crude oil. Also mentioned was Rush Limbaugh’s description of McConnell’s leadership as no different from former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s.</p>
<p>“It is as though Nancy Pelosi is still running the House and Harry Reid is still running the Senate. ‘Betrayed’ is not even the word here. What has happened here is worse than betrayal. Betrayal is pretty bad, but it's worse than that,” said Limbaugh of Republican complicity in signing off on Obama’s agenda without leveraging congressional powers.</p>
<p>Earlier in the segment, McConnell opted not to respond to Senator Ted Cruz’s <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/07/24/ted-cruz-calls-mitch-mcconnell-a-liar-on-the-senate-floor/" type="external">exposure</a> of his dishonesty when lying to Senate colleagues about private negotiations with Democrats.</p>
<p>McConnell also mischaracterized Donald Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim immigration and visitation, saying that it would lead to the blocking of Muslim heads of state. Trump is <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/dec/8/donald-trump-exceptions-muslim-ban-sporting-events/" type="external">on record</a> stating his proposal includes exceptions for such circumstances.</p>
<p>No mention was made of daring Obama’s veto with a spending bill not to the President’s liking.</p> | McConnell: We Need To 'Compromise' With Obama Until We Win In 2016 | true | https://dailywire.com/news/2005/mcconnell-we-need-compromise-obama-until-we-win-robert-kraychik | 2015-12-20 | 0 |
<p>When you have your regular Saturday night rendezvous, you might feel totally satisfied. But when that typical tryst turns into a mighty scene that seems like it would be straight out of an adult movie… can you ever go back to have your normal stuff ever again? After what this blogger experienced, it seems highly unlikely.</p>
<p />
<p>Credit: Photographee.eu/Shutterstock</p> | She Came Over and We F**Ked Like Adult Stars | true | http://thefrisky.com/g/she-came-over-and-we-fked-like-adult-stars/?utm_source%3Dfrisky%26utm_medium%3DNIBND-3991%26utm_content%3Dnib%26utm_campaign%3Dsocial-o%26ipp%3D3 | 2018-10-03 | 4 |
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<p />
<p>On opening night of the 2014-15 season, one of them – Atrisco – looked much less in transition than the other.</p>
<p>The Jaguars were in control virtually the entire way Monday night against the visiting Matadors, with a mostly fresh set of starting guards sparking Atrisco Heritage past Sandia 60-49.</p>
<p>“It’s gonna be a fun team,” Jags coach Adrian Ortega said.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Tremendous guard play elevated Atrisco Heritage all the way to the Class 5A state title game last March. But that standout trio – Corbin Waquie, Joe Brooks and Ortega’s son, also named Adrian – graduated.</p>
<p>Senior guard DeShawn Lucero was the only returning starter, and he led the Jaguars with 17 points. New starters Chris Trujillo and Johnny Rodriguez, both guards, added 13 apiece.</p>
<p>“I thought we would come out pretty strong,” said Lucero. “We weren’t getting any respect.”</p>
<p>Lucero had seven first-quarter points, and Rodriguez added a couple of 3-pointers in the second quarter for Atrisco, whose offense was fairly high functioning for a season opener on a team with four new starters.</p>
<p>Coach Ortega attributed this, in part, to Waquie, Brooks and his son, seeing as how guys like Rodriguez and Trujillo have had to guard them in practice the last couple of years.</p>
<p>“We looked up to those guys,” said Trujillo, who scored all 13 in the second half. “Now we just want to get back to where they were last year.”</p>
<p>The Jaguars won every quarter. They led 28-22 at halftime on the strength of their perimeter work, and extended out to a 44-35 lead late in the third quarter on a four-point play by Rodriguez. The lead was up to 10 by the end of the quarter.</p>
<p>“Bottom line, they wanted to win more than we did,” Sandia coach Alvin Broussard said.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>The Matadors’ much-ballyhooed size was not much of a factor, save for containing Atrisco post Deven Peace.</p>
<p>Atrisco Heritage, all things considered, held its own on the glass with the taller Matadors. And the Jaguars’ guards did a superb job of protecting the lead; Atrisco ran several lengthy offensive sets in the second half that led to buckets, frustrating Sandia’s attempt at a comeback after the Matadors got within five at 48-43 early in the fourth quarter.</p>
<p>“It’s gonna be different, but we’ve been with each other the past three years,” Lucero said. “So we’re pretty used to each other.”</p>
<p>Sam Crews and Caleb Wroten led the Matadors with 16 points each, but Broussard was surprised and disappointed.</p>
<p>“Tonight,” he said, “I saw a different team than I saw in practice every day.”</p>
<p>Also Monday</p>
<p>• Post Christian Cunningham had 18 points for Cibola’s boys, who beat Eldorado 66-61. Mykol LaGarde had 25 points for the Eagles.</p>
<p>• La Cueva’s girls ripped Valley 76-51 behind 22 points from senior post Alyssa Yocky and 21 from guard Alexa Romano.</p>
<p>• Las Cruces’ girls dominated Eldorado 67-41.</p>
<p>• Sandia had three girls in double figures, led by Alyssa Provencio’s 17, as the Matadors won 53-38 at Atrisco Heritage.</p>
<p />
<p /> | Prep basketball: Jaguars get good guard play | false | https://abqjournal.com/501420/jaguars-get-good-guard-play-in-win-over-sandia.html | 2014-11-24 | 2 |
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<p>FILE – In this Nov. 3, 2012 file photo, Eddie Murphy addresses speaks at the close of “Eddie Murphy: One Night Only,” a celebration of Murphy’s career at the Saban Theater in Beverly Hills, Calif. Murphy will be awarded the nation’s top prize for humor this year by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The center announced Thursday that the 54-year-old Murphy will receive the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor on Oct. 18 in a show that will be broadcast nationally. The humor prize honors those who influence society through their social commentary and satire in the tradition of Mark Twain. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision, File)</p>
<p>WASHINGTON — Eddie Murphy will be awarded the nation’s top prize for humor this year by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.</p>
<p>The center announced Thursday that the 54-year-old Murphy will receive the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor on Oct. 18 in a show that will be broadcast nationally. The humor prize honors those who influence society through their social commentary and satire in the tradition of Mark Twain.</p>
<p>Murphy got his break in comedy in 1980 when he joined the cast of “Saturday Night Live.” He went on to become one of the film industry’s top box office performers as an actor. The Kennedy Center says Murphy is the most commercially successful African-American actor in film history.</p>
<p>Past honorees include Jay Leno, Carol Burnett and Ellen DeGeneres.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> | Eddie Murphy to receive top US humor prize at Kennedy Center | false | https://abqjournal.com/566866/eddie-murphy-to-receive-top-us-humor-prize-at-kennedy-center.html | 2 |
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<p>JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Park rangers in South Africa detained 28 suspected poachers in April in the country's main wildlife park, a sharp increase over the detention rate of previous months, an official said Thursday.</p>
<p>Paul Daphne, a spokesman for South Africa's parks service, attributed the increase in arrests in Kruger National Park to the effectiveness of new anti-poaching helicopters as well as sniffer dogs that track intruders. Kruger rangers have four helicopters, including two donated by American philanthropist Howard Buffett, according to Daphne.</p>
<p>While more poachers are infiltrating Kruger park, the ranger force there is showing a more robust ability to counter the threat, Daphne said.</p>
<p>A total of 62 suspected poachers have been arrested in the Kruger park so far this year, according to parks officials. Many poachers cross into Kruger from neighboring Mozambique.</p>
<p>Poachers killed more than 1,200 rhinos in South Africa, many of them in Kruger, in 2014 to meet demand for rhino horn in parts of Asia.</p>
<p>The horn is made of keratin, a substance also found in human fingernails. Some people covet it as a status symbol and a healing agent despite a lack of evidence that it can cure.</p>
<p>JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Park rangers in South Africa detained 28 suspected poachers in April in the country's main wildlife park, a sharp increase over the detention rate of previous months, an official said Thursday.</p>
<p>Paul Daphne, a spokesman for South Africa's parks service, attributed the increase in arrests in Kruger National Park to the effectiveness of new anti-poaching helicopters as well as sniffer dogs that track intruders. Kruger rangers have four helicopters, including two donated by American philanthropist Howard Buffett, according to Daphne.</p>
<p>While more poachers are infiltrating Kruger park, the ranger force there is showing a more robust ability to counter the threat, Daphne said.</p>
<p>A total of 62 suspected poachers have been arrested in the Kruger park so far this year, according to parks officials. Many poachers cross into Kruger from neighboring Mozambique.</p>
<p>Poachers killed more than 1,200 rhinos in South Africa, many of them in Kruger, in 2014 to meet demand for rhino horn in parts of Asia.</p>
<p>The horn is made of keratin, a substance also found in human fingernails. Some people covet it as a status symbol and a healing agent despite a lack of evidence that it can cure.</p> | South African park reports increase in poacher arrests | false | https://apnews.com/amp/807a8bccb0bd4871af26119850cddb56 | 2015-05-08 | 2 |
<p>The Washington Post is reporting that musician and activist <a href="" type="internal">Wyclef Jean is responding to a recent report by the New York Post</a> questioning the spending of Jean's charitable organization, the Yele Haiti Foundation, <a href="" type="internal">again</a>. The New York Post reported that the foundation collected $16 million in 2010, but less than a third of that went to emergency efforts. The Post also says that $1 million was paid to a Florida firm that doesn't appear to exist.</p>
<p>Jean says that he is proud of what the foundation has accomplished after the earthquake almost two years ago. He says his Yele Haiti Foundation rebuilt an orphanage and set up a system of outdoor toilet and shower facilities in one of the largest shanties in the Haitian capital.</p>
<p>The star told the <a href="http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/11/28/2521577/wyclef-jean-defends-his-haiti.html" type="external">Miami Herald</a>:</p>
<p>"The Post [New York Post] conveniently fails to acknowledge that the decisions that Yele made were a response to one of the world's most catastrophic natural disasters in modern history and required an immediate humanitarian response," Jean said in a written statement. "We made decisions that enabled us to provide emergency assistance in the midst of chaos and we stand by those decisions."</p>
<p>We find it interesting that <a href="" type="internal">media outlets are so focused on following Jean's paper trail</a> while ignoring others. What about countries that pledged to send aid to Haiti and still have yet to do so - including the United States, because of congressional shenanigans? The lesson here should be that people should actually donate money to organizations that are in the business of rebuilding after disaster relief, not just famous faces that are known for being musical geniuses. <a href="" type="internal">The two don't translate</a>, much like the numbers.</p>
<p>Read more at <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/americas/haitis-wyclef-jean-defends-charity-following-story-of-questionable-spending/2011/11/27/gIQAxD2p2N_story.html" type="external">the Washington Post</a>.</p>
<p>In other news: <a href="" type="internal">Are Open Marriages a Solution or Contradiction?</a></p> | Wyclef Jean Defends Yele Charity, Again | true | https://theroot.com/wyclef-jean-defends-yele-charity-again-1790867079 | 2011-11-28 | 4 |
<p>VAL D’ISERE (Reuters) – Six-times overall World Cup winner Marcel Hirscher defied difficult conditions to win the slalom at Val d’Isere on Sunday.</p>
<p>The Austrian, who broke his ankle in pre-season training in August but now looks fully recovered, was only eighth fastest after the first leg in heavy snow and poor visibility.</p>
<p>But the 28-year-old bounced back to produce a perfect second run and win with a combined time of one minute 41.94 seconds, 0.39 seconds ahead of ahead of Norway’s Henrik Kristoffersen while Andre Myhrer of Sweden was third.</p>
<p>Twenty-four skiers fell victim to the conditions as they failed to complete the first run.</p>
<p>Hirscher’s second World Cup win of the season, following his giant slalom victory at Beaver Creek one week earlier, lifted him to second in the overall standings behind Kristoffersen.</p>
<p />
<p>Fusion Media or anyone involved with Fusion Media will not accept any liability for loss or damage as a result of reliance on the information including data, quotes, charts and buy/sell signals contained within this website. Please be fully informed regarding the risks and costs associated with trading the financial markets, it is one of the riskiest investment forms possible.</p> | Alpine skiing: Hirscher defies difficult conditions to win slalom | false | https://newsline.com/alpine-skiing-hirscher-defies-difficult-conditions-to-win-slalom/ | 2017-12-10 | 1 |
<p>ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - The Albuquerque Journal's daily newsletter, Business Insider, is now available to everyone and sign-up is easier than ever.</p>
<p>The Journal's Business Insider gives email subscribers up-to-the-minute access to the day's top business stories.</p>
<p />
<p>Journal reporters in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, southern New Mexico and Washington, D.C. And on Thursdays, you'll also get a preview of the following week's Business Outlook.</p>
<p>Besides the afternoon email, Insider subscribers also receive special alerts on breaking business stories as soon as they are posted.</p>
<p>Sign-up is as simple as entering your email address at <a href="" type="internal">www.abqjournal.com/bizinsider</a>. You'll also find the form at the bottom of any business story you open at <a href="" type="internal">ABQJournal.com</a> or by going to <a href="" type="internal">ABQJournal.com's business page</a> and clicking on the "Business Insider" link.</p>
<p>Sign up for Business Insider and you'll join the thousands of email subscribers who already receive the day's news before everyone else.</p>
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<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> | Business Insider expands access | false | https://abqjournal.com/668958/business-insider-expands-access.html | 2 |
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<p><a href="http://luckypeach.com/fixed-menu/" type="external">Fixed Menu</a></p>
<p>By Kevin Pang, Lucky Peach</p>
<p>Kevin Pang visits an Indiana prison for a look at the reality and morality of how we feed our inmate population in America.</p>
<p><a href="https://medium.com/matter/the-shut-in-economy-ec3ec1294816?src=longreads" type="external">The Shut-In Economy</a></p>
<p>By Lauren Smiley, Medium</p>
<p>Something to read this weekend between Amazon.com shopping and Seamless deliveries, this article describes the epicenter of click-and-get-it in San Francisco and the impact on the people who are making the orders and those who are fulfilling them.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/article/2015/03/24/rwandan-genocide/" type="external">The Monster Next Door</a></p>
<p>By Michele McPhee, Boston Magazine</p>
<p>A federal agent tries to prove that a Rwandan immigrant is not the innocent survivor she claims she is but actually a diabolical war criminal. This one is chilling.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/30/an-artist-with-amnesia" type="external">Life Lines</a></p>
<p>By Daniel Zalewski, The New Yorker</p>
<p>This is a fascinating look at Lonni Sue Johnson, an artist who once illustrated New Yorker covers and now has an extremely unusual form of amnesia due to hippocampal damage. The story tracks both her daily life and the way in which her injury is changing our understanding of how the brain stores memory.</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><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/27/sports/ncaabasketball/matt-stainbrook-drives-strangers-around-and-xavier-onward.html?_r=0" type="external">Matt Stainbrook Drives Strangers Around, and Xavier Onward</a></p>
<p>By John Branch, The New York Times</p>
<p>Take a break from NCAA games to read about Matt Stainbrook, the college player who doubles as an Uber driver. Really. And he has great googles.</p> | The Daily Beast's Best Longreads, Mar 22-28 | true | https://thedailybeast.com/the-daily-beasts-best-longreads-mar-22-28 | 2018-10-04 | 4 |
<p>The father of former U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, who was killed in an attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya last month, said <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-14/libyan-ambassador-s-death-not-a-political-issue-says-dad.html" type="external">that it would be</a> “abhorrent” to politicize his son’s death in the presidential campaign.</p>
<p>The Romney campaign has tried to politize the incident in an effort to try to chip away at one of President Obama’s strengths: foreign policy. Romney himself <a href="http://www.wmal.com/article.asp?id=2542103&amp;SPID=40282" type="external">has</a> <a href="http://hotair.com/archives/2012/10/05/romney-we-sure-didnt-get-transparency-from-obama-on-benghazi-attack-huh/" type="external">repeatedly</a> <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2012/10/08/text-of-romney-speech-on-foreign-policy-at-vmi/" type="external">attacked</a> Obama and his administration’s response to the Sept. 11 Libya attacks. But Jan Stevens, Chris Stevens’ father, criticized using the issue for political gain and urged patience for full investigation to complete, Bloomberg news <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-14/libyan-ambassador-s-death-not-a-political-issue-says-dad.html" type="external">reports</a>:</p>
<p>“It would really be abhorrent to make this into a campaign issue,” Jan Stevens, 77, said in a telephone interview from his home in Loomis, California, as he prepares for a memorial service for his son next week. […]</p>
<p>The ambassador’s father, a lawyer, said politicians should await the findings of a formal investigation before making accusations or judgments.</p>
<p>“The security matters are being adequately investigated,” Stevens said. “We don’t pretend to be experts in security. It has to be objectively examined. That’s where it belongs. It does not belong in the campaign arena.” Stevens said he has been getting briefings from the State Department on the progress of the investigation.</p>
<p>Citing the Bloomberg report, top Obama campaign aids David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs said on Sunday that Romney is indeed politicizing Stevens’ death and agreed with his father’s assessment. “We ought to follow ambassador’s family and allow this investigation to run and get to the bottom of it,” Axelrod said.</p>
<p>Last week, after the mother of a former Navy SEAL who was also killed in the Benghazi attack, <a href="" type="internal">asked</a> Romney to stop recounting a meeting he had with her son in his campaign speeches, the Romney campaign <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/mckaycoppins/mother-of-slain-seal-tells-romney-to-stop-talking" type="external">complied</a>.</p>
<p>Yet it’s unclear whether the Romney camp will acquiesce to Stevens’ father’s wish, as his top aid said that Benghazi attack “ <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/29/us/politics/shifting-reports-on-libya-killings-may-cost-obama.html?pagewanted=all" type="external">opens up the opportunity</a>” to attack the President on foreign policy.</p> | Father Of U.S. Ambassador Killed In Libya: ‘It Would Be Abhorrent To Make This Into A Campaign Issue’ | true | http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/10/14/1010311/stevens-father-abhorrent-campaign-issue/ | 2012-10-14 | 4 |
<p>With a week to go before CPS must propose guidelines for school closings and other actions, district officials are holding last-minute meetings to give community leaders a reality check, as well as ask their advice on the criteria.</p>
<p>These meetings are forerunners to those CPS is required to hold after announcing the guidelines, and then on the proposed actions themselves, which are due Dec. 1, said Adam Anderson, head of planning and strategy for the CPS Office of Portfolio.</p>
<p>“What we are doing tonight is because we believe it is the right thing to do,” Anderson told a packed meeting held Tuesday night at Daley College on the Southwest Side. Other meetings will be taking place throughout the week, including Wednesday night at Truman College in Uptown, Thursday night at Kennedy-King College and next Monday at the Charles Hayes Center in Grand Boulevard.</p>
<p>CPS spokeswoman Robyn Ziegler said these meetings are not open to the general public, as they are intended to be an opportunity for people to express opinions in private. However, the fact that these meetings are private is not clear to recipients of the invitations, as notices have been put on listserves, such as everyblock.com, and forwarded to a wide range of people.&#160;</p>
<p>Ziegler said the school action process will be transparent.</p>
<p>While the mandatory hearings are often contentious, these meetings are highly orchestrated, with participants asked to answer specific questions and take surveys.</p>
<p>The Chicago Educational Facilities Task Force, which is made up of state lawmakers and community activists, recommended that CPS publish the guidelines early and post all opportunities for feedback at the beginning of October, said task force member Cecile Carroll. She is now worried that CPS officials are taking the recommendations and implementing them “swiftly and haphazardly.”</p>
<p>Last year, the guidelines and school actions were never changed once they were proposed, despite a lot of input at the hearings. Carroll said she has gotten indications that the same thing will happen this year.&#160;</p>
<p>CPS officials at the meeting said they are trying to make the process of school closings more palatable than last year, when CPS was sharply criticized for not heeding input and some community members were paid by a politically connected organization to show up at meetings in support of the actions.</p>
<p>Officials conceded they are skeptical that any outreach efforts could temper the resistance to school actions. Still, they said they wanted to prevent community members from coming forward and saying they didn’t know that their schools were in bad shape and in danger of being targeted.</p>
<p>Also, one official said he regretted that the meetings were hurried. Some community leaders only got invitations the day before, though CPS officials said they sent them out last week. Officials said they were delayed by the teachers’ strike and the uncertainty over district leadership.</p>
<p>Michael Rendina, director of CPS intergovernmental affairs, said the district has been holding similar meetings over the last year, surveyed local school council members and held a tele-townhall meeting last week.</p>
<p>At a meeting held Tuesday night at Daley College, about 40 percent of the attendees were CPS employees. Others were from local community development organizations, and several were from the UNO charter school network.</p>
<p>This year, CPS plans to target severely under-used schools, in addition to those that are poorly performing. &#160;Last year, poor academic performance was the main factor that doomed a school. Anderson said CPS is looking at consolidations rather than simply closing schools, though even in a consolidation at least one school ends up shuttered.&#160;</p>
<p>At the start of Tuesday’s meeting, Southwest High School Network Chief Liz Kirby set the stage by reminding people about the district’s dire financial straits and its supply of unused classrooms. &#160;As many as 140 schools are more than 50 percent under-used, according to board calculations, though some community members and schools have disputed the figures. &#160;Another challenge, Kirby said, is that a lot of school buildings need major repairs.</p>
<p>“In this area, many of the schools are overcrowded, but schools like Hope and Robeson [high schools] could easily serve 500 more students if you just look at the number of seats,” she said.</p>
<p>Also, 125,000 students attend Level 3 schools, the lowest rating that CPS gives schools.</p>
<p>Kirby then told the participants how the neighborhood schools fared: 27 percent are Level 3 schools, but only five of them are severely underutilized.</p>
<p>Next, the audience was given keypads and asked to vote on the following question: What is the most important thing that impacts students? The choices were: maintain the adults, maintain the building or provide an effective transition to a higher performing school nearby.</p>
<p>Immediately, Capers C. Funnye, rabbi at Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation on the Southwest Side, grumbled. “This is very skewed. I feel like I am being used, and I don’t like being used. The choices are out of focus. Seems like the decisions have already been made and we are just supposed to fall into place.”</p>
<p>The preface to the question—that the district is broke and has much excess capacity—seemed to steer the answer, he said.</p>
<p>About 45 percent of the audience voted that it is important to provide effective transition to a higher-performing school. &#160;The rest were split between the two other answers.</p>
<p>For the rest of the meeting, which lasted almost three hours, small groups discussed topics such as their personal priorities for schools — academic performance was tops — space utilization standards and the CPS school performance policy.</p>
<p>One question that emerged was whether the performance policy applies to charter schools. Anderson said that it does, but that CPS must wait to shut down a charter school until its contract is up. Most charter schools have five-year contracts, he said.</p>
<p>CPS rarely has declined to renew a charter school contract. This past year, former CEO Jean-Claude Brizard said he was going to shut down some charter schools, but instead he awarded them a short two-or three-year contract.&#160;</p>
<p>Anderson said that in the future, CPS officials want charter schools to be subject to the same school action process as district-run schools.</p>
<p>At the end of the meeting, participants were asked what should be added to the school action criteria. Overwhelmingly, participants voted that the district should consider whether the parents and community support the action.</p> | CPS holding “private” meetings with community leaders on school actions | false | http://chicagoreporter.com/cps-holding-private-meetings-community-leaders-school-actions/ | 2012-10-24 | 3 |
<p>AS THE FISCAL CLIFF TURNS:&#160;Today in the fiscal cliff drama, people close to the negotiations say that while talks may appear stalled,&#160; <a href="" type="internal">progress is actually being made behind closed doors.</a>&#160;One problem though: the conversation has almost been exclusively about taxes. What about the automatic across-the-board spending cuts coming from sequestration?&#160; <a href="" type="internal">No one is talking about them.</a>&#160;Tune in next time for the continuing drama.</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | Not campaigning | false | https://nolabels.org/blog/not-campaigning/ | 2012-12-11 | 2 |
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<p>EUGENE, Ore. — One of three Oregon football players that were hospitalized following a series of intense workouts have been released from PeaceHealth Sacred Heart Medical Center at Riverbend in Springfield.</p>
<p>A hospital spokeswoman confirmed that Doug Brenner was released Tuesday and the other two were in good condition as of Tuesday evening.</p>
<p>The Oregonian reported ( <a href="http://bit.ly/2iCfSGt" type="external">http://bit.ly/2iCfSGt</a> ) late Monday that the players were hospitalized after being taken there late last week.</p>
<p>The school didn’t immediately identify the players who were hospitalized. It said in a statement that it will continue to monitor and support the players as they recover. The university says it has “implemented modifications as we transition back into full training to prevent further occurrences.”</p>
<p>The newspaper reports that the mother of one of the players says her son has been diagnosed with rhabdomyolysis, a condition that occurs when muscle tissue breaks down and leaks into the blood stream. The condition can cause kidney damage.</p>
<p>Executive assistant athletic director Dave Williford, when contacted via email, referred further questions to senior associate athletic director Craig Pintens, who did not return phone and email messages left by the Associated Press.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> | Report: Oregon players hospitalized after intense workouts | false | https://abqjournal.com/929405/report-oregon-players-hospitalized-after-intense-workouts.html | 2017-01-17 | 2 |
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