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<p>Drivers competing in the old car rally will begin arriving in Albuquerque around 11:30 a.m. and make a two-hour lunch stop. The event is free.</p>
<p>The race makes a lunch stop in Tucumcari today at the convention center, then hits downtown Santa Fe at about 4:45 p.m.</p>
<p>The 2015 event, with its $150,000 purse, follows a 2,400-mile course along Route 66, from Illinois to California. It will finish June 28 at the Santa Monica Pier.</p>
<p>Guy and Colby Mace of Springfield, Ill., won stage 2 in their 1932 Ford M-1 Racer. The overall leaders after two stages were Jonathan Klinger and Davin Reckow of Traverse City, Mich. in a 1917 Peerless. Last year's winners, Barry and Irene Jason of Keller, Texas, drove a 1966 Mustang and won $50,000.</p>
<p>Floyde Adams of Mimbres and Bill Adams of Las Cruces entered the race with a 1928 Buick Speedster, but dropped out during the second stage.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Cars built in 1972 and earlier are eligible, with most entries having been manufactured before World War II. In the 2014 Great Race from Maine to Florida, a 1915 Hudson racer, a 1916 Hudson Hillclimber and a 1917 Peerless were the three oldest vehicles. All of those vehicles are participating again in 2015.</p>
<p>The Great Race, which began 32 years ago, is a time/speed/distance rally. The vehicles, each with a driver and navigator, are given precise instructions each day that detail every move down to the second. They are scored at secret check points along the way and are penalized one second for each second either early or late. As in golf, the lowest score wins.</p>
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<p /> | Great Race making stops in New Mexico | false | https://abqjournal.com/602610/route-66.html | 2 |
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<p>The Supreme Court has sided with the Obama administration in upholding a rule making mortgage brokers eligible for overtime pay under federal labor law.</p>
<p>The justices unanimously agreed Monday to throw out a lower court ruling that faulted the administration for trying to change overtime rules without following proper procedures.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>The case turned on rules put in place by the Department of Labor that would make the mortgage brokers eligible for overtime pay under federal labor law. The rules were changed twice in a four-year period that spanned the Bush and Obama administrations.</p>
<p>In 2006, the Labor Department said the mortgage brokers were like executives and thus not covered by the overtime provision. In 2010, the department reversed itself.</p> | Supreme Court upholds Obama rule making mortgage brokers eligible for overtime pay | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2015/03/09/supreme-court-upholds-obama-rule-making-mortgage-brokers-eligible-for-overtime.html | 2016-03-09 | 0 |
<p>UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – The U.S. State Department on Thursday announced more than $697 million in additional humanitarian assistance for the people of Syria, bringing total U.S. assistance since 2012 to more than $7 billion.</p>
<p>“The new funding also helps mitigate the impact of the crisis on governments and communities throughout the region,” the State Department said in a statement.</p>
<p>Nearly $516 million will be destined to assistance inside Syria, according to the statement. Around the region, Jordan will receive about $88 million, Turkey $35 million, Lebanon $29 million, Iraq $15 million, Egypt $13 million and regional organizations $2 million.</p>
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<p>Fusion Media or anyone involved with Fusion Media will not accept any liability for loss or damage as a result of reliance on the information including data, quotes, charts and buy/sell signals contained within this website. Please be fully informed regarding the risks and costs associated with trading the financial markets, it is one of the riskiest investment forms possible.</p> | U.S. announces near $700 million in humanitarian aid to Syria | false | https://newsline.com/u-s-announces-near-700-million-in-humanitarian-aid-to-syria/ | 2017-09-21 | 1 |
<p>Two passenger trains have crashed head-on in Germany, leaving several dead and hundreds injured, media reports said. One train was derailed in the early-morning collision Tuesday near Bad Aibling, a town about 40 miles south east of Munich in Bavaria, with many carriages overturned, the reports said. At least eight people have been killed, according to a police spokesman cited by British newspaper <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/12147601/German-train-crash-Several-killed-and-100-injured-in-Bad-Aibling-Bavaria-live.html" type="external">The Telegraph Opens a New Window.</a>, but the number of deaths and casualties has not been confirmed. In a <a href="https://twitter.com/polizeiOBS/status/696963880803766272" type="external">post to Twitter Opens a New Window.</a>, local police said, "So far there are around 100 injured, including the seriously injured or even dead."</p>
<p>Copyright © 2016 MarketWatch, Inc.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p> | German Head-on Train Crash Leaves Several Dead | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2016/02/09/german-head-on-train-crash-leaves-several-dead.html | 2016-02-09 | 0 |
<p>President Donald Trump’s approval rating has fallen to a low of 34 percent in the latest <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/201617/gallup-daily-trump-job-approval.aspx" type="external">Gallup daily tracking poll</a> on Friday.</p>
<p>The president’s disapproval rate is at 61 percent, according to Gallup. The difference represents a new low net approval rate of negative 27 points.</p>
<p>The approval rate is down 1 point from the previous week, while the disapproval figure had risen, also by a point.</p>
<p>President Trump reached these figures earlier this month, in the daily tracking poll for <a href="http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/donald-trump-approval-rating-disapproval-high/2017/08/14/id/807579/" type="external">Aug. 14.</a></p>
<p>Before then, the president’s lowest approval rate had been 35 percent on March 28.</p>
<p>Gallup’s tracking poll is based on interviews with 1,500 adults nationally and has a margin of error of 3 percent.</p>
<p>In addition, <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/08/30/fox-news-poll-voters-mood-sours-56-percent-say-trump-tearing-country-apart.html" type="external">Fox News reported</a> Wednesday that Trump’s approval rating had fallen by 10 points since April, to 35 percent — the lowest since President Barack Obama in 2013.</p>
<p>Trump’s disapproval rating rose 11 points, to 64 percent.</p>
<p>The Fox poll also found that 56 percent of its 1,006 respondents said that President Trump was “tearing the country apart,” compared with 33 percent who said that he was “drawing the country together.”</p>
<p>At the White House briefing on Friday, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders slammed the surveys as unreliable.</p>
<p>“A lot of these polls are the same polls that predicted that Donald Trump would never be the president — and he’s sitting in the Oval Office as I stand here.</p>
<p>“I don’t have a lot of faith in a lot of these polls.</p>
<p>“The numbers that we’re focused on have to do with actual problems that Americans are facing,” she added. “The numbers that we’re focused on are the ones that actually impact day-to-day life for all Americans.</p>
<p>“That’s what we’re focused on, certainly not silly polls that frankly weren’t much use to us in the election — and certainly I don’t think are now.”</p> | Gallup Poll: Trump's Approval Rating Falls to 34 Percent | false | https://newsline.com/gallup-poll-trumps-approval-rating-falls-to-34-percent/ | 2017-09-01 | 1 |
<p>Asian stock rose for a second day on Friday as the Greek government proposed a broad financial overhaul to its creditors and Beijing's attempts to arrest a sharp slide in the Chinese market appeared to be working. But most Asian markets were still in the red from a week earlier.</p>
<p>KEEPING SCORE: China's Shanghai Composite Index jumped 5.3 percent to 3,904.91. The index was down 0.2 percent from one week earlier. Gains in other markets were moderate. South Korea's Kospi advanced 0.2 percent to 2,031.17 and Hong Kong's Hang Seng index rose 2.5 percent to 24,992.38 while Australia's S&amp;P/ASX 200 gained 0.4 percent to 5,492.00. Japan underperformed the region with Nikkei 225 finishing 0.4 percent lower at 19,779.83.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>GREEK SAGA: Greece and its European creditors appeared to be narrowing their differences after Athens offered a raft of proposals to reduce the cost of pensions, hike taxes and cut state spending. The proposals raised hopes that Greece can get a rescue deal that will prevent its exit from the euro. Its European creditors said they were open to discussing how to ease the country's debt load.</p>
<p>THE QUOTE: "Greece's proposal to its European creditors appears to significantly improve the prospects for a weekend agreement on extending further credit," said Ric Spooner, chief market analyst at CMC Markets. He said an agreement between Greece and its creditors is still not certain. But the fact that Greece has proposed a fiscal package along the lines of the one recently demanded by its European creditors is a "significant step in the direction of compromise."</p>
<p>CHINA SURGE: Chinese stocks jumped for a second day following a three-week slide that authorities tried to arrest with increasingly desperate support measures. The Shanghai Composite Index has dived about 30 percent from its June 12 peak. In the latest move to stabilize the market, the China Securities Regulatory Commission said late Wednesday that it had ordered investors holding more than 5 percent of a company's shares not to sell any of their holdings for the next six months.</p>
<p>WALL STREET: Wall Street closed higher on Thursday. The Standard &amp; Poor's 500 was up 0.2 percent to 2,051.31. The Dow Jones industrial average gained 0.2 percent to 17,548.62. The Nasdaq composite rose 0.3 percent to 4,922.40.</p>
<p>ENERGY: Benchmark U.S. crude fell rose 83 cents to $53.61 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract gained $1.13 to close at $52.78 a barrel in New York on Thursday. Brent crude, a benchmark for international oils used by many U.S. refineries, rose 81 cents to $59.42 per barrel in London.</p>
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<p>CURRENCIES: The euro strengthened to $1.1114 from $1.1065 in the previous global trading session. The dollar rose to 121.95 yen from 121.71 yen.</p> | Asian stocks extend gains as Greece proposes budget overhaul, China surges | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2015/07/10/asian-stocks-extend-gains-as-greece-proposes-budget-overhaul-china-surges.html | 2016-03-06 | 0 |
<p>FOX Business: The Power to Prosper</p>
<p>Stock-index futures held on to gains after weekly jobless claims came in close to expectations, and traders weighed a slew of corporate earnings and headlines regarding Europe's sovereign debt crisis.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Today's Markets</p>
<p>As of 8:35 a.m. ET, <a href="" type="internal">Dow Jones</a> Industrial Average futures climbed 36 points to 11,480, S&amp;P 500 futures rose 4.8 points to 1,211, and <a href="" type="internal">Nasdaq</a> 100 futures gained 5.8 points to 2,324.</p>
<p>Trading has been particularly volatile over the past two weeks; indeed, the Dow has closed in opposing directions for nine-straight sessions. &#160;The blue-chip index is 0.63% in negative territory as of Wednesday's close, but has been teetering on the breakeven point for the year.</p>
<p>Earnings season is in full swing with almost half of all Dow components and more than 20% of the S&amp;P 500 reporting this week.</p>
<p>American&#160;Express (NYSE:AXP) posted earnings that topped expectations, and sales that met forecasts. AT&amp;T's (NYSE:T) quarterly revenue missed analysts' expectations, while its bottom-line matched estimates.</p>
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<p>Technology heavyweight Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) is set to report after the closing bell.</p>
<p>Also on the corporate front, Silver Lake Partners, Microsoft and others are working on a bid for struggling technology firm <a href="" type="internal">Yahoo</a>! (NASDAQ:YHOO), the Wall Street Journal reported.&#160;</p>
<p>Data Dump</p>
<p>There are several key economic reports slated for release Thursday.</p>
<p>New claims for unemployment benefits fell to 403,000 from 409,000 the week prior, but checked in higher than the 400,000 economists had been expecting. &#160;Claims have been hovering about the 400,000 level for months, and represent one of many gauges that suggest the labor market is still struggling.</p>
<p>Sales of previously-occupied single-family homes are anticipated to have slipped 1.8% to 4.9 million in September. &#160;Data released this week on the market for new homes have topped expectations. &#160;Still, the housing market has struggled with a glut of supply, depressed prices, and still-tight consumer lending conditions.</p>
<p>The Philadelphia Federal Reserve's read on the manufacturing sector in the mid-Atlantic region will show continued contraction, but at a slower pace, according to economists estimates. &#160;The release follows a report from the New York Fed that showed contraction in that region.</p>
<p>European Angst</p>
<p>"The European sovereign debt crisis affects investors everywhere."</p>
<p>Market participants are paying close attention to Europe, where policymakers are struggling to craft a unified solution to tackle the 17-member currency bloc's debt crisis. &#160;A report from the Journal suggesting the European bailout fund, called the <a href="" type="internal">European Financial Stability Facility</a>, would only be able to provide first-loss insurance on sovereign debt instead of direct guarantees spooked traders worldwide, pushing global shares into the red. &#160;The Journal also said the EFSF may not be able to use bonds it buys as collateral to borrow from the <a href="" type="internal">European Central Bank</a>. &#160;Both of those developments, economists say, limit the power of the EFSF.</p>
<p>"The European sovereign debt crisis affects investors everywhere," analysts at <a href="" type="internal">HSBC</a> wrote in a research note, adding the crisis is "hugely complex."</p>
<p>Officials meet on October 23, but it remains unclear whether a firm solution will come out of that meeting.</p>
<p>The euro rose 0.23% to $1.38, while the dollar fell 0.17% against a basket of world currencies. &#160;European shares were roughly 1% to the downside.</p>
<p>Energy markets were slightly lower despite a weaker dollar. &#160;Light, sweet crude fell 16 cents, or 0.19%, to $85.95 a barrel. &#160;Wholesale RBOB gasoline dipped less than a penny to $2.67 a gallon.</p>
<p>In metals, gold dropped $24.20, or 1.5%, to $1,623 a troy ounce. Silver slid 54 cents, or 1.6%, to $30.75 a troy ounce.</p>
<p>Yields on government debt were slightly lower. &#160;The benchmark 10-year Treasury note yielded 2.162% from 2.164%. &#160;Bond yields move in the opposite direction of prices.</p>
<p>Foreign Markets&#160;</p>
<p>The Euro Stoxx 50 fell 0.8% to 2,311, the English FTSE 100 slid 0.7% to 5,413, and the German DAX dipped 0.92% to 5,859.</p>
<p>In Asia, the Japanese Nikkei 225 dropped 1% to 8,682 and the Chinese Hang Seng tumbled 1.8% to 18,983.</p> | Futures Hold Gains as Traders Mull Data, Earnings | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2011/10/20/stock-futures-point-higher-ahead-jobs-data.html | 2016-03-07 | 0 |
<p>Police in South Africa arrested six men suspected of being part of an international child pornography ring, authorities said on Wednesday.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2013/08/21/South-African-police-say-international-kiddie-porn-ring-broken/UPI-29551377085119/?spt=hs&amp;or=tn" type="external">An elementary school principal</a> and award-winning author, two teachers, a lawyer, a dermatologist and a businessman were taken into custody after raids were carried out on 15 properties.</p>
<p>"The initial charge was possession, but we suspect that they're involved in manufacturing, import and export as well as mass-distribution," police spokesman Solomon Makgale <a href="http://gulfnews.com/news/world/other-world/six-men-arrested-as-south-africa-police-bust-child-porn-ring-1.1222567" type="external">told Agence France-Presse</a>.</p>
<p>"The indications are there. They had cameras. They had these external hard drives," he added.</p>
<p>Another 26 people are under investigation, and more arrests are pending in the bust, which ran simultaneously with other arrests overseas.</p>
<p>The ring appears to have connections in the US, Canada, the UK and other European countries.</p>
<p>Police <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-23778127" type="external">confiscated 672 DVDs</a>, 22 memory sticks, eight laptops, 39 external hard drives and 25 books during their investigation.</p>
<p>Some of the images found showed children "suffering extreme forms of violence" and officers involved in the operation described what they found as "sickening."</p>
<p>South African police are now working with other international law enforcement agencies to find out if any of the children being abused within the child pornography ring are from their countries.</p>
<p>Overseas officers are also investigating the possibility that some of the children have been killed.</p>
<p>More from GlobalPost:&#160; <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/argentina/130112/argentina-international-pedophile-ring-busted" type="external">International pedophile ring busted in Argentina</a></p> | South Africa busts international child pornography ring | false | https://pri.org/stories/2013-08-21/south-africa-busts-international-child-pornography-ring | 2013-08-21 | 3 |
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<p>Not because it's come and gone so fast, but because she comes and goes so fast.</p>
<p>Herrera, Pojoaque Valley's top cross-country runner, has her eyes set on the individual state championship and hopes that will also be enough to help her fellow Elkettes achieve an even greater goal - a PVHS team title.</p>
<p>Herrera, a junior, already has had three top-10 finishes, including runner-up twice.</p>
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<p>The Elkettes have not won as a team since 2002 and have not had an individual champion since Sophia Torres in 2007.</p>
<p>Megan Herrera runs cross-country for Pojoaque Valley High School. (Courtesy of Ky Renna)</p>
<p>But this could be the year Pojoaque Valley puts an end to those droughts.</p>
<p>"This year, she's doing her best running," said coach Allan Lockridge. "She's really been running great and, for the first year overall, it's a good team, so she has some good kids backing her up."</p>
<p>Seeing the success the team has shown helps push her to even greater heights, Herrera said.</p>
<p>"The season's going really well," she said. "I'm happy with how I'm doing as an individual, but I'm even more happy with how we're doing as a team. Everybody is really stepping up and working hard."</p>
<p>Having teammates, especially fellow junior Jenae Bobchak, who recently rejoined the team, dogging her steps in practice is a strong motivator, Herrera said.</p>
<p>"It makes me really work harder, being able to see I have other teammates that I can't pull away (from) and we're just really improving as a team," she said.</p>
<p>And that's a big reason for her optimism this season.</p>
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<p>"To me, it's very important," Herrera said. "It's really good seeing all of us pushing and working hard. I really know that if we all work hard enough, we'll get that state championship. That's what we're all aiming for."</p>
<p>The younger runners take their cues from Herrera, Lockridge said.</p>
<p>"She's encouraging both in her training, out on the hills and she's a leader on the course," he said. "For the first time in her career, she has a group of kids trying to get on her heels. That's encouraging her and encouraging the other girls, as her inspiration, the person they want to be running with."</p>
<p>Herrera, a strong, athletic runner who also runs track in the spring, got her start in the sport in middle school when Lockridge started a running club. It was enough to woo her away from volleyball, which was a difficult decision.</p>
<p>"It kind of was because I was playing since fourth grade," she said. "Giving up that first sport that I really loved was hard. But I think it's good to try different things."</p>
<p>Lockridge is certainly glad she made that decision.</p>
<p>"She could be doing any sport," he said. "Combine that natural talent with strength and give her a lot of hard training, and she doesn't back off on any kind of training. - That's what makes her, gives her that edge. She's competitive. She knows her limits, but she's not afraid to go after whoever happens to be ahead of her."</p>
<p>Herrera will a get a chance Saturday to test herself not only against district rival Cora Cannady of Taos, but also the top runners in all classes in the Rio Rancho Jamboree, which is run on the state meet course.</p>
<p>"It's really important to do well because it's the state course," she said. "I need to put my mind to it, look for all those rough spots, know where to look around, keep my eyes on things. It really motivates me to get ready for state."</p>
<p>Lockridge is convinced she's ready to burst out with a big performance.</p>
<p>"Her training is better every day," he said. "And her racing is better every meet. She should be the one people are chasing. She's doing her best running she's ever done. I think she's ready to move up to another level."</p>
<p /> | Pojoaque Valley junior has eye on championship and team crown | false | https://abqjournal.com/660514/headline-414.html | 2 |
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<p>By Kieran Cooke / <a href="http://climatenewsnetwork.net/politicians-heat-rising-temperatures/" type="external">Climate News Network</a></p>
<p />
<p>&#160; &#160; New research shows that the hotter the world gets, the quicker the pace of political change. (Gabor Dvornik via Flickr)</p>
<p>LONDON — Voters who feel good about life — whether it is to do with their job, their marriage or even the success of their sports team — are more likely to support their politicians.</p>
<p />
<p>On the other hand, those who are disgruntled and fed up are more prone to want a change of political leadership. That, at least, is the received wisdom of political pundits.</p>
<p>New research indicates that, in future, climate change — and specifically rising temperatures — could also be a key factor in undermining and determining political longevity. The hotter it gets, the theory goes, the quicker the pace of political change.</p>
<p>Nick Obradovich, <a href="http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/project/44/science_technology_and_public_policy.html" type="external">a researcher at Harvard University</a> in the US, has conducted what is described as the first ever investigation into the relationship between temperature, electoral returns and future climate change.</p>
<p>In a <a href="http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-016-1833-8/fulltext.html" type="external">study</a> published in the journal <a href="http://link.springer.com/journal/10584" type="external">Climatic Change</a>, Obradovich sets out to substantiate the idea that climate change, by threatening feelings of wellbeing, will lead to a quicker turnover of politicians and political parties.</p>
<p>There is no doubting the thoroughness of his research: altogether, Obradovich analysed more than 1.5 billion votes cast in nearly 5,000 elections in 19 countries ranging from Argentina to Zambia between 1925 and 2011.</p>
<p>This data was then set alongside meteorological records.</p>
<p>The analysis indicates, says Obradovich, that “warmer than normal temperatures in the year prior to an election produce lower vote shares for parties already in power, driving quicker rates of political turnover”.</p>
<p>The study also finds that voter disgruntlement is more pronounced in warmer countries where average annual temperatures are above 21°C.</p>
<p>“In these warmer places, voter support shrinks by nine percentage points from one election to the next, relative to office bearers in cooler electoral districts,” the study finds.</p>
<p>Countries lacking historical electoral data — including those in sub-Saharan Africa already feeling the impact of climate change — were not included in the research.</p>
<p>Obradovich also uses climate models to predict future voter behaviour, suggesting that the pace of political change in many countries between now and the end of the century is likely to considerably speed up.</p>
<p>“Climate change may increase the frequency of democratic turnover most in warmer, poorer nations,” says the study.</p>
<p>Global warming is a complex problem that can only be tackled through international agreement and long-term planning.</p>
<p>Obradovich says that faced with ever more fickle electorates, politicians in future will be tempted to focus on short-term policies instead of adopting longer-term strategies.</p>
<p>This could not only hamper the fight against climate change but also cause economic and political upheaval.</p>
<p>“Turnover in nations with weak democratic institutions can up-end political stability — if incumbents in weak democracies foresee a greater risk of losing office, they sometimes employ electoral fraud and pre-electoral violence to maintain power,” says Obradovich.</p>
<p>“If these methods fail, incumbents’ loss occasionally precipitates post-electoral violence that can in turn induce broader civil conflict.”</p>
<p>Kieran Cooke, a founding editor of Climate News Network, is a former foreign correspondent for the BBC and Financial Times. He now focuses on environmental issues</p> | Politicians Will Feel the Heat From Rising Temperatures | true | https://truthdig.com/articles/politicians-will-feel-the-heat-from-rising-temperatures/ | 2016-11-04 | 4 |
<p>By Quentin Webb</p>
<p>LONDON (Reuters) - Glencore's top management, led by chief executive Ivan Glasenberg, is starting several days of meetings with big U.S. fund managers who could support its flotation, two people familiar with the matter said.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>The meetings highlight how the world's largest commodity trader is continuing intensive preparation for a possible listing in London and Hong Kong, despite market turmoil scuppering share issues across the world.</p>
<p>The meetings, beginning on Monday , are partly aimed at securing so-called "cornerstone" investors, the people said.</p>
<p>Such investors underpin a listing by agreeing in advance to buy a big stake and to hold it for months, and are a common feature in Hong Kong flotations.</p>
<p>Glencore, valued earlier this year by one analyst at about $60 billion, wants to swap a partnership structure for a public listing. That would help it pursue bigger deals -- including a possible merger with Xstrata Plc , the Swiss miner it already part-owns.</p>
<p>The visit is likely to include New York and Boston, the biggest U.S. centers of equity investing.</p>
<p>But it is not clear whether the Glencore delegation will meet with investors who have already backed the Swiss trader.</p>
<p>Three U.S. asset managers -- New York-based <a href="" type="internal">BlackRock</a> , The Capital Group Cos of Los Angeles and Boston-based <a href="" type="internal">Fidelity Investments</a> -- were among a select group that bought $2.2 billion in convertible bonds from Glencore in December 2009.</p>
<p>Glencore also sold some of the bonds, which convert into equity if it stages an initial public offering (IPO), to First Reserve Corp, the energy-focused private equity firm that has U.S. offices in Greenwich, Connecticut and Houston, Texas.</p>
<p>Glencore declined to comment.</p>
<p>INVESTORS EXPECT IPO</p>
<p>Meanwhile, a Reuters poll of fund managers published on Monday found that Glencore is expected to cling on to plans for a bumper London listing by the end of May, despite global stock market uncertainty.</p>
<p>The survey of 10 fund managers from investment houses controlling total global assets of $3 trillion found a majority assuming the deal will proceed before a summer listings hiatus, despite the near panic on markets caused by the Japan disaster.</p>
<p>Six of the 10 said they thought it unlikely Glencore would peg back its long-term plans for an IPO, with some suggesting a backlash against <a href="" type="internal">nuclear energy</a> could boost its oil and coal trading activities.</p>
<p>Only two said they thought recent events pose a serious threat to the expected timetable. (Additional reporting by Kylie MacLellan; editing by Alexander Smith)</p>
<p>Advertisement</p> | Glencore top brass courts U.S. investors: sources | true | http://foxbusiness.com/features/2011/03/21/glencore-top-brass-courts-us-investors-sources.html | 2016-01-28 | 0 |
<p>GLASTONBURY, Conn. (AP) — State police say a 51-year-old woman has been killed in a minivan crash on the Route 3 bridge in Glastonbury.</p>
<p>Troopers say Devra Lee Koromanian, of Glastonbury, was driving southbound Saturday evening on the bridge over the Connecticut River between Glastonbury and Wethersfield when she lost control and the minivan struck a barrier several times.</p>
<p>Authorities say Koromanian wasn't wearing her seat belt and was ejected from the vehicle. She was later pronounced dead at a hospital.</p>
<p>State police say the cause of the accident is under investigation, and they're seeking information from any witnesses.</p>
<p>GLASTONBURY, Conn. (AP) — State police say a 51-year-old woman has been killed in a minivan crash on the Route 3 bridge in Glastonbury.</p>
<p>Troopers say Devra Lee Koromanian, of Glastonbury, was driving southbound Saturday evening on the bridge over the Connecticut River between Glastonbury and Wethersfield when she lost control and the minivan struck a barrier several times.</p>
<p>Authorities say Koromanian wasn't wearing her seat belt and was ejected from the vehicle. She was later pronounced dead at a hospital.</p>
<p>State police say the cause of the accident is under investigation, and they're seeking information from any witnesses.</p> | Woman killed in Route 3 bridge crash in Glastonbury | false | https://apnews.com/amp/152936658f8b49679c3b01b0613640cb | 2017-12-31 | 2 |
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<p>When the Iraqi Survey Group released its long awaited report last week that said Iraq eliminated its weapons programs in the 1990s, President George W. Bush quickly changed his stance on reasons he authorized an invasion of Iraq. While he campaigned for a second term in office, Bush justified the war by saying that that Saddam Hussein was manipulating the United Nation’s oil-for-food program, siphoning off billions of dollars from the venture that he intended to use to fund a weapons program.</p>
<p>The report on Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, prepared by Charles Duelfer, a former U.N. weapons inspector and head of the Iraqi Survey Group, said Saddam Hussein used revenue from the oil-for-food program and “ <a href="" type="internal">created a web of front companies and used shadowy deals with foreign governments, corporations, and officials to amass $11 billion in illicit revenue in the decade before the US-led invasion last yea</a>r,” reports The New York Times.</p>
<p>“Through secret government-to-government trade agreements, Saddam Hussein’s government earned more than $7.5 billion,” the report says. “At the same time, by demanding kickbacks from foreign companies that received oil or that supplied consumer goods, Iraq received at least $2 billion more to spend on weapons or on Saddam’s extravagant palaces.”</p>
<p>The oil-for-food program was supervised by the U.N. and ran from 1996 until the war started in Iraq last year. It was designed to alleviate the effects sanctions had on Iraqi citizens by allowing limited quantities of oil to be sold to buy food and medicine.</p>
<p>But the one company that helped Saddam exploit the oil-for-food program in the mid-1990s that wasn’t identified in Duelfer’s report was Halliburton, and the person at the helm of Halliburton at the time of the scheme was Vice President Dick Cheney. Halliburton and its subsidiaries were one of several American and foreign oil supply companies that helped Iraq increase its crude exports from $4 billion in 1997 to nearly $18 billion in 2000 by skirting U.S. laws and selling Iraq spare parts so it could repair its oil fields and pump more oil. Since the oil-for-food program began, Iraq has sold $40 billion worth of oil. U.S. and European officials have long argued that the increase in Iraq’s oil production also expanded Saddam’s ability to use some of that money for weapons, luxury goods and palaces. Security Council diplomats estimate that Iraq was skimming off as much as 10 percent of the proceeds from the oil-for-food program thanks to companies like Halliburton and former executives such as Cheney.</p>
<p>U.N. documents show that Halliburton’s affiliates have had controversial dealings with the Iraqi regime during Cheney’s tenure at the company and played a part in helping Saddam Hussein illegally pocket billions of dollars under the U.N.’s oil-for-food program. The Clinton administration blocked one deal Halliburton was trying to push through sale because it was “not authorized under the oil-for-food deal,” according to U.N. documents. That deal, between Halliburton subsidiary Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co. and Iraq, included agreements by the firm to sell nearly $1 million in spare parts, compressors and firefighting equipment to refurbish an offshore oil terminal, Khor al Amaya. Still, Halliburton used one of foreign subsidiaries to sell Iraq the equipment it needed so the country could pump more oil, according to a report in the Washington Post in June 2001.</p>
<p>The Halliburton subsidiaries, Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co., sold water and sewage treatment pumps, spare parts for oil facilities and pipeline equipment to Baghdad through French affiliates from the first half of 1997 to the summer of 2000, U.N. records show. Ingersoll Dresser Pump also signed contracts — later blocked by the United States — according to the Post, to help repair an Iraqi oil terminal that U.S.-led military forces destroyed in the Gulf War years earlier.</p>
<p>Cheney’s hard-line stance against Iraq on the campaign trail is hypocritical considering that during his tenure as chief executive of Halliburton, Cheney pushed the U.N. Security Council, after he became CEO to end an 11-year embargo on sales of civilian goods, including oil related equipment, to Iraq. Cheney has said sanctions against countries like Iraq unfairly punish U.S. companies.</p>
<p>During the 2000 presidential campaign, Cheney adamantly denied that under his leadership, Halliburton did business with Iraq. While he acknowledged that his company did business with Libya and Iran through foreign subsidiaries, Cheney said, “Iraq’s different.” He claimed that he imposed a “firm policy” prohibiting any unit of Halliburton against trading with Iraq.</p>
<p>“I had a firm policy that we wouldn’t do anything in Iraq, even arrangements that were supposedly legal,” Cheney said on the ABC-TV news program “This Week” on July 30, 2000. “We’ve not done any business in Iraq since U.N. sanctions were imposed on Iraq in 1990, and I had a standing policy that I wouldn’t do that.”</p>
<p>But Cheney’s denials don’t hold up. Halliburton played a major role in helping Iraq repair its oil fields during the mid-1990s that allowed Saddam to siphon off funds from the oil-for-food program to fund a weapons program, which Cheney and President Bush insist was the case.</p>
<p>As secretary of defense in the first Bush administration, Cheney helped to lead a multinational coalition against Iraq in the Persian Gulf War and to devise a comprehensive economic embargo to isolate Saddam Hussein’s government. After Cheney was named chief executive of Halliburton in 1995, he promised to maintain a hard line against Baghdad.</p>
<p>But that changed when it appeared that Halliburton was headed for a financial crisis in the mid-1990s. Cheney said sanctions against countries like Iraq were hurting corporations such as Halliburton.</p>
<p>“We seem to be sanction-happy as a government,” Cheney said at an energy conference in April 1996, reported in the oil industry publication Petroleum Finance Week.</p>
<p>“The problem is that the good Lord didn’t see fit to always put oil and gas resources where there are democratic governments,” he observed during his conference presentation.</p>
<p>Sanctions make U.S. businesses “the bystander who gets hit when a train wreck occurs,” Cheney told Petroleum Finance Week. “While virtually every other country sees the need for sanctions against Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s regime there, Cheney sees general agreement that the measures have not been very effective despite their having most of the international community’s support. An individual country’s embargo, such as that of the United States against Iran, has virtually no effect since the target country simply signs a contract with a non-U.S. business,” the publication reported.</p>
<p>JASON LEOPOLD is the former Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires where he spent two years covering the energy crisis and the Enron bankruptcy. He just finished writing a book about the crisis, due out in December through Rowman &amp; Littlefield. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p> | Under Cheney, Halliburton Helped Saddam Siphon Billions from UN’s Oil-for-Food Program | true | https://counterpunch.org/2004/10/12/under-cheney-halliburton-helped-saddam-siphon-billions-from-un-s-oil-for-food-program/ | 2004-10-12 | 4 |
<p>I usually don’t watch local TV news, which is about Los Angeles 45 miles away from Huntington Beach. But I watched NBC channel 4 yesterday night as a lead-in to Barbra Streisand on Jimmy Fallon’s show. Babs still is fabulous! (She stayed away from politics.)</p>
<p>Commercials included several <a href="http://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_46,_Medical_Malpractice_Lawsuits_Cap_and_Drug_Testing_of_Doctors_(2014)" type="external">anti-Proposition 46 ads</a>. One showed a kindly, middle-aged doctor in a white lab coat saying how much it would increase medical costs. This is a typical doctors vs. trial lawyers battle.&#160;There were no ads last night from the trial lawyers.</p>
<p>It looks like the initiative is in trouble, according to a USC poll. The <a href="http://www.latimes.com/local/politics/la-me-pol-poll-malpractice-20140913-story.html" type="external">Los Angeles Times reported</a>:</p>
<p>Among likely voters, 61% favored the measure, or leaned in that direction; 29% were opposed.</p>
<p>But that approval slid to 47% when respondents were told of high potential costs to the state — as well as possible savings — and opposition rose to 39%.</p>
<p>Backing eroded further when those surveyed heard both sides’ main campaign arguments. Support fell to 37%, with 50% opposed.</p>
<p>The initiative’s main part would increase the cap on malpractice damages, which has been <a href="http://www.californiahealthline.org/articles/2014/5/16/measure-to-raise-medical-malpractice-cap-qualifies-for-nov-ballot" type="external">$250,000 since 1975,</a>&#160;to $1 million.&#160;The current limit has&#160;been one of the few sensible curbs on excess litigation in a state known to have too many lawsuits. But according to the <a href="http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=250%2C000&amp;year1=1975&amp;year2=2014" type="external">U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Inflation Calculator</a>, $250,000 in 1975 is equal to $1.1 million today.</p>
<p>So Prop. 46’s increase in limits is reasonable. Except the proposition increases it too fast. They should have tried something smaller at first, say to $400,000.</p>
<p>Then the initiative, in typical California fashion, lards the wording with extra stuff supposedly to make it more attractive to voters:</p>
<p>It’s just more harassment of your doctor, who’s already suffering under a mountain of paperwork from Medicare, Medi-Cal, Covered California, etc.</p>
<p>Of course, we don’t want doctors drunk or high on the job. But this would be an intrusive attack on their integrity.</p>
<p>Maybe we should make the same requirements for trial lawyers.</p>
<p>Just kidding, counselors! But don’t be surprised if there’s retaliation from the sawbones.</p> | Poll: Weak support for Prop. 46, medical malpractice | false | https://calwatchdog.com/2014/09/16/poll-weak-support-for-prop-46-medical-malpractice/ | 2018-09-20 | 3 |
<p>“It’s the economy, stupid!” — James Carville’s memorable note-to-self during the 1992 presidential race — will be the determining factor in the 2012 campaign, according to the common wisdom. That may be true. But as Catholics consider their responsibilities between now and Nov. 6, it would be good to remember that the future of the pro-life cause in America is also at stake.</p>
<p>Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 79. Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy are 76. Justice Stephen Breyer is 74. The president elected in November will likely appoint two Supreme Court justices, and may appoint as many as four, over the next quadrennium. If that next president replaces Justices Ginsburg, Breyer and Kennedy with nominees who think that Roe v. Wade (1973) and Casey v. Planned Parenthood (1992) were wrongly decided, there could conceivably be a 7-2 Court majority to overturn (or, in effect, gut) those dreadful decisions and return the abortion debate (and related life-issues questions like euthanasia) to the states. There, the pro-life cause would win some states (likely the majority) and lose some others. With national opinion polls showing a pro-life majority for the first time in a long time, however, the conditions would be right for legally advancing the cause in a dramatic way.</p>
<p>If, conversely, Justice Scalia (and Justices Ginsburg and Breyer, and possibly Kennedy) were to be replaced in the next presidential term by nominees favorable to the court’s judgment in Roe and Casey, the radical abortion license created by those two decisions might well be set in federal legal concrete for the next 30 years. The pro-life cause would go on, but it would continue under severe federal legal restraints.</p>
<p>That this choice should present itself in partisan terms is a national tragedy. In the aftermath of the 1992 election, several of us gathered around Gov. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania to plan a Democratic nomination challenge to President Clinton in 1996. Casey had been blocked by the Clintons from speaking at the 1992 Democratic convention; he combined a strong pro-life record with an appeal to the important voting bloc of “Reagan Democrats”; he had twice been elected governor of a crucial swing state; and whether or not he could wrest the Democratic nomination away from President Clinton, a strong Casey campaign in 1996 would have established two crucial points — the pro-life issue is a bipartisan one, and there is ample room in the Democratic Party for gung-ho pro-lifers.</p>
<p>It would have been great fun; it might have been historic; but it was not to be. Governor Casey’s health went south, the challenge to President Clinton never materialized, and the throw-weight of pro-lifers within the Democratic Party was further reduced. Where all of that eventually led was demonstrated in early 2010, when pro-life Democrats in the House of Representatives provided the slim margin of victory for Obamacare-the implementers of which are now whittling away religious freedom and asking dental insurers whether they provide abortion coverage in their plans, all in the name of a virtually unlimited and government-funded right to abortion-on-demand.</p>
<p>As the natural successor to the classic civil rights movement, the pro-life cause ought to have been a bipartisan cause; it should certainly have been the cause of Catholic progressives. Yet as early as 1967, Richard John Neuhaus, then a Lutheran pastor and a civil rights veteran, warned his fellow-liberals in a Commonweal article that they were betraying the civil rights cause by flirting with “liberalized ” abortion laws. Neuhaus’s article won a prize from the Catholic Press Association; but that was then, and this is now. And as the Democratic Party has become ever more intransigent on the abortion question-with rare exceptions like Congressman Dan Lipinski (D-Illinois), a true pro-life hero — the pro-life cause has been abandoned by the old pro-civil rights coalition, even as African-American communities are decimated by the abortion license.</p>
<p>In any case, the pro-life stakes in 2012 could not be greater. Men and women of conscience will form their judgments accordingly.</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> | The Future of the Pro-Life Cause | false | https://eppc.org/publications/the-future-of-the-pro-life-cause/ | 1 |
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<p>RELATED: <a href="" type="internal">WHITE HELMETS: State Sanctioned Terrorism and Hollywood Poster Boys for War</a></p>
<p>Shady practices by mainstream media outlets have become the norm in the “journalistic” profession, as mainstream outlets work overtime to cover-up 6 years of lies and deception in their reporting of the Syrian war.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.ukcolumn.org" type="external">UK Column News</a> anchor Mike Robinson is joined by 21WIRE’s Patrick Henningsen, along with guest Vanessa Beeley, breaking down the lies and disinformation being pushed out by the mainstream media.</p>
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<p>READ MORE WHITE HELMETS NEWS AT:&#160; <a href="" type="internal">21st Century Wire White Helmets Files</a></p>
<p>SUPPORT OUR&#160;WORK BY SUBSCRIBING &amp; BECOMING A MEMBER&#160; <a href="https://21wire.tv/membership/plans/" type="external">@21WIRE.TV</a>&#160;&#160;</p> | UK COLUMN: Vanessa Beeley on The Guardian, White Helmets and the Exploitation of Bana | true | http://21stcenturywire.com/2017/10/09/uk-column-vanessa-beeley-guardian-white-helmets-bana-aleppo/ | 2017-10-09 | 4 |
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<p>A man climbs through the window of a sleeping girl. She stirs awake and starts to scream, but he punches her with a closed fist. Brandishing a gun, he vows to kill her parents, asleep in the next room, if she makes another sound. She nods in tearful comprehension and he is upon her, tearing at her night clothes. Then he violently makes love to her.</p>
<p>It could be argued that there’s nothing wrong with the foregoing description. After all, the basic mechanics of love-making and rape are the same: sexual intercourse. But if you understand why that argument would be specious and offensive, please explain it to Ben Carson. The new secretary of Housing and Urban Development just described slaves as “immigrants.”</p>
<p>This happened Monday in a speech before HUD staff. Carson waxed eloquent about America as a nation built by people from other places, then said, “There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less. But they, too, had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great-grandsons, great-granddaughters, might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.”</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>But the slaves were no more “immigrants” than rape is making love. Nor is it difficult to tell the difference.</p>
<p>Immigrants booked passage and came to these shores in steerage, enduring heat, stench and cramped conditions in hopes of better lives in America. Slaves were kidnapped and came to these shores shackled, lying cheek to cheek in their own body waste.</p>
<p>Immigrants disembarked at Ellis Island where they endured questioning and health inspections before being allowed to enter the country. Slaves disembarked at places like Annapolis, Charleston and Savannah, where families were snatched away from one another, had their bodies probed by foreign fingers, then were sold at auction, sometimes on credit.</p>
<p>Immigrants stood staring up at the towers of New York City, and were daunted and inspired by the universe of possibilities they represented. Slaves stood staring down at fields of cotton or tobacco, at an overseer’s whip, at a thin mattress of corn shucks in a tiny cabin where winter’s icy breath came slicing through the cracks, and tried to understand that this was life now, and that death would be their only freedom.</p>
<p>Immigrants relocated. Slaves were relocated. They had no more say in the matter than a chair moved from one side of a room to the other.</p>
<p>After being excoriated for his apparent ignorance of this, Carson issued a statement on Facebook that said that the immigrant and slave experiences were different and “should never be intertwined.” Which doesn’t explain why he did exactly that.</p>
<p>It’s hard not to see this as part of an ongoing campaign by the political right to arrogate or neuter entirely the language of politics and social grievance. Consider how, in the past 25 years, “liberal” and “feminist” became curse words, and “racism” was redefined as “speaking about race.” Now it’s becoming sadly common to hear enslaved Africans described as “workers,” “settlers” and, yes, “immigrants.”</p>
<p>Words, you must understand, have weight and effect. So this campaign is neither incidental nor accidental. No, like Holocaust denial, it is an attempt to minimize and trivialize a crucible of agony, to rob it of pathos, to render it unworthy of reverence. It’s heartbreaking to have to explain to anyone why this is wrong.</p>
<p>It’s pathetic to have to explain it to a 65-year-old African-American man.</p>
<p>Copyright, The Miami Herald; email to [email protected].</p>
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<p /> | Carson’s comments trivialize agony of slavery | false | https://abqjournal.com/965057/carsons-comments-trivialize-agony-of-slavery.html | 2 |
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<p>House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon, whose panel oversees a lot of defense pork, has spent much of the debt-ceiling debate fending off attacks on military spending. When the compromise bill emerged Wednesday, he put out <a href="http://armedservices.house.gov/index.cfm/2011/8/mckeon-statement-on-the-debt-ceiling-compromise" type="external">another blistering press release</a> that raged against its Pentagon-paring provisions:</p>
<p>Our senior military commanders have been unanimous in their concerns that deeper cuts could break the force.&#160; I take their position seriously and the funding levels in this bill won’t make their job easier… There is no scenario in the second phase of this proposal that does not turn a debt crisis into a national security crisis. Defense cannot sustain any additional cuts either from the joint committee or the sequestration trigger.</p>
<p>McKeon then proceeded to vote “Yes” on the debt-ceiling compromise bill, calling it “the least bad proposal before us.”</p>
<p>So, if you think a bill is certain to make America less safe, why would you vote for it? I asked an Armed Services GOP&#160;staffer that question <a href="http://twitter.com/AdamWeinstein/statuses/98164185724239872" type="external">on Twitter</a>.</p>
<p>His full <a href="http://twitter.com/noonanjo/statuses/98168248431951872" type="external">reply</a>: “you get the press release?”</p>
<p>I’ll have more tomorrow on the impact this debt deal will actually have on US&#160;defense. Assuming no one attacks us in the meantime, of course.</p>
<p /> | HASC Chairman: Debt Bill Will Cause War | true | https://motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/hasc-chairman-debt-bill-will-cause-war/ | 2011-08-01 | 4 |
<p>Wikipedia is big news in college, Texas textbooks go the way of toilet paper and the NPR strike we never saw coming.</p>
<p>On a regular basis, Truthdig brings you the news items and odds and ends that found their way to Larry Gross, director of the USC Annenberg School for Communication. A specialist in media and culture, art and communication, visual communication and media portrayals of minorities, Gross helped found the field of gay and lesbian studies.</p>
<p>The links below open in a new window. Newer ones are on top.</p>
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<p>More than half of college students frequently or always consult Wikipedia for course-related research, according to a report published in First Monday, an online, peer-reviewed journal.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/03/15/israel/print.html" type="external">U.S.-Israel rift undermining some long-standing taboos</a> The remarkable tensions of the last week make it increasingly difficult to deny key facts.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2010/3/15/headlines#9" type="external">As Texas textbooks go, so goes the nation’s education?</a> Conservatives on the Texas Board of Education have approved a series of major changes to the state’s social studies curriculum. The new curriculum stresses the superiority of American capitalism, questions the separation of church and state, and presents Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.dclabor.org/" type="external">NPR Union busting?</a> Gusting winds and drizzling rain failed to dampen the spirits of dozens of broadcast technicians and audio engineers at National Public Radio who walked the picket line at noon yesterday chanting “Hey hey, ho ho, union busting has got to go” in front of NPR’s Massachusetts Avenue headquarters.</p> | NPR Strike Edition | true | https://truthdig.com/articles/npr-strike-edition/ | 2010-03-17 | 4 |
<p>Bon Jovi was celebrating Monday after being named the most successful live act of 2010, earning $146.5 million from their tours, according to Billboard magazine.</p>
<p>The rock band made the money between Nov. 20, 2009, and Nov. 28, 2010, by selling 1,591,154 tickets over 69 sell-out gigs in their The Circle tour.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Fans go to the band’s concerts “because they've seen it before and they're willing to spend their disposable dollars," singer Jon Bon Jovi, 48, told the magazine.</p>
<p>The band achieved the same top tour rating in 2008, earning $210 million for the “Lost Highway” tour, suggesting the group is hitting its touring peak 26 years after releasing its debut album.</p>
<p>Jon Bon Jovi added, "It's funny, because there's obviously a part of you that's very proud of it. In the industry it means something; it doesn't mean anything to the public. But in the industry, all your peers are going to look at it.”</p>
<p>Irish band U2, which came second place in the chart, “are paying attention," the singer claimed.</p>
<p>Pop star Lady GaGa also featured high on the list of 2010's highest earning tour acts, earning $116.2 from her "Monster Ball Tour."</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Read more: <a href="http://www.billboard.com/features/bon-jovi-billboard-s-top-touring-act-of-1004134335.story#/features/top-25-tours-2010-1004134022.story" type="external">http://www.billboard.com/features/bon-jovi-billboard-s-top-touring-act-of-1004134335.story#/features/top-25-tours-2010-1004134022.story Opens a New Window.</a></p> | Bon Jovi Named World's Highest-Earning Tour Act of 2010: Report | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2010/12/13/bon-jovi-named-worlds-highest-earning-tour-act-report.html | 2016-03-18 | 0 |
<p>Trump supporters sure were in for a surprise at the aptly-named “Deploraball” on Thursday, when protesters projected an unflattering message on the side of the National Press Club just as supporters attempted to “sieg heil” The Donald&#160;without any interruption from those who exist outside their hateful little bubble.</p>
<p>As white supremacists, people who love white supremacists, and pro-Trump Sheriff David Clarke joined together in a diverse crowd of white people to celebrate Trump’s ascension to Grand Wizard of the U.S. of A., protesters outside had a little bit of fun with technology, projecting the sort of messaging that sends their leader into an uncontrollable Twitter rage.</p>
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<p>“Resist, protect, create,” one message read. Another urged our leaders to “impeach the predatory President.” One of them, which Trump fans would describe as “crazy light pictures what has some of them words on them,” reminded everyone that Trump routinely brags about grabbing women by their genitals.</p>
<p>During these next four years, it is important that we never allow a white supremacist party for a President who got where he by is sowing seeds of fear and spewing hate speech to become normal. Every time&#160;this sort of thing happens, it is our duty to our country to show up and denounce it. It’s going to be rough for us for quite some time, but if we fight hard against the Deplorables and their sick ideology, we can ensure a brighter future for our country some time after 2020.</p>
<p>Featured image via Twitter</p> | Protesters Just Trolled Trump’s ‘Deploraball’ SO F*cking Hard You Have To See It To Believe It (VIDEO) | true | http://addictinginfo.org/2017/01/20/protesters-just-trolled-trumps-deploraball-so-fcking-hard-you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it-video/ | 2017-01-20 | 4 |
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<p>In a development that may qualify for Ironic Event of the Century, the saddest country on earth is looking into banning expressions of sadness. The Moscow Times <a href="http://www.themoscowtimes.com/article/1010/42/368995.htm" type="external">reports</a> that the Russian Duma is considering legislation that would regulate emo-themed websites and ban the neo-gothic dress and hair styles typical of the scene from schools and government buildings. The legislators claim that emo culture is “negative” and encourages anti-social behavior, to which a million My Chemical Romance fans say “duh,” and also may lead to depression and suicide, to which I say, “not nearly as often as you’d like.” Awww, sorry, too soon?</p>
<p>In case you’re wondering what the hell emo even is these days, the proposed bill helps define it:</p>
<p>Emos, according to the bill, are from 12 to 16 years old and wear black and pink clothing. They have black hair with long bangs that “cover half the face,” black fingernails, black belts peppered with studs and pins, and ear and eyebrow piercings, the bill says. The “negative ideology” of emo culture may push young people toward depression and social withdrawal, and the movement carries a significant risk of suicide… The bill also outlines what it calls a “spiritual and ethical crisis” facing Russian youth, including the high rate of alcohol abuse, teen abortions and “negative youth movements.”</p>
<p>I’d just like to point out that spending more than 30 minutes in Russia carries a significant risk of suicide. Anyway, fans in Krasnoyarsk <a href="http://www.mnweekly.ru/national/20080724/55338868.html" type="external">protested</a> in an oh-so-adorable emo way, by pasting strips of red tape over their mouths and holding up signs that read, no lie, “Kill the State in Yourself.” I don’t even know what that means, but I think it’s the title of the next Panic at the Disco album.</p>
<p>Okay, I love to poke fun at the emo kids but I’d much rather have Russian youth piercing their noses and jamming out to <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyDd6pQP40A" type="external">MAIO</a> than joining <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashi_(Ours)" type="external">Nashi</a>. However, as the country <a href="http://geography.about.com/od/obtainpopulationdata/a/russiapop.htm" type="external">empties out</a>, it’s probably only a matter of time before Nashi membership is mandatory, if only for repopulation purposes. Enjoy your floppy bangs while you can, russkies!</p>
<p /> | Russian Lawmakers Draft Bill to Ban Emo, Immediately Turning Everyone Emo | true | https://motherjones.com/politics/2008/07/russian-lawmakers-draft-bill-ban-emo-immediately-turning-everyone-emo/ | 2008-07-24 | 4 |
<p>For the third month in a row, figures coming in from the Department of Labor signal a stronger recovery in the employment market than the country has seen in years. President Obama gets a boost from the good news, but is there any way to read these numbers differently? And who’s benefiting the most? Here’s a breakdown from The New York Times.</p>
<p>The New York Times:</p>
<p>The economy added 227,000 jobs in February, the Labor Department reported Friday, and though the unemployment rate held steady at 8.3 percent, that was largely because nearly half a million people had joined, or resumed, the search for work in hopes their prospects had improved.</p>
<p>“We’ve seen a lot less Eeyore,” said Sherry Leginski, operations director at CareerPlace, a job placement center in the Chicago suburb of Barrington. “Maybe they’re turning a little bit more Tigger instead of Eeyore. They’re feeling better.”</p>
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<p>[…] There were job gains across a broad swath of industries, including manufacturing, finance, professional services like law and accounting, hotels and restaurants, and mining. The construction industry lost jobs after two months of gains, and the retail sector shrank. For black men, the jobless rate increased, to 14.3 percent from 12.7 percent, while the biggest employment gains went to whites, black women and, overwhelmingly, to college graduates.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/10/business/economy/us-added-227000-jobs-last-month-rate-at-8-3.html?_r=1&amp;hp" type="external">Read more</a></p> | More Good News on Jobs for February | true | https://truthdig.com/articles/more-good-news-on-jobs-for-february/ | 2012-03-10 | 4 |
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<p>In case anyone was under the illusion that the health insurance situation is improving in this country, a recently-released Commonwealth Fund <a href="http://www.cmwf.org/publications/publications_show.htm?doc_id=367876" type="external">report</a> sets things straight. 37 percent of low-income workers are currently uninsured, up from 33 percent in 2001. And the number of low-income workers who have gone without insurance at some point in the past year is 53 percent. This despite the fact that Medicaid is ostensibly supposed to help cover this group (it doesn’t, of course, and has way too many gaps to be fully effective, but that’s another story).</p>
<p>“Moderate income” workers, making between $20,000 and $40,000 a year, aren’t doing too well either—the number of uninsured has risen from 17 percent five years ago to 28 percent today. And this all matters: more than half of all uninsured adults have debt or medical bill problems. 59 percent of uninsured adults with a chronic illness had to skip a treatment or a prescription. Those adults are much more likely to go to an emergency room than those with insurance. It’s a crisis.</p>
<p /> | Ranks of Uninsured Growing | true | https://motherjones.com/politics/2006/04/ranks-uninsured-growing/ | 2006-04-26 | 4 |
<p><a href="http://pienews.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/OLY.jpg" type="external" />Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg's dream of having the Olympic flame burn in New York is flickering back to life. Gov. Cuomo acknowledged Wednesday that he is mulling whether to make a push to lure the 2024 Summer Games to the Big Apple. "We are looking at it," Cuomo said [?]</p>
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<p><a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/gov-cuomo-mulling-2024-summer-olympics-push-nyc-article-1.1792759" type="external">Click here to view original web page at www.nydailynews.com</a></p>
<p /> | 2024 Olympics Coming To NYC? | true | http://politicalillusionsexposed.com/gov-cuomo-considering-push-to-bring-2024-summer-olympics-to-new-york-city/ | 0 |
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<p>What in the world was Kerry doing with his face and fingers during Netanyahu's remarks?</p>
<p>Video embedded in <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2014/01/04/Netanyahu-Lectures-Thumb-Twiddling-Kerry-On-Unapologetic-Palestinian-Terror-Tactics" type="external">Breitbart: Netanyahu Lectures Thumb-Twiddling Kerry on Unapologetic Palestinian Terror Tactics</a></p>
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<p>And his fingers?</p>
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<p>Maybe he needs to see a dermatologist.</p>
<p>Or a psychiatrist?</p>
<p>Kerry seems to have three obsessions:</p>
<p>1) Windsurfing (see pic)</p>
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<p>2) Global Warming "Climate Change" - via Business Insider: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/john-kerry-to-pursue-climate-change-treaty-in-2015-2014-1" type="external">John Kerry Is Going To Pursue A Climate Change Treaty in 2015</a></p>
<p>3) Pushing a peace treaty on the Israelis and "Palestinians" - via Yahoo: <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/kerry-says-making-progress-towards-israeli-palestinian-framework-152824331.html;_ylt=A0oG7j9ZH8pS0RsA8JdXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTBscWN2ZnBjBHNlYwNzYwRjb2xvA2FjMgR2dGlkAw--" type="external">Kerry sees progress on Israeli-Palestinian framework deal</a></p>
<p>Apparently, no one has alerted him to the latest news:</p>
<p>CNN: <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/05/us/winter-weather/index.html" type="external">Polar blast barrels across the United States</a></p>
<p>Times of Israel: <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/upbeat-kerry-says-some-progress-made-in-peace-talks/" type="external">Abbas said to reject Kerry call to recognize Israel as Jewish state</a></p> | true | http://tammybruce.com/2014/01/video-john-kerry-our-secretary-of-thumb-twitching-or-something.html | 0 |
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<p>Another fake election is over, and no one should be surprised at the results. What do I mean by “fake” you ask? Well, just look at what has transpired in the weeks leading up to “election” day:</p>
<p>Florida prevented 91,000 legally registered voters from casting their ballots, and the majority of them were people of color. They did this by using the already discredited and politically questionable list of felons and dead people that they used to rig the 2000 election for the governor’s brother. In Minnesota, the corporate-controlled media prevented a Libertarian candidate from participating in the crucial debate between a tired old Democrat and the anointed business candidate . . . this is a state with a sitting Libertarian governor. Poor candidates were completely drowned out in a tidal wave of special interest campaign money, much of which was collected directly by Bush himself. U.S. taxpayer money was used to fly Bush and his cronies around the country so they could spread more fear with their rhetoric about terrorists and the imminent destruction of all things American by Middle Easterners. For some mysterious reason, no exit polling data was released. Thus, particularly in precincts that used computer terminals for voting, there was no way to determine how much fraud was being committed by election officials. The power elite and their media lackeys intentionally obscured real issues, like the loss of jobs, corporate graft that is robbing our pension plans, and the devastation caused by a phony war on drugs.</p>
<p>I could go on, but you already know the story. The real question is “What are you going to do about it?” Are you going to roll over like just another wage slave, or are you going to stand up and be counted? For now, you still have a choice, but if you assume you can wait until November of 2004 to do something about the death of democracy in this country, you have already lost.</p>
<p>It is time for us to be brutally honest with ourselves. We are being lied to by the media and by almost every politician in Washington. Of course, the lies are extremely well packaged. For example, look at how skillfully the Bush-Cheney junta forced Congress to spend most of the pre-election period in a debate about whether we should abandon everything this once great nation stood for and adopt a first strike policy. Striking out in blind fear, as Congress has authorized our emperor to do, is simply un-American. How anyone could vote for a member of Congress that supported a first strike policy is beyond me. Yet almost all of those fearful and cowardly congress-people who voted for this insane policy were re-elected.</p>
<p>If we are to have any hope at all of unseating the oligarchy and returning to a republic, we must act now . . . TODAY! What makes you think you can wait another two years to effect change? We have already seen how a crazed, military-trained sniper can paralyze a city. If such a madman were loose in your city next election day, would you go out to vote? When you think about all of the insidious ways the will of the people can be thwarted on election day, it isn’t hard to see that the usurpers who have captured the machinery of our government don’t have to declare martial law to keep us in check. All they need is a few homegrown terrorists and a media machine to fuel the fear, and we sheep will remain indoors, watching sitcoms and dreaming about our new SUVs.</p>
<p>Are you an American or a slave? Are you going to sit behind your double-locked doors until November 2004 and hope for the best, or are you going to stand up and be counted? We have a war to stop! We have a democracy to restore! And we can’t do it by staying home and watching TV.</p>
<p>If we can’t trust the government, and if we can’t trust the news media, whom can we trust? Each other! We can and should trust the common sense of one another. The days of quietly keeping your opinions to yourself at work, church, school, and in other public places is over. The moment has arrived for each and every one of us to speak out. To me, there is no discernable difference any more between the Democrats and the Republicans, but that doesn’t mean I have no choices at the polls. I think we actually have a three party system: Green, Libertarian, and Rebublicrat. But I don’t think those first two parties will have much of a chance unless we begin today to rebuild a free America. In November 2004, our cry will be “To the Polls.” Until then, the best way to let the world know that there are still some freedom-loving people in this country is to turn out into the streets. First we demonstrate our unwillingness to send our children to be slaughtered in a quest to enrich a few oil companies and their military cousins like the Carlyle Group. Once we have prevented the Bush-Cheney junta from depleting our treasury and spilling innocent blood, we can focus on the important business of restoring democracy to this land.</p>
<p>Let our cry not be “Poor me. What can I do,” but “TO THE BARRICADES!”</p>
<p>LORENZO HAGERTY can be reached at: <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
<p>Copyright (C) 2002 by LORENZO HAGERTY</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | To the Barricades! | true | https://counterpunch.org/2002/11/07/to-the-barricades/ | 2002-11-07 | 4 |
<p>Hiring increased in 11 U.S. states in July, while the unemployment rate tumbled to record lows in two states.</p>
<p>The Labor Department said Friday that unemployment rates were relatively stable in most states. They fell in 15 states and rose in 23, but many of the changes were statistically insignificant.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>The jobs report for states reflects the steady job gains in a recovery from the Great Recession that has entered its ninth year. The overall unemployment rate fell to 4.3 percent last month as employers added 209,000.</p>
<p>Several states saw strong job growth between June and July. California added 82,600 jobs. Florida gained 32,700. Pennsylvania saw hiring of 29,000.</p>
<p>North Dakota's unemployment rate fell to 2.2 percent, a record low. Tennessee's rate of 3.4 percent is also a record low for that state.</p>
<p>When unemployment drops that to that low level, businesses may be forced to raise pay to compete for talented workers. So far, wage gains nationwide remain at about 2.5 percent a year, below the 3.5 percent pace normally associated with a healthy economy. But inflation has stayed relatively low, so the wage growth is still leaving many workers better off</p>
<p>Over the past year, Oregon, Arkansas, Florida, New Hampshire, Utah and Texas saw the largest percentage job gains — with growth of at least 2.4 percent. Texas added the most jobs in the past 12 months: 293,400.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>Alaska's unemployment rate of 7.0 percent is the nation's highest, followed by New Mexico at 6.3 percent.</p>
<p>The unemployment rate fell by 1.4 percentage points in Indiana, Tennessee and Wyoming over the past year — the biggest declines in the country.</p> | 11 US states added jobs in July | true | http://foxbusiness.com/politics/2017/08/18/11-us-states-added-jobs-in-july.html | 2017-08-18 | 0 |
<p>The budget deal that emerged this week was crafted to win support of Democrats and Republicans alike, and that's simply a bridge too far for one tea party congressman.</p>
<p>"This bill is not designed to get our vote," Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-SC)&#160; <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/366064/house-conservatives-ryan-murray-deal-isnt-designed-get-our-vote-betsy-woodruff" type="external">said</a> Wednesday at a meeting hosted by the Heritage Foundation. "This bill is designed to pass with bipartisan support in the House."</p>
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<p>The <a href="" type="internal">deal</a>, hashed out by Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), has been <a href="" type="internal">met with stiff resistance</a> by many in the GOP's most conservative wing.</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Heritage Action</a>, the powerful political arm of the Heritage Foundation, came out against the budget and right-wing firebrand Brent Bozell <a href="" type="internal">predicted</a> that the budget will cause the GOP's conservative base to "stampede away from a party that has lost its principles and bearings."</p>
<p>Mulvaney's comments encapsulate the spirit of a movement typified by ideological rigidity more than compromise. A <a href="" type="internal">poll</a> in September found 71 percent of tea party Republicans preferred lawmakers to stand by their principles even at the risk of a government shutdown.</p> | GOP Rep Upset That Budget Deal Was 'Designed To Pass With Bipartisan Support' | true | http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/gop-rep-upset-that-budget-deal-was-designed-to-pass-with-bipartisan-support | 4 |
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<p>On a warm evening in early April, a rally on Washington, DC’s Capitol Hill took a turn for the dramatic when protestors surged into Constitution Avenue, blocking rush-hour traffic. U.S. Capitol police arrested 41 of the demonstrators, among them District of Columbia Mayor Vince Gray and six members of the DC Council.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Protests in Washington are a common sight, but one featuring the arrest of much of the city’s elected leadership is not. Their grievance: As part of the deal to prevent a shutdown of the federal government, Congress — with the acquiescence of President Obama — had just banned the District from using its own money to pay for abortions for low-income women, and had revived a private-school voucher program that many local officials and residents opposed. "John, I will give you DC abortion," Obama was quoted by the Washington Post as telling House Speaker John Boehner,[1] words that outraged DC residents, most of whom were — or had been until that moment — strong supporters of the President. Once again, DC residents were reminded of the extent to which they lack the rights of other U.S. citizens.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; It’s a sad fact, but too few Americans are aware that their nation’s capital is a colony within the mainland of our country — "the Canal Zone in the United States," in the words of the late Congressman Adam Clayton Powell.[2] Since the District of Columbia’s founding more than two centuries ago, the city’s residents have been denied the democratic rights that Americans living in the 50 states take for granted, including voting representation in Congress and control over their own legislation, budgets, courts, and prison system. Among all countries with elected national legislatures, only the United States denies voting representation to the citizens of its nation’s capital.[3] District residents could not even vote for President until 1964, after the ratification of the 23rd Amendment to the Constitution. However, DC residents — unlike those of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the other overseas U.S. colonies — pay their full share of federal income taxes, among the highest per-capita in the country.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; While the budget deal was the trigger for the April demonstrations, two centuries of disenfranchisement were the fuel. And for Mayor Gray and many of the other protestors, the demonstration was not only to register outrage but also to promote a solution: making DC the 51st state.</p>
<p>Origins of DC’s Disenfranchisement</p>
<p>The story of the District of Columbia’s struggle against disenfranchisement goes back nearly to the founding of the republic. Just after the end of the American Revolution, as Congress was gathered in Philadelphia debating, among other issues, where to locate the permanent seat of government, an incident occurred that influenced the future course of relations between the national government and the not-yet-embryonic capital city. In June 1783 a group of armed Continental Army soldiers marched on the State House, seat of both Congress and the Pennsylvania Executive Council, demanding back pay for their service in the Revolution. Congress, which had no armed force under its control, demanded that the Executive Council call out the state militia to confront the soldiers, but the Council refused, instead meeting with a delegation of the soldiers and defusing the tension.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; A number of members of Congress, notably Alexander Hamilton, cited the incident as evidence that the capital needed to be under the firm control of Congress, and this notion was soon the consensus among the early nation’s leadership. But was it justified? A number of historians have concluded that Hamilton and his allies had always wanted Congress to control the capital city, and manipulated the Philadelphia incident to build their case. By some accounts, Congress was under no real threat of harm, but Hamilton exaggerated the danger in order to gain control of the future capital for Congress.[4]</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; As a result, at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 — at which Hamilton played a leading role — the delegates adopted the following clause, which became part of the U.S. Constitution when it was ratified the following year: "Congress shall have power . . .to exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten miles square) as may, by cession of particular states, and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States. . ." The spot chosen was a 10-mile-square diamond of land on the Potomac River, just north of George Washington’s estate, with land ceded by Maryland and Virginia.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; This paragraph had the effect of consigning the residents of the future District of Columbia — only about 11,000 at its founding (including the existing cities of Alexandria on the Virginia side of the river and Georgetown, formerly part of Maryland)[5] but numbering more than 600,000 today — to more than two centuries of barely second-class citizenship. Yet while certain members of the Constitutional Convention were determined that the federal government have firm control over the capital, a number of founding fathers made clear that they did not envision the complete disenfranchisement of the capital’s residents. "The inhabitants [of the capital] will have their voice in the election of the government which is to exercise authority over them, as a municipal legislature for local purposes, derived from their own suffrages, will of course be allowed them," wrote James Madison in Federalist Paper No. 43. In Federalist Paper No. 85, Hamilton added that "[p]rovision shall be made by Congress for having District representation in that Body" when the population reached some unspecified number.[6]</p>
<p>Early History under Congressional Rule</p>
<p>Over the ensuing two centuries, the issue of DC’s disenfranchisement was periodically addressed by DC residents and federal officials alike. With the Revolutionary War slogan "No Taxation Without Representation" still a fresh memory, DC residents issued the same complaint immediately after their congressional voting rights in Maryland or Virginia were revoked in 1801.[7] These complaints resulted in no representation, but Congress did grant Washington an elected council in 1802 and an elected mayor in 1820, albeit with Congress still ultimately exercising legislative control. The Virginia side of DC was eager to become part of a state again, as much to prevent abolitionists in Congress from freeing their slaves as to regain full citizenship, and Congress granted its wish in 1846, returning the territory to slaveholding Virginia.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Nevertheless, there were reasons why demands for expanded local autonomy were fairly muted in those days. In the city’s early days, many of the residents were new arrivals (an even larger proportion than today), drawn by the opportunities opened by the presence of the government; these people had little interest in local issues. And then there was the matter of race.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Race has been a major factor in the District’s quest for equality, as it has in so many facets of American life. As early as 1800, the District had a substantial African-American population, both free and enslaved. After the Civil War, Congress granted local voting rights to African-Americans in the District. This provoked resistance among whites in DC, many of whom preferred disenfranchisement to being governed by blacks (and Radical Republicans, elected with substantial black support, controlled the local government from 1868 to 1870).[8] As a result, there was little objection from whites when Congress established a territorial government in 1871, with a federally appointed governor and upper house of the legislature, nor in 1874 when Congress ended all vestiges of local democracy and established a three-member, federally appointed commission to oversee the District. This was the way DC would be governed for the next century.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Even so, during these years there were numerous pleas from DC residents for home rule and congressional representation. But these requests largely fell on deaf ears in Congress. And as the African-American population swelled after World War II, Congress — with DC affairs overseen by largely Southern legislators such as John McMillan, a Jim Crow Democrat from South Carolina — had even less interest in helping the District. The late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, a longtime friend of expanded political rights for the District, cited the "four ‘toos’" as a reason that certain members of Congress opposed greater democratic rights, especially voting representation: they feared that members of Congress elected from DC "would be too liberal, too urban, too black, and too Democratic."[9]</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; The owners of large businesses in the District, represented by the Greater Washington Board of Trade, also stood in the way of home rule. They were comfortable with congressional oversight and fought any proposal to create a local government that might have the power to interfere with their ability to do as they pleased. "The white business community . . . held more political power than the three commissioners," wrote journalists Harry S. Jaffe and Tom Sherwood, longtime observers of DC politics. "The businessmen simply leapfrogged the commissioners and went straight to McMillan’s committee."[10]</p>
<p>Civil Rights Movement Comes to DC</p>
<p>During the 1950s and 1960s, many African-American civil-rights activists moved to DC to work with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and other organizations. Once they arrived and experienced the disenfranchisement that came with living in the District, many became involved in the campaign for local democracy. The experience and energy these activists brought with them infused new life into an old struggle.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; One of the new arrivals was Marion Barry, an activist from Tennessee who moved to DC in 1965 to open a branch office of SNCC. Barry quickly became involved in local issues, organizing a one-day boycott against the local bus operator over a fare hike in 1966. Shortly afterward he dove into the struggle for self-government for the District, launching the "Free DC" movement. Because the Board of Trade opposed home rule, Barry demanded that local businesses (which were mostly white-owned) display stickers in support of a local elected government, or face a customer boycott if they did not. This in-your-face activism and the wide publicity it generated established Barry as a political force in the District.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; By the late 1960s, a number of developments had turned in the District’s favor, most significantly the home-rule movement’s becoming linked to the nationwide civil rights movement, and a national government — with Lyndon Johnson in the White House and strong Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress — more supportive than ever before of the aspirations of African-Americans and, by extension, those of the District, with a population at the time that was more than 70 percent black.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Then, on April 4, 1968, came the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the ensuing riots. Washington was not the only city to experience rioting after the assassination, but the violence was especially severe in the nation’s capital, with 12 deaths and millions of dollars in property damage, most of it in predominantly African-American neighborhoods.[11]</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Was it only coincidental that Congress, in the several years following the riots, approved more legislation to advance DC political rights than ever before or since? While the riots were not triggered by the lack of home rule, clearly there had been a simmering frustration in the majority African-American city with Congress’ heavy-handed control that contributed to the anger and intensity of the riots. The uprising served as a wake-up call to members of Congress, who realized that their own safety depended on calm and order in the city where they conducted their business and many of them lived — and that law enforcement alone might not be sufficient to keep the peace. "For once, someone in power was actually afraid of this city," journalist Sam Smith commented.[12]</p>
<p>Between 1968 and 1974, Congress approved legislation giving DC an elected school board, a delegate to the House of Representatives (who could serve on and vote in committees, but not on the House floor), and finally, with the Home Rule Act, a mayor and 13-member council to be elected by District voters. The first election for the new local government took place in 1974. Marion Barry, who had been one of the first elected school board members, was elected to the DC Council, while Walter Washington was elected mayor.</p>
<p>Beyond Home Rule</p>
<p>Most District residents welcomed these new avenues of civic participation, but many realized that the new rights still left them short of full citizenship. Instead of home rule, District residents had been handed "home fool," in the derisive words of Councilmember Julius Hobson.[13] DC’s representative to the House had no floor vote (the same arrangement made for the U.S. overseas colonies) and the District had no voice in the Senate at all. In addition, Congress still retained its constitutional "exclusive legislation" authority over the District; legislation and budgets adopted by the local Council were still subject to congressional review, and Congress, if it wished, could simply enact legislation and impose it on the District, whether local residents wanted it or not.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; And Congress made extensive use of its legislative control, often the work of Republicans eager to win points with their constituencies by imposing conservative social policies on the mostly liberal, Democratic District. Over the subsequent years it blocked numerous initiatives of the DC government, mostly through riders on the local DC appropriations bill (even though only a small percentage of the DC budget consists of federal funding, Congress must approve the entire budget — including funds raised through local taxes — through an annual appropriations bill). Many of these budget riders targeted policies adopted by the liberal-to-progressive District government that Congress, usually during periods of Republican control, found distasteful. These riders blocked such local initiatives as a medical marijuana program, city benefits for the unmarried domestic partners of DC employees, and needle exchange programs for intravenous drug users to prevent the spread of HIV and AIDS. The latter prohibition, while satisfying the need of some members of Congress to pander to conservative constituencies in their home districts, has had especially deadly consequences for DC residents: 3 percent of District residents are infected with HIV or AIDS, the highest rate of any city in the nation.[14]</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Yet even before the first Home Rule government had settled into its offices, a number of local leaders and activists had begun discussing how the District might advance beyond the unsatisfactory limitations of "home fool." By the early 1970s, three competing ideas each had gained a substantial number of adherents: (1) returning, or "retroceding," most of the District to Maryland; (2) a constitutional amendment for full voting representation in both the House and Senate; and (3) making the District the 51st U.S. state.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; There was a precedent for retrocession: the return of Virginia’s portion of the District in 1846. Return of the remainder to Maryland, with the carve-out of federal lands and properties to satisfy the constitutional requirement for a federal district, would provide voting representation in Congress through Maryland’s delegation. It also would end the federal government’s legislative control of the retroceded territory, although in its place the city would inherit the Maryland state government’s oversight. However, polls consistently have shown that the majority of District residents don’t want to be part of Maryland, and most Marylanders don’t want the District.[15] Given these feelings, somehow forcing a shotgun marriage between the two jurisdictions would be the most blatant offense against self-determination.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; The idea of the constitutional amendment for voting representation had greater support, and advocates of DC voting representation — spearheaded by then-DC Delegate Walter Fauntroy — succeeded in lobbying Congress to approve a constitutional amendment in 1978 that would give the District two voting senators and one voting member of the House. However, the amendment was ratified by only 16 states, well short of the required 38, and died when the seven-year ratification window closed in 1985.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Yet even before the constitutional amendment was taken up by Congress, a number of DC citizens were hatching a different solution for their disenfranchisement: statehood.</p>
<p>Growth of DC Statehood Movement</p>
<p>Why apparently no one proposed DC statehood prior to the 1970s could be laid to a variety of factors: the District’s small size and population, and its economic dependence on the federal government, were certainly major considerations. But by the 1970s the District was a much different place than it had been during the Reconstruction era, or even prior to World War II. It had a population of over 700,000, larger than that of 10 states, with tax revenues sufficient to support a variety of local programs without depending on federal support.</p>
<p>The idea of seeking statehood for the District first appeared in print in 1970, advocated by Sam Smith in his newsletter DC Gazette.[16] But would it be legal or constitutional for the District of Columbia to become a state? Statehood supporters, as well as a number of constitutional lawyers, argued that it would be.[17] The Constitution sets a maximum limit on the size of the federal district (10 miles square, or 100 square miles) but no minimum size. The original 100-square-mile District already had been sliced to 68 square miles following the return of Virginia’s portion. Therefore, it should be possible to further reduce the constitutionally mandated "district" to the uninhabited areas of central Washington where federal buildings, museums and monuments were located (the same argument made by the retrocessionists) and to allow the populated portions of the District to become a separate state.</p>
<p>The statehood movement gained momentum through the 1970s — there was even a local political party, the Statehood Party, launched with the achievement of statehood as a principal goal. Julius Hobson, running as a Statehood Party candidate, was elected in 1974 as a member of the first DC Council under home rule; after his death in 1977, Statehood Party member Hilda H.M. Mason succeeded him and served another two decades. The election of Marion Barry, a Democrat, as mayor in 1978 was cause for further optimism among statehood supporters: the founder of the Free DC movement, a charismatic politician with deep support in the African-American community as well as substantial backing from the white establishment, was now the public face of the District.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; The next step was to petition Congress for statehood. In 1980 statehood backers placed a referendum on the ballot to determine if voters supported statehood; 60 percent voted yes.[18] Two years later a convention of elected citizens drew up a constitution for the new state-in-the-making — to be called New Columbia.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Getting citizen approval for statehood was one thing; actually achieving statehood was another. Many District elected officials, still wedded to pursuing only voting representation in Congress, did not regard statehood as a priority (although there were exceptions, notably Mason). Also, the 1980s were a time of Republican control of the White House — first Ronald Reagan, then George H.W. Bush — making it likely that any statehood bill that survived Congress would die by veto.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; By 1993, however, the political balance in Washington had shifted. Bill Clinton, a Democrat who professed support for DC statehood, was in the White House, and both houses of Congress had strong Democratic majorities. Many DC statehood advocates saw this as a propitious time to move forward — Democrats in Congress should be eager to allow the heavily Democratic District to add members to their caucuses in the House and Senate.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; But, justified or not, many members of Congress, including some Democrats, concluded that the District was not ready for statehood. A fiscal crisis was unfolding in the District, one exacerbated by the inherent limitations of an enclave under control of the federal government. The District was prohibited by Congress from assessing a tax on the income of suburban commuters, costing the city more than $2 billion annually in potential revenue. A high proportion of the District’s land was occupied by entities that paid no property tax — principally the federal government, but also embassies, international institutions, and non-profit organizations. Moreover, as part of the 1974 home rule bill, the federal government had saddled the local government with unfunded liability for the pensions of DC government employees, a mounting bill that had grown to $4.8 billion by 1997.[19] These handicaps, along with the continued flight of the District’s tax base to the suburbs, had by the mid-1990s led to steep and growing budget deficits.[20]</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; In addition, crime was rising steeply in the District — as it was across most of urban America — fueled by the rise of crack cocaine. The crack epidemic, which was sweeping cities across the United States, hit DC especially hard, bringing with a wave of violent crime that gave the District the unwanted nickname of the "Murder Capital" of America. And then, in 1990, Mayor Barry was arrested in an FBI sting for possession of crack. It was a dark moment for the District and its hopes of expanded self-rule.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Nevertheless, after several years of effort by Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, the statehood bill reached the floor of the House of Representatives in 1993. But with the reputation of the nation’s capital at an all-time low, many congressional Democrats felt the time was not ripe for DC statehood. The bill failed, 153 to 277, with 40 percent of House Democrats, along with nearly every Republican, voting no.[21]</p>
<p>DC Democracy Moves Backward</p>
<p>Over the next several years, the District’s reputation on Capitol Hill only grew worse. Barry had left office in 1991 — en route to trial for drug possession and six months in prison — but under new mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly crime continued to rise and the fiscal crisis snowballed. Public dissatisfaction with Kelly’s administration led to her defeat for re-election in 1994, to be replaced by — Marion Barry.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Barry’s comeback from his drug conviction to reclaim the mayor’s office is one of the remarkable political stories of recent decades. Clearly, many African-American voters saw their own experiences reflected in the FBI sting against Barry. They felt themselves frequently targeted for harassment by the police, and resented the harsh penalties and aggressive enforcement against crack possession — while users of cocaine powder, who were much more likely to be white and affluent, faced much more lenient potential penalties and relatively lax enforcement. While members of Congress and many white Washingtonians were appalled by Barry’s return to power, many African-Americans saw Barry’s rehabilitation as a story of justice and redemption.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; The redemption narrative, however, found few sympathizers on Capitol Hill. And Congress retaliated against the District for making what it considered the "wrong" choice in the election. In 1995 it created a Control Board and endowed it with complete authority over the District’s finances — DC would need the board’s approval before spending any of its own money. In 1996 Congress transferred control over DC schools from the elected school board to a Board of Trustees, answerable not to voters but to the Control Board. And in 1997 Congress went further by effectively stripping the local government of nearly all its powers, making the Control Board not only the financial authority of the District but the legislative and executive arms as well. The mayor and council continued to show up for work, but they had virtually no power.</p>
<p>Assaults on DC Revive the Democracy Struggle</p>
<p>The DC government may have lost its powers, but the movement for greater local autonomy — which had gone into eclipse after the failed statehood vote — was energized by the congressional power grab. Immediately after the news broke, citizens began meeting to organize demonstrations and discuss strategy. The most visible and enduring organization to arise out of the 1997 activities was the Stand Up! for Democracy in DC Coalition, which was led initially by a number of prominent figures from the civil rights movement (including Jesse Jackson Sr., Walter Fauntroy, and National Council of Negro Women President Dorothy Height) and which borrowed its slogan — "Free DC!" — from Barry’s former organization. Indeed, many of Stand Up!s early members were Barry supporters angry at the federal government’s stripping away of his powers. Yet Stand Up! also attracted many longtime statehood and democracy activists who remained active in the movement longer after Barry, and many Barry supporters, had moved on.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; In August 1997, Stand Up! helped to organize a bus caravan to North Carolina. Their target: Republican Senator Lauch Faircloth, the architect of the bill that stripped the District government of its local powers. Some 600 DC activists brought the District’s concerns directly to Faircloth’s constituents, registering them to vote and educating them about how much of their Senator’s schedule was occupied by the affairs of a jurisdiction 300 hundred miles distant from those he was allegedly representing. (The trip no doubt played at least a small part in Faircloth’s defeat by John Edwards for re-election the following year). For much of the rest of that year, Stand Up! and its allies held almost-weekly demonstrations against Congress, many of them resulting in participants being arrested.[22]</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; With the end of the 1990s came three developments that, along with the more vigorous pro-democracy activism, offered greater hope for expansion of DC’s right to govern itself: (1) improvements in the national economy that erased the red ink of past decades and yielded local budget surpluses, (2) a sharp drop in the crime rate; and (3) Marion Barry’s departure as mayor. Barry was replaced as mayor by Tony Williams, who rose to prominence as the Control Board-appointed chief financial officer and the reputed financial wizard who put the District’s tattered finances back in order. Congress approved of DC’s selection and restored the governing powers of the mayor, council, and school board — that is, to their pre-1997 state, still subject to intervention by Congress and the still-operating Control Board, but with much more room to maneuver than during Barry’s final term. Then in 2001, after several years of prosperity and four consecutive balanced DC budgets, the Control Board closed its doors.</p>
<p>Statehood vs. Congressional Representation</p>
<p>Yet for much of the following decade, the focus drifted away from full statehood and toward a plan to achieve only voting representation in Congress. The shift became apparent after 20 DC residents filed a federal lawsuit in 1998 asking for the courts to make it possible for DC residents to either choose statehood or to unite with another state. Hard on its heels came a competing lawsuit, filed by a different group of residents, asking only for congressional representation. The federal courts combined the two suits, where they were eventually rejected by the Supreme Court.[23]</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; The prospects of congressional representation received a boost when Rep. Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican and chairman of one of the House committees overseeing DC affairs, took up the cause. Davis was not a supporter of statehood, in part because his constituents would be subject to the commuter tax that the new state would be likely to adopt. But he was more sympathetic to the District’s plight than most Republicans, and he saw an opportunity to make voting representation for the District palatable to members of his party. Following the 2000 census, Utah fell just short of being able to add another congressional district. Creating an additional congressional district in predominantly Republican Utah while at the same time giving overwhelmingly Democratic DC a voting seat would, David hoped, allow for bipartisan support for DC voting representation.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; And so in 2005, Davis introduced a bill to expand the House from 435 to 437 members, with the added seats going to Utah and the District. The bill would provide no representation in the Senate and would not address other aspects of the District’s disenfranchisement, such as congressional control of the District’s legislation and budgets.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Many of DC’s statehood advocates were, at best, lukewarm about the Davis bill; many complained that it would leave them far short of — and divert attention from the struggle for — full citizenship. But the bill gained support from most DC elected officials, including the mayor and Delegate Norton, for whom a deal on the table was preferable to chasing a distant dream. But there was another factor, largely tied up in the politics of race and class. Affluent, well-connected Washingtonians — mostly white — had long resented their lack of a vote for Congress, but many were less than enthusiastic about the idea of giving the local government more authority. Just as whites in the post-Civil War District were opposed to opening the door even a crack to African-American political empowerment, so were many whites a century later mistrustful of African-American leadership. Many white DC residents who worked on Capitol Hill, in federal agencies or for the various lobbying firms and pressure groups had connections to members of Congress or their senior staffers — often they were neighbors. These Washingtonians who had connections and knowledge of how to work the system appreciated their ability to go over the heads of the local government if its actions displeased them. "One of the city’s deepest secrets is how many of its elites — both white and black — have never really liked the idea of self-government. They would rather use their Rolodexes than the ballot box," wrote Sam Smith in 1998.[24]</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; In addition, Washington — more so than most large cities — features a large elite class of newly arrived political appointees, Congressional staffers, public-interest workers and others with a strong desire to have a voice on Capitol Hill but little interest in local government. "The city’s mandarin class is mainly interested in national politics. It is perfectly happy to have city services provided under a dictatorship but is frustrated by its lack of leverage in Congress," Smith wrote.[25] Among these elites were the large, Board-of-Trade connected corporations doing business in DC (many of them headquartered elsewhere) who, like in the days of Barry’s Free DC movement, opposed an empowered local government that could challenge their prerogatives. Mere voting representation posed no similar threat to their interests.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Also, Barry’s return to the mayor’s office after his drug conviction — in which he received heavy support from blacks but very little from whites — led many whites to believe (whether justified or not) that they would achieve better results being ruled from Congress than by their own locally elected government.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Despite elite support for the voting-rights bill, a number of constitutional scholars and other critics of the bill— many of whom were sympathetic to the District’s effort to end its disenfranchisement — pointed to its dubious constitutionality.[26] The language of the Constitution clearly referred to the right to vote for members of Congress as deriving from statehood (Article 1, Section 1 reads: "The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States"). If simple legislation was sufficient, why had the District previously taken the much harder (and ultimately unsuccessful) route of a constitutional amendment?</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Nevertheless, District leaders and a newly formed advocacy group, DC Vote (which was heavily funded by DC government grants), lobbied Congress for passage of the Davis bill. They argued that pairing a vote for DC with an additional House seat for Utah gave the bill a good chance to be enacted, a much better chance than a bill for full statehood — which, they argued, could be pursued at some unidentified time in the future. They also produced their own legal experts who vouched for the bill’s constitutionality. Delegate Norton argued that the District would not be ready for statehood until it regained control of state-type functions such as prisons and courts, which the federal government had taken over in 1997 as a measure to help balance the local budget. Statehood advocates countered by pointing out that statehood would open new streams of revenue to the District, especially a commuter tax, enabling the new state to re-assume and pay for these functions.\</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Voting-rights advocates were still trying to push the Davis bill through Congress when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. The accession of a Democratic, African-American, reputedly liberal president to the White House energized activists in the capital city whose residents shared so many of his characteristics. The District had favored Obama with 93 percent of its vote in the election, and had reason to expect Obama would reciprocate by making expanded rights for DC a priority. Indeed, on a number of occasions Obama stated his support for statehood, including in a brief exchange with Stand Up! President Anise Jenkins. But it was never more than passive support; the economic recession, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the new health-care initiative dominated the White House agenda during the early Obama years.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; However, the Davis voting-rights bill gained adherents, and in 2009 the Senate approved the legislation — with a catch. Members of Congress allied to the gun lobby had long attempted to repeal the District’s restrictions on ownership of handguns, among the strongest in the nation. Gun laws are the province of state governments, but given the District’s colonial status, Congress can impose measures on the District that they cannot in their own districts, or anywhere else in the country. A 2008 Supreme Court decision had struck down some of the more stringent provisions, but the District still required guns to be registered and kept in the home. So the pro-gun Senators, led by Republican John Ensign of Nevada (who later resigned after it was discovered that he had paid hush money to a former staffer to keep quiet about an affair the senator was having with his wife), tied an amendment to the voting rights bill, which would effectively eliminate all restrictions on guns in the District. If passed, all manner of unregistered guns, including assault weapons, could be concealed or carried in the open practically everywhere in the District, including into schools, playgrounds and DC government buildings (but not the U.S. Capitol; the members’ appreciation for the proliferation of guns didn’t extend that far).</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; This was too much for the District leadership to swallow, even in exchange for voting rights. Delegate Norton, after failing to strip the gun provision from the House version of the bill, in 2010 asked the House leadership to drop the legislation. Five years of lobbying, compromises and deal cutting to win voting representation in the House had come to naught. The death of the voting-rights bill was an illustration of its own limitations: while it would have given the District one vote out of 437 in the House, it still would have left DC subject to the legislative whims of Congress.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Hard on the heels of the defeat of the voting rights bill came the 2010 congressional elections, in which Republicans took control of the House — with many of the new members coming out of, or lending an ear to, the hard-right Tea Party movement. Any prospects for expanded DC rights through congressional legislation had evaporated — indeed; the District now would have to defend itself against a new round of onslaughts against its limited home rule.</p>
<p>2011 and Beyond — Statehood Takes Center Stage</p>
<p>Yet these setbacks may have pointed the way forward for the DC democracy movement. With the backroom dealing on Capitol Hill over the voting rights bill having come to naught, there is a growing realization that the District cannot rely on "friends" in Congress or the White House, and that more of the impetus for change will have to come from local residents themselves. A stronger, more assertive movement is needed, the kind that was displayed in the April arrests. Ultimately, the disenfranchised District of Columbia must make its voice heard throughout the country and the world, striking the consciences of all people who cherish democracy and human rights. If Americans could subject themselves to arrest for democracy in South Africa, or be willing to fight to remove a dictator in Iraq, surely they could join the movement for equal rights for 600,000 U.S. citizens in the nation’s capital.</p>
<p>Another lesson of the voting rights debacle is that settling for half-measures is a fool’s errand (perhaps a "home fool’s" errand, to paraphrase Julius Hobson). Under the Constitution, only statehood confers full citizenship in the United States. That is the path chosen by District citizens, and more residents and elected officials are coming to the realization that statehood, and nothing less, should be the goal.</p>
<p>After the defeat of the one-vote bill, Delegate Norton reintroduced legislation for voting representation — but along with it, a bill for DC statehood. "We accept no imposed limits on our equal rights as American citizens, and we will pursue them all until the day when there is no difference in citizenship between the residents of the District of Columbia and other American citizens," Norton said in introducing the legislation.[27] Although there was little immediate prospect of any of the bills passing, or even getting a hearing, her decision to revive the statehood effort in Congress was evidence of the growing voice of the local statehood movement.</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; In his inaugural address last January, Mayor Gray signaled the DC leadership’s new outlook when he said, "Washington is the greatest symbol of our nation’s democracy. Yet, we as Washingtonians continue to be the only people in our nation that remain shut out of that democracy. . . That is why we cannot rest until we achieve true self-determination and become our nation’s 51st state."[28]</p>
<p>&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Now that there is no near-term prospect of favorable action by Congress, DC activists and officials should turn their attention to organizing the citizens of DC, and reaching out to supporters of human rights everywhere, in order to build a powerful movement to achieve what the District wants and needs — statehood. The day will come when the makeup of Congress will lead it to be more sympathetic to the District’s appeal for statehood. But DC will win the day only if the local statehood movement is strong enough to force Congress to do the right thing.</p>
<p>Let's engage the children of DC in a statewide RENAMING CONTEST.&#160; What two words or names with the initials DC will replace "District of Columbia" once we are a State?&#160; Second, let's RENAME the Mayor's Office the Governor's Office, and our Council a Legislature or House of Delegates.&#160; These may seem small things ... but they will psychologically engergize the general public that is generally apathetic ... even unaware ... about these concerns ... as most corporate media outlets ... be they print, radio, TV, or Internet ... pretend that all that's been written about above so eloquently is suffused with ho-hum unimportance ...</p>
<p>What about "District County" for DC?</p>
<p>There are still major issues to be dealt with before statehood can happen.&#160; The residual District of Columbia in the statehood bill needs to be pared back to just the&#160;Congressional office buildings so that all potential are taxpayers are included in any non-resident income tax (not even the White House, Supreme Court and Library of Congress should be spared being part of New Columbia).&#160; The issue of that tax should also be dealt with first, along with a solution to the problem of DC felons in federal custody and federal mental patients in DC custody.&#160; The answer to these issues is the same - trade a non-resident tax for having it fund Maryland and Virginia housing our felons and assisting us with mental health and offender supervision.&#160; The final issue is calling the Republican bluff on retrocession by including a vote by the Maryland General Assembly on retrocession in the statehood bill.&#160; Since we are sure that they will vote no, it is a no-brainer to include it.&#160; The other thing DC needs to do is to insist that the President appoint an Administrator for the National Capital Service Area so that we can present the federal government with a bill for all the services DC provided to the NCSA which were meant to be reimburesed under Home Fool.</p>
<p><a href="/filter/tips" type="external">More information about formatting options</a></p> | The District of Columbia: From the Oldest Colony to the 51st State? | true | http://newpol.org/node/595 | 4 |
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<p>BRUSSELS — You know those awkward large family dinners around the holidays, with the one loud, boorish relative that everyone dreads but is studiously polite to? In the picturesque cobblestone-lined streets of Brussels, that’s what NATO officials are expecting when President <a href="" type="internal">Donald Trump</a> visits in roughly two months’ time.</p>
<p>“He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t care,” one top Western official told The Daily Beast.</p>
<p>“At least Tillerson knows what he doesn’t know, and he’s keeping his mouth shut,” the official said of <a href="" type="internal">Secretary of State Rex Tillerson</a>, citing preliminary conversations with the former oil executive.</p>
<p>“We’re worried about what [Trump] might promise,” or what he might be goaded or baited into pledging, said a U.S. official.</p>
<p>All of the officials interviewed spoke anonymously in order to speak frankly about unclassified matters, fearing, as do many serving officials, future retaliation by the Trump administration.</p>
<p>The Secretary of State was clearing the way for Trump’s visit with his Friday trip to Brussels, but European officials are still bracing for an unwelcome public dressing down when Trump gets here, and the way the Friday meeting came about hasn’t helped.</p>
<p>Tillerson followed Art of the Deal-style rules by forcing a change in the date when all 28 NATO foreign ministers would meet, moving it to this Friday, though it was originally scheduled next week. The White House said Tillerson couldn’t attend then because it conflicts with the Chinese premier’s visit to Washington. So, everyone else had to change their schedules to accommodate the American.</p>
<p>NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the fact that he was coming at all shows “a clear signal” that the U.S. values NATO, but the message received by other NATO representatives was that Washington calls the shots.</p>
<p>When he arrived, Tillerson repeated his boss’s mantra that NATO members have to do more to fight terrorism, and that they also have to map out exactly how they plan to ramp up to investing 2 percent of their GDP in defense in the next decade, or sooner.</p>
<p>“Our goal should be to agree at the May leaders meeting that by the end of the year all allies will have either met the pledge guidelines or will have developed plans that clearly articulate how, with annual milestone progress commitments, the pledge will be fulfilled,” he told the ministers.</p>
<p>All 28 NATO members already committed at the 2014 Wales Summit to reach the full investment target by 2024, but Trump as well as Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May have said other countries are not moving fast enough, a bit like being reminded by your neighbor that you said you’d paint your house sometime this year.</p>
<p>“Unfortunately, whether it’s intended or not, Secretary Tillerson has some ground to make up because of the president’s views on NATO,” said Derek Chollet, a former Obama administration official now at the German Marshall Fund. It didn’t help that after meeting with Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, Trump tweeted that Germany owes “vast sums of money to NATO &amp; the United States must be paid.”</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>That was strongly rebuffed by German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen, who explained in a statement that “there is no debt account in NATO,” i.e. <a href="" type="internal">Trump misunderstood that each country is supposed to invest that 2 percent of GDP in its own military</a>, not send it to an uber-NATO budget. It’s not a question of “dues.”</p>
<p>“The defense spending also goes to UN peace missions, into European missions, and towards our contributions to the fight against ISIS terrorism,” she said.</p>
<p>“While we’ve been trying to get our allies to spend more since the ’90s, I think the way Trump’s been going about it has been counterproductive,” says Mark Jacobson, former NATO senior civilian representative to Afghanistan. “While only five out of 28 are spending 2 percent, you motivate with a private scolding,” he said, adding that what Germany had done was making sure they have a smaller, but expeditionary force. “Two percent doesn’t mean squat if your forces aren’t deployable.... It’s an imperfect metric.”</p>
<p>NATO members also don’t appreciate the lecture when they feel like they’ve already invested heavily in fighting terrorism, losing roughly 1,000 troops in the war in Afghanistan. They were answering Washington’s call to fight the Taliban and al Qaeda after the 9/11 attacks, the first time NATO’s Article 5 ever was triggered.</p>
<p>But the nagging from Uncle Sam is preferable to what many NATO members feared—that the Trump administration would look the other way on the annexation of Crimea simply to achieve better relations with Russia.</p>
<p>“We no longer think they’ll do that,” one of the top Western officials said, because of reassuring anti-Moscow comments in closed-door conversations with Vice President Mike Pence and Defense Secretary James Mattis in Munich.</p>
<p>It’s the wild-card tweets and offhand comments that have NATO—and American—officials worried.</p>
<p>“We just never know what he’s going to say,” one of the senior Western officials said.</p>
<p>“I always thought that the word of the president of the United States was the ultimate guarantor of NATO,” said British Parliamentarian and ex-UKIP Brexiteer Douglas Carswell, someone who would have seemed a natural ally for Trump. “I look at [his] tweets, and I’m not quite sure what the word of the president of the United States constitutes anymore,” he told an audience at the Marshall Fund’s Brussels Forum last week.</p>
<p>White House press secretary Sean Spicer, announcing Trump’s attendance at the upcoming NATO meeting, insisted Trump is looking forward to the chance to “reaffirm our strong commitment to NATO, and to discuss issues critical to the alliance, especially Allied responsibility sharing and NATO’s role in the fight against terrorism.”</p>
<p>There’s a fear among U.S. officials that Trump may get in over his head, and be baited into promising more than the U.S. can deliver.</p>
<p>One U.S. official imagined a conversation like the French asking, "Mr. President, we really need help from your military to stop the refugee flow," and Trump replying, "We have the greatest military in the world. Absolutely." And then sending U.S. warships to help. What he would likely not be aware of is that if refugees get picked up by U.S. warships, they have to be flown to the United States, and repatriated from U.S. soil.</p> | Can Tillerson Ease NATO’s Trump Fears in Brussels? | true | https://thedailybeast.com/can-tillerson-ease-natos-trump-fears-in-brussels | 2018-10-06 | 4 |
<p>Strong winds gusting over 70 mph triggered deadly accidents Tuesday in Nevada and Utah, including a 17-vehicle pileup that killed one person and injured at least 16 others, authorities said.</p>
<p>The winds were expected to move Wednesday onto southern Utah and Las Vegas down to Yuma, Arizona.</p>
<p>Gusts and dust wreaked havoc on Utah's Interstate 80 on Tuesday, knocking over several semi-trucks. Six semis and 11 passenger vehicles were involved in a chain-reaction crash in Tooele County, Utah, the state Highway Patrol told <a href="https://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&amp;sid=34237223" type="external">NBC station KSL of Salt Lake City</a>. A second semi then hit the pile, causing more collisions behind it. A man in one of the passenger vehicles was killed, and other people were taken to hospitals for treatment, the Highway Patrol said.</p>
<p>In all, as many as eight semis overturned or were involved in accidents on I-80, several of them dumping their contents into the roadway, Transportation Department spokesman John Gleason told NBC News. The interstate's eastbound lanes were reopened late Tuesday afternoon.</p>
<p>Rocky Mountain Power said the winds caused widespread damage to its equipment and facilities in Utah. Almost 15,000 customers remained without power at 4:30 p.m. (6:30 p.m. ET), the utility said.</p>
<p>Gusts up to 40 mph snapped the top off a power pole in Churchill County, Nevada, according to NV Energy, which reported that about 425 Nevada customers were without power. The Nevada Transportation Department recorded a 70-mph gust near Baker and Great Basin National Park.</p>
<p>High winds forced a British Airways from London Heathrow Airport bound for Las Vegas to be diverted to Ontario International Airport in California, the airline said.</p>
<p>The National Weather Service said the winds were part of a strong spring system that was expected to continue until near midnight in Utah and Nevada — and simultaneously, a moderate-to-strong Santa Ana wind system was moving across Southern California.</p>
<p>Strong winds pushed a 185-acre wildfire northwest of Reno from private land to the edge of Plumas National Forest in Northern California, the U.S. Forest Service said. No injuries were reported and no homes were thought to be in danger as more than 150 firefighters responded to the blaze.</p>
<p>Wind advisories were issued for the Las Vegas Valley west to the San Gabriel Mountains in Southern California, including the U.S. military's National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, and the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms, California.</p>
<p>California fire officials increased staffing as the weather service issued a red flag warning for high winds moving into the Los Angeles Basin through Thursday.</p> | High Winds Topple Trucks in Utah and Nevada; 1 Dead, 16 Hurt | false | http://nbcnews.com/news/weather/high-winds-topple-trucks-close-highways-utah-nevada-n341541 | 2015-04-15 | 3 |
<p>Image: AP/Wide World Photos</p>
<p />
<p>A generation ago, when Robert Mugabe rid his country of the racist legacy of Cecil Rhodes, the newly renamed nation of Zimbabwe served as a democratic inspiration to its neighbors in southern Africa. Today, the tiny white minority is irrelevant — but the overwhelming black majority remains powerless to remove Mugabe, who is again seeking reelection as president. Critics of the 78-year-old leader are routinely jailed and beaten by government goons, and those who oppose Mugabe are accused of engaging in “terrorism.”</p>
<p>Near the top of Mugabe’s terrorist list is Geoff Nyarota. The wry, soft-spoken newspaper editor doesn’t seem like much of a bomb thrower. In fact, the bombs are usually thrown at him: His printing presses were destroyed in an arson attack in January 2001, and explosives were hurled at his office the previous April. Yet Nyarota’s Daily News has never missed an edition. Three years after its founding, it is now widely considered the one indispensable paper in a country where most news media operate under strict official control. And, by all accounts, it drives Mugabe crazy.</p>
<p>Even before the 51-year-old Nyarota started the News, the Mugabe regime had been enraged by his exposés in other newspapers of official corruption, from illicit sales of government cars by politicians to graft-laden real-estate scams. The scoops were usually followed by Nyarota’s departure, at the behest of the nervous publishers. But these days, backed by a group of trusted associates, Nyarota is his own boss.</p>
<p>State prosecutors arrested Nyarota three times last year alone — but the outcry from readers at home and colleagues abroad has always sparked his quick release. “There is no way anything negative can quietly happen to the Daily News now without provoking international reaction,” Nyarota says by phone from Harare. This year will be a test, though. Mugabe is pressing lawmakers to pass his Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Bill requiring state accreditation of journalists and imposing jail terms on unlicensed reporters, including foreign correspondents. Mugabe has already banned BBC crews and forced out wire-service reporters, ordering foreign journalists to get their “dirty, interfering hands” out of his country’s affairs.</p>
<p>When Nyarota received journalism prizes in London and New York last fall, he took the opportunity to chastise the big media corporations that had underwritten his awards. “What amazes Zimbabwean journalists is how easily foreign media have accepted this,” he told a gathering of network anchors and magazine and newspaper editors in November. “Unlike the departed correspondents, they have no other home to go back to. They wait, like sheep to be slaughtered, for the day when the police pay them a nocturnal visit, or the peace of their newsroom is shattered by another bomb.”</p>
<p>The crackdown on journalists is not the only story being overlooked by the international press, Nyarota notes. Thousands of Zimbabweans, born on some of the world’s most fertile farmlands, are now facing starvation — and Nyarota has published extensive reports proving that the state police have supervised the ostensibly spontaneous mobs that have seized farms. After the stories appeared, Nyarota and three of his Daily News colleagues were arrested under the charge of publishing “rumor or false information likely to discredit security forces.” A few days later a judge dismissed the charges.</p>
<p>Despite the hazards, Nyarota has no problem recruiting aspiring journalists. “I worry constantly about the security of my staff,” he says. “It is really my greatest concern, and there is not much I can do. But so far, only one person has left out of fear. The younger reporters tell me that working on the Daily News is a privilege. I don’t know that this is true, but it is gratifying to hear.”</p>
<p />
<p /> | The Journalist and the Dictator | true | https://motherjones.com/politics/2002/03/journalist-and-dictator/ | 2018-03-01 | 4 |
<p>Published time: 14 Nov, 2017 05:21</p>
<p>To force RT America to register as a foreign agent is “unprecedented,” Georgetown University journalism professor Chris Chambers says. The law used against the network was first used to combat Nazi propaganda, but has never been applied to a news network.</p>
<p>RT America host Ed Schultz spoke with Chambers on Monday, following a similar reaction from the Committee to Protect Journalists, which called the US government’s designation of RT America under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) “a troubling precedent” and a “bad idea.”</p>
<p>FARA became law in 1938, when the US sought to prevent Nazi propaganda before officially entering World War II. The 79-year-old law has never been used against a news network.</p>
<p>Read more</p>
<p><a href="https://www.rt.com/news/409780-rt-foreign-agent-reactions/" type="external" /></p>
<p>Schultz said it was “selectively applied to RT to put pressure on perspectives some people in the government, especially Democrats, would rather not hear.”</p>
<p>“Now this is coming from, I believe, Democratic senators such as Jeanne Shaheen and Amy Klobuchar, who supported Hillary Clinton to the hilt and want to retaliate against the Trump presidency. That’s my opinion,” Schultz said on ‘News with Ed’ Monday night.</p>
<p>“It should be pointed out that no employee from RT has ever been invited to testify under oath on Capitol Hill,” Schultz continued. “I ask tonight, where’s the fairness? Because Google and Facebook testified openly just within the last 10 days that RT had a minimal footprint in social media leading up to the election.”</p>
<p>Schultz added that “no one in Congress has pointed to any stories that we have done that are not journalistically-based, that are not fair to the viewer.”</p>
<p>[embedded content]</p>
<p>Chambers estimated that the law has been used “maybe 20 times in 70 years.”</p>
<p>“Basically, you register as a lobbyist or some other organization that is supposedly speaking for another country and another country’s best interests,” he said.</p>
<p>“It’s not the government coming after you with full fangs and claws. It’s the government coming at you like a weasel,” Chambers said. “There’s a difference between a lion coming after you with full fangs and claws and a weasel coming after you through the backdoor. And this is basically backdoor censorship.”</p>
<p>RT America “has the same First Amendment rights as Comcast Universal does with NBC,” Chambers told Schultz. “But they can’t infringe on those rights without doing a backdoor to RT, because they don’t like the content. I mean, it’s clear that they don’t like the content.”</p>
<p>“If it’s a problem with a foreign media outlet,” he continued, “why isn’t it done to the BBC? Why isn’t it done to China national television or the Japanese or any number of other media outlets that, say, the Saudis might contribute to?”</p>
<p>[embedded content]</p> | US used ‘backdoor censorship,’ attacked RT ‘like a weasel’ – journalism prof (VIDEO) | false | https://newsline.com/us-used-backdoor-censorship-attacked-rt-like-a-weasel-journalism-prof-video/ | 2017-11-14 | 1 |
<p>In recent decades, the Republican party has been a vehicle — imperfect, like all human institutions, but serviceable — for promoting causes at the center of Catholic social concern in the United States: (1) providing legal protection for unborn children, the physically disabled and cognitively handicapped, the frail elderly, and other victims of what Saint John Paul II branded “the culture of death”; (2) defending religious freedom in the face of unprecedented assaults by officials at every level of government who have made themselves the enemies of conscience; (3) rebuilding our marriage culture, based on a sound understanding of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife; and (4) re-establishing constitutional and limited government, according to the core Catholic social-ethical principle of subsidiarity. There have been frustrations along the way, to be sure; no political party perfectly embodies Catholic social doctrine. But there have also been successes, and at the beginning of the current presidential electoral cycle, it seemed possible that further progress in defending and advancing these noble causes was possible through the instrument of the Republican party.</p>
<p>That possibility is now in grave danger. And so are those causes.</p>
<p>Donald Trump is manifestly unfit to be president of the United States. His campaign has already driven our politics down to new levels of vulgarity. His appeals to racial and ethnic fears and prejudice are offensive to any genuinely Catholic sensibility. He promised to order U.S. military personnel to torture terrorist suspects and to kill terrorists’ families — actions condemned by the Church and policies that would bring shame upon our country. And there is nothing in his campaign or his previous record that gives us grounds for confidence that he genuinely shares our commitments to the right to life, to religious freedom and the rights of conscience, to rebuilding the marriage culture, or to subsidiarity and the principle of limited constitutional government.</p>
<p>We understand that many good people, including Catholics, have been attracted to the Trump campaign because the candidate speaks to issues of legitimate and genuine concern: wage stagnation, grossly incompetent governance, profligate governmental spending, the breakdown of immigration law, inept foreign policy, stifling “political correctness” — for starters.&#160;There are indeed many reasons to be concerned about the future of our country, and to be angry at political leaders and other elites. We urge our fellow Catholics and all our fellow citizens to consider, however, that there are candidates for the Republican nomination who are far more likely than Mr. Trump to address these concerns, and who do not exhibit his vulgarity, oafishness, shocking ignorance, and — we do not hesitate to use the word — demagoguery.</p>
<p>Mr. Trump’s record and his campaign show us no promise of greatness; they promise only the further degradation of our politics and our culture. We urge our fellow Catholics and all our fellow citizens to reject his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination by supporting a genuinely reformist candidate.</p>
<p>Robert P. George McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence Princeton University</p>
<p>George Weigel Distinguished Senior Fellow and William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies Ethics and Public Policy Center</p>
<p>and</p>
<p>Ryan T. Anderson William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow The Heritage Foundation</p>
<p>Stephen M. Barr University of Delaware</p>
<p>Francis J. Beckwith Professor of Philosophy and Church–State Studies Baylor University</p>
<p>Mary Ellen Bork Ethics and Public Policy Center Board</p>
<p>Gerard V. Bradley Professor of Law University of Notre Dame</p>
<p>Don J. Briel John Henry Newman Chair of Liberal Arts University of Mary</p>
<p>Brian Burch President, CatholicVote.org.</p>
<p>James C. Capretta Senior Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center</p>
<p>Joseph Cella Founder, National Catholic Prayer Breakfast</p>
<p>Grazie Pozo Christie, M.D. The Catholic Association</p>
<p>Ann Corkery Founder, Catholic&#160;Voices USA</p>
<p>Neil Corkery Sudan Relief Fund</p>
<p>David Paul Deavel Interim Editor, Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture</p>
<p>Mary Eberstadt Senior Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center</p>
<p>Eduardo Echeverria Professor of Philosophy and Systematic Theology Sacred Heart Major Seminary</p>
<p>Thomas F. Farr Director, Religious Freedom Project Georgetown University</p>
<p>Matthew J. Franck Director, William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution, Witherspoon Institute</p>
<p>Anna Halpine Founder, World Youth Alliance</p>
<p>Mary Rice Hasson Director, Catholic Women’s Forum, Ethics and Public Policy Center</p>
<p>Stephen J. Heaney Associate Professor of Philosophy University of St. Thomas</p>
<p>John P. Hittinger Pope John Paul II Forum, Center for Thomistic Studies University of St. Thomas</p>
<p>Elizabeth M. Kelly Managing Editor, Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture</p>
<p>Rachel Lu Senior Contributor, The Federalist</p>
<p>Bruce D. Marshall Lehman Professor of Christian Doctrine Perkins School of Theology Southern Methodist University</p>
<p>Robert T. Miller Professor of Law and F. Arnold Daum Fellow in Corporate Law University of Iowa College of Law</p>
<p>Kate O’Beirne Former Washington Editor, National Review</p>
<p>C. C. Pecknold The Catholic University of America</p>
<p>Robert Royal Faith and Reason Institute</p>
<p>Deborah Savage Professor of Philosophy and Theology University of St. Thomas</p>
<p>Timothy Samuel Shah Religious Freedom Project Georgetown University</p>
<p>Nina Shea Director, Center for Religious Freedom Hudson Institute</p>
<p>Hilary Towers Developmental psychologist and author</p>
<p>David R. Upham Associate Professor of Politics University of Dallas</p>
<p>Edward Whelan Ethics and Public Policy Center</p>
<p>Stephen P. White Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center</p>
<p>Titles and affiliations of each individual are provided for identification purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individual signatories and do not necessarily represent the views of any organization or entity.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington, D.C.’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies. Robert P. George holds Princeton University’s McCormick Chair in Jurisprudence and is the founding director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He also serves as vice chairman of&#160;EPPC’s board of directors.</p> | An Appeal to Our Fellow Catholics | false | https://eppc.org/publications/an-appeal-to-our-fellow-catholics/ | 1 |
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<p>How The Progressive Left Is Sodomizing The Military It has taken them many decades of wrangling, but the pro-Gay, Progressive Left under Obama has finally gotten a toe-hold deep within the US military. They are there to make serious and profound changes in how our military functions. They are on a seek-and-destroy mission to neutralize their enemy. Who is their enemy, you ask? It is anyone who stands in the way of the pro-Gay agenda, but especially the bible-believing Christian and Jew who stand for the truth of the bible and hetrosexual marriage. Soldiers who believe and uphold the truths of the Bible will be driven out as soon as they are identified. But please, don't take my word for it, listen to the threatening words of Lt. General Bostick - "Those serving who oppose the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) agenda are no longer welcome." Lt. Gen. Bostick - 9/16/10</p>
<p>"Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire." <a href="javascript:;" type="external">Jude 1</a> Christian and Jewish Bible-believers to be purged from the military On December 18, 2010, the US Senate voted to repeal the military laws regarding homosexuality. Starting late last Summer, as it appeared the laws were going to be revoked, both military and civilian leaders started to make startling comments about what was going to happen when it was repealed. These comments made it clear that the Hard Left was going to use homosexuality to purge the Christians out of the military. The military will be purged of anyone, from private to general, who will not go along with the Hard Left agenda. They were not going to allow chaplains to remain in the military who said that homosexuality was a sin. Vast sections of the American public are now in great danger as the Hard Left will be in control of the entire United States military. This is a danger Americans never had to face until now. This is going to be a real purge, just as Stalin and all the tyrants in the past purged anyone who they even suspected might be a threat to them. The tyrants would simply kill their opposition or send them to a forced reeducation camp. The American purge is going to be much more subtle. There will be no bloodshed as it will be silent and cunning. Anyone in the military who speaks out will be court-marshaled, demoted, harassed or by whatever way possible forced to resign. The military will be purged of anyone, from private to general, who will not go along with the Hard Left agenda. The military that remains will be morally beaten down and with soldiers that are godless; thus leaving the military without a soul. These will be the type of soldiers who will do whatever they are told. These are the type of soldiers who could be used against the American people. Please do not think that the Hard Left would not use the American military against the people. The Left hates Christians with a passion that is only matched for Nazis towards the Jews. They hate and despise Christians for standing against abortion and homosexuality. They hate anyone who is in any way associated with the Holy God of Israel. You can see this hatred on college campuses, the political left and in the media. Now, they are going to be in control of the US military with all of its power. Obama signs the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, thus ushering in the "rainbow age" of the US Military</p> Lt. Gen. Bos tick - Read Part 1:
<a href="the-strategic-implications-of-american-millennialism.htm" type="external">US Military Now Identifies Bible Believers As Threat To Nat'l Security</a> Read Part 2: Read Part 3 Read Part 4 | How The Progressive Left Is Sodomizing The Military How The Progressive Left Is Sodomizing The Military Declaration of God's Holiness To the United States of America | true | http://nowtheendbegins.com/writers/john-mcternan/sodomizing-the-military.htm | 0 |
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<p>Political turmoil suggests Trump faces uphill battle in executing tax reform</p>
<p>It was good while it lasted.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Almost seven months to the day President Donald Trump took office, his "Make America Great Again" agenda has been eclipsed by political turmoil that is threatening to unravel a record-breaking rally in stocks.</p>
<p>After a chaotic few days that culminated with the resignation of White House strategist Stephen Bannon (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bannon-out-as-white-house-chief-strategist-2017-08-18), doubts over whether the embattled president will be able to deliver on his business-friendly policies have started to seep into the market.</p>
<p>"The country is very divided. The Congress is at war with the president," said Ian Winer, head of the equities division at Wedbush Securities. "This week opened up the possibility that nothing will happen [on the policy front] throughout the next four years."</p>
<p>Much of the market's gains since Trump's election win have been underpinned by hopes that the president will push through tax cuts and roll back regulations that had hobbled U.S. corporations.</p>
<p>But that all changed as Trump's combative style increasingly alienated those within his own party, making it more difficult for the president to secure legislative support for something as complex as tax reforms, said Brad McMillan, chief investment officer at Commonwealth Financial Network.</p>
<p>Advertisement</p>
<p>"I would not rule it out entirely, but I think the chances are pretty low at this point," McMillan said. Any hope for a tax overhaul is now "dead and buried," in his view.</p>
<p>Stocks closed lower on Friday (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/dow-set-to-fight-for-direction-but-flirts-with-biggest-two-week-drop-in-nearly-a-year-2017-08-18), falling for a second straight week in another sign that investors' confidence in Trump's economic leadership may be floundering.</p>
<p>There are other bearish signals, too.</p>
<p>The Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Dow Transportation Average are continuing to diverge, suggesting that stocks may be headed for a rough patch. In a robust market, benchmarks should move higher in tandem and serve to confirm each other, according to the Dow Theory.</p>
<p>After an extended period of calm, recent sessions have been punctuated by dramatic swings in the index.</p>
<p>As Frank Cappelleri, a technical strategist at Instinet LLC, points out, three of the seven 1% moves in the S&amp;P 500 this year occurred in the past few days, hinting at emotionally driven trades,</p>
<p>"The cluster of large moves, increased volatility and widening divergences between the S&amp;P 500 and the smaller cap indexes have made the market environment appear more ominous in my opinion," said Cappelleri.</p>
<p>Read:Bad news for the stock market: The Hindenburg Omen is back (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bad-news-stock-marketthe-hindenburg-omen-is-back-2017-08-17)</p>
<p>Most market dips this year have been countered with resurgent demand for stocks, which had been forceful enough to push stocks to new highs. However, if similar buying does not materialize after this most recent drop, it will be a clear sign that "the market's character has changed," he said.</p>
<p>Still, there are die-hard bulls who refuse to throw in the towel.</p>
<p>Andrew Adams, market strategist at Raymond James, remains steadfast in his belief that the market's upward trajectory is on track.</p>
<p>"Our secular bull market thesis remains intact despite the action over the last two weeks. The current dip is not unexpected at all given the historically-long duration of the run we've been on since the election and the weakening under the surface of the market the last few weeks," said Adams.</p>
<p>The strategist, in fact, believes politics are a convenient scapegoat for bears and investors should not read too much into the market's recent stumble given that it coincides with the end of the earnings season.</p>
<p>"This is probably just a round of profit-taking exacerbated by a lack of positive earnings news to counterbalance the negativity, and that the market still likely has a relatively high floor to how low it will fall," he said.</p>
<p>Adams is advising his clients to stay cautious in the near-term, but not bearish.</p>
<p>(END) Dow Jones Newswires</p>
<p>August 20, 2017 20:08 ET (00:08 GMT)</p> | MARKET SNAPSHOT: Stock Market's Record-setting Rally At Risk As Doubts Grow Over Trump Agenda | true | http://foxbusiness.com/features/2017/08/19/market-snapshot-stock-markets-record-setting-rally-at-risk-as-doubts-grow-over-trump-agenda.html | 2017-08-20 | 0 |
<p>Associated PressSteve Falk, the Chronicle's new publisher, says the paper has 500 more workers than other publications its size. A newsroom union rep estimates the possible job cuts would be in the hundreds, ultimately affecting every department. Falk tells staffers in a memo: "We will use the 'win-win' bargaining process with our unions to achieve the changes we need to have a great and successful newspaper."</p> | San Francisco Chronicle may cut up to 500 jobs | false | https://poynter.org/news/san-francisco-chronicle-may-cut-500-jobs | 2003-03-19 | 2 |
<p>James T. Hodgkinson, 66, of Belleville, Illinois, who allegedly <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/reports-shooting-at-congressional-baseball-practice" type="external">attacked members of Congress on Wednesday morning</a> at a baseball practice, had a history of violence even before his shooting rampage.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/congressional-shooter-loved-bernie-sanders-hated-racist-and-sexist-republicans" type="external">The Daily Beast</a> cited a police report stating that Hodgkinson was arrested in 2006 for domestic battery and discharge of a firearm because he punched a man’s girlfriend “in the face with a closed fist.” Hodgkinson also aimed a shotgun at the man, firing one round.</p>
<p>The same police report asserted that Hodgkinson was also “observed throwing” an unidentified minor, whom police identified as his daughter, “around the bedroom” After she got loose, Hodgkinson followed and “started hitting her arms, pulling her hair, and started grabbing her off the <a href="http://www.walmart.com/search/?query=bed" type="external">bed</a>.” When Hodgkinson’s girlfriend tried to flee in a vehicle, he “turned off the ignition …. James then pulled out a possible pocket knife and cut [her] seatbelt.”</p>
<p>On March 24, 2017, a neighbor of Hodgkinson called the St. Clair County Sheriff’s office, informing them that 50 shots had been fired nearby; Hodgkinson was shooting in the pine trees; an officer told him to stop, although Hodgkinson has a valid firearm license.</p>
<p>In March 2010, Hodgkinson wrote the Belleville News-Democrat, "I don't ever again want to hear how great a president [Ronald Reagan] was. All he did was give tax breaks to the rich and put the rest of the country (or at least 13.1 percent) out of work. To think the Republican Party can call this man their idol is un-American. It's all about the money.”</p>
<p>Another letter to the editor stated, “Also to fund the government deficit I hope the Obama administration raises the income tax rate for the rich to 70 percent or more."</p>
<p>Other letters to the editor from Hodgkinson evidencing his leftism can be found <a href="http://www.bnd.com/news/local/article156092134.html" type="external">here</a>.</p>
<p>Hodgkinson called himself a Bernie Sanders supporter on social media; Sanders released a <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/sanders-condemns-supporter-who-shot-congressman?via=desktop&amp;source=copyurl" type="external">statement</a> decrying Hodgkinson’s actions, adding, “I have just been informed that the alleged shooter at the Republican baseball practice is someone who apparently volunteered on my presidential campaign,”</p> | Shooter Who Targeted Congressmen Had History Of Violence, Leftism | true | https://dailywire.com/news/17534/shooter-who-targeted-congressmen-had-history-hank-berrien | 2017-06-14 | 0 |
<p><a href="http://variety.com/tag/danny-strong/" type="external">Danny Strong</a> is attached to executive produce a legal drama in development at <a href="http://variety.com/tag/fox/" type="external">Fox</a>,&#160;Variety has learned.</p>
<p>“The Midnight Lawyer” follows an attorney who gets his clients out of trouble they get into after dark. He used to live the NYC after-hours life and now he’s always striving to save people the way he saved himself, but the business comes with temptations. His clients are colorful night owls, celebrities with paparazzi on their tails, thrill-seeking partiers, and mobsters who will prove time and time again that nothing good happens after 2 a.m. <a href="http://variety.com/2017/tv/news/jimmy-kimmel-jonathan-kimmel-fox-the-nepotist-1202579790/" type="external">Fox</a> has ordered a script for the project with a penalty attached.</p>
<p>Nick Schenk, the writer of the Clint Eastwood film “Gran Torino,” will write and executive produce. Strong will executive produce along with Stacy Greenberg, Todd Hoffman, and Dennis Kim. 20th Century Fox Television will produce.</p>
<p>Schenk is repped by CAA. Strong is repped by CAA,&#160;Sweeney Entertainment, and</p>
<p>In addition to “Gran Torino,” Schenk recently wrote for and co-executive produced the Discovery series “Manhunt: Unabomber.” His other writing credits include “Harley and the Davidsons,” “Narcos,” and the Robert Downey Jr. film “The Judge.”</p>
<p>This is the second legal drama Strong has set up at Fox this season. He is also attached as an executive producer on “Infamy,” which follows a law firm that specializes in wrongful conviction cases. Strong is also the co-creator of the hit Fox series “Empire,” which recently launched its fourth season. Last year, he signed a <a href="http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/danny-strong-20th-century-fox-overall-deal-1201796846/" type="external">multi-million dollar overall deal with 20th TV.</a></p> | Danny Strong to Produce Legal Drama From ‘Gran Torino’ Writer at Fox | false | https://newsline.com/danny-strong-to-produce-legal-drama-from-gran-torino-writer-at-fox/ | 2017-10-03 | 1 |
<p>Southern Illinois University Daily Egyptian More Kennings hoax fallout: Burke Wasson, a former Daily Egyptian editor who now works for the Lahontan Valley News, writes: "I guess you could say I was duped, too. And I want everyone to know. ...I know it sounds cold to say, but in journalism, it's healthy not to trust anyone. The DE and I learned the hard way." &gt; <a href="http://newshound.de.siu.edu/voices05/stories/storyReader$887" type="external">Were Kodee, Dan Kennings invented to discredit peace movement? (DE)</a> &gt; <a href="http://newshound.de.siu.edu/voices05/stories/storyReader$885" type="external">Prof: I may have to delete the fact that I'm an "SIU Emeritus" (DE)</a></p> | Ex-Daily Egyptian editor "never meant to deceive anybody" | false | https://poynter.org/news/ex-daily-egyptian-editor-never-meant-deceive-anybody | 2005-08-30 | 2 |
<p>BEIJING, Jan 18 (Reuters) - Real estate investment in China rose 7 percent in 2017 from a year ago, slowing from a 7.5 percent gain in January-November but still registered the highest annual growth since 2014, official data showed on Thursday.</p>
<p>Property investment growth in December alone moderated to 2.4 percent from a year earlier, the lowest since July 2016, Reuters calculated from the data.</p>
<p>A housing boom was a major growth driver for China’s economy last year, but is expected to gradually slow as official measures to curb property speculation drag on sales.</p>
<p>New construction starts measured by floor area rose 7 percent last year, compared with a 6.9 percent increase in the first 11 months of the year, the National Bureau of Statistics said.</p>
<p>Property sales by floor area grew 7.7 percent, slowing from the 7.9 percent growth seen in the first 11 months of the year. (Reporting by Fang Cheng, Yawen Chen and Kevin Yao; Editing by Eric Meijer)</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>SYDNEY (Reuters) - Share markets started firmer in Asia on Monday amid relief U.S.-led strikes on Syria looked like being a one-off event that avoided a direct confrontation with Russia, weighing on oil prices and safe-haven Treasuries.</p> A man looks at an electronic stock quotation board outside a brokerage in Tokyo, Japan February 9, 2018. REUTERS/Toru Hanai
<p>EMini futures for the S&amp;P 500 ESc1 sprang 0.6 percent higher in early trade, while Japan's Nikkei <a href="/finance/markets/index?symbol=.N225" type="external">.N225</a> added 0.3 percent.</p>
<p>MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan .MIAPJ0000PUS edged up 0.1 percent.</p>
<p>The United States, France and Britain launched 105 missiles targeting what the Pentagon said were three chemical weapons facilities in Syria in retaliation for a suspected poison gas attack in Douma on April 7.</p>
<p>Russian President Vladimir Putin warned on Sunday that further Western attacks on Syria would bring chaos to world affairs, as Washington prepared to increase pressure on Russia with new economic sanctions.</p>
<p>But with President Donald Trump declaring mission accomplished, investors wagered the worst had been avoided.</p>
<p>“Trump was able to enforce his chemical weapons red line without crossing the threshold for Russian retaliation,” said analysts at JPMorgan in a note.</p> Slideshow (2 Images)
<p>“Stocks were concerned about a prolonged and expanded U.S. campaign towards Assad and that doesn’t look probable.”</p>
<p>Safe-haven assets eased in response, with yields on U.S. 10-year Treasury debt US10YT=RR up two basis points at 2.84 percent.</p>
<p>The dollar inched up 0.2 percent on the yen to 107.53 yen <a href="/finance/currencies/quote?srcCurr=JPY&amp;destCurr=USD" type="external">JPY=</a>, and away from last week's low around 106.62.</p>
<a href="/finance/markets/index?symbol=.N225" type="external">Nikkei Inc</a> 21778.74 .N225 Nikkei Index +118.46 (+0.55%) .N225
<p>The euro was flat at $1.2330 <a href="/finance/currencies/quote?srcCurr=EUR&amp;destCurr=USD" type="external">EUR=</a>, while the dollar index was a fraction firmer at 89.803 .DXY.</p>
<p>In commodity markets, gold dipped 0.1 percent to $1,343.70 an ounce XAU=, and remained well short of last week’s peak at $1,365.23.</p>
<p>Oil prices slipped with Brent crude futures LCOc1 off 31 cents at $72.27 a barrel, while U.S. crude CLc1 fell 26 cents to $67.13 a barrel.</p>
<p>Looking ahead, the U.S. earnings season kicks into high gear this week with Thomson Reuters data predicting profits at S&amp;P 500 companies increased by 18.6 percent in the first quarter from a year ago, their biggest rise in seven years.</p>
<p>Yet with expectations so high, bank shares ran into profit-taking on Friday after a batch of mixed results.</p>
<p>In Asia, China reports its gross domestic product for the first quarter on Tuesday with market forecasts clustered around growth of 6.7 percent to 6.8 percent.</p>
<p>The U.S. reports retail sales later Monday and there are around 15 Federal Reserve speakers in the diary for the week.</p>
<p>Also this week, the IMF will hold its annual Spring meetings of central bankers and finance ministers in Washington.</p>
<p>Editing by Shri Navaratnam</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>TOKYO (Reuters) - The dollar firmed on Monday, hovering near a two-month high against the yen, after the market gained some clarity following military strikes on Syria by the United States and its allies at the weekend.</p> FILE PHOTO: U.S. Dollar and Japan Yen notes are seen in this picture illustration June 2, 2017. REUTERS/Thomas White/Illustration/File Photo
<p>The United States, France and Britain launched missiles targeting what the Pentagon said were chemical weapons facilities in Syria on Saturday, in retaliation for a suspected poison gas attack on April 7.</p>
<p>Suggesting that the military action would not be prolonged, Trump declared “mission accomplished” after the strikes.</p>
<p>The greenback gained against the yen after the military intervention, although the Japanese currency usually draws demand in times of political tension and market turmoil thanks to its perceived safe-haven status.</p>
<p>The U.S. currency was 0.2 percent higher at 107.515 yen. A rise above Friday’s high of 107.780 yen would take the dollar to its highest since Feb. 22.</p>
<p>“The reaction in currencies have been limited as President Trump had provided advance notice about a possible strike on Syria, giving speculators ample time to brace for the actual event,” said Yukio Ishizuki, senior forex strategist at Daiwa Securities.</p>
<p>“Many speculators are showing less of a response to yen-supportive factors lately, after the Bank of Japan made clear it was not going to normalise policy soon. This goes for domestic factors as well, like falling support ratings for (Japan Prime Minister Shinzo) Abe.”</p>
<p>Support for Prime Minister Abe, plagued by accusations of cronyism and cover-ups, fell to 26.7 percent in a survey by private broadcaster Nippon TV released on Sunday, the lowest since he took office in December 2012.</p>
<p>The dollar index against a basket of six major currencies was a shade higher at 89.807.</p>
<p>The euro was nearly flat at $1.2332 after ending Friday little changed.</p>
<p>The pound traded at $1.4244 after rising to a near three-month high of $1.4296 on Friday.</p>
<p>Expectations of a rate rise from the Bank of England have been a major driver of sterling’s gains in recent days.</p>
<p>The Australian dollar was flat at $0.7770 and the New Zealand dollar dipped 0.05 percent to $0.7348.</p>
<p>The Hong Kong dollar traded at 7.8499 per dollar, continuing to hover near 7.85, the weak end of its trading band.</p>
<p>The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) stepped in last week to prop up the Hong Kong dollar, as it is obliged to intervene and keep intact a trading band of 7.75 to 7.85.</p>
<p>Reporting by Shinichi Saoshiro; Editing by Eric Meijer</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>SCHROBENHAUSEN, Germany (Reuters) - Bauer, a big producer of construction equipment, is better placed than many German companies that invested heavily in China over the past few decades.</p> Thomas Bauer, CEO of Bavaria-based construction equipment maker Bauer AG, talks during an interview with Reuters in Schrobenhausen, Germany April 3, 2018. REUTERS/Michael Dalder
<p>The Bavaria-based firm, which traces its roots back to 1790, does not have to worry about keeping a Chinese joint venture partner happy because it is the sole owner of its two plants in Shanghai and Tianjin.</p>
<p>And the specialist engineering machines Bauer produces there are sold in countries across Asia, shielding the group from swings in the volatile Chinese building market.</p>
<p>Even so, CEO Thomas Bauer, the seventh generation in his family to run the firm, is worried about his company’s place in China and a broader economic relationship that until recently was seen by German corporations and politicians as a lucrative one-way bet.</p>
<p>“Germany has put too many eggs into one basket, and that basket is China,” Bauer, a jovial 62-year-old with a thick Bavarian accent, told Reuters at the company’s headquarters in Schrobenhausen, an hour’s drive north of Munich.</p>
<p>Bauer’s BSAG.DE concern points to a growing fear in Germany. For more than a decade, the country has been the growth locomotive of Europe, its economy weathering global financial turmoil, the euro zone debt crisis and a record influx of refugees.</p>
<p>That resilience was based on two key drivers: Germany had innovative firms that produced high-end manufactured goods that fast-growing economies needed; and the country was better than others at profiting from an open, rules-based global trading system that rewarded competitiveness.</p>
<p>China has been crucial on both fronts. Over the past decade it bought up German cars and machinery at an astonishing pace, as it gradually opened up to foreign firms. Last year alone, German manufacturers sold nearly 5 million cars in China, more than three times as many as in the United States.</p>
<p>But even as the good times roll on, a radical shift is taking place in how Deutschland AG views the vast Chinese market.</p>
<p>Not only has the opening of China shifted into reverse under President Xi Jinping, but Chinese firms have moved up the value chain far faster than many in Germany expected.</p>
<p>Germany’s China conundrum is part of a broader challenge facing Europe: Years of inward-focused crisis fighting have left the bloc politically divided and ill-prepared to respond to looming geopolitical and economic challenges. Now the continent risks being squeezed between a more assertive Beijing and the “America First” policies of Donald Trump.</p>
<p>In private, some executives liken the situation of German industry in China to the proverbial frog in a pot of slowly heating water which ends up boiling to death because it won’t or can’t jump out.</p>
<p>Germany’s ambassador to China, Michael Clauss, warned at a meeting with industry chiefs in Berlin last month of “tectonic changes” in the relationship, according to participants.</p>
<p>“We need to prepare people here for a new era in our partnership with China,” an official at Germany’s powerful BDI industry federation said. “These are still golden times. But there is a huge amount of concern about what lies ahead.”</p>
<p>(GRAPHIC: Germany's China problem - <a href="https://tmsnrt.rs/2GUN6BK" type="external">tmsnrt.rs/2GUN6BK</a>)</p> ROLE OF THE STATE
<p>German companies were among the first in the West to set up shop in China, giving Germany an advantage as the Chinese economy took off.</p>
<p>Bilateral trade between the two countries hit a record 187 billion euros last year, dwarfing China’s trade with France and the UK, both around 70 billion. In 2017, Germany ran a trade deficit with China of 14 billion euros, tiny compared to the U.S. deficit of $375 billion, or about 346 billion euros.</p>
<p>Bauer AG, which employs 11,000 workers in 70 countries, built its first production facilities in China in the mid-1990s. At the time, not a single Chinese firm could make the sophisticated drilling machines it produces – towering yellow structures used to build the foundations for skyscrapers, power stations and airports.</p>
<p>By 2013 Bauer counted 36 Chinese competitors able to make such machines, a shift the CEO says was accelerated by European suppliers selling co-designed parts to the Chinese.</p>
<p>A decade ago, the company’s Chinese plants generated revenues of 109 million euros. Sales slumped to less than half that amount in five of the nine years that followed.</p>
<p>Today, what Bauer and other German firms say they are most worried about is the role of the Chinese state in the economy.</p> Slideshow (7 Images)
<p>Last year, China introduced a cyber security law which tightened state control over internet services, including secure VPN connections that are used by foreign firms to communicate confidentially with headquarters. More recently, some German companies have complained of pressure to accept Communist party officials on the boards of their joint ventures.</p>
<p>The Bauer boss fears that Xi’s “Made in China 2025” strategy, which identifies 10 key sectors – including robotics, aerospace and clean-energy cars – where China wants to be a leader, represents a direct challenge to German manufacturing dominance.</p>
<p>To keep its edge Bauer says his firm is focusing intensively on digitalization.</p>
<p>“It will not be a contest against copiers. It will be one against innovative engineers who are intent on overtaking us,” he said. “If we don’t start finding answers soon, this can end very badly.”</p> TRUMP TARIFFS
<p>The German angst over China mirrors that which has prompted Trump to threaten Beijing with tens of billions of dollars in trade tariffs.</p>
<p>But because Germany’s top firms have become so dependent on the Chinese market, the government in Berlin has avoided confronting China head-on.</p>
<p>Back in February, carmaker Daimler ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=DAIGn.DE" type="external">DAIGn.DE</a>) showed just how skittish some companies are about upsetting Beijing.</p>
<a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=DAIGn.DE" type="external">Daimler AG</a> 65.65 DAIGn.DE Xetra +0.18 (+0.27%) DAIGn.DE 000333.SZ KU2G.DE
<p>After a backlash in China over a Mercedez-Benz ad on Instagram that quoted the Dalai Lama – the Tibetan spiritual leader seen by Beijing as a separatist – Daimler deleted the post and its CEO Dieter Zetsche wrote a letter expressing deep regret for the “hurt and grief” his company’s “negligent and insensitive mistake” had caused the Chinese people.</p>
<p>“There is a huge gap between what people in Germany are saying about China and what they are really thinking,” said Bernhard Bartsch of the Bertelsmann Foundation, a German research group.</p>
<p>Later this month, Bertelsmann and Berlin-based China think tank MERICS will host an Oxford Union-style debate on the motion: “In ten years’ time, China will have substantially undermined Europe’s political and economic system”</p>
<p>The mood among German firms operating in China is also souring.</p>
<p>A survey late last year from the German Chamber of Commerce in China showed that for the first time in many years, more than half of its members were not planning investments in new locations in China. Nearly 13 percent of German firms operating in China said they could leave within the next two years.</p>
<p>For decades, Germany’s approach to China could be summed up with the motto “Wandel durch Handel” (change through trade).</p>
<p>Now that strategy is in tatters and government officials joke darkly that the “win-win” relationship has a new meaning: China wins twice.</p>
<p>“The hope was that closer economic ties would lead to an opening. Today it is clear this was a false hope,” said a German government official. “They tell us what we want to hear and then do the opposite.”</p>
<p>Berlin is starting to push back. Last year, after Chinese firm Midea’s ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=000333.SZ" type="external">000333.SZ</a>) takeover of robotics maker Kuka ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=KU2G.DE" type="external">KU2G.DE</a>) sparked an uproar, it tightened restrictions on foreign investments and launched a push for new Europe-wide rules for screening takeovers.</p>
<p>In December, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency infuriated Beijing when it accused Chinese counterparts of using fake social media accounts to gather information on German politicians - a rare public rebuke that Berlin says was intended to send the Chinese a message.</p>
<p>A summit between the German and Chinese governments later this year is likely to reveal a tougher line from Berlin, officials say.</p>
<p>But they also concede that divisions within the EU and a wide gap between Europe and the go-it-alone Trump administration will make it more difficult to force change in Beijing.</p>
<p>“What the Chinese are really worried about is Europe and the United States working together against them,” said the German official. “In that sense, Trump really is a gift to China.”</p>
<p>Reporting by Noah Barkin; Editing by Simon Robinson</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. equity index futures rose on Sunday as financial market trading resumed for the first time since the United States, Britain and France hit Syria with missile strikes in retaliation for a suspected poison gas attack.</p> FILE PHOTO - A specialist trader works at his post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, (NYSE) in New York, U.S., March 22, 2018. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
<p>The move suggested Wall Street was set to shrug off the attack and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s warning on Sunday that further Western attacks on Syria would bring chaos to world affairs.</p>
<p>In the first few minutes of trading on Sunday evening, S&amp;P 500 e-mini futures ESv1 were up by about 0.6 percent. Futures tracking the Nasdaq Composite Index and Dow Jones Industrial Average were up by comparable amounts.</p>
<p>Futures tracking safe-haven U.S. Treasury securities were slightly lower.</p>
<p>U.S. stocks fell on Friday as results from big banks failed to enthuse and worries over the Syria situation, but major market benchmarks gained ground on the week.</p>
<p>Reporting by Dan Burns; Editing by Peter Cooney</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a> | China Dec property investment slows, full year growth highest since 2014 Asian shares up, oil down as Syria fallout seen limited Dollar firms after Syria strikes, nears 2-mth high versus yen 'Boiled frog syndrome': Germany's China problem Wall Street futures rise, shrug off allied missile attack on Syria | false | https://reuters.com/article/china-economy-property-investment/china-dec-property-investment-slows-full-year-growth-highest-since-2014-idUSB9N1P500T | 2018-01-18 | 2 |
<p>From the Bay Citizen:</p>
<p>Interim Mayor Ed Lee on Tuesday walked a fine line between supporting growing anti-Wall Street protests and justifying the money San Francisco has spent responding to the Occupy SF encampment.</p>
<p>In an appearance before the Board of Supervisors Tuesday afternoon, Lee said the city had spent about $100,000 “accommodating” the protests.</p>
<p>He did not specify where the money went, but his spokeswoman, Christine Falvey, told The Bay Citizen via email that about $80,000 was spent on the San Francisco Police Department. The rest, she said, went to public health and public works costs such as cleaning the encampment and providing porta potties.</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal" /></p>
<p><a href="http://www.baycitizen.org/blogs/pulse-of-the-bay/city-has-spent-100000-occupy-sf/" type="external">(Read Full Article.)</a></p> | City Has Spent $100,000 on Occupy SF | false | http://capoliticalreview.com/trending/city-has-spent-100000-on-occupy-sf/ | 2011-10-20 | 1 |
<p>Jan 19 (Reuters) - Allied Motion Technologies Inc:</p>
<p>* ALLIED MOTION ACQUIRES ORIGINAL EQUIPMENT STEERING BUSINESS FROM MAVAL INDUSTRIES</p>
<p>* ALLIED MOTION TECHNOLOGIES INC - ACQUISITION IS EXPECTED TO BE ‘NEUTRAL TO SLIGHTLY ACCRETIVE’ TO EARNINGS FOR ALLIED IN 2018</p>
<p>* ALLIED MOTION TECHNOLOGIES- ‍ONCE CARVE-OUT COMPLETE, ORIGINAL EQUIPMENT STEERING BUSINESS TO BE LOCATED WITHIN ITS OWN DEDICATED FACILITY IN TWINSBURG​ Source text for Eikon: Further company coverage:</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>SEOUL (Reuters) - A South Korean court jailed former President Park Geun-hye for 24 years on Friday over a scandal that exposed webs of corruption between political leaders and the country’s conglomerates.</p> Members of a conservative civic group attend a protest to support ousted President Park Geun-hye outside a court in Seoul, South Korea, April 6, 2018. REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji
<p>Park became South Korea’s first democratically elected leader to be forced from office last year when the Constitutional Court ordered her out over a scandal that landed the heads of two conglomerates in jail.</p>
<p>The court also fined Park, the daughter of a former military dictator, 18 billion won ($16.9 million) fine, after finding her guilty of charges including bribery, abuse of power and coercion.</p>
<p>“The defendant abused her presidential power entrusted by the people, and as a result, brought massive chaos to the order of state affairs and led to the impeachment of the president, which was unprecedented,” judge Kim Se-yoon said as he handed down the sentence.</p>
<p>The court ruled that Park colluded with her old friend, Choi Soon-sil, to receive 23.1 billion won from major conglomerates including Samsung and Lotte to help Choi’s family and bankroll non-profit foundations owned by her.</p>
<p>Prosecutors sought a 30-year sentence and a 118.5 billion won ($112 million) fine for Park.</p>
<p>Park, 66, who has been in jail since March 31 last year, has denied wrongdoing and was not present in court.</p> Members of a conservative civic group attend a protest to support ousted President Park Geun-hye outside a court in Seoul, South Korea, April 6, 2018. REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji
<p>The judge said Park had shown “no sign of repentance” but had instead tried to sift the blame to Choi and her secretaries.</p>
<p>“We cannot help but sternly hold her accountable,” Kim said.</p>
<p>Friday’s sentence dealt a bitter blow for Park, who returned to the presidential palace in 2012 as the country’s first woman leader, more than three decades after she left it following the assassination of her father.</p>
<p>Her ouster from office last year led to a presidential election won by the liberal Moon Jae-in, whose conciliatory stand on North Korea has underpinned a significant warming of ties between the rival neighbors.</p>
<p>Moon’s office said Park’s fate was “heartbreaking” not only for herself but the nation.</p>
<p>More than 200 supporters gathered outside the court, holding national flags and signs calling for an end to “political revenge” against Park.</p>
<p>Reporting by Hyonhee Shin and Heekyong Yang; Additional reporting by Soyoung Kim and Christine Kim; Editing by Robert Birsel</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>NEW YORK (Reuters) - The New York State attorney general’s office said on Thursday it would investigate the fatal shooting by police of an unarmed black man in Brooklyn after he pointed a metal pipe at officers that they believed was a gun.</p>
<p>“We’re committed to conducting an independent, comprehensive and fair investigation,” Amy Spitalnick, a spokeswoman for New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, said in a statement.</p>
<p>The death of Saheed Vassell on Wednesday was the latest fatal shooting of an unarmed black man by police, fueling more protests and heightening a nationwide debate over the use of excessive force by police and accusations of racial bias in the criminal justice system.</p>
<p>More than 200 demonstrators and activists took to the streets of the Crown Heights neighborhood in which Vassell was shot, chanting “Justice for Saheed.”</p>
<p>“They murdered my son and I want justice for him,” Lorna Vassell, his mother, said at the protest.</p>
<p>The family has demanded a coroner’s inquest.</p>
<p>Police said Vassell was killed by officers responding to reports of a man aiming a gun at pedestrians. When the officers arrived, police said, Vassell took a two-handed shooting stance and pointed an object at them.</p> Saheed Vassell points a metal pipe at a pedestrian in Brooklyn April 4, 2018, in a still image from surveillance video released by the New York Police Department in New York City, New York, U.S. on April 5, 2018. NYPD/Handout via REUTERS
<p>The officers believed the suspect was holding a firearm, a senior police official told a news conference on Wednesday, and three plainclothes officers and one uniformed officer fired 10 shots. Vassell died in a hospital.</p>
<p>Police on Thursday released security camera footage that showed Vassell approaching people on the street and pointing the pipe at them as if it were a pistol. They also released partial transcripts of three 911 emergency calls.</p>
<p>“There’s a guy walking around the street, he looks like he’s crazy but he’s pointing something at people that looks like a gun and he’s pulling the trigger,” one of the callers said.</p> Slideshow (5 Images)
<p>Local media reported that Vassell was 34 years old, suffered from mental illness, and was well known in parts of Crown Heights.</p>
<p>His killing followed the fatal shooting by police of an unarmed black man, Stephon Clark, 22, in Sacramento, California, that has sparked more than two weeks of demonstrations.</p>
<p>Officers responding to a report of someone breaking windows killed Clark on March 18 in his grandmother’s backyard. The officers feared he had a gun, but it turned out he was holding a cellphone, Sacramento police said.</p>
<p>Reporting by Gina Cherelus in New York; Additional reporting by Bernie Woodall in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Editing by Daniel Wallis, Bill Trott, Tom Brown</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>BEIJING (Reuters) - China warned it would fight back “at any cost” with fresh measures to safeguard its interests if the United States sticks to its protectionist actions, after President Donald Trump threatened an extra $100 billion in tariffs in a worsening trade dispute between the world’s two biggest economies.</p>
<p>Responding to Trump’s comments, the commerce ministry on Friday reiterated in a statement that China was not afraid of a trade war even though it did not seek one, and said the conflict had been provoked by the United States.</p>
<p>“If the United States disregards the objections of China and the international community and persists in unilateralism and trade protectionism, the Chinese side will follow through to the end, at any cost, and definitely fight back resolutely,” a spokesperson was quoted as saying in the statement posted on the ministry’s website.</p> Related Coverage
<a href="/article/us-usa-trade-southkorea/south-korea-notifies-wto-of-plans-to-suspend-tariff-concessions-on-u-s-goods-idUSKCN1HD0S8" type="external">South Korea notifies WTO of plans to suspend tariff concessions on U.S. goods</a>
<a href="/article/us-ecb-policy-trade/trade-war-fear-already-raising-borrowing-costs-ecbs-coeure-idUSKCN1HD0WM" type="external">Trade war fear already raising borrowing costs: ECB's Coeure</a>
<p>The Chinese foreign ministry issued an identical statement, which added that Beijing will continue to monitor tariff moves from the United States.</p>
<p>Chinese state media had earlier on Friday slammed Trump’s threat of more trade action as “ridiculous” after the U.S. President had directed trade officials to identify tariffs on $100 billion more Chinese imports, escalating an already high-stakes trade dispute between the two nations.</p>
<p>“This latest intimidation reflects the deep arrogance of some American elites in their attitude towards China,” the state-run Global Times said in an editorial.</p>
<p>Analysts at Oxford Economics warned that a full-blown trade war will have damaging consequences.</p>
<p>“Importantly, these threatened tariffs will be subject to negotiation, and therefore shouldn’t be considered as final,” the analysts wrote in a note to client.</p>
<p>“A (full blown) trade war meanwhile would have a more pronounced effect. The US and China would suffer significant slowdown in real GDP growth – a cumulative loss around 1.0 percentage point,” and cut global economic growth to 2.5 percent in 2019 from 3.0 percent in Oxford’s baseline scenario.</p>
<p>The escalating tit-for-tat trade actions between the two economic superpowers have roiled global financial markets, as investors worried about the impact on world trade and growth, hitting equities, the dollar and a range of riskier assets such as copper and boosting safe-havens such as the Japanese yen and gold.</p> Shipping containers are being loaded onto Xin Da Yang Zhou ship from Shanghai, China at Pier J at the Port of Long Beach in Long Beach, California, U.S., April 4, 2018. REUTERS/Bob Riha Jr.
<p>The dollar fell in Friday’s trade,while U.S. stock futures and most of Asia’s stock markets were in the red.</p>
<p>Trump said in a White House statement that the new tariffs were being considered “in light of China’s unfair retaliation” against earlier U.S. trade actions, which included a proposed $50 billion of tariffs on Chinese goods.</p>
<p>“This is what a trade war looks like, and what we have warned against from the start,” said National Retail Federation President and CEO Matthew Shay.</p> Slideshow (2 Images)
<p>“We are on a dangerous downward spiral and American families will be on the losing end,” Shay added in a statement, urging Trump “to stop playing a game of chicken with the U.S. economy.”</p>
<p>Reporting by Tom Daly and Min Zhang in BEIJING, addittional reporting by David Lawder in WASHINGTON; Editing by Shri Navaratnam</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea said on Friday it has notified the World Trade Organization (WTO) that it seeks to suspend tariff concessions on imported U.S. goods worth $480 million, in response to U.S. measures against South Korean imports.</p> FILE PHOTO: Giant cranes are seen at the Hanjin Shipping container terminal at Incheon New Port in Incheon, South Korea, September 7, 2016. REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji/File Photo
<p>U.S. President Donald Trump slapped a steep tariff on imported washing machines and solar panels in February to protect American manufacturers, prompting a fierce backlash from South Korea and China.</p>
<p>South Korea’s trade ministry said in a statement that it has informed the WTO Council for Trade in Goods that its plan to suspend tariff concessions on imported U.S. goods, which are equal in value to the South Korean washing machines and solar panels affected by U.S. tariffs.</p>
<p>The trade ministry said it plans to produce details on which U.S. products will be subject to the suspension closer to when it takes effect. Under the WTO framework, a country’s right of suspension on concessions of a trading partner cannot be exercised for up to three years from when the trading partner’s safeguards take effect.</p> Trump threatens new $100 billion round of China tariffs
<p>U.S. President Trump has stepped up trade protectionist actions by raising tariffs to guard U.S. manufacturing. Amid escalating fears of a trade war, Trump said on Thursday he had ordered an additional $100 billion new tariffs on China.</p>
<p>He has also taken issue with U.S. trade imbalances with South Korea. In March, the two countries agreed to revise an existing bilateral trade agreement in principle, with Seoul giving more market access to U.S. autos, while Korean steelmakers avoided hefty steel tariffs.</p>
<p>Reporting By Jane Chung and Hyunjoo Jin; Editing by Sam Holmes</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a> | BRIEF-Allied Motion Acquires Equipment Steering Business From Maval Industries South Korean court jails Park for 24 years for bribery New York attorney general probing Brooklyn police shooting death China says will fight back 'at any cost' against U.S. trade tariffs South Korea notifies WTO of plans to suspend tariff concessions on U.S. goods | false | https://reuters.com/article/brief-allied-motion-acquires-equipment-s/brief-allied-motion-acquires-equipment-steering-business-from-maval-industries-idUSASB0C1LC | 2018-01-19 | 2 |
<p>The case of genetically modified (GM) mustard in India has reached the Supreme Court. The government has said it will bow to the court’s eventual ruling. That ruling could green-light GM mustard as first commercial GM food crop. If this goes ahead, there will be&#160; <a href="" type="internal">wide-ranging implications</a>&#160;for Indian food and agriculture.</p>
<p>Environmentalist Aruna Rodrigues&#160; <a href="" type="internal">has petitioned</a>&#160;India’s Supreme Court, seeking a moratorium on the release of any genetically modified organisms (GMOs) into the environment pending a comprehensive, transparent and rigorous biosafety protocol in the public domain conducted by agencies of independent expert bodies, the results of which are made public.</p>
<p>As the lead petitioner, Rodrigues’ case is that, to date, serious conflicts of interest, sleight of hand, regulatory delinquency, cover-ups, lies and scientific fraud has tainted the entire appraisal process concerning GM mustard. Moreover, the case is made that there is a general lack of rigour and expertise and overall incompetency where India’s assessment and regulation of GMOs is concerned.</p>
<p>In a response to the petition, the government (Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change) has issued a Reply Affidavit, which Rodrigues now says (in a rejoinder affidavit) is an astonishing filibustering, copious response that clearly reflects a high degree of scientific and technical incompetence in the regulatory oversight of HT Mustard DMH 11 (GM mustard). She says that the ‘Reply’ is brazen, misleading and weak in its interpretation of available data and facts.</p>
<p>In a 7,000-plus word response (read the Rejoinder Affidavit here:&#160; <a href="" type="internal">rejoinder-affidavit-mustard-final-dmh-8th-nov-2016ia</a>) response to the&#160; <a href="" type="internal">government’s Reply Affidavit</a>, Rodrigues goes into a fair amount of technical detail. She argues that that HT Mustard DMH 11 and its two HT parental lines that are before the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC) for commercial approval are funded by the regulators, promoted by them and regulated by them. This is, she argues, simply unacceptable: the evidence shows the outcome of such hand-in-glove, subterranean regulation that seeks to hide the data from scientific and public scrutiny and release HT mustard to the detriment of India.</p>
<p>She states that the regulators acquiescent role in the fudging of field trail data invites “a charge of criminal conduct and intent to deceive, with inestimable ramifications of harm to our nation. A criminal investigation is required into these processes.”</p>
<p>The Rejoinder Affidavit argues that, counter to the arguments set out in the 72-page Reply Affidavit by the government, the following is the actual reality underpinning GM mustard in India.</p>
<p>1)&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Field trial data was fudged.</p>
<p>2)&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; HT DMH 11 and its two parental line GMOs are scientifically and unambiguously herbicide tolerant (HT) crops.</p>
<p>3)&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; India is indeed a centre of diversity/domestication of mustard with a rich germplasm. Contamination from commercialised HT DHM11 of India’s mustard germplasm is a certainty.</p>
<p>4)&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Field trails of the GM mustard discarded scientific norms wholesale and are invalid.</p>
<p>5)&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; HT Mustard DMH 11 remains unproven on scientific grounds as a superior hybrid-making technology.</p>
<p>6)&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; The cumulative evidence is that HT DMH11 (and its GMO parental lines) are a monumental and dangerous bluff and the nation has been fooled into believing that it will reduce imports of oilseeds because it will provide high-yielding hybrids.</p>
<p>Fudged data and invalid field tests</p>
<p>Rodrigues presents various field trial data and goes into much technical detail to make the case for how data was fudged to present GM mustard in a favourable light. Readers are urged to consult the Rejoinder Affidavit for the details.</p>
<p>Made for Bayer?</p>
<p>While there appears to be an attempt to confuse the issue in the government’s Reply Affidavit, Rodrigues argues that the gene for glufosinate herbicide resistance will be present in GM mustard hybrids, making the crop resistant to (Bayer’s) herbicide. And while the government argues “there is no proposal to use this herbicide in the farmers’ field,” such arguments, according to Rodrigues “smack of ignorance and carelessness of how a HT GM crop can be possibly used and more dangerously, approved for commercialisation by the GEAC.”</p>
<p>In other words, the government’s argument in the matter of DMH 11 is “a blatant misrepresentation of facts, expedient policy and scientifically untenable.”</p>
<p>Contamination and the crucial importance of centres of genetic/biological diversity</p>
<p>Rodrigues cites examples to highlight that a 20-year history of GMOs in various countries shows that GMO Contamination of non-GMO crops is a biological certainty and is irreversible. Such contamination leads to a loss of native varieties that contain important genetic diversity needed for future traits. These traits are bred into crop varieties through traditional breeding techniques that genetic engineering has failed to match.</p>
<p>GM crops themselves must rely on nature’s genetic diversity to supply what is required in traits of parental lines to meet new problems and diseases. India holds a rich store house of genetically diverse germ plasm and plant traits that is vital for future food security and well-being.</p>
<p>The case of Bt brinjal is referred to. India has the world’s greatest brinjal diversity of 2,500 varieties and this is in large part why the indefinite moratorium was imposed in 2010. An assessment by several leading international scientists revealed the great malaise of Indian GMO regulation at the time and exposed the rot. Rodrigues argues that the regulatory oversight of HT mustard DMH 11 overtakes the regulatory shambles connected with Bt brinjal.</p>
<p>Bogus claims and a “monumental bluff”</p>
<p>Various arguments are then put forward to discount many of the other claims made by the government, and Rodrigues takes issue with the fact that HT Mustard DMH 11 remains unproven on scientific grounds as a superior hybrid-making technology. She makes the case that GM mustard is a monumental and dangerous bluff and the nation has been fooled into believing that HT DMH 11 will reduce imports of oilseeds because it will provide high-yielding hybrids.</p>
<p>However, as described&#160; <a href="" type="internal">here</a>, the government’s own admission s that GM traits in mustard would not be responsible for increased yields. Moreover, the issue of oilseeds imports has nothing to do with the supposed low productivity of Indian oilseed agriculture and everything to do with trade policies&#160; <a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/palm-oil-and-gm-mustard-a-marriage-made-in-hell/5513685" type="external">which has seen</a>&#160;India become a dumping ground for subsidised imports.</p>
<p>Supporters of GM have cynically twisted this situation to call for the introduction of GM mustard to increase productivity. But if HT Mustard DMH 11 will not enhance yields and if the real cause of rising edible oils imports is not the result of poor productivity within India, what is the point of this GM mustard? We need&#160; <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/colin-todhunter/india-bayer-monsanto_b_12794698.html" type="external">look no further than</a>&#160;the geopolitics of food and energy that derive from certain corporate-written trade deals.</p>
<p>Rodrigues also questions the efficacy (and, by implication, the politics) of hybrid seeds, especially as farmers must purchase them every year to obtain the properties of the hybrid. Becoming dependent on the seed industry (which is becoming increasingly consolidated in the hands of a few major transnational corporations) can again lead to loss of native varieties that contain important genetic diversity needed for future yield gains, pest resistance and responses to climate change and could increase farmer costs (Bt cotton is a case in point).</p>
<p>The evidence is far from conclusive with regard to the superiority of hybrids, and Rodrigues cite examples of non-GM mustard hybrids currently on the Indian market. When there are also so many conventional mustard hybrids available, the case for GM mustard looks even more shaky to say the least.</p>
<p>What Rodrigues has set out to show is a lack of logic and hard science in the Reply Affidavit by the government. In fact, she calls out the government for relying on statements based on “pure spin” and concludes that the case in favour of GM mustard in India relies on “unremitting regulatory fraud,” is “ethically deviant” and defies “democratic processes.”</p> | GM Mustard in India | true | https://counterpunch.org/2016/11/11/gm-mustard-in-india/ | 2016-11-11 | 4 |
<p>AP</p>
<p>: NEW HAVEN, Conn. – In a lecture hall on Yale’s storied Old Campus, not long after an afternoon astronomy class has cleared out, a middle-aged sex toy saleswoman demonstrates her technique and hands out free products to an eager crowd.</p>
<p>“I want you to close your eyes,” Patty Brisben playfully instructs a young man as she rubs scented lotion into his forearm and, to raucous laughter, reaches for an electric toy and a glove. “Fantasize about having an all-over body massage.”</p>
<p>Truthdig says: A prudish Harvard student, writing in a conservative campus newspaper, says the following of <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060217/ap_on_re_us/ivy_league_sex;_ylt=Ao18MHaT9rFR99Wa4RbMgt9vzwcF;_ylu=X3oDMTA5aHJvMDdwBHNlYwN5bmNhdA--" type="external">Yale’s annual ode to sex:</a> “I don’t see how bringing a Playboy stripper to campus is helping anything.”</p>
<p />
<p>No surprise there. The Yale contingent at Truthdig knows from experience that Cantabs are sooooo uptight.</p>
<p /> | Sex Week at Yale Draws Controversy, Porn Stars | true | https://truthdig.com/articles/sex-week-at-yale-draws-controversy-porn-stars/ | 2006-02-18 | 4 |
<p>.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........</p>
<p>CENTENNIAL, Colo. (AP) — In the nearly eight months since James Holmes first shuffled into court with vacant eyes and reddish-orange hair, neither he nor his lawyers have said much about how he would plead to charges from the deadly Colorado movie theater shooting.</p>
<p>There have been plenty of hints, however. As his hair turned more natural-looking and his demeanor more even at court hearings, Holmes’ lawyers repeatedly raised questions about his mental health, including a recent revelation that he was held in a psychiatric ward for several days last fall, often in restraints, because he was considered a danger to himself.</p>
<p>If, as many expect, they enter a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity on his behalf today, it will clarify the court battle ahead: Was Holmes, 25, legally insane — unable to tell right from wrong — at the time of the shootings?</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Pleading insanity could be the only way he can avoid life in prison or execution, given the evidence that has emerged so far, some legal experts said.</p>
<p>Prosecutors laid out a case that Holmes methodically planned the shooting for months, amassing an arsenal and elaborately booby-trapping his apartment to kill anyone who tried to enter. On the night of the attack, they say, he donned a police-style helmet, gas mask and body armor, tossed a gas canister into the seats and then opened fire.</p>
<p>The attack killed 12 people and injured 70 others.</p>
<p>“This is not a whodunit,” criminal defense attorney Dan Recht said in January. He is not involved in the case.</p>
<p>Holmes is charged with 166 counts, mostly murder and attempted murder, in the July 20 assault on moviegoers at a midnight showing of “The Dark Knight Rises” in Aurora, a Denver suburb.</p>
<p>If a jury agrees he was insane, he would be committed indefinitely to a state mental hospital. There would be a remote and unlikely chance he could be freed one day if doctors find his sanity has been restored.</p>
<p>The plea carries risk, however. Prosecutors would gain access to Holmes’ mental health records, which could help their case if the evidence of insanity is weak. If Holmes does plead insanity, the proceedings would be prolonged further while he is evaluated by state mental health officials.</p>
<p>“You heard the evidence they have. There is no doubt that he knew what he was doing was wrong, there’s no doubt it was premeditated,” said Tom Teves of Phoenix, whose 24-year-old son, Alex, died in the theater while shielding his girlfriend. “There’s no doubt he did it. Zero. So why are we playing a lot of games?”</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Holmes could also plead innocent — not by reason of insanity — which would significantly change the court fight. Prosecutors would not have those medical records, but Holmes could be convicted outright, with a possible life term or death.</p>
<p>No matter how Holmes pleads, he could still be convicted and sentenced to execution or life in prison without parole. Prosecutors have 60 days after the plea to say whether they will seek the death penalty.</p>
<p>The hard-fought case has already taken some surprise turns, and Tuesday’s hearing could offer another unforeseen twist, including the remote possibility the two sides, ordered by the judge to not speak publicly about the case, have reached a plea agreement.</p>
<p>The case could also veer in other directions:</p>
<p>— Holmes could be ordered to undergo an evaluation to determine whether he is mentally competent to stand trial — able to understand what is going on in court and to help his lawyers. If he is found incompetent, the case would come to a halt and he would undergo treatment at the state mental hospital indefinitely, until doctors there say his competency has been restored.</p>
<p>— Holmes could plead guilty, but that appeared unlikely, given his attorneys’ vigorous defense, unless prosecutors offered a plea deal sparing him the death penalty or offering another concession.</p>
<p>— Some unforeseen issue raised by attorneys could delay the case, or Holmes could be absent, as he was at a November court date that corresponds roughly with the time he was taken to Denver Health Medical Center’s psychiatric ward.</p>
<p>Since his arrest outside the theater, his attorneys have aggressively challenged prosecutors, investigators and even the constitutionality of Colorado law nearly every step of the way.</p>
<p>Just this month, they asked the presiding judge, William Sylvester, to rule parts of the state insanity law unconstitutional, arguing it raised too many questions for them to give Holmes effective advice. Sylvester refused.</p>
<p>“This is going to take some time. You know, I remind myself that they got the guy, he’s not going anywhere,” said Tom Sullivan, whose 27-year-old son, Alex, died on his birthday at the movie theater. “I don’t know what kind of shape he’s in right now, but you assume it’s not a pleasant experience what’s going on right now.”</p>
<p>___</p>
<p>Associated Press writer P. Solomon Banda contributed to this report.</p> | Plea expected in Colo. theater shooting | false | https://abqjournal.com/177299/plea-expected-in-colo-theater-shooting.html | 2013-03-12 | 2 |
<p>With a focus on social media blunders, Twitter gaffes, and Facebook faux pas, we’ll be profiling one politician, political figure, organization, or candidate who has committed one of the social media sins in our weekly series Social Slipups.</p>
<p>Infamous for his blunt, “tell it like it is” mentality, the Governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie is making news with his recent speech given at the 2012 Republican National Convention. Although many praise him for his straightforward delivery of speeches, arguing that he is a breath of fresh air from all the “pandering” politicians out there, his comments delivered in the public eye can sometimes be interpreted as crass.</p>
<p>The governor has become a well known political figure on YouTube. After a slew of videos of the governor interacting with various press and constituents, he was dubbed as “Governor Youtube”.</p>
<p>Various YouTube videos have been posted of the governor, shedding a more negative light on his appearance in social media with critics implying that he is more concerned about receiving publicity than improving New Jersey economically.</p>
<p>“Web videos of Christie berating teachers at town hall meetings quickly went viral, giving Christie a large national audience. Critics dubbed him “Gov. YouTube,” suggesting he was more interested in getting publicity for himself than for improving New Jersey’s finances.” – <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/29/christie-christie-speech-rnc_n_1838448.html" type="external">Huffington Post’s&#160;Beth Fouhy and Thomas Beaumont</a></p>
<p>Here are just a couple videos of Governor Christie that have gone viral in the past:</p>
<p>As well as some <a href="https://www.tmz.com/2012/07/06/chris-christie-governor-jersey-shore-video-boardwalk-fight/#ixzz24ljN5XRy" type="external">TMZ coverage</a> of a Jersey Shore fight.</p>
<p>The question of whether those on the other end of his shouting matches and name calling actually deserved the attacks is subjective. But the high view counts on captured encounters has elevated the governor’s&#160; <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/GovChristie" type="external">official YouTube channel</a>&#160;to high popularity along with his nation wide fame. For many, this may provide grounds for questioning his need for publicity.</p>
<p>With some already trying to predict candidates for the 2016 election, many are criticizing his speech as the RNC as yet another pull for self-publicity. <a href="https://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/08/28/758981/rnc-tuesday/" type="external">ThinkProgress</a> reports&#160;that in his speech given yesterday, he said the word “I” a whopping 37 times while “Mitt Romney” was benched at just a 7 mentions. The blog post’s guide used words like “bragged” and “touting” to describe Christie’s speech.</p>
<p>As a result of video social media being a channel in which politicians can gain publicity (both negative and positive) the case of Governor Chris Christie and his criticism of priorities makes way for Gov. YouTube to be this week’s “Social Slipup”.</p>
<p /> | Social Slipup: Chris Christie dubbed “Governor YouTube” | false | https://ivn.us/2012/08/30/social-slipup-chris-christie-dubbed-governor-youtube/ | 2012-08-30 | 2 |
<p>Jan 18 (Reuters) - Enish Inc :</p>
<p>* Says 1,520 units of its second series options were exercised to 152,000 shares of its common stock during period from Jan. 12 to Jan. 18</p>
<p>Source text in Japanese: <a href="https://goo.gl/RhAki9" type="external">goo.gl/RhAki9</a></p>
<p>Further company coverage: (Beijing Headline News)</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former FBI director James Comey said in an ABC News interview on Sunday that U.S. President Donald Trump is a dangerous, “morally unfit” leader doing “tremendous damage” to institutional and cultural norms.</p>
<p>Comey, fired by Trump in May last year, was worried the president may be open to blackmail by Russia given claims he was present when prostitutes urinated on each other during a 2013 Moscow visit.</p>
<p>Comey’s firing came as the Federal Bureau of Investigation was probing possible connections between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia’s meddling in the U.S. election.</p>
<p>Russia has denied interfering in the election and Trump has denied any collusion or improper activity.</p>
<p>Comey said in the exclusive interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, which aired at 10 p.m. on Sunday (0200 GMT on Monday), that it is “possible, but I don’t know” whether Russia has evidence to back up the allegations about Trump’s Moscow trip.</p>
<p>Trump told Comey that he had not stayed overnight in the Moscow hotel and that the claims related to the prostitutes were not true, Comey said.</p>
<p>“A person ... who talks about and treats women like they’re pieces of meat, who lies constantly about matters big and small and insists the American people believe it, that person’s not fit to be president of the United States, on moral grounds. And that’s not a policy statement,” Comey said.</p>
<p>“He is morally unfit to be president,” he added.</p>
<p>Comey has a tell-all book, “Higher Loyalty,” due out on Tuesday.</p>
<p>The book’s imminent release - and the slated ABC News interview - prompted Trump to hurl a new set of insults at Comey earlier on Sunday, challenging accusations made in the book, and insisting that he never pressed Comey to be loyal to him.</p>
<p>“Slippery James Comey, a man who always ends up badly and out of whack (he is not smart!), will go down as the WORST FBI Director in history, by far!” Trump wrote early on Sunday in one of five Twitter posts aimed directly at Comey.</p>
<p>Reuters and other news outlets have obtained copies of Comey’s book before its formal release. In it, Comey wrote that Trump, in a private meeting, pressed the then-FBI director for his loyalty.</p>
<p>Comey told ABC News that the title of the book came from that “bizarre conversation” he had with Trump at the White House in January 2017, shortly after his inauguration.</p>
<p>“He asked for my loyalty personally as the F.B.I. director. My loyalty’s supposed to be to the American people and to the institution,” Comey said in the interview.</p>
<p>The FBI has long tried to operate as an independent law enforcement agency.</p>
<p>“I never asked Comey for Personal Loyalty. I hardly even knew this guy. Just another of his many lies,” Trump said on Twitter.</p> A copy of former FBI director James Comey's book "A Higher Loyalty" is seen in New York City, New York, U.S. April 13, 2018. REUTERS/Soren Larson
<p>Comey is now a crucial witness for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump has tried to obstruct the Russia probe.</p>
<p>Comey told ABC News that he believes there is “certainly some evidence of obstruction of justice.”</p>
<p>Comey also defended his decision to publicly disclose the FBI’s re-opening of its investigation into Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s handling of email when she was secretary of state.</p>
<p>The Clinton probe was already public, Comey said, whereas the FBI’s examination of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia was in its early stages. It did not become publicly known until after the 2016 presidential election.</p>
<p>Despite his myriad of reservations about Trump, Comey told ABC News that he did not believe the U.S. Congress should impeach him, as it would let the American people “off the hook” for something “they’re duty bound to do directly.”</p>
<p>“People in this country need to stand up and go to the voting booth and vote their values,” he said.</p> Slideshow (2 Images)
<p>U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, interviewed on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday morning, expressed qualified support for Comey. Asked whether Comey was a man of integrity, the Republican speaker said: “As far as I know,” but added that he did not know him well.</p>
<p>Asked about Trump’s use last week of the words “slime ball” to describe Comey, Ryan said: “I don’t use words like that.”</p>
<p>Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said the ABC interview reaffirms that Comey’s “higher loyalty is to himself.”</p>
<p>“He has no credibility and President Trump was right to follow through on the bipartisan calls for him to be fired,” McDaniel said in a statement.</p>
<p>Reporting by Amanda Becker and Sarah Lynch; Additional reporting by Richard Cowan; Editing by Lisa Shumaker and Peter Cooney</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>ATLANTA (Reuters) - Deadly slow-moving storms generated record or near-record snowfall and low temperatures in the U.S. Midwest and tornadoes further east on Sunday, leaving airline travelers stranded and thousands without power.</p>
<p>In Michigan, where snowfall was expected to reach 18 inches in some areas, about 310,000 homes and businesses were without power because of an ice storm, most of them in the southeast of the state.</p>
<p>Large areas of Detroit were without power and customers were not expected to have it back on Sunday night, utility DTE Energy ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=DTE.N" type="external">DTE.N</a>) said. It was working to have 90 percent of outages restored by Tuesday, DTE spokeswoman Carly Getz said in a statement.</p>
<p>The weight of ice on power lines, coupled with high winds, caused more than 1,000 power lines to fall in Detroit and Wayne County, DTE said.</p>
<p>The worst of the snow was focused on the upper Great Lakes, with Green Bay, Wisconsin, seeing its second largest snowstorm ever after 23.2 inches fell as of Sunday afternoon, the National Weather Service said.</p>
<p>For the twin cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, the April monthly record for snowfall of 21.8 inches (55 cm) was surpassed on Saturday, the National Weather Service said.</p>
<p>Two tornadoes tore up trees and ripped apart homes in Greensboro and Reidsville, North Carolina, killing a motorist who was hit by a tree, according to Greensboro’s city manager, local media reported.</p> Slideshow (2 Images)
<p>The storms stretched from the Gulf Coast to the Midwest and were moving into the Northeast and New England.</p>
<p>Record low temperatures for the date were expected in Oklahoma City on Monday at 30 degrees F (-1 C), and in Kansas City, Missouri, at 25 F (-4 C), Hurley said.</p>
<p>On Friday, the weather system produced 17 reports of tornadoes in Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri and Texas, with four people injured and 160 buildings damaged in a possible tornado in northwest Arkansas, local media reported.</p>
<a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=DTE.N" type="external">DTE Energy Co</a> 102.44 DTE.N New York Stock Exchange +0.34 (+0.33%) DTE.N
<p>The weather was blamed for two traffic deaths in western Nebraska and Wisconsin, according to National Public Radio.</p>
<p>The storms also killed a one-year-old girl when a tree fell on a recreational vehicle where she was sleeping, the sheriff’s office in Bossier Parish, Louisiana, said.</p>
<p>By Sunday night, 1,804 flights had been canceled into or out of U.S. airports, the website flightaware.com reported, including 148 flights in or out of the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport.</p>
<p>Reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta; Additional reporting by Bernie Woodall in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. and Andrew Hay in Taos, N.M.; Editing by Adrian Croft and Peter Cooney</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese Foreign Affairs Minister Taro Kono and his Chinese counterpart have pledged to improve ties between their nations and affirmed a commitment to stick with U.N. resolutions aimed at forcing North Korea to abandon nuclear weapons.</p> Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi (L) and Japan's Foreign Minister Taro Kono gesture at their meeting in Tokyo, Japan April 15, 2018. Behrouz Mehri/Pool via Reuters
<p>Kono met the Chinese government’s top diplomat, State Councillor Wang Yi, in Tokyo on Sunday, having made his own official visit to Beijing earlier this year.</p>
<p>Wang is the first Chinese foreign minister to visit Japan in a bilateral context in the nine years. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Chinese President Xi Jinping last year promised to reset the sometimes fraught relations between Asia’s two largest economies.</p> Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi (2nd L) and Japan's Foreign Minister Taro Kono (2nd R) meet in Tokyo, Japan April 15, 2018. Behrouz Mehri/Pool via Reuters
<p>“Through mutual visits between our two leaders we agreed to pursue wide-reaching cooperation and improved ties,” Kono said after Sunday’s meeting.</p>
<p>Economic ties between Japan and China are close, led by corporate investment. The neighbors remain at odds, however, over China’s growing military presence in the South China Sea, through which much of the region’s sea-borne trade sails, and a dispute over ownership of uninhabited islets in the East China Sea, known as the Senkaku in Tokyo and the Diaoyu in Beijing.</p>
<p>Wang said his visit was in response to Japan’s positive attitude towards China.</p> Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi (L) shakes hands with Japan's Foreign Minister Taro Kono at their meeting in Tokyo, Japan April 15, 2018. Behrouz Mehri/Pool via Reuters
<p>“Since last year Japan has, in relations with China, displayed a positive message and friendly attitude,” he said.</p>
<p>The talks came ahead of a summit between the two Koreas this month and a meeting between North Korean leader Kim Jon Un and U.S. President Donald Trump. The U.S-North Korea talks are aimed at ending a stand-off over Pyongyang’s development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.</p>
<p>“To establish a complete, irreversible and verifiable denuclearization of North Korea we agreed to continue to fully implement all relevant U.N. resolutions and to work closely together,” Kono said.</p>
<p>Wang, who spent eight years in Japan as a diplomat, including three as China’s ambassador, is scheduled to hold further talks with Kono and other Japanese Cabinet ministers on Monday.</p>
<p>On Tuesday Japanese Self Defense Force officers will meet counterparts from China’s People’s Liberation Army at a reception hosted by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation in an effort to build trust between the military rivals.</p>
<p>(Changes to Japan and China pledged relationship reset last year.)</p>
<p>Reporting by Nobuhiro Kubo; Writing by Tim Kelly and Ritsuko Ando; Editing by Sam Holmes and David Goodman</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a>
<p>(Reuters) - Starbucks Chief Executive Kevin Johnson apologized late on Saturday for the arrests of two black men at a Philadelphia coffee shop last week, which sparked accusations of racial profiling.</p>
<p>Promising to make everything right, Johnson promised a thorough investigation of the incident caught on video by a patron Thursday and shared widely online.</p>
<p>The men were accused of trespassing but have said they were waiting for a friend before ordering.</p>
<p>“The video shot by customers is very hard to watch and the actions in it are not representative of our Starbucks mission and values,” Johnson said in a statement.</p>
<p>He added, “The basis for the call to the Philadelphia police department was wrong.”</p>
<p>Philadelphia’s police commissioner on Saturday defended the arrest, saying his officers had to act after Starbucks employees told them the pair were trespassing.</p>
<p>Video of Thursday’s incident showed other patrons telling officers the pair were doing nothing wrong and appeared to have been targeted merely because of their race.</p>
<p>Police Commissioner Richard Ross said he knew the incident had prompted a lot of concern, but said his officers “did absolutely nothing wrong.”</p>
<p>In a video statement, Ross said store employees called 911 to report a disturbance and trespassing.</p>
<p>When officers arrived, Ross said, staff told them the two men had wanted to use the restroom but were informed it was only for paying customers. The pair repeatedly refused to leave when politely asked to do so by the employees and officers, he said.</p> Slideshow (8 Images)
<p>“If you think about it logically, that if a business calls and they say that someone is here that I no longer wish to be in my business, they (the officers) now have a legal obligation to carry out their duties. And they did just that,” Ross said.</p>
<p>“They were professional in all their dealings with these gentlemen, and instead they got the opposite back.”</p>
<p>Ross said that as an African-American man he was acutely aware of implicit bias. “We are committed to fair and unbiased policing and anything less than that will not be tolerated in this department,” he said.</p>
<p>The two men were released, Ross said, after officers learned Starbucks was “no longer interested” in prosecuting them.</p>
<a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=SBUX.O" type="external">Starbucks Corp</a> 59.24 SBUX.O Nasdaq -0.19 (-0.32%) SBUX.O
<p>In a post on Twitter earlier on Saturday, Starbucks Corp ( <a href="/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=SBUX.O" type="external">SBUX.O</a>) said it was sorry for what took place.</p>
<p>Johnson added his apology, saying the company would review its policies and “further train our partners to better know when police assistance is warranted.”</p>
<p>Melissa DePino, an author who posted video of the arrest, said staff called police because the two men had not ordered anything while waiting for a friend. She said white customers were “wondering why it’s never happened to us when we do the same thing.”</p>
<p>Police departments across the United States have come under criticism for repeated instances of killing unarmed black men in recent years, which activists blame on racial biases in the criminal justice system.</p>
<p>Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York; Additional reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta; Editing by David Gregorio and Clarence Fernandez</p> Our Standards:
<a href="" type="internal">The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.</a> | BRIEF-Enish announces exercise of options Fired FBI director Comey says Trump 'morally unfit': ABC News interview Storms unleash tornadoes in U.S. east, record snow in Midwest Japan and China's foreign ministers pledge to pursue improved ties Starbucks chief executive apologizes for arrests of two black men | false | https://reuters.com/article/brief-enish-announces-exercise-of-option/brief-enish-announces-exercise-of-options-idUSL3N1PD2NQ | 2018-01-18 | 2 |
<p>The White House has filed a legal brief arguing people blocked by President Donald Trump’s Twitter account cannot sue him for restricting their access to his tweets. Opponents say the brief is tantamount to claiming the Commander in Chief’s social media use is beyond the reach of the First Amendment, placing the president above the law.</p>
<p>The argument came in reaction to a lawsuit <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/us/politics/trump-twitter-users-lawsuit.html" type="external">filed in July</a> by seven users who have been blocked by Trump on Twitter and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Plaintiffs allege that a president blocking users on the social media service violates the First Amendment, as Trump’s use of the service constitutes a “state action.” In other words, <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2017/08/31/president-trump-keeps-blocking-people-twitter-that-legal/jv6w58QH5lQZDnIGccpjTM/story.html" type="external">they argue</a>, blocking users infringes on their First Amendment rights because it inhibits their ability to speak freely (to the president) in a public forum.</p>
<p>“The First Amendment applies to this digital forum in the same way it applies to town halls and open school board meetings,” Jameel Jaffer, the Knight Institute’s executive director, <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2017/08/31/president-trump-keeps-blocking-people-twitter-that-legal/jv6w58QH5lQZDnIGccpjTM/story.html" type="external">told the Boston Globe in August</a>. “The White House acts unlawfully when it excludes people from this forum simply because they’ve disagreed with the president.”</p>
<p>President Snowflake.</p>
<p />
<p>White House lawyers flatly rejected this claim in a brief <a href="https://knightcolumbia.org/sites/default/files/content/Knight_v_Trump_WH_opening_brief.pdf" type="external">filed on Friday</a>. They argued that not only are the Commander in Chief’s published statements on Twitter not a “state action,” but that individual citizens don’t have standing to sue the president because “it would flout the separation of powers for the Court to issue an order limiting the President’s discretion in managing his Twitter account.”</p>
<p>Even if the plaintiffs have standing, the brief contends, the president’s use of Twitter is simply a “forum” that does not require neutrality.</p>
<p>“At most, the account is a channel for The President’s speech, and the requirement of viewpoint neutrality accordingly does not apply,” the authors write.</p>
<p>The brief’s insistence that the president’s account is “personal” was also backed by the Department of Justice, which <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4108381-document-20388626.html" type="external">argued in a letter</a> on Friday that the president’s use of the account doesn’t constitute a state action but is just one of “many… personal decisions he makes as president.”</p>
<p>Leaders at the Knight Institute were not convinced.</p>
<p>“The White House’s claim that the court lacks authority to enjoin the president is wrong, and if it were accepted&#160;its&#160;implications would be far-reaching and intolerable. The president isn’t above the law,” Jaffer said in a statement Saturday morning.&#160;“The government’s claim to the contrary is based on an overbroad reading of cases that involved very different factual contexts as well as executive interests far more weighty than the ones at issue here.”</p>
<p>Other issues with the president’s claim abound. Although both the brief and the DoJ claim that the president’s account is personal, for instance, Trump’s own former press secretary Sean Spicer once argued the tweets were “ <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/06/politics/trump-tweets-official-statements/index.html" type="external">official statements</a>” of the president. What’s more, the White House <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/23/politics/white-house-comey-tapes-trump-tweet/index.html" type="external">argued in a June letter to Congress</a> that Trump’s tweets are official state language when discussing Trump’s firing of former FBI director James Comey.</p>
<p>The case is currently still making its way through the federal court system. In the meantime, Trump’s longstanding habit of blocking people on Twitter who disagree with him persists. In addition to blocking celebrities such as author <a href="https://twitter.com/StephenKing/status/874646427091251201?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&amp;ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fpeople.com%2Fpolitics%2Fpeople-president-trump-blocked-twitter-chrissy-teigen-stephen-king%2F" type="external">Stephen King</a>, the president’s account has also reportedly blocked <a href="http://people.com/politics/people-president-trump-blocked-twitter-chrissy-teigen-stephen-king/" type="external">models</a>, <a href="" type="internal">veterans organizations</a>, and <a href="" type="internal">a woman with stage 4 cancer</a> who criticized his health care plan.</p> | White House claims Trump’s Twitter account is personal, so he can block whoever he likes | true | https://thinkprogress.org/white-house-twitter-personal-eaa2346371e2/ | 2017-10-14 | 4 |
<p>JUBA, South Sudan (AP) — The new leader of UNICEF says the children’s agency is taking a new approach in 2018 by engaging with private companies to help prepare young people for productive lives.</p>
<p>In an interview with The Associated Press, executive director Henrietta Holsman Fore said she plans to draw on her experience in the business and development worlds. The American was the first woman to lead the U.S. Agency for International Development and was CEO of Holsman International, an investment and management firm.</p>
<p>“I would hope that we can cross over and try to take the best from each other and scale it up for the people that we serve, as we serve children and children need everything,” Fore told the AP during a visit to South Sudan this week.</p>
<p>She chose the civil war-torn nation for her first international trip since taking over the U.N. agency at the start of the year because South Sudan is where aid workers face the greatest risk worldwide. At least 28 aid workers were killed in the East African nation last year, according to figures released by the U.N. this week.</p>
<p>Fore urged South Sudan President Salva Kiir to make the country’s people his “first priority” and called the country’s dire situation “a crisis for children.”</p>
<p>South Sudan’s civil war, now in its fifth year, has killed tens of thousands and displaced millions. Children have borne the brunt of the conflict.</p>
<p>“The fighting shows no sign of abating and the humanitarian needs are massive,” Fore said in a statement Friday at the end of her visit. “2.4 million children have been forced to flee their homes. More than a quarter of a million children are severely malnourished and at imminent risk of death. Over 19,000 children have been recruited into the conflict.</p>
<p>“At least one in three schools has been damaged, destroyed, occupied or closed. And we have documented more than 1,200 cases of sexual violence against children. The numbers go on and on.”</p>
<p>Over 70 percent of children are out of school, the highest proportion of children without education in the world, according to the U.N.</p>
<p>The combination of an illiterate generation with one that’s been severely displaced means that “you’ve lost them twice,” Fore said. “You lose them to education and you lose them to life skills. You’re impoverishing a nation.”</p>
<p>Fore said she plans to launch new initiatives to focus on the “second decade of life,” or children between the ages of 10 and 18. Her idea is to use education and work programs including local and multinational companies that can bring children into their work and teach them skills.</p>
<p>UNICEF is the U.N.’s second-largest agency, with a budget of about $5 billion in 2017.</p>
<p>JUBA, South Sudan (AP) — The new leader of UNICEF says the children’s agency is taking a new approach in 2018 by engaging with private companies to help prepare young people for productive lives.</p>
<p>In an interview with The Associated Press, executive director Henrietta Holsman Fore said she plans to draw on her experience in the business and development worlds. The American was the first woman to lead the U.S. Agency for International Development and was CEO of Holsman International, an investment and management firm.</p>
<p>“I would hope that we can cross over and try to take the best from each other and scale it up for the people that we serve, as we serve children and children need everything,” Fore told the AP during a visit to South Sudan this week.</p>
<p>She chose the civil war-torn nation for her first international trip since taking over the U.N. agency at the start of the year because South Sudan is where aid workers face the greatest risk worldwide. At least 28 aid workers were killed in the East African nation last year, according to figures released by the U.N. this week.</p>
<p>Fore urged South Sudan President Salva Kiir to make the country’s people his “first priority” and called the country’s dire situation “a crisis for children.”</p>
<p>South Sudan’s civil war, now in its fifth year, has killed tens of thousands and displaced millions. Children have borne the brunt of the conflict.</p>
<p>“The fighting shows no sign of abating and the humanitarian needs are massive,” Fore said in a statement Friday at the end of her visit. “2.4 million children have been forced to flee their homes. More than a quarter of a million children are severely malnourished and at imminent risk of death. Over 19,000 children have been recruited into the conflict.</p>
<p>“At least one in three schools has been damaged, destroyed, occupied or closed. And we have documented more than 1,200 cases of sexual violence against children. The numbers go on and on.”</p>
<p>Over 70 percent of children are out of school, the highest proportion of children without education in the world, according to the U.N.</p>
<p>The combination of an illiterate generation with one that’s been severely displaced means that “you’ve lost them twice,” Fore said. “You lose them to education and you lose them to life skills. You’re impoverishing a nation.”</p>
<p>Fore said she plans to launch new initiatives to focus on the “second decade of life,” or children between the ages of 10 and 18. Her idea is to use education and work programs including local and multinational companies that can bring children into their work and teach them skills.</p>
<p>UNICEF is the U.N.’s second-largest agency, with a budget of about $5 billion in 2017.</p> | New UNICEF chief to engage private sector to help children | false | https://apnews.com/207417db801347de8cbef75eedfffdd5 | 2018-01-19 | 2 |
<p />
<p>Live in Wyoming? Ever wondered what it’s like to listen to Robert Byrd drone on and on in a barely conscious state? Want to shin kick have a few words with Joe Lieberman?</p>
<p>Then it’s your lucky day. <a href="http://wonkette.com/politics/career-opportunities-dept%27/who-wants-to-be-a-senator-268220.php" type="external">Over at Wonkette</a>, they’ve discovered that the Wyoming GOP is honoring the <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19038581/" type="external">recent death</a> of Republican senator Craig Thomas by posting an application for his job <a href="http://www.wygop.org/" type="external">on its website</a>. Jeez, Craig, why’d you die? Your job couldn’t have been that taxing. It’s basically reality TV show fodder.</p>
<p>Anyway, there’s a PDF application that you have to fill out, and apparently it helps if you’re a member of the GOP/have served the state of Wyoming previously/have a platform. But whatevs, MoJoBlog readers could probably do a better job than a lot of the goofs currently in Congress. Go give it a shot.</p>
<p /> | You Could Be the Next Senator From Wyoming! | true | https://motherjones.com/politics/2007/06/you-could-be-next-senator-wyoming/ | 2007-06-13 | 4 |
<p>The following is a summary of analysts' assessments of the likely economic impact of the devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck the northeast coast of Japan. Most were published before Japan warned on Tuesday that radioactive levels had become significantly higher around a quake-hit nuclear plant.</p>
<p>CITIGROUP</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>"It may be too early to discuss how much damage was done to housing and infrastructure, but we suspect it could match that of the Great Hanshin Earthquake in 1995.</p>
<p>"Some of the damage will likely generate reconstruction demand and bolster activity in the coming months as actual restoration begins."</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">UBS</a></p>
<p>"You will have a drop in economic growth, but after that, of course, a recovery process.</p>
<p>"Because of disruptions to power supplies and transport, you to tend to find drops in (economic growth). But as that infrastructure is repaired in the months ahead, you get a re-acceleration in economic growth. This is by far the most likely outcome.</p>
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<p>BARCLAYS CAPITAL</p>
<p>"The final damages are expected to exceed those from the Kobe earthquake. There is also a need to consider the potentially negative impact on other regions due to the Tohoku region's 'trade economy' character.</p>
<p>"Earthquakes not only curb effective demand (eg. consumption, capex) but also lower potential growth through damage to tangible fixed assets and human capital. In terms of the CPI, we believe the impact will be neutral."</p>
<p>NOMURA</p>
<p>"Based on what occurred after the Kobe earthquake, we think an all-out slump in the Japanese economy caused by the Sendai earthquake is overly pessimistic. However, a V-shaped recovery supported by a rapid upturn in demand driven by rebuilding work in the affected areas is also unlikely.</p>
<p>"We now expect the Japanese economy to take longer than we expected to exit its current soft patch owing to the earthquake and tsunami.</p>
<p>"The consensus forecast on the timing for this exit was Jan-March 2011, while we had projected April-June. However, we now think July-September or possibly October-December is more likely. We expect solid economic recovery to be confirmed in October-December."</p>
<p>(Compiled by Kevin Yao; editing by Vidya Ranganathan)</p> | Disaster in Japan: The Economic Impact | true | http://foxbusiness.com/2011/03/15/disaster-china-economic-impact.html | 2016-03-07 | 0 |
<p>Swiss drugmaker Roche Holding AG has reported "stable" or flat sales for the first nine months of 2013 but says the results show strong demand for its cancer drugs and emerging new products.</p>
<p>The Basel, Switzerland-based company says group sales were 34.8 billion Swiss francs, nearly unchanged from 34.9 billion francs in the same time period last year. But when measured in constant exchange rates, sales rose 5 percent over the first three quarters of the year.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>It notes that a number of currencies, notably the U.S. dollar, remained weaker against the Swiss franc throughout the year.</p>
<p>The world's biggest producer of cancer-fighting drugs said Thursday that sales of cancer medicines Herceptin, Perjeta and Kadcyla together increased 21 percent, while its sales of rheumatoid arthritis treatment Actemra/RoActemra rose 24 percent.</p> | Swiss drug maker Roche posts flat third-quarter sales amid strong franc | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2014/10/16/swiss-drug-maker-roche-posts-flat-third-quarter-sales-amid-strong-franc.html | 2016-03-05 | 0 |
<p>Published time: 27 Nov, 2017 22:25Edited time: 27 Nov, 2017 22:32</p>
<p>The FDNY is in all-hands-on-deck mode after a fire and smoke prompted over 100 people to evacuate 1540 Broadway in Times Square, including the 45-story Viacom building. No injuries have been reported so far.</p>
<p />
<p>FDNYalerts MAN ALL HANDS 1540 BROADWAY, HIGH RISE FIRE IN PARKING GARAGE STORAGE AREA,</p>
<p>— FDNYalerts (@FDNYAlerts) <a href="https://twitter.com/FDNYAlerts/status/935270189121376257?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" type="external">November 27, 2017</a></p>
<p />
<p>The fire began around 4:30pm in a storage room of the Midtown Manhattan skyscraper, the FDNY said, WCBS <a href="http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2017/11/27/fire-in-storage-room-prompts-partial-evacuation-of-high-rise-near-times-square/" type="external">reported</a>.</p>
<p>DETAILS TO FOLLOW</p> | Fire in Times Square forces mass evacuation, all hands on deck response | false | https://newsline.com/fire-in-times-square-forces-mass-evacuation-all-hands-on-deck-response/ | 2017-11-27 | 1 |
<p>EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, a climate denier, is launching&#160;an initiative at the agency&#160;to challenge scientists' near-universal consensus on climate science by having experts debate scientific studies, <a href="https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060056858" type="external">E&amp;E News</a> reported Friday.</p>
<p>The initiative&#160;will include "red team, blue team" exercises to perform "at-length evaluation of U.S. climate science," an anonymous administration&#160;official told E&amp;E News. The term "red team, blue team" is used by the military to describe exercises&#160;aimed at finding vulnerabilities, and it was <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-red-team-exercise-would-strengthen-climate-science-1492728579" type="external">popularized</a> as a way to debate climate science by Wall Street Journal columnist Steven Koonin.</p>
<p>"The administrator believes that we will be able to recruit the best in the fields which study climate and will organize a specific process in which these individuals - provide back-and-forth critique of specific new reports on climate science," the official told E&amp;E News.</p>
<p>Pruitt has previously said that he would support such a&#160;debate over climate science at the EPA, but this report is the first indication that he's moving toward starting one. The agency did not immediately respond Friday to TPM's request for comment.</p>
<p>He told Breitbart News earlier in June that he would like to facilitate this type of debate at the EPA.</p>
<p>"What the American people deserve, I think, is a true, legitimate, peer-reviewed, objective, transparent discussion about CO2," <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/06/07/epas-scott-pruitt-wants-to-set-up-opposing-teams-to-debate-climate-change-science/?utm_term=.6ac79a4c99ea" type="external">he said</a>.</p>
<p>Though Pruitt reportedly has&#160;started this initiative, it's not clear that he'll try to challenge the endangerment finding, the EPA determination that greenhouse gas emissions damage the climate, which the agency has used&#160;to justify regulation of greenhouse gases, per E&amp;E News' report. Pruitt&#160; <a href="" type="internal">vowed</a>&#160;that he would not touch the endangerment finding during his confirmation hearing earlier this year.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | Pruitt Is Reportedly Starting An EPA Initiative To Challenge Climate Science | true | http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/pruitt-epa-climate-science-critique | 4 |
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<p>Break out the vodka and caviar!</p>
<p>Russian comrades might have made a show of spreading the wealth equally in the days of communism -- but no more. The country's 1 percent has embraced capitalism to such an extent that dozens of fabulously wealthy oligarchs live super-sized lifestyles, splurging around the world.</p>
<p>In America and Europe, Russia's uber-rich have bought up expensive homes in New York and Miami, scooped up priceless artwork, taken stakes in businesses and landmark buildings, and even dropped millions for sports teams.</p>
<p>These billionaires are not on the list of Russians whose assets have been ordered frozen by President Obama because of Moscow's moves to force the secession of Crimea from Ukraine, but their influence in the West has not gone unnoticed.</p>
<p>Their fortunes are such that financiers in the world's banking capitals are falling over each other to help these loaded Russians make investments. Britain's financial center, the City of London, was even jokingly dubbed "LondonGrad" recently because of the amount of business done there on behalf of the Russian billionaires.</p>
<p>Here's a look at some of the bold-faced names, many of whom made vast fortunes in the energy and natural resources industries after the breakup of the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>Roman Abramovich</p>
<p>The 47-year-old made his fortune in a series of oil export deals in the early 1990s and has a net worth of more than $9 billion according to Forbes magazine. But his stake in steel giant Evraz lost almost two-thirds of its value in 2013, driven down by falling steel prices and a global steel glut. His 18 percent stake in Highland Gold Mining also did poorly.</p>
<p>He was reported to be in contract last year to close on a Fifth Avenue townhouse on Central Park, New York city for a staggering $75 million. The deal fell through, but Forbes sources now say it's back on.</p>
<p>Abramovich is well known in Europe as the owner of London's Chelsea FC soccer club, which has won three English Premier League titles and one European Champions League title since he took over the team 10 years ago.</p>
<p>He also owns the world's largest yacht, the 533-foot Eclipse, which cost him $400 million in 2010. He has a 377-foot ice boat, the Luna, a Boeing 767 and homes in London, France, St. Barts, Colorado and Los Angeles. His art collection includes 40 paintings by Ilya Kabakov, the most expensive living Russian artist.</p>
<p>He was rumored to be the buyer of Francis Bacon's "Three Studies Of Lucian Freud," which sold for $142.4 million last November. Abramovich paid $86 million for "Triptych, 1976" in 2008 -- previously the highest amount paid for a Bacon work</p>
<p>In the mid- to late 1990s, during Russia's privatization process, Onexim supervised the auctions that gave it and other banks the right to lend to the government. When the government defaulted on the loans, the banks acquired the shares in conpanies. In 1995 Onexim got control of mining giant Norilsk Nickel--the foundation of phenomenal wealth for both him and Potanin.</p>
<p>Prokhorov, who is 6-foot-8, played basketball and enjoys other sports, including jet skiing. He joined with several partners, including rapper Jay-Z, in bidding for the Brooklyn Nets basketball team. In 2010, the NBA approved the sale to Prokhorov, making him the majority owner of the team with an 80-percent stake. He also acquired a 45-percent interest in the new Barclays Center sports and entertainment arena.</p>
<p>Alisher Usmanov</p>
<p>The richest man in Russia, Usmanov made his $18.6 billion fortune in iron ore and steel and now has interests ranging from telecommunications to media. He has also owned shares in U.S. companies such as Facebook and Apple and is a part owner of another English Premier League soccer club, Arsenal.</p>
<p>In 2013 he formed USM Holdings, dividing with billionaire partners Andrey Skoch and Farhad Moshiri nearly all of his businesses. In 2013 the partners sold all the shares in Facebook they owned, and they bought and then sold a stake in Apple for a substantial profit.</p>
<p>Dmitry Rybolovlev</p>
<p>Rybolovlev, who was valued by Forbes last year as being worth $9.1 billion, is a philanthropist who made his money in the potash business. He is famous for his real estates moves in the United States and elsewhere. He bought the Maison de L’Amitie mansion in Florida from Donald Trump for $95 million in 2008 and in 2011 Rybololev reportedly bought a mansion from Hollywood star Will Smith on Kauai, Hawaii, for $20 million. He is also said to have paid $300 million for a belle epoque penthouse in Monaco where he lives.</p>
<p>In December 2011, Rybolovlev’s daughter Ekaterina purchased the most expensive apartment to have been bought at that time in New York City for $88 million. She also bought the Greek island of Skorpios, which once belonged to shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, for $153 million.</p>
<p>Roustam Tariko</p>
<p>The owner of Russian Standard Bank and Russian Standard Vodka is worth an estimated $1.1 billion. He owns one of the most expensive homes in Miami Beach -- a $25.5 million estate on Star Island. And like many of his fellow Russian oligarchs, that's about all we know about him.</p> | Frozen Assets? These Russians Are Spending Money Like Crazy | false | http://nbcnews.com/storyline/ukraine-crisis/frozen-assets-these-russians-are-spending-money-crazy-n55911 | 2014-03-18 | 3 |
<p>By Clara Ferreira-Marques</p>
<p>LONDON (Reuters) - Commodities giant Glencore is set to launch a roughly $10 billion public offering on Thursday, when it outlines plans for a May market debut that will make multi-millionaires of its partners and boost its deal-making capacity.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Sources close to the situation say the secretive Swiss-based firm -- the world's largest commodities trader -- is preparing to publish an Intention to Float, ending months of frenzied speculation as it details its plan to sell a stake of up to 20 percent in a dual London-Hong Kong listing.</p>
<p>Fueled by the lofty prices in many of the raw materials Glencore buys, mines, ships and sells, the float could be one of the biggest in London's history, propelling the firm into the FTSE 100 bluechip index and into the pension funds and investment portfolios of millions.</p>
<p>Glencore, valued earlier this year by an analyst at $60 billion, has consistently declined to comment on the timing of the float and its potential valuation.</p>
<p>A convertible bond issued in 2009 valued the company at about $35 billion, before conversion, but strong profits since then will have led to a significant increase.</p>
<p>At current market values, Glencore's listed stakes alone are worth around 31 billion pounds. These include just over 34 percent of Swiss miner Xstrata and just under 9 percent of Russian aluminum giant RUSAL &lt;0486.HK&gt;.</p>
<p>LIFTING THE VEIL</p>
<p>Notoriously discreet, Glencore and its executives will be stepping into the limelight after four decades of closely guarded privacy with the bumper IPO.</p>
<p>But by scrapping its long-standing partnership structure in favor of life as a public company, Glencore will be able to reward its 500 or so partners and to fund more -- and larger -- acquisitions, including a possible merger with Xstrata.</p>
<p>Glencore, which owns extensive mining operations, oil fields, grain elevators and more ships than Britain's Royal Navy, has so far taken an opportunistic approach to deals, often snapping up lower "tier" assets than its diversified miner rivals, but at much keener prices.</p>
<p>The Swiss-based mining and trading firm is also expected to name a new non-executive chairman on Thursday -- a requirement for the listing. Three candidates were on the shortlist days before the document was published, including former French Foreign Legionnaire Simon Murray.</p>
<p>The new chairman will sit on an eight-strong board alongside Chief Executive Ivan Glasenberg.</p>
<p>Glencore is expected to sign up "cornerstone" shareholders to its IPO, but these may be made public only when it publishes its prospectus next month.</p>
<p>After months of volatility, investors remain jittery, but on the credit markets at least, they have shown signs of increased confidence.</p>
<p>Five-year credit default swaps on Glencore have continued to tighten, hitting their lowest levels since February 2010 earlier in the week and touching 153.7 basis points on Wednesday, Markit data showed. That price means it costs 153,700 euros a year to insure 10 million of debt against default.</p>
<p>Glencore has yet to officially mandate its advisors, but Citi , <a href="" type="internal">Morgan Stanley</a> and <a href="" type="internal">Credit Suisse</a> are likely to serve as joint global co-ordinators, with Bank of America <a href="" type="internal">Merrill Lynch</a> and BNP Paribas as bookrunners.</p>
<p>Barclays Capital , <a href="" type="internal">Societe Generale</a> and <a href="" type="internal">UBS</a> are likely to make up a third tier of banks advising, according to sources familiar with the matter.</p>
<p>(Reporting by Clara Ferreira-Marques; Additional reporting by Quentin Webb; Editing by Jon Loades-Carter)</p>
<p>Advertisement</p> | Glencore set to detail plans for $10 billion listing | true | http://foxbusiness.com/features/2011/04/13/glencore-set-to-detail-plans-for-10-billion-listing.html | 2016-01-28 | 0 |
<p />
<p>Consumer-products giant Procter &amp; Gamble (NYSE:PG) impressed Wall Street on Friday by more than doubling its fiscal second-quarter profits and hiking its full-year guidance above estimates.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Shares of the maker of Tide laundry detergent and Bounty paper towels rallied 2% on the upbeat developments.</p>
<p>P&amp;G, the world’s largest consumer products maker, said it earned $4.06 billion, or $1.39 a share, last quarter, compared with a profit of $1.69 billion, or 57 cents a share, a year earlier.</p>
<p>Excluding one-time items, it earned $1.22 a share, up from $1.09 a year before and well above the Street’s view of $1.11.</p>
<p>Revenue rose 2% to $22.18 billion, besting consensus calls from analysts for $21.91 billion. Organic sales grew by 3%, while gross margins expanded to 50.9% from 50.1%.</p>
<p>“Global market share trends improved as we continued to implement our growth strategy and made very good progress against our productivity and cost savings goals,” CEO Bob McDonald said in a statement.</p>
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<p>P&amp;G pleased shareholders by raising its earnings targets, projecting fiscal 2013 non-GAAP EPS of $3.97 to $4.07. Even the conservative end of the new range would meet the Street’s view of $3.97.</p>
<p>The maker of Duracell batteries and Pantene hair products also upped its organic-sales growth view to a range of 3% to 4%, compared with 2% to 4% previously.</p>
<p>For the current quarter, P&amp;G is calling for non-GAAP EPS of 91 cents to 97 cents, compared with estimates from analysts for 95 cents. Organic sales are seen rising 3% to 4%.</p>
<p>P&amp;G also said it now sees buying back $5 billion to $6 billion of its own stock, up from $4 billion to $6 billion earlier.</p>
<p>“Our strong first half results have enabled us to raise our sales, earnings and share repurchase outlook for the fiscal year, while we strengthen investments in our innovation and marketing programs,” McDonald said.</p>
<p>Wall Street cheered the P&amp;G news, bidding the Cincinnati-based company’s shares 2.07% higher to $71.88 in premarket trading.</p>
<p>The rally should boost P&amp;G’s 2013 gain of nearly 4%, but the stock has picked up just 6% over the past 12 months, compared with 23% for rival Colgate-Palmolive (NYSE:CL).</p> | Procter & Gamble Unveils Fiscal 2Q Beat, Ups FY View | true | http://foxbusiness.com/features/2013/01/25/procter-gamble-unveils-fiscal-2q-beat.html | 2016-01-25 | 0 |
<p>After a long and lively Emmy campaign season, TV industry insiders head for the Microsoft Theater today eagerly anticipating the epic finale of the most suspenseful competition in a decade.</p>
<p>Not since “Mad Men” began its four-peat winning streak in 2008 has there been such a wide open field for the night’s most prestigious trophy: best drama series.</p>
<p>What is predictable: host Stephen Colbert is sure to offer up plenty of political humor in his monologue, and look for winners to also share some fiery political sentiments in their speeches.</p>
<p>During the past 72 hours of pre-Emmy revelry, a strong sentiment has emerged in favor of NBC’s “ <a href="http://variety.com/t/this-is-us/" type="external">This Is Us</a>.” There is a widespread feeling — expressed by many with no connection to the show or the Peacock — that it would be “good for the business” if a broadcast network series were to win for the first time since Fox’s “24” in 2006.</p>
<p>A “This Is Us” victory would signal to the creative community that the old-guard networks can still be kudos contenders. And it would reward creator Dan Fogelman and studio 20th Century Fox TV for delivering what seemed to be the impossible in a multiplatform world: a broad-based, must-see hit. The hope is that a “This Is Us” win would convince nervous networks to invest in original ideas that break the storytelling mold.</p>
<p>But the narrative of the night could just as easily turn to becoming a milestone for the digital crowd. A win for Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” would be a David-versus-Goliath triumph for the smallest of the Big Three streamers. It would also be a major statement for MGM Television, the studio behind the adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel.</p>
<p>Or, the night could end with Netflix claiming its first drama series Emmy, for “ <a href="http://variety.com/t/stranger-things/" type="external">Stranger Things</a>,” “The Crown” or “House of Cards.” Of the three, the level of affection among Emmy voters seems to be strongest for “Stranger Things.” The town loves a good by-the-bootstraps story, as creators Ross and Matt Duffer delivered in coming out of nowhere to charm fans and critics with a sci-fi whodunit that offered a loving homage to 1980s genre pics.</p>
<p>Even in this glossy field, no one is counting out the chance that the scrappy Jimmy McGill might elbow his way to the stage. AMC’s “Better Call Saul” had an undeniably impressive third season, and Emmy wins are in the DNA of the “Breaking Bad” prequel, after all.</p>
<p>The comedy series race is almost as unpredictable. HBO’s reigning champ “Veep” is the frontrunner, after back-to-back wins in 2015 and 2016. FX’s “Atlanta” is putting up a powerful fight, armed with its Golden Globe win and a year’s worth of critical raves for Donald Glover’s intimate portrait. But there’s also a strong feeling that ABC’s “Black-ish” and Netflix’s “Master of None” are wild cards.</p>
<p>There’s even less clarity in the variety-talk series field. Will Samantha Bee triumph for TBS’ “Full Frontal”? Will HBO’s “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” score a repeat win? Might Emmy host Stephen Colbert do a victory lap around the stage for his surging “Late Show”? Or will James Corden, Jimmy Kimmel or Bill Maher crash the party?</p>
<p>In this year of hard-edged political humor, nothing is sacred, and nothing is a shoo in — with the exception of the variety sketch category. After the muscle that “Saturday Night Live” flexed in the opening months of the Trump era, the Earth will stop spinning on its axis if the venerable NBC sketch comedy doesn’t take the trophy tonight.</p>
<p>All the uncertainty surrounding the night’s big winners should make for a lively ceremony. Nominees will be sweating it out, for sure, but other Emmy attendees probably won’t. The forecast calls for the temperature in downtown Los Angeles to stay at an unseasonably low 73 degrees during the late-afternoon red carpet processional. What’s more, in an Emmy first that is oh-so-L.A., the carpet area will be tented and air-conditioned.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the LAPD said Friday that major tourist venues would see “increased security measures” after the recent London underground attack.</p>
<p>The 2017 Emmy Awards airs live tonight on CBS at 5pm PT/8pm ET.</p>
<p>(Pictured: Emmy telecast producers Ricky Kirshner and Glenn Weiss, host Stephen Colbert, CBS’ Jack Sussman and the Television Academy’s Hayma Washington)</p> | Emmys 2017: Politics and a Possible Network Comeback Take Center Stage | false | https://newsline.com/emmys-2017-politics-and-a-possible-network-comeback-take-center-stage/ | 2017-09-17 | 1 |
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<p>The company said Friday that it would cut capital and exploratory spending next year by one-fourth, with further cuts in 2017 and 2018 depending on the oil industry's condition then.</p>
<p>"With the lower investment, we anticipate reducing our employee workforce by 6-7,000," Chairman and CEO John Watson said in a statement. Chevron has 64,700 employees, according to a spokesman.</p>
<p>With lower prices for the oil and natural gas that it produces, Watson said the company was "focused on improving results by changing outcomes within our control." He said operating and administrative costs were 7 percent lower than last year, and further reductions are likely.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Watson said the company has raised $11 billion by selling assets in the last two years, and it could generate another $5 billion to $10 billion in sell-off gains by the end of 2017.</p>
<p>Cheaper energy prices were key to 64 percent drop in third-quarter profit at Chevron, the nation's second-biggest oil company behind Exxon Mobil. Oil prices have fallen from over $100 in June 2014 to under $50 this month.</p>
<p>Chevron said that third-quarter earnings plunged to $2.04 billion, or $1.09 per share, down from $5.6 billion, or $2.95 per share, a year ago. The latest results still beat Wall Street expectations. The average estimate of 10 analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research was for 79 cents per share.</p>
<p>Revenue fell 37 percent to $34.32 billion despite an uptick in production. Five analysts surveyed by FactSet expected $27.70 billion.</p>
<p>In morning trading, shares of San Ramon, California-based Chevron rose 67 cents to $90.56. They began the day down 20 percent since the beginning of 2015, while the Standard &amp; Poor's 500 index rose 1.5 percent.</p>
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<p>Elements of this story were generated by Automated Insights ( <a href="http://automatedinsights.com/ap)" type="external">http://automatedinsights.com/ap)</a> using data from Zacks Investment Research. Access a Zacks stock report on CVX at <a href="http://www.zacks.com/ap/CVX" type="external">http://www.zacks.com/ap/CVX</a></p>
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<p>Keywords: Chevron, Earnings Report</p> | Chevron cutting up to 7,000 jobs; profit falls to $2 billion | false | https://abqjournal.com/668104/chevron-cutting-up-to-7000-jobs-profit-falls-to-2-billion.html | 2 |
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<p>July 25 (UPI) — Scientists at the University of Washington are considering the prospects of a controversial climate change solution called “marine cloud brightening.”</p>
<p>Most agree the best solution to climate change is the curbing of carbon emissions — by reducing the burning of fossil fuels, as well as increasing the adoption of renewable energy sources.</p>
<p>But if efforts to curb emissions fall short or prove insufficient, emergency solutions may be necessary to avoid the most catastrophic consequences of global warming. Enter marine cloud brightening, a climate engineering solution.</p>
<p>Clouds form when water droplets condense on particles in the air and coalesce in the atmosphere. Higher concentrations of particulates allow smaller water droplets to form clouds, yielding bigger, whiter clouds that reflect sunlight instead of absorbing heat.</p>
<p>Researchers at the University of Washington have proposed spraying particulates over the ocean to encourage the formation of solar energy-reflecting marine clouds. They published their proposal this week <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017EF000601/abstract;jsessionid=A6E4EBF189C9C930C98F9A9776057D22.f04t02" type="external">in the journal Earth’s Future</a>.</p>
<p>Some climate scientists believe marine cloud brightening is already happening as a result of an increase in air pollution since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The phenomenon may be offsetting a small percentage of the greenhouse gas effect, but measuring how much has proven difficult.</p>
<p>“Testing out marine cloud brightening would actually have some major benefits for addressing both questions,” Rob Wood, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Washington, <a href="http://www.washington.edu/news/2017/07/25/could-spraying-particles-into-marine-clouds-help-cool-the-planet/" type="external">said in a news release</a>. “Can we perturb the clouds in this way, and are the climate models correctly representing the relationship between clouds and aerosols?”</p>
<p>Wood and his research partners are currently seeking public and private fundings for their work.</p>
<p>Their team aims to develop an efficient aerosol spraying device and test its ability to eject particles in the lab. The researchers must also find an ideal place to test their marine cloud brightening technology — somewhere without significant pollution and sufficient rates of marine cloud formation.</p>
<p>“We’re talking about some kind of new world in terms of the ethical issues,” said Thomas Ackerman, also a professor of atmospheric sciences. “But for climate, we’re no longer in an era of ‘do no harm.’ We are altering the climate already. It’s now a case of ‘the lesser of two evils.'”</p>
<p>Ackerman and his colleagues aren’t yet endorsing large-scale marine cloud brightening. They just want to test the solution’s potential.</p>
<p>“There’s a science question about can we do it, but there’s also an ethical question about should we do it, and a policy question about how would we do it,” Ackerman said. “I’m an agnostic on this. I want to test geoengineering and see if it works. But the whole time we’re working on this, I think we need to still be asking ourselves: ‘Should we do it?'”</p> | Scientists consider 'cloud brightening' to slow global warming | false | https://newsline.com/scientists-consider-cloud-brightening-to-slow-global-warming/ | 2017-07-25 | 1 |
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<p>Trombone Shorty is coming to the Lensic.</p>
<p>SANTA FE, N.M. — Maybe it’s a little too late for Mardi Gras, but we can still party as if Lent hadn’t started yet when Trombone Shorty &amp; Orleans Avenue come to the Lensic Performing Arts Center, 211 W. San Francisco St., at 7:30 this evening.</p>
<p>This guy’s been around. New Orleans native Trombone Shorty was among performers at the White House in 2012 for a concert in honor of Black History Month, and the group coming to the Lensic performed on the 2014 Grammy Awards show, with music described as jazz, funk, rock and hip-hop.</p>
<p>Tickets are $39 and pretty much sold out, but you can check the Lensic box office, 988-1234 or www.ticketssantafe.org, for returns.</p>
<p>SLACK KEY: Close your eyes, and maybe you’ll hear the crash of waves and cries of sea gulls. The Masters of Hawaiian Music will take you on a musical trip to the islands with folk styles sunk in local traditions. Guitarist George Kahumoku Jr., multi-instrumentalist Nathan Aweau and guitarist David “Kawika” Kahiapo are the masters headlining this concert, which will be performed 7:30 p.m. Sunday at the James A. Little Theater, 1060 Cerrillos Road.</p>
<p>Tickets are $32 ($7 for kids 12 and under), available through holdmyticket.com or by calling 505-886-1251.</p>
<p>Jimmy Webb</p>
<p>GALVESTON GUY: Songwriter Jimmy Webb had hits with Richard Harris (“MacArthur Park”) and The Fifth Dimension (“Up, Up and Away”), but he may be best known for his collaboration with Glen Campbell (“By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Wichita Lineman,” “Galveston”). Webb will sing some of those songs, and share memories, photos and audio clips from that musical pairing 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Lensic.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p>
<p>Tickets are $20-$55, available through the same Lensic sources mentioned above.</p>
<p>Printmaker Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. (Courtesy of 20kfilms)</p>
<p>BE BOLD: Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. is a letterpress printer who was the subject of a 2008 documentary, “Proceed and Be Bold!” Operator of a letterpress poster shop in Detroit, he has become known for his hand-printed art filled with social commentary.</p>
<p>He’s coming to the New Mexico History Museum, 113 Lincoln Ave., for a free talk today at 6 p.m. in the auditorium. Topics will include civil rights and the power of the press, so how could we resist recommending it?</p>
<p /> | Arts and Entertainment: Top Picks for the Week | false | https://abqjournal.com/961180/top-picks-for-the-week-35.html | 2 |
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<p>The events I am about to relate are far less dramatic than those still occurring in Cairo, Bagdad and innumerable hot spots throughout the world. But they are no less typical of the times we now live—times pregnant with change, tension-filled and replete with both the possibilities for democratic transformation and for fascistic reaction.</p>
<p>I am reporting from deep inside the interior of the historically insurrectional region called Les Cévennes, famous for its resistance to centralized tyranny since the early seventeenth century and even before. It is a region of low but rugged mountains, a region topographically similar to others along the Mediterranean coast such as southeastern Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. From my high base camp near the tiny village of Soudorgues, I can see the flat horizon that is the Mediterranean, 35 miles in the distance.</p>
<p>The population of Les Cévennes is proud of its rebellious heritage. There are many monuments about and hotels and restaurants named for the “Camisards”—rebels against crown and Catholic Church who successfully opposed the armies of Louis XIV, the absolutist “Sun King.” Bloody guerrilla fighting raged from the late seventeenth century until 1715 when the state came to terms with the rebels, although fighting continued for decades, right up to the French Revolution.</p>
<p>During the Nazi occupation of France, Les Cévenols—as the inhabitants are called—hid and protected large numbers of Jewish children and German deserters, and carried out armed resistance against the occupiers and their collaborators. Many Cévenols, of course, paid the full price for their activities. Today, secret passages and hiding places—some yet undiscovered—remain a common feature of this region and the lives of its rustic mountain people. Since the events of May 1968, the population of Les Cévennes has been supplemented by an influx of large numbers of agitators and visionaries, now well integrated into the indigenous culture and society.</p>
<p>Two weeks ago, on January 21, 2011, several dozens of the turbulent Cévenols staged a non-violent protest against renewed efforts to bring the region under tighter state control. At issue is an on-going government project to consolidate local electoral and administrative districts so as to harmonize resource management and tax levies—what has been bothering the Les Cévenols for the last four centuries.</p>
<p>As if France was not centralized enough, officialdom now wishes to incorporate small municipalities and communal districts into larger divisions dominated by bigger towns and cities in dire need of greater tax revenues. All this is in a context of diminished state funding—part of president Sarkozy’s “reforms”—putting fiscal pressure on every administrative instance all down the line.</p>
<p>The opponents of the project jumped on the occasion when they learned that the top regional and local officials preparing the fiscal noose—mainly members of Sarkozy’s gang—were commandeering an ancient, steam-powered tourist train running between the towns of Anduze and Alès in order to celebrate the “reforms.” The demonstrators—including five village mayors decked out in suits and with their official, honorific tri-colored sashes crossed diagonally over their chests—gathered in front of the train before it could leave the Anduze station. The gendarmes were there too. Among the demonstrators, including children and many elderly people, the atmosphere was gay. Not only was the demonstration non-violent, it was almost joyous.</p>
<p>All was friendly as the five mayors spoke with the commander of the gendarmes. After handshakes all around, the chief gendarme—commandant Frédéric Warion—asked, as reported in the Canard enchaîné on February 3&#160; 2011: “What do you plan to do?” To which Alain Beaud, socialist mayor of Saint-Sébastien-d’Aigrefeuille and president of the communes opposing the administrative consolidation, said: “We are just going to cause the train to be a little late, but we are not going to stop it. When we’ve finished, come over and take me by the arm and we will leave.”</p>
<p>Commander Warion nodded and returned to the platform. At his feet, an elderly, white-haired lady was seated with her legs over the rails, the elected officials with their red, white and blue sashes stood shoulder to shoulder astride the tracks. The other good citizens pressed together around and behind them, singing and chanting in favor of local autonomy.</p>
<p>Suddenly, commandant Warion—holding a large aerosol can with an extinguisher-like release lever, and with the demonstrators standing below him—leaned towards them and let loose with a powerful stream of tear gas. At this angle and range it was easy going. His men stood in a line along the platform, making it difficult for the people to rise out of the trap, and Warion was able to maintain his forceful spraying of their heads and faces.</p>
<p>As anyone who has been in a similar situation understands, it is difficult to remain stolidly calm and immobile under the direct impact of tear gas. The body protects itself by reacting in panic to the ensuing pain and blindness. Nevertheless, one white-haired man close to the platform managed to rise up out of the mass of writhing bodies and, voicing his indignation, approached Warion. But the latter simply held him at range with a hand on the oldster’s breast, and then shot the gas pointblank into the man’s face. This accomplished, Warion turned back to the others, aiming long strategic blasts into whomever’s face turned towards him.</p>
<p>There was, however, no general dispersal. In spite of being gassed and momentarily incapacitated, young and old alike continued to demonstrate, but now—understandably—with more anger and vengeful gestures. Those who remonstrated too closely received the customary blows with the standard riot clubs.</p>
<p>Assuming my role as non-embedded war correspondent, I called the Gendarmerie in the town of Alès claiming to be a reporter for an American newspaper. To my regret, but perhaps unsurprisingly, I was not accorded an interview with commandant Warion, nor was any official statement issued. Significantly, I was told that all such requests must be addressed to main headquarters in Paris.</p>
<p>It wasn’t the Battle of Seattle, but it shows how the will to resist exists everywhere where liberty and the right to a secure social and environmental existence are threatened.</p>
<p>We can only imagine the effects of this treatment on future relations between state authority and the local population. With their history of insurrection, and the on-going attempts to reduce them to sources of revenue for a distant state concerned only to close down schools, hospitals, post offices and other facilities needed in rural regions, tensions are building in Les Cévennes, but equally in all provincial areas in France. For the tradition of popular uprising is in no way specific to the Cévenols. What happened in the delightful town of Anduze on January 21 has happened in many places throughout the country. The difference is that most such events are not as well filmed. <a href="" type="internal">Here</a> is the link to YouTube, no French language skills required.</p>
<p>Just days before this skirmish, the latest issue of the local magazine called L’Aigoualité pour tous—a title that, in French, sounds suspiciously like “equality for everyone”—carried Robert Destanque’s latest editorial. Now, this magazine focuses primarily on ecological issues and is distributed freely in the many cooperatives of the region. It is printed in the small town of Ganges, in the middle of Les Cévennes and near Mount Aigoual, highest peak between the Pyrenees and the Alps—on a clear day you can see both ranges in the distance as well as the Mediterranean Sea. Robert Destanque, born in 1931, is a highly respected leftist documentary filmmaker and novelist. His words to his fellow Cévenols are an uncompromising summons to action:</p>
<p>“No. The power is not in the street, not yet. It hasn’t yet really expressed itself. It is reserved, limiting itself to demands and recriminations or appeals to the ministers of a president serving Big Capital and his billionaire friends who personally exploit the resources of this Nation. [But] the anger is there, and anger is an energy that—like all energies—can have contrary effects, positive or negative, depending on the situation. […] Attention, there is danger. The trap must be avoided.&#160; Have no doubt, it is a war that is being prepared—it has already begun and it will be long and without mercy.”</p>
<p>“The wall erected by the capitalist rabble is thought to be impregnable. But here is the target. It is this wall that we must tear down. Now our work must be to inform everyone—from the bottom to the top of the social pyramid—of the coming combat and the absolute duty of each of us to prepare for it physically, psychically and, especially, politically. We must go into overdrive towards—I say it openly—to insurrection. At every level we must raise and harden the tone, affirm the anger and, at the same time, transmit and channel it. Strikes,demonstrations and elections must be used to express this anger. [This] is the only way to have an effect on the people who lie to us, who have contempt for us, who lead the people of France like a vulgar flock of sheep. By the convergence of all popular forces our just and mounting anger will become power.”</p>
<p>Larry Portis can be reached at: <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
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<p /> | Tear Gassed in the Cévennes | true | https://counterpunch.org/2011/02/11/tear-gassed-in-the-c-vennes/ | 2011-02-11 | 4 |
<p>‘Discrimination in public accommodations is common and is associated with adverse health outcomes among transgender and gender-nonconforming adults in Massachusetts.’</p>
<p>BOSTON — A study says that discrimination in accessing health care for transgender people can lead to postponement of needed care two to three times above normal, <a href="http://wgbhnews.org/post/beacon-hill-prepares-consider-transgender-rights-study-cites-health-risks-discrimination" type="external">WGBH News</a> reports.</p>
<p>“Anti-transgender discrimination in public accommodations has effects on the physical and emotional wellbeing of transgender people, and therefor it’s really a public health issue,” Sean Cahill, director of policy research at the Fenway Institute told WGBH News.</p>
<p>“Discrimination in health care settings creates a unique health risk for gender minority people. The passage and enforcement of transgender rights laws that include protections against discrimination in public accommodations — inclusive of health care — are a public health policy approach critically needed to address transgender health inequities,” the study, written by the Fenway Institute’s Sari Reisner, concludes.</p>
<p>The study found that 65 percent of respondents reported discrimination when accessing public accommodations. The five most prevalent areas where the respondents ran into discrimination were in transportation settings, retail establishment, restaurants, public gatherings and health care, WGBH reports.</p>
<p>“Discrimination in public accommodations is common and is associated with adverse health outcomes among transgender and gender-nonconforming adults in Massachusetts,” the study reads.</p>
<p>In 2013, researchers surveyed 452 individuals from the transgender community and assessed “demographics, health, health care utilization, and discrimination in public accommodations venues in the prior 12 months.</p>
<p>“We also asked people, particularly those who have experienced discrimination in a health care setting, if that affected their desire to return for health care or to seek health care in the future. And we found that of those experiencing discrimination in health care settings, 25 percent were less likely to seek routine care and 19 percent were less likely to seek emergent care,” Cahill told WGBH.</p>
<p>Researchers from the Harvard and Yale schools public health, the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University, Wagner School of Public Service, New York University, Fenway Health and the advocacy group Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition published the investigation “ <a href="http://www.milbank.org/uploads/documents/featured-articles/pdf/Legal_Protections_in_Public%20Settings_Reisner.pdf" type="external">Legal Protections in Public Accommodations Settings: A Critical Public Health Issue for Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming People</a>” in the Milbank Quarterly this month. Some of the study’s data had previously been released in 2014, the WGBH article notes.</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Fenway Institute</a> <a href="" type="internal">Sean Cahill</a> <a href="" type="internal">trans</a> <a href="" type="internal">transgender</a> <a href="" type="internal">WGBH News</a></p> | Study finds trans people postpone medical care | false | http://washingtonblade.com/2015/08/21/study-finds-trans-people-postpone-medical-care/ | 3 |
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<p>“The novel on the cutting room floor”</p>
<p>They are literature’s cold cases, the Missing and Presumed Dead. They are the unlucky novels and stories that inspired movies so successful that they eclipsed the originals almost completely. Some books weather a subsequent movie’s success. Gone With the Wind survives as a classic film and a classic novel. But how many people know that before it was a movie, Die Hard was a very good novel called Nothing Lasts Forever, or that Forrest Gump is based on the novel Forrest Gump?</p>
<p>Good fiction deserves a better fate. By way of a modest corrective, this series seeks out and showcases those obscured, forgotten novels and stories that gave their lives that movies might live, stories that were always at least as good as the well-known films they inspired and in more than a few instances, a lot better.</p>
<p>First up, The Birds.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hitchcock-Revised-Francois-Truffaut/dp/0671604295/" type="external">Truffaut/Hitchcock</a>, the book of interviews that French director Francois Truffaut conducted with Alfred Hitchcock toward the end of the English director’s life, Hitchcock quickly distances himself from Rebecca as soon as that film comes into the conversation, baldly admitting that “it’s not a Hitchcock picture; it’s a novelette, really.”</p>
<p>Truffaut asks if the film faithfully follows the Daphne Du Maurier novel on which it’s based. “Yes, it follows the novel very faithfully,” Hitchcock says, “because [producer David O.] Selznick had just made Gone With the Wind. He had a theory that people who had read the novel would have been very upset if it had been changed on the screen, and he felt this dictum should also apply to Rebecca.” (There had been, apparently, an earlier draft of the screenplay in which Hitchcock had cut great chunks of the novel’s plot. Selznick nixed that version and ordered a rewrite more faithful to the novel, saying, “We bought Rebecca and we intend to make Rebecca.”) Lest any doubt remain as to what Hitchcock thought of Selznick’s theory of appeasing an audience’s expectations, the director immediately offers a joke: “You probably know the story of the two goats who are eating up cans containing the reels of a film taken from a best seller. And one goat says to the other, ‘Personally, I prefer the book.’”</p>
<p>Elsewhere Hitchcock said that the lesson he learned from making Rebecca was never to film a bestseller, and he was as good as his word. Watching the film, you begin to understand his disaffection—it’s not at all a bad movie, but it’s never really his movie, except in bits and pieces, merely a highly competent but rigorously literal transfer of Du Maurier’s story to the screen.</p>
<p>Almost 25 years would pass before Hitchcock filmed another Du Maurier story, and the results suggest that in that quarter century he stoked an enormous grudge—not against his studio masters nor the public his Rebecca had sought to placate but rather against the woman whose novel had so nicely greased his entry to Hollywood. When he made <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Look-Now-Selected-Classics/dp/1590172884/" type="external">The Birds</a>, which is based on a Du Maurier novella, Hitchcock kept her title and premise (birds randomly attacking humans in ever greater numbers for no discernable reason). Everything else he threw in the trash. According to Evan Hunter, the novelist who wrote the screenplay, Du Maurier’s original was history well prior to his hiring.</p>
<p>Before The Birds, Hitchcock had enjoyed enormous success with Psycho, a “little” picture he made in part to prove that television’s cheap, fast techniques could be used to create a successful feature film. Psycho was minimalism to maximum effect, but it was also a one off. With The Birds, he returned to the glamorous, big budget pictures that had made him a household name in the 50s (although much of the money spent on that film would be lavished on its special—or, half a century later, not so special—effects). How different things might have been had he chosen The Birds over Psycho for his less-is-more experiment and stuck with DuMaurier’s harrowing plot. That original, for one thing, might have survived to receive the credit it’s due, not as merely inspiration for a famous Hitchcock movie but as possibly the greatest—and certainly the most prescient—fiction she ever wrote. But the film version of The Birds, whatever its shortcomings, was a box office hit, and Du Maurier had to be content with whatever she got paid for the rights (not much, in all likelihood, since Hitchcock prided himself on never overpaying for original material when he could avoid it). Ask anyone today who wrote The Birds, and the odds are good that you’ll get a blank stare for a response.</p>
<p>Time has not been kind to Hitchcock’s version. From their meet-cute in the pet store to the final ominous fade-out, Tippi Hedrin and Rod Taylor give us one of the great wooden-Indian romances in cinema. There is also the threadbare jealous-mother subplot, barely salvaged by Jessica Tandy, and the equally threadbare jealous-old-girlfriend subplot, so successfully salvaged by Suzanne Pleshette that you spend a lot of the movie wondering what kind of fool would spurn her and take up with Hedrin.</p>
<p>The good things about the movie have little to do with any of that. We remember the scene in the diner and the subsequent first massive bird assault that culminates in a gas tank explosion and leaves Hedrin besieged in a phone booth dive-bombed by gulls. Equally memorable: the creepy moment when the crows slowly alight on the jungle gym in the schoolyard, Tandy’s discovery of the farmer murdered and mutilated by birds, and the climactic moment where Hedrin fights off the birds in the upstairs bedroom. None of these scenes derive their power from the characters or the Hitchcock-Hunter plot. Instead, they depend on two things: Hitchcock’s ability to tell a story through images and editing (although, admittedly, the diner scene is wonderfully written), and DuMaurier’s initial premise, which remains, no matter what Hitchcock does, the scariest thing in his film.</p>
<p>Ironically, the Du Maurier story holds up much better today than Hitchcock’s version does. It works better as a horror story and even better as a cautionary eco-tale: her story of nature turning on man seems downright visionary in a world increasingly crippled by environmental disaster—although the biggest chill in each version of The Birds arises from the fact that neither story nor film offers any explanation for the bird attacks; author and filmmaker sharing a bent for the macabre that allows them to envision a natural world as malign as it is Arcadian.</p>
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<p>Set in remote Cornwall in the 50s, Du Maurier’s tale chronicles farm laborer Nat Hocken’s efforts over two icy, windblown days to protect himself and his family from ever greater flocks of ever more predatory birds. Told in language steeped in the cadence and phrases of fairy tales and legends (“On December the third the wind changed overnight and it was winter”), it’s a spare but always hypnotic portrait of a solitary man who keeps the world at arm’s length, a habit he shares with the story he’s in: the few other characters—the wife and kids and the farmer next door—are deftly drawn but never very real or important—they’re just there to help the plot along. It’s Hocken’s story first and last. Thoughtful, intuitive, resourceful—he’s the counterweight to all the bleak malignancy that surrounds him.</p>
<p>Clearly shrewder than his wife or his foolish, loudmouthed neighbors (the story’s wise man/foolish man exchanges might as well be biblical parables), Hocken is also the only person to understand in time that the birds have become aggressors and the only one to gauge the scope of the threat (“What he had thought at first to be the white caps of the waves were gulls. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands… They rose and fell in the trough of the seas, heads to the wind, like a mighty fleet at anchor, waiting on the tide.”). Wisdom in this story belongs to a minority of one, and in the end that’s not enough to make any difference.</p>
<p>Besides its title and the general idea, Hitchcock did lift a handful of episodes from the original story (the discovery of the murdered neighbor, the children being hunted by birds, and the dark, open-ended climax). What’s disappointing is that what he added is never as good as what he cut out. As a result, his version is a technical tour de force but a movie that never gets under your skin. It’s just a great example of what money can buy when it’s spent by a genius. Du Maurier’s story, by comparison, looks like a miser’s dream: a 50-page novella that compels us to keep reading using only the barest prose, never two words where one will do. But compel you it will. It’s a doom-driven tale from the very beginning—we know going in that no good will come of any of this—and yet we continue, as though hypnotized, right to the dreadful end. This is one instance where the film-munching goat that preferred the book definitely had the right idea.</p> | Why the Original ‘Birds’ is Superior to Hitchcock’s Version | true | https://thedailybeast.com/why-the-original-birds-is-superior-to-hitchcocks-version | 2018-10-06 | 4 |
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<p><a href="" type="internal" />THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. - Despite higher sales, biotech drugmaker Amgen's first-quarter profit fell 25 percent as production and research costs rose sharply, while the year-ago quarter enjoyed a tax benefit. The company badly missed Wall Street's expectations for both earnings per share and revenue.</p>
<p>The maker of injected osteoporosis treatment Prolia says net income was $1.07 billion or $1.40 per share, down from $1.43 billion, or $1.88 per share, in 2013's first quarter.</p>
<p>Excluding one-time items, income would have been $1.44 billion, or $1.87 per share. Analysts expected $1.94.</p>
<p>Revenue totaled $4.52 billion, up 7 percent. Analysts were expecting $4.76 billion.</p>
<p>The company reiterated its 2014 financial forecasts, for adjusted earnings per share of $7.90 to $8.20 and revenue of $19.2 billion to $19.6 billion.</p>
<p>Amgen shares slipped nearly 3 percent in late trading.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> | Amgen misses 1Q views as higher costs cut profit | false | https://abqjournal.com/387856/amgen-misses-1q-views-as-higher-costs-cut-profit.html | 2 |
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<p>Monday was a great day for many investors, as major stock market benchmarks hit new record-high levels. Gains of between 0.5% and 1% came on the heels of solid performance in the energy market and continuing enthusiasm about the future direction of the U.S. economy. Yet even with those big gains for the stock market broadly, some stocks didn't participate in the rally, and Energy Transfer Partners (NYSE: ETP), Canadian Solar (NASDAQ: CSIQ), and Cubic (NYSE: CUB) all suffered big declines. Below, we'll look more closely at these stocks to tell you why they did so poorly.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Image source: Energy Transfer Partners.</p>
<p>Energy Transfer Partners fell 7% even after receiving a buyout bid from industry peer Sunoco Logistics (NYSE: SXL). The two companies announced this morning that Sunoco would seek to acquire Energy Transfer Partners in an all-equity deal that will give Energy Transfer investors 1.5 units of Sunoco for every Energy Transfer unit they own. Consolidation is usually a positive event for companies, especially those that are getting bought out. However, some investors worry that because Sunoco's distribution yield is less than Energy Transfer's, the merger will result in Energy Transfer unitholders receiving less distribution income following the deal's consummation. The trade-off is that the combined company's balance sheet should be healthier, but investors seemed to put more value on the lost income in sending shares of both energy master limited partnerships down.</p>
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<p>Canadian Solar dropped 9% in the wake of its third-quarter financial report. The solar company said that it shipped 1,185 megawatts of solar modules during the quarter, falling short of its 1,200 to 1,300 megawatt estimate. Revenue also fell short of previous guidance, and despite gross margin gains, net income fell by more than half compared to the second quarter of 2016. Even though Canadian Solar had strong success in Europe, where revenue more than doubled from year-ago levels, performance in its much larger Americas and Asia regions was much weaker. CEO Shawn Qu blamed "the dislocation of the global solar market during the quarter and the quarter-end logistic disruption caused by the bankruptcy of Hanjin Shipping" for much of the poor results. Going forward, Canadian Solar still thinks that it can rebound by managing its inventory and manufacturing processes as efficiently as possible to overcome macroeconomic challenges in the solar market.</p>
<p>Finally, Cubic fell 10%. The maker of transportation and defense systems and services reported a 5% drop in fiscal fourth-quarter revenue compared to the year-ago period, with particular weakness in the global defense systems and services segments. The sales drop helped send adjusted pre-tax operating earnings down by more than a third, and full-year results were equally troubling. However, CEO Bradley Feldmann is optimistic that much of the disruption is due to order delays that will simply come in during the 2017 fiscal year, and if that's the case, then today's declines could reverse themselves as soon as signs of healthier growth start to emerge. However, guidance for fiscal 2017 was weaker than many had expected, especially on the bottom line, and that could hold Cubic stock back.</p>
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<p><a href="http://my.fool.com/profile/TMFGalagan/info.aspx" type="external">Dan Caplinger 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=isiedilnk018048&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">free for 30 days Opens a New Window.</a>. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that <a href="http://www.fool.com/knowledge-center/motley.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">considering a diverse range of insights Opens a New Window.</a> makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a <a href="http://www.fool.com/Legal/fool-disclosure-policy.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">disclosure policy Opens a New Window.</a>.</p> | Why Energy Transfer Partners, Canadian Solar, and Cubic Slumped Today | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2016/11/21/why-energy-transfer-partners-canadian-solar-and-cubic-slumped-today.html | 2016-11-21 | 0 |
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<p>"The Republican Party needs to stop talking to itself."--The RNC's post-2012 election report.</p>
<p>Governor Scott Walker (R-WI) <a href="http://www.tpnn.com/2015/02/22/governor-scott-walker-blames-media/" type="external">fumes</a> about " <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/23/politics/walker-twitter-giuliani-comments-response/" type="external">gotcha</a>" questions from " <a href="http://jimromenesko.com/2015/02/23/scott-walker-give-me-money-to-show-how-much-you-hate-the-press/" type="external">clueless</a>" political reporters and <a href="http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/this-time-gov-scott-walkers-political-qualities-lead-him-to-trouble-b99449730z1-293536691.html" type="external">vows</a>not to be distracted by them on the campaign trail. Fox News host Bill O'Reilly blames the media for the swirling controversies surrounding his "combat" reporting, and even <a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/02/bill-oreilly-threatens-ny-times-reporter-202990.html" type="external">levels</a> an on-the-record "threat" against a New York Times reporter for daring to cover the story. And now the Republican Party announces <a href="http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/prnewswire/LA37495.htm" type="external">it's teaming up with</a> partisan, conservative media partners to help host primary debates in an effort to make the forums more appealing for candidates.</p>
<p>The first three Republican debates will air on CNN and will be co-presented by the Salem Media Group, a major player in right-wing talk radio. (Its CEO is also politically active in <a href="http://projects.latimes.com/prop8/donation/27165/" type="external">conservative causes</a>.) Salem talker Hugh Hewitt has been invited to be among those asking candidates questions at the first debate. Afterwards, Republican participants will "be invited to join Hewitt to talk candidly about the event," <a href="http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/prnewswire/LA37495.htm" type="external">according</a> to a press release. A Salem talk radio host will be included in each of the three debates.</p>
<p>In shifting some of the debate control away from independent journalists, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus is following through on his promise last year to make the debates more GOP-friendly and to <a href="http://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/rnc-chair-i-want-debate-moderators-invested" type="external">tap</a> media participants "who are actually interested in the Republican Party."</p>
<p>It's true that there's nothing <a href="http://prospect.org/waldman/why-its-good-thing-gop-debates-will-be-moderated-conservatives" type="external">inherently wrong</a> with having a talk radio partisan like Hewitt in the mix on the night of a debate. Different perspectives should always be welcome. But the inclusion of unabashed Republican cheerleaders for this year's forums appears to be driven out of fear and distrust of the news media, not out of a GOP desire for inclusion. Indeed, the move has an undeniable whiff of paranoia about it.</p> | With New Debate Strategy, GOP Slips Further Into The Right-Wing Media Bubble | true | http://mediamatters.org/blog/2015/02/25/with-new-debate-strategy-gop-slips-further-into/202661 | 2015-02-25 | 4 |
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<p>New Mexico State Police say medical investigators have confirmed the identity of a body a found in a cave at El Malpais National Monument as that of a missing Albuquerque man.</p>
<p>They say it was 23-year-old Fernando Enriquez. He had been reported missing in early November.</p>
<p>Two men were arrested earlier this week in connection with Enriquez’s death after investigators tracked the use of his credit card to the Grants area. Bryce Franklin and Clifford Bearden are facing open counts of murder and other charges.</p>
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<p>State police say Franklin’s mother, 51-year-old Sandy Franklin, was arrested Friday night and charged with conspiracy to tamper with evidence.</p>
<p>It wasn’t immediately clear if the three had legal representation.</p>
<p>State police say they’re continuing to investigate, along with the Grants and Albuquerque police departments.</p>
<p>Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.</p> | Police: Body identified as missing Albuquerque man | false | https://abqjournal.com/151969/police-body-identified-as-missing-albuquerque-man.html | 2 |
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<p>According to law enforcement officials, Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, the 29-year-old Uzbekistan national suspected of mowing down pedestrians and cyclists in Manhattan on Tuesday, was interviewed by Homeland Security agents two years ago about possible ties to suspected terrorists, but the agents could not find enough to open a case on him.</p>
<p>Officials say that the interview was conducted in 2015 by the Department of Homeland Security Investigations Unit, which was looking into Saipov's possible terror connections. "Saipov's name and address was listed as a 'point of contact' for two different men whose names were entered into the Counterterrorism and Criminal Exploitation Unit’s list after they came to the United States from 'threat countries,'" <a href="" type="external">ABC News</a> reports, citing an unnamed federal official.</p>
<p>ABC reports that one of the two men has disappeared and is now being sought as a "suspected terrorist."</p>
<p><a href="http://​https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/national-international/Tribeca-Terror-Attack-ISIS-Note-NYC-Manhattan-Truck-Driver-Bike-Path-Killed-Injured-Schools-Sayfullo-Saipov-Uber-Uzbek-454388793.html" type="external">NBC News</a> presented similar information earlier in the day, citing a senior government official who indicated that Saipov "was not on government investigators' radar, though his name did surface several steps removed from another person who was on their radar."</p>
<p>On Tuesday afternoon, Saipov allegedly drove a rented Home Depot truck onto a bike path, mowing down pedestrians and cyclists for nearly a mile before ramming into a school bus near the World Trade Center. He was shot in the abdomen by a NYPD officer and currently remains in critical care. His rampage left at least 8 dead and 11 wounded.</p>
<p>Police say that Saipov was yelling "Allahu Akbar" as he exited his vehicle and that they found images of ISIS flags and a handwritten note declaring "ISIS lives forever" in the truck.</p>
<p>After Saipov underwent surgery for his wounds, investigators spoke with him in the hospital. A senior official said that he showed no remorse for his murderous act, and in fact seemed "almost boastful about it," according to <a href="http://​https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/national-international/Tribeca-Terror-Attack-ISIS-Note-NYC-Manhattan-Truck-Driver-Bike-Path-Killed-Injured-Schools-Sayfullo-Saipov-Uber-Uzbek-454388793.html" type="external">NBC</a>. Though Saipov was not himself on the government's radar, said an official, his name was connected to another suspect who was:</p>
<p>A senior official with direct knowledge of the investigation tells NBC News Saipov himself was not on government investigators' radar, though his name did surface several steps removed from another person who was on their radar.</p>
<p>Saipov's social media activity showed that he actively sought and engaged with radical Islamic propaganda and sympathized with ISIS. Officials believe Saipov may have planned the attack; his role as an Uber driver for the last six months allowed him to be familiar with the area.</p>
<p>Saipov gained entry into the country in 2010 under that controversial "diversity visa lottery" program, which offers visas to immigrants from countries that send relatively few immigrants to the U.S., as opposed to a merit-based system. On Wednesday, President Trump called for an end to the program and <a href="" type="internal">condemned</a> Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer for his role in developing it.</p>
<p>Trump also announced via Twitter that he has "ordered Homeland Security to step up our already Extreme Vetting Program," adding, "Being politically correct is fine, but not for this!"</p>
<p>This article has been updated as new details have emerged.</p> | More Details On NYC Terror Suspect Emerge: Feds Interviewed Him In 2015 | true | https://dailywire.com/news/23018/official-nyc-terrorist-was-connected-suspect-james-barrett | 2017-11-01 | 0 |
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<p>LAS VEGAS, N.M. — The mayor of the nation’s oldest state capital will serve as New Mexico Highlands University’s commencement speaker this May.</p>
<p>The northern New Mexico university recently announced that Javier Gonzales will address graduates May 13 at the John A. Wilson Complex.</p>
<p>Gonzales served as the chairman of the Highlands University Board of Regents from 2005 to 2010.</p>
<p>In recent weeks, the Democrat has garnered attention as the public face of “sanctuary cities” following Donald Trump’s presidential victory. Gonzales has framed the sanctuary city debate around moral values and economic common sense.</p>
<p>But last week, the Santa Fe city councilors voted on a revised resolution taking the word “sanctuary” out of a statement of support for immigrants. Immigrant rights groups have tried to frame the vote as a victory.</p>
<p>ADVERTISEMENT</p> | Highlands announces Santa Fe mayor as commencement speaker | false | https://abqjournal.com/958773/highlands-announces-santa-fe-mayor-as-commencement-speaker.html | 2 |
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<p>By Neal Gabler / <a href="http://billmoyers.com/story/obamacare-repeal-effort-will-not-die/" type="external">Moyers &amp; Company</a></p>
<p>A sign urging the repeal of the Affordable Care Act during a tea party protest in 2010. (Flickr / CC 2.0)</p>
<p>If you want to calibrate just how bad the Senate Republican health care bill is, you don’t need the Congressional Budget Office telling you that 22 million Americans would lose their insurance. Look no further than Susan Collins. The bill is so god-awful that the Republican senator from Maine, <a href="" type="internal">whom I lacerated last week</a> for always fretting and dithering over her party’s initiatives only to support them in the end, wouldn’t even vote to bring it to the floor.</p>
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<p>Of course, Collins being Collins, she says she is open to negotiations, and I suspect Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will make a concession on Collins’ precious Health Savings Accounts. Whether the opposition of Collins and others ultimately sinks the bill remains to be seen, though I wouldn’t count on it. The vote postponement notwithstanding, Republicans being Republicans are going to resurrect it with nips and tucks for many more go-rounds, since Republicans are absolutely determined to savage Medicaid and ultimately destroy it. Stay tuned.</p>
<p>Since the vast majority of the public loathe the GOP bill, and since it has been universally panned in the media and by just about every stakeholder, you have to wonder how the GOP can keep flogging it. The answer is that they clearly feel there will be no political consequences for doing so, and they may be right. Republican Dean Heller, who came out against it this week, represents Nevada, a blue state with a heavy Medicaid enrollment, so he is unlikely to be wooed, but among Republicans running in 2018, he is virtually alone. (He was not spared, however, from <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/27/trump-senate-majority-2018-240028" type="external">attacks from a Trump super PAC</a>, and he is almost certain to be primaried from the right.) No one else in the party seems to fear retribution as much as they fear bucking conservative ideology.</p>
<p>Take West Virginia. Thirty percent of West Virginians — <a href="http://www.theintelligencer.net/news/top-headlines/2017/01/30-percent-of-w-va-families-on-medicaid/" type="external">some 554,000 people</a> — are dependent on Medicaid, which the Republican Senate bill will effectively decimate, and the state has a serious opioid problem, which Obamacare addresses. Still, West Virginia gave Trump, who campaigned on the promise to repeal Obamacare, a whopping 42-point margin of victory, and there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that it will vote for a Democratic presidential candidate in my lifetime.</p>
<p>Or take Kentucky. Out of a population of 4.5 million, <a href="http://chfs.ky.gov/NR/rdonlyres/853431AF-E8E4-4511-96E6-0440EACC6509/0/KYDataWarehouseMonthlyMembershipCountsbyCounty20170501204613.pdf" type="external">1.3 million are on Medicaid</a>. And yet its senior senator, McConnell, is the architect of the plan to reduce Medicaid, and the state’s other senator, Rand Paul, has no qualms about saying he wants to destroy Medicaid altogether. Once again, there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that either McConnell or Paul will lose re-election.</p>
<p>Politics is supposed to operate on the principle that if an officeholder works against the interest of his or her constituents, those constituents will take revenge by booting him or her out of office. That’s just common sense. And it’s also common sense that health care should be a prime consideration for those constituents. When Republicans propose huge tax cuts for the wealthy while simultaneously cutting health benefits for the poor and the working and middle classes, or when they propose a bill that drives up premiums and deductibles while shredding the safety net, the logical result would be a revolt. Instead, these folks keep coming back to the party, which is why the GOP can keep coming back to its Draconian health care plan.</p>
<p>How do you parse this? You could say that people don’t understand their self-interest very well, and there is certainly some truth to that. A <a href="http://www.kff.org/health-reform/poll-finding/kaiser-health-tracking-poll-june-2017-aca-replacement-plan-and-medicaid/" type="external">Kaiser Health poll</a> shows that a bare 51 percent of Americans now support Obamacare, which is a high-water mark, while 74 percent have a favorable view of Medicaid, the very linchpin of Obamacare. That suggests they don’t understand how inextricably Obamacare and Medicaid are bound.</p>
<p>Or you can say, as I wrote here, that many of these folks believe in <a href="http://billmoyers.com/story/has-the-trump-budget-blown-republicans-cover/" type="external">stripping government benefits from the seemingly undeserving</a>, even if doing so hurts themselves.</p>
<p>Yet it isn’t the economy, stupid, or health care reform that drives these voters to Republicanism. It is their perception of the march of history. They have come to believe that they are a persecuted white majority, and that grievance supersedes everything else, including their own health insurance. Republicans count on that.</p>
<p>Three recent surveys support this explanation. One, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-attitudes-about-immigration-race-and-religion-contributed-to-trump-victory/2017/06/13/6c2c1892-506f-11e7-b064-828ba60fbb98_story.html" type="external">a recent post-mortem of the 2016 election</a> by the non-partisan Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, reports that Trump’s vote, especially among whites, had far less to do with economic distress than with nativism, racism, sexism and Islamophobia — what you might call cultural distress.</p>
<p>Another analysis <a href="https://www.prri.org/research/white-working-class-attitudes-economy-trade-immigration-election-donald-trump/" type="external">conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and The Atlantic magazine</a> also found that economic distress did not correlate with Trump support. In fact, it was the opposite: “Those who reported being in fair or poor financial shape were 1.7 times more likely to support Clinton, compared to those who were in better financial shape.” But those who felt culturally dispossessed and felt that the country needed to be safeguarded against immigrant invasion were 3.5 times as likely to support Trump as those who felt differently.</p>
<p>If you still don’t think that lots of working-class white Americans feel culturally aggrieved, consider another survey in February by PRRI finding that <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/perceptions-discrimination-muslims-christians/519135/" type="external">white evangelicals believe Christians are more discriminated against in America</a> than Muslims, with 57 percent asserting “a lot” of discrimination against Christians.</p>
<p>This jibes with an earlier study from Michael Norton of the Harvard Business School and Samuel Sommers of Tufts that showed <a href="http://www.people.hbs.edu/mnorton/norton%20sommers.pdf" type="external">deep white belief in “reverse racism”</a> coupled with the belief that African-American gains come at the expense of white losses.</p>
<p>On its face, of course, this is absurd. There is virtually no metric — be it education, wages, wealth, social mobility or health — in which African-Americans have it better than whites. (I won’t even address Islamophobia versus an animus against Christianity because it is beyond absurd.) But we now generally accept that many whites, especially older, uneducated and religious whites, believe — not entirely without justification — that they are on the wrong side of history. Everything seems to be moving against them and against the dominance they once asserted, and to them, America seems cleaved between a halcyon past and a foreboding future, which may be the real division in America that subsumes so many others.</p>
<p>This sense of dispossession is the what sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild calls the “deep story” — the story told by one’s feelings as opposed to the story told by the facts. In her book, “ <a href="http://thenewpress.com/books/strangers-their-own-land" type="external">Strangers in Their Own Land</a>,” Hochschild writes that working-class Republicans’ deep story is one of betrayal, neglect, disrespect, suspicion and unfairness.</p>
<p>Such cultural disaffection is what our ahistorical president preys upon. He promised that he would push back history, that he would rescue whites from immigrants and minorities and women and intellectuals and homosexuals. He promised that he would restore the America they believed they had lost.</p>
<p>“Make America Great Again” is a euphemism for “Make America White Again.” It is no coincidence that Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters are <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/behind-trumps-victory-divisions-by-race-gender-education/" type="external">white, male, uneducated and evangelical</a> — people for whom history is moving in the wrong direction. They are Trump’s political superfecta.</p>
<p>Which brings me back to the health care bill. The Obamacare repeal effort has always functioned on two levels: the practical and the symbolic. On a practical policy level, Obamacare repeal was never particularly realistic. The original bill had been compromised and jiggered about as much as one could possibly do in an effort to build a government/market hybrid, so the idea of jiggering it any more without just scrapping it for single payer was highly unlikely to make it more effective. After seven years, the only thing Republicans can seem to come up with is undoing Obamacare without really replacing it.</p>
<p>But you could only let it lapse and throw those 22 million off insurance if you were confident the symbolism would supplant the practicality, that it was more important for those beneficiaries of Obamacare to score a victory against the encroaching forces of cultural liberalism than to get decent health care. Symbolically, Obamacare represented change, government interference, social engineering by pointy heads and uncertainty. It was yet one more thing that would push the glorious past farther away.</p>
<p>There is a strange poignancy in this. People will continue to vote enthusiastically for the party that will strip them of their health care so long as that party promises to turn back the clock. So we will get another GOP health care bill and another and another until one finally passes, as I am fairly certain it will. And when it does, the congressional Republicans and their addled president can rejoice because whatever price their constituents pay, they themselves will pay none.</p> | Why the Obamacare Repeal Effort Will Never Disappear | true | https://truthdig.com/articles/why-the-obamacare-repeal-effort-will-never-disappear/ | 2017-07-01 | 4 |
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<p>Albuquerque City Councilor Dan Lewis, a candidate for mayor, talks to Brandon Sanchez after announcing his crime-fighting plan at a news conference recently. (Adolphe Pierre-Louis/Albuquerque Journal)</p>
<p>Editor’s note: This is the seventh in a series of profiles on Albuquerque’s mayoral candidates the Journal has been publishing in recent weeks. The eighth and final profile will be published later this week.</p>
<p>Copyright © 2017 Albuquerque Journal</p>
<p>He’s a Republican city councilor hoping to succeed a Republican mayor, and while that might ordinarily be a recipe for accord, it hasn’t worked out that way.</p>
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<p>City Councilor Dan Lewis and Mayor Richard Berry have clashed on key issues over the years.</p>
<p>Lewis doesn’t mince words when talking about the Berry administration, accusing it of having a “bunker mentality and defensive nature … on everything that’s mattered, including public safety, the challenges facing APD, certainly the ART (project).”</p>
<p>Dan Lewis</p>
<p>Lewis, an ordained Baptist minister, was the first city councilor to ask for the U.S. Department of Justice to examine the Albuquerque Police Department, and he broke ranks with his Republican colleagues on the council to pass a resolution to that effect. Berry vetoed the resolution, and in the end, the council passed a watered-down version that pledged cooperation if the DOJ were to come in.</p>
<p>While serving as council president, Lewis publicly called for then-Police Chief Ray Schultz to resign.</p>
<p>And he was one of two city councilors to vote against Berry’s Albuquerque Rapid Transit project, which will transform Central Avenue into a rapid transit corridor with a nine-mile stretch of bus-only lanes and bus stations.</p>
<p>“I think that the reason why people don’t trust elected officials is because they get elected and then they begin to think they’re a little more important than they really are and they forget that serving in public office is about listening to the people that elected you,” says Lewis, one of eight candidates on the mayoral ballot.</p>
<p>More from ABQJournal.com</p>
<p>1. What is the biggest issue facing the city, and how would you address it?… continue reading »</p>
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<p>Also running are:</p>
<p>• Republicans Wayne Johnson, a county commissioner; and Ricardo Chaves, founder of Parking Company of America.</p>
<p>• Democrats Tim Keller, the state auditor and a former state senator; Gus Pedrotty, a recent University of New Mexico graduate; and Brian Colón, an attorney and former state Democratic Party chairman.</p>
<p>• Independents Susan Wheeler-Deichsel, co-founder of the civic group Urban ABQ; and Michelle Garcia Holmes, a former chief of staff for the state attorney general and a retired Albuquerque police detective.</p>
<p>Election Day is Oct. 3. If no candidate receives at least 50 percent of the vote, the top two will advance to a runoff election in November.</p>
<p>The new mayor takes office Dec. 1.</p>
<p>Support, criticism</p>
<p>Among Lewis’ most prominent supporters is local developer Paul Silverman of Geltmore LLC.</p>
<p>“Dan is a very hard worker, he is honest, he is a good listener, he is well-organized, and he has not sold his soul to any special interest groups,” Silverman said in an email.</p>
<p>He said Lewis’ experience on the council gives him in-depth knowledge of the city operations and its budget.</p>
<p>“There is no learning curve when he is elected, and he can immediately attack the issues that need to be addressed in this community,” Silverman said. “While I do not agree with all of his ideas or positions, I believe that his ability to understand various aspects of any issue will allow him to make good decisions that will best benefit the future of the city.”</p>
<p>But Lewis has faced criticism at mayoral forums, with some making the case that Lewis already had a chance to fix APD but failed. And during at least one forum, Lewis was accused of voting for ART before he voted against it.</p>
<p>On ART funding, Lewis says, “It’s absolutely false that I’ve ever supported or voted for ART.” As for APD, Lewis says he’s not the mayor or the administrator of the department.</p>
<p>“The City Council created a new police oversight board, revamped that whole thing,” he says. “Council has put together budgets that have funded 1,000 officers.”</p>
<p>Lewis says APD should have 1,200 officers; it currently has about 850. He says that if he is elected, he will immediately push for a $15 million increase in APD’s budget and institute aggressive pay raises for police.</p>
<p>And Lewis says his administration would develop a scorecard by which voters can “judge the judges” on their decisions to release or keep “dangerous and repeat criminals” in jail.</p>
<p>Higher calling</p>
<p>Lewis, 47, didn’t always aspire to a life in politics.</p>
<p>A native of San Jose, Calif., he’s the youngest of four sons born to Paul and Ann Lewis. His father was a pastor, and they moved around a lot, living in Carson City, Nev.; Phoenix; and Cheyenne, Wyo., among other places.</p>
<p>Lewis pursued his undergraduate degree at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix because it’s where his brothers were and he had the opportunity to play baseball at the school. It’s also where he met his wife, Tracy.</p>
<p>He left the baseball team after his freshman year, opting to devote more of his time to youth ministry.</p>
<p>After graduating, Lewis enrolled at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.</p>
<p>“I wanted to pursue full-time ministry,” he says.</p>
<p>He was ordained while serving at South Hills Baptist Church in Fort Worth and then moved to Albuquerque with his wife and daughter, Madison, in 1996 to work with First Baptist Church. About a year later, with the help of First Baptist, Lewis and his wife started a church on the West Side.</p>
<p>“Tracy and I started Soul Rio Church in our living room with about seven people,” he says, adding, “I wasn’t really interested in going and being a pastor of a big church that had already been around for a long time. I wanted to start something from new.”</p>
<p>He served as Soul Rio pastor from 1997 until 2013, when he stepped down to focus on a business opportunity.</p>
<p>Founded 2 firms</p>
<p>While Lewis felt a calling to minister to people, he also “had an entrepreneurial spirit” and started two companies while serving as pastor of Soul Rio Church.</p>
<p>Founded in 2005, Rio Grande Rustics specialized in Southwestern, rustic-style furniture. Lewis says that when he sold his interest in the company to his business partner, the company had two employees.</p>
<p>“The company indirectly probably employed another dozen people at any given time,” he says.</p>
<p>Lewis and a business partner launched Rio Grande Foam in 2006, selling customized pieces of polyurethane foam, along with other upholstery products.</p>
<p>Lewis sold his interest in that company to his business partner in 2012. At the time, he says, the company had three employees.</p>
<p>Lewis says being a business owner was a great experience.</p>
<p>“I learned a lot. You learn about being an entrepreneur. You learn about how to start something from nothing and build it. It’s a lot of solving problems,” he says.</p>
<p>Lewis currently works for Desert Fuels, a wholesale fuel supplier. Lewis went to work for the company in 2012 and served as interim president from 2015 to 2016. He currently serves as vice president of the company and president of Desert Fuels Transport LLC., a division he started.</p>
<p>Council campaign</p>
<p>Amid pastoring a church, operating businesses and raising two children, Lewis decided to take on another challenge in 2009: running for City Council.</p>
<p>“I was involved in the neighborhood association,” he says. “I was coaching Little League. I saw we didn’t have very good facilities for Little League. On the West Side, I saw the roads that were needed. I saw the growth of residential housing, but the services weren’t there, the commercial services. … I had never considered running for public office until I began to see some of the needs and began to see that I could make a difference.”</p>
<p>Lewis says he knocked on 6,000 doors in the five months leading up to the election, introducing himself and listening to what residents had to say. He defeated the incumbent with 56 percent of the vote.</p>
<p>He says his biggest triumphs as a councilor have been the Unser extension and the Paseo del Norte-Interstate 25 interchange.</p>
<p>Up until 2011, Lewis said, there was a 2.5-mile stretch of Unser that hadn’t been built yet, roughly from Montaño to Paradise.</p>
<p>“On my first council meeting – so I didn’t even know where I sat; I didn’t know how to work the microphone – but I had a bill sponsored that was a $5 million bill to fund the Unser extension, and we passed it that night,” he says.</p>
<p>Lewis says that while he was campaigning, one concern he frequently heard was that something had to be done to fix the Paseo and I-25 interchange. He said he made that a priority during his first two years in office, lobbying for it and reaching out to other elected officials.</p>
<p>“We found a way to get it done,” he says.</p>
<p>Lewis launched a bid for Congress in 2012 but withdrew after coming in a distant second in the pre-primary convention. He subsequently won re-election to a second City Council term.</p>
<p>Lewis says he’s the best candidate for mayor because he has created private jobs in the city and because he’s the “only serious candidate” who’s never held an elected partisan position.</p>
<p>“I’m driven to help our city succeed,” he says. “And for our city to succeed, our neighborhoods must succeed and our businesses and job creators need to succeed.”</p>
<p>More about Dan Lewis</p>
<p>POLITICAL PARTY: Republican</p>
<p>AGE: 47</p>
<p>EDUCATION: Master of divinity, Southwestern Seminary, 1996; bachelor of arts, Grand Canyon University, 1992.</p>
<p>OCCUPATION: Vice president, Desert Fuels Inc., 2012-present; president, Desert Fuels Transport LLC, 2015-present; president (interim), Desert Fuels Inc., 2015-16; owner, Rio Grande Rustics Inc., 2005-11; owner, Rio Grande Foam Inc., 2006-12; founding pastor, Soul Rio Church 1997-2013.</p>
<p>FAMILY: Tracy Lewis, wife; two children.</p>
<p>POLITICAL/GOVERNMENT EXPERIENCE: City councilor, 2009-present; president of City Council, 2011 and 2015.</p>
<p>MAJOR PROFESSIONAL ACCOMPLISHMENT: Named a “Top CEO” by Business First, creating high-paying private-sector jobs at Desert Fuels, one of “New Mexico’s Top 100 Private Companies” (Albuquerque Business Journal) and one of the “Fastest Growing Companies in the U.S.” (Inc. Magazine).</p>
<p>MAJOR PERSONAL ACCOMPLISHMENT: Along with my incredible wife, Tracy, a third-grade teacher at Seven Bar Elementary, we raised our two children, Madison and Jensen, who attended and graduated from Albuquerque Public Schools and now attend the University of New Mexico.</p>
<p /> | Boosting APD, fighting crime priorities for Lewis | false | https://abqjournal.com/1058409/boosting-apd-fighting-crime-priorities-for-lewis.html | 2 |
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<p>The West Virginia farm where the Golden Delicious apple was first discovered is going up for auction.</p>
<p>The Charleston Gazette-Mail (http://bit.ly/2fXfeXE) reports the 52-acre property near Bomont comes with a three-bedroom ranch home and a roadside marker that notes its place in history.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>The marker says the apple was discovered by property owner Anderson Mullins in 1905 along Porters Creek. Mullins sent some of the fruit to Missouri's Stark Brothers Nursery, one of the nation's biggest mail-order nurseries.</p>
<p>The Stark brothers liked it so well that they bought the tree and the rights to reproduce it, selling the new variety as the Golden Delicious apple.</p>
<p>Aside from the historical marker, no trace remains of the famed tree.</p>
<p>The auction, following the death of the most recent owner, will be Saturday.</p>
<p>___</p>
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<p>Information from: The Charleston Gazette-Mail, http://wvgazettemail.com.</p> | 'Golden' piece of history to be auctioned in West Virginia | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2016/11/11/golden-piece-history-to-be-auctioned-in-west-virginia.html | 2016-11-11 | 0 |
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<p>There's talk in Washington of changing Social Security, and that has many people worried. After all, close to 61 million Americans depend on Social Security for income in retirement -- the program pays out $918 billion in benefits annually.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Fortunately, Social Security is still here and intact -- and if you make some smart moves, you can maximize the benefits you get from the program.</p>
<p>Image source: Getty Images.</p>
<p>Here are six ways you might get more benefits from Social Security:</p>
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<p>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> | Social Security: 6 Smart Ways to Get More Benefits | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/04/04/social-security-6-smart-ways-to-get-more-benefits.html | 2017-04-04 | 0 |
<p>Usually the point of Jimmy Kimmel’s “Celebrities Read Mean Tweets” is to make you feel a little better about yourself, given the fact that incredibly beautiful and rich people still get vitriolic shit, just like normals. (My karma — at taking delight in this — and I will sort ourselves out later, thanks.) But last night’s music edition of “Celebrities Read Mean Tweets” will likely just have you feeling like a lame old person, because I swear to god, I don’t know who half of these people are.</p>
<p>What is 5 Seconds of Summer? Why does summer only last five seconds? Why would anyone want that, let alone name a band after such a thing? Who is that little ginger goblin? I don’t think he looks like shit, but I&#160;do&#160;have a lot of followup questions. I’m 27 but I feel 43. Very soon, my own children will be turning down Jordan Knight singles in the car so that I can’t hear the lyrics, not that it matters because I won’t understand the lyrics anyways. I’m on that side of the fence now, instead of the side that is turned on by Jordan Knight lyrics far too long after New Kids on the Block broke up.</p>
<p>Everything is terrible. Thanks, Jimmy.</p> | Jimmy Kimmel’s Latest “Celebrities Read Mean Tweets” Will Make You Feel Old As Balls | true | http://thefrisky.com/2015-02-03/jimmy-kimmels-latest-celebrities-read-mean-tweets-will-make-you-feel-old-as-balls/?utm_source%3Dsc-fb%26utm_medium%3Dref%26utm_campaign%3Djimmy-kimmel | 2018-10-07 | 4 |
<p>The presidential election is fewer than a hundred days away and, even though both are wildly disliked by all but a small group of zealots, either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump will win, we’re told.</p>
<p>In addition to the fact that the two candidates each have unprecedentedly high unfavorability ratings (of&#160; <a href="" type="internal">nearly sixty per cent</a>), and both display little interest in meaningfully addressing catastrophic climate change, widening poverty, and other effects of our biophagous political economy, the two do differ. Beyond their respective styles (or lack thereof), and their preferences concerning&#160; <a href="" type="internal">strongmen</a>, the two are distinguished by the groups of people they plan to persecute, and the wars they’re likely to foment.</p>
<p>But since Clinton’s support of intervention and aggression (in Iraq, Libya, Honduras, Ukraine, and Afghanistan, not to mention her proposal for a broader US role in Syria) promises to only intensify US militarism, raising the possibility of war with&#160; <a href="" type="internal">Russia</a>, among others, and the ethnic cleansing of immigrants and Muslims (which constitutes the bulk of Trump’s platform – though the Democrats are no strangers to carrying out&#160; <a href="" type="internal">mass deportations</a>&#160;themselves) are all anathema, what’s one to do?</p>
<p>Because it’s extremely unlikely that an earthquake, or super-tornado, will swallow the stage during one of their debates (a disaster that, in today’s nationalistic climate, would probably be attributed to Russia, or China, or Islam – or all three in a sort of axis of evil redux – which would only strengthen the power blocs subtending the status quo), Clinton and Trump, and their agendas, will have to be knocked out another way.&#160;Rather than through the divine violence of a natural disaster, those disgusted by Clinton and Trump can simply vote – for the Green Party’s Jill Stein, or for the Libertarian Party’s candidate, that reefer addict, Gary Johnson.</p>
<p>Notwithstanding the influentiality of political pundits’ predictions, and the preeminent programmability of the plastic human mind, because even their supporters dislike them, a Clinton or Trump presidency may not be inevitable after all. Over three months before the election, there’s still plenty of time for&#160;the political analogue of an earthquake, or tornado, to eliminate them both.</p> | Eliminate Them Both | true | https://counterpunch.org/2016/08/01/eliminate-them-both/ | 2016-08-01 | 4 |
<p>Fidel Castro has died at the age of 90.</p>
<p>Late Friday, Raul Castro made the announcement on State TV.</p>
<p>He was the former President of Cuba and leader of the communist revolution. He stepped down as President&#160;in 2008 and Raul Castro took over.</p>
<p>Miami’s Cuban-American congressional delegation made the following statements upon hearing of Castro’s death:</p>
<p>“The day that the people, both inside the island and out, have waited for has arrived: A tyrant is dead and a new beginning can dawn on the last remaining communist bastion of the Western hemisphere.&#160; The message is now very clear to those who think they will continue to misrule Cuba through oppression and fear. Enough is enough. The Cuban people have been shortchanged for too long to continue down this reviled path.&#160;</p>
<p>Those who still rule Cuba with an iron grip may attempt to delay the island’s liberation, but they cannot stop it.&#160; Castro’s successors cannot hide and must not be allowed to hide beneath cosmetic changes that will only lengthen the malaise of the Cuban nation. No regime, no matter who leads it, will have a shred of legitimacy if it has not been chosen by the people of Cuba in free and fair elections.</p>
<p>Fidel’s apologists around the world can help to restore freedom and human rights for Cuba by joining the call for the new regime to free the hundreds of freedom fighters and pro-democracy activists still locked in Castro’s prisons.</p>
<p>Not until the gulags are closed, elections are held, political prisoners are freed and liberty is restored can the United States lawfully end its embargo against the communist regime in Havana. The time to act is now.</p>
<p>We must seize the moment and help write a new chapter in the history of Cuba; that of a Cuba that is free, democratic, and prosperous. A Cuba where faith in God has prevailed over tyranny, a Cuba whose people rose up to meet the challenges placed before them and overcame them through sheer patriotism and love of country.”-Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R)</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>“Today, a tyrant is dead.&#160;&#160;Although his totalitarian dictatorship deeply scarred a once prosperous nation, his death ushers in a renewed hope that the Cuban people finally will be free.&#160; Now we must work even harder toward achieving liberty, basic rights, and free, multi-party elections for the Cuban people. &#160; “The dictator has the blood of innocents on his hands, and his dictatorship is guilty of torture, murder and numerous other atrocities. As an evil dictator finally faces his Creator, the malevolent Castro dictatorship continues. &#160;Shamefully, President Obama has spent the past eight years attempting to cede important leverage to the ailing Castro regime.&#160;&#160;Despite President Obama’s collaboration and betrayal of America’s longstanding mission to promote freedom, the American people continue their strong solidarity with the Cuban people in their struggle for free elections, human rights, and liberty.”-Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R)</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>“Cuban dictator Fidel Castro terrorized the people of Cuba for decades with religious and political persecution, oppression of free speech and free press, and disrespect for basic human rights. His passing marks the end of a long, horrifying chapter in Cuba’s history.</p>
<p>“For the past 50-plus years Castro and his regime undermined American interests in Latin America and on our home-front. His anti-American policies and relationships with brutal regimes like Iran and North Korea have proved a significant threat to our national security time and time again. Policies that have not changed despite the Obama Administration’s endless concessions to the regime over the past two years.&#160;</p>
<p>“Now more than ever, the people of Cuba need our solidarity. Our country and all of our democratic allies must demand political reforms that secure the human rights of all Cubans.”-Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R)</p> | Fidel Castro Has Died | true | http://shark-tank.com/2016/11/26/fidel-castro-died/ | 0 |
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<p>Nazareth.</p>
<p>In a state established on a founding myth — that the native Palestinian population left of their own accord rather than that they were ethnically cleansed — and in one that seeks its legitimacy through a host of other lies, such as that the occupation of the West Bank is benign and that Gaza’s has ended, deception becomes a political way of life.</p>
<p>And so it is in the “relative calm” that has followed Israel’s month-long pounding of Lebanon, a calm in which Israelis may no longer be dying but the Lebanese most assuredly are as explosions of US-made cluster bombs greet the south’s returning refugees and the anonymous residents of Gaza perish by the dozens each and every week under the relentless and indiscriminate strikes of the Israeli air force while the rest slowly starve in their open-air prison.</p>
<p>Israeli leaders deceive as much in “peace” as they do in war, which is why it is worth examining the slow trickle of disinformation coming from Tel Aviv and reflecting on where it is leading.</p>
<p>Many of Israel’s war lies have already been deeply implanted in Western consciousness by the media:</p>
<p>* that Hizbullah “started” the war by capturing two Israeli soldiers rather than that Israel maintained a hostile and provocative posture for the previous six years by daily sending its warplanes and spy drones into Lebanese airspace;</p>
<p>* that Hizbullah’s launching of rockets into Israel was an act of aggression, even though they were fired after, and in response to, Israel’s massive bombing of civilian areas in Lebanon;</p>
<p>* that Hizbullah, unlike Israel, used the local civilian populaton as human shields, even though Israel’s continual and comprehensive aerial spying on south Lebanon produced almost no evidence of this;</p>
<p>* that Hizbullah, not Israel, targeted civilians, despite a death toll that suggests the exact opposite;</p>
<p>* and that Hizbullah’s arming by Iran is entirely illegitimate, even though the weapons were used to defend Lebanon from a long-prepared Israeli attack, while Israel has an absolute and unchallengeable right to receive its arsenal from the US, even though those armaments have been used offensively, mostly against Lebanese and Palestinian civilian populations.</p>
<p>Similar deceptions are now being sown after the fighting.</p>
<p>For example, it now appears to be accepted wisdom that Hizbullah’s rocket attacks on Israel led to one million Israelis being made refugees. The most senior commentator with Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, Yoel Marcus, made exactly this point the other day in an op-ed in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, when he observed that “about a million Israeli refugees” had been forced to leave the north. Marcus appears to take an extremely liberal view of the meaning of the word “about”.</p>
<p>In fact, it is impossible that one million Israelis could have been made refugees, as a quick calculation proves. There are approximately 1.2 million Israelis living in the north, with the population divided equally between Jewish and Arab citizens. Hardly any Arabs left the north during the Hizbullah rocket attacks, either through a residual fear that their homes might be taken by the state, as were those of Palestinians who fled or were terrorised away during the 1948 war, or because they had nowhere else to go. Most assumed, probably rightly, that the Jewish population in the country’s centre would not welcome them as refugees.</p>
<p>It is also reported that 300,000 Israelis sought sanctuary in bomb shelters. Such shelters were open only in the north, and do not exist in the country’s Arab areas, so those using the shelters must have been the north’s Jewish citizens. Which means that if 300,000 of the 600,000 Jews in northern Israel were in shelters, there can have been at most — assuming all other Israeli Jews fled — 300,000 refugees.</p>
<p>Why does Marcus want us to believe that one million Israelis were turned out their homes? Because it helps Israel portray the threat posed by Hizbullah in a more terrifying light and because it makes more convincing the claim that Israelis suffered as much as the Lebanese, one million of whom really did end up as refugees.</p>
<p>It also conveniently glosses over the fact that most of the 300,000 (or fewer) Israeli “refugees” were staying with relatives or friends 100km or so further south in spare rooms and out of harm’s way. They were not, as were the Lebanese, fleeing for their lives — their convoys under fire from warplanes — and living in the open air without shelter, food or water and still within range of missile attacks.</p>
<p>Outside of Kiryat Shmona, close to the border with Lebanon, almost all of Israel’s “refugees” returned to untouched homes, whereas tens of thousands of Lebanon’s refugees have found their houses turned to rubble, and amid that rubble cluster bombs that threaten to kill and maim them.</p>
<p>But again, that is not what the Israeli government wants us to believe, which is why it published a report this week claiming that 12,000 buildings had been damaged by Hizbullah rocket attacks. That seems a strangely large figure given that the Israeli army says only 4,000 rockets were fired into Israel and that a substantial proportion supposedly landed in open ground. The same report also says more than 400 bush fires were started by the rockets.</p>
<p>So how and why did the government reach the figure of 12,000 buildings? That would mean that each rocket that hit a structure damaged at least another three buildings. Anyone who has seen the destruction inflicted by a Katyusha rocket (Hizbullah’s main weapon) will known that it does little more than punch a hole in whatever surface it hits. The spray of shrapnel, however, does minor damage to neighbouring structures (though much worse harm to human beings), such as piercing the rendering on homes or breaking windows. In other words, most of those 12,000 “structures” — and of course none of us can know what Israeli officials are including as a structure (individual apartments, garages, dog kennels?) — suffered minor damage that can be fixed in an afternoon.</p>
<p>So why the need to promote that inflated number? Because Hizbullah is reporting that 15,000 buildings were destroyed: that is, wrecked beyond repair by Israel’s missile attacks. As is the tradition in Arab society, many of those several-storey buildings were home to multiple families, meaning that probably many more “homes” than 15,000 have been destroyed. Some Lebanese sources estimate that more than 100,000 homes have been ruined. But for Israel the goal is to make it look as though its own people’s suffering is the same as that of the Lebanese.</p>
<p>Interestingly, the estimates of economic damage inflicted on Lebanon by Israel’s onslaught stand at about $5 billion, a figure which again Israel says neatly fits with its own assessments of its losses. It seems that each time one of those American-supplied munitions was dropped it did as much harm to Israel’s defence budget as it did to the place where it exploded. The point presumably is that, if and when the reparations account is being settled, Israel will claim its own losses cancel out those of Lebanon’s.</p>
<p>Many of Israel’s deceptions are also being used domestically to determine who will benefit — and who will be excluded — from the government’s largesse as it plans the north’s “reconstruction”. No suprises about which way the wind is blowing.</p>
<p>Government ministers, for example, have been claiming in the war’s aftermath that Arab — not Jewish — municipal leaders fled from their communities to avoid the rocket fire. For example, after a tour of the north, the interior minister, Ronnie Bar-On, argued that the failings in some towns and villages to cope with the war stemmed from the fact that local leaders “ran away, at the highest levels”. Asked to name the mayors and local councillors who had fled, Bar-On would only say: “Those people I am referring to I can say that in their towns I saw no synagogues.”</p>
<p>Why make this claim, even though all the evidence suggests that the Arab populations of the north stayed put during the fighting while, as we have seen, a large number of Jewish citizens did flee? There are two reasons.</p>
<p>First, the government has been embarrassed by reports that nearly half of the civilians killed by rockets were Arab, and by suggestions that the reasons for this were the state’s long-standing failure to protect Arab communities by building public bomb shelters, providing air raid sirens and disseminating advice from the civil defence authorities in Arabic. Better to shift the blame on to their elected leaders.</p>
<p>And second, the government is amassing huge sums of money for the reconstruction effort from Jewish groups in America and Europe and is looking for an excuse not to fund work in Arab communities. Another senior politician, Effi Eitam, leader of the National Religious Party, has accused Arab authorities of “pretending to be deprived”. The north’s Arabs will most likely be cut out of tasting the reconstruction pie. Certainly there is no discussion of building public bomb shelters for Arab towns, even though few in Israel appear to believe the ceasefire with Hizbullah will hold long.</p>
<p>Similarly, the environment minister Gideon Ezra has stated that Arab communities in the north should not receive money to rehabilitate their separate and grossly deprived education system, on the grounds that during the war “the residents there behaved as per usual, as if nothing had happened” — a reference that sounds like they are being penalised because they did not flee. His reasoning appears popular, among the public and in the cabinet, because Arab citizens generally opposed Israel’s war.</p>
<p>A related deception being promoted by the government is that it is committed to compensating workers and businesses in the north who lost income during the war. But the list drawn up by the finance ministry of areas eligible for compensation reveals that all Arab communities have been excluded, apart from four Druze villages (the Druze serve in the army and are treated by Israel as a national group separate from the rest of the Arab population). Most of the money, millions of dollars, is being made available only to Jewish citizens, even though Arab citizens comprise half the population of the north. What a contrast to Hizbullah’s non-discriminatory policy of compensating all Lebanese harmed by the fighting, whether from its own Shia community or Christian, Druze and Sunni Muslims.</p>
<p>(Incidentally, according to Haaretz, in one court case being brought by an Arab engineer from the village of Fassouta who, unlike his Jewish colleagues, is being denied compensation for loss of income during the war, it is noted that he could not leave his home because the Israeli army was firing artillery batteries stationed on the edge of the village. So much for Israel’s argument, adopted by the United Nation’s representative Jan Egeland, that only Hizbullah was using civilians as human shields!)</p>
<p>Israel’s post-war deceptions, of course, embrace the Palestinians living under occupation too. Yuval Diskin, head of the Shin Bet secret service, is claiming that, inspired by the success of Hizbullah, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are turning Rafah into “the garden of Eden of weapons smuggling”. Apparently Israel knows about 15,000 guns, 4 million bullets, 38 rockets, 10-15 Katyusha rockets, and dozens of anti-tank missiles that have entered Gaza through the Rafah crossing in the past year. Israel believes that just about everything bar tanks and planes is coming across the short border with Egypt it still controls. In a few years, says Diskin, Israel will face the same situation in Gaza as in south Lebanon. We will just have to take his word for that.</p>
<p>But there is a problem. Since November 2005, say human rights groups, the Rafah crossing has been almost continuously shut. Those weapons must have been smuggled in a stampede on the day or two when the crossing was open.</p>
<p>Further doubt is cast on Diskin’s claims by a report in Haaretz this week that the blanket closure of Rafah crossing has continued since one of Israel’s soldiers was captured by Palestinian fighters two months ago. The reason for the crossing’s closure, recommended by Shin Bet, is also noted by Haaretz — and it has nothing to do with weapons smuggling. The blockade was imposed as a way to put pressure on the Palestinians to release the Israeli soldier, a form of collective punishment illegal under international law.</p>
<p>Diskin’s comparisons between developments in Gaza and south Lebanon are at best fanciful. How Gaza’s resistance fighters will be able to build hundreds of underground bunkers in the Strip’s flat, sandy terrain unknown to Israel as its planes and tanks freely roam the area, and as Military Intelligence operates its network of collaborators, is not explained. But Diskin’s conclusions presumably will be used to justify Israel’s continuing assaults on Gaza’s civilian population. Better, the argument will go, not to wait to be caught out as in Lebanon.</p>
<p>The biggest deception of all, however, relates to the reasons for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s decision this week to reject the establishment of an independent commission of inquiry, headed by a judge, that would have been free to investigate all aspects of the war. Instead Olmert has set up two separate internal committees of investigation, one to examine government decision-making and the other the army’s conduct. (A third watchdog body, under the government’s state comptroller, is supposed to look at failings in civil defence.)</p>
<p>Most Israelis are deeply unhappy about what one commentator has called Olmert’s “committee of non-inquiry”. Separate investigations mean that the remit of each committee will be very narrow, focusing on technical issues and failings, and unable to look at the wider picture.</p>
<p>The members of the committee who will be investigating Olmert have been handpicked by him. All the judges approached to head the committee turned down the offer, as did the country’s foremost constitutional law expert, Amnon Rubinstein, apparently aware that being party to a whitewash would permanently tarnish his reputation.</p>
<p>It will now be led by a former head of Mossad, Israel’s international spy agency. Observers have speculated that 77-year-old Nahum Admoni’s room for criticising the government will be extremely limited, given that he himself was admonished by the Kahan Commission of Inquiry that in 1982 investigated Israel’s role in the massacre of Palestinian civilians in the Lebanese refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla. Admoni failed to give “an unequivocal warning about the danger entailed in the Phalangists’ entry into the camps” that resulted in the slaughter of more than 1,000 Palestinians. Mossad was keenly involved with the Christian Phalangists, attempting to install them in power as a puppet regime.</p>
<p>Kahan took no action against Admoni, however, because he — like Olmert now — had only recently taken up his job. It will be hard for Admoni to treat Olmert more harshly than Kahan treated him two decades ago.</p>
<p>Why would Olmert want a discredited committee rather than a proper commission of inquiry, especially if, as he claims, the reason against the latter is that it will take years to report? By then, he may be out of office and never have to face the fall-out. The official reason, according to Olmert, is that such a delay would paralyse the army. But most commissions of inquiry have produced interim reports, making recommendations for reforms, within a few months and have then taken their time to produce a final report.</p>
<p>Other factors are at play, relating to the past and the future. The obvious one is that a powerful commission would almost certainly investigate the six-year build-up to the war following Israel’s withdrawal from south Lebanon. There is a real danger that its investigations might throw an uncomfortable light on Israel’s motives for continuing provocative overflights by its war planes in Lebanon; on its refusal to hand over the maps of the minefields it planted in south Lebanon during its two decades of occupation; on its refusal to release the last remaining Lebanese prisoners in its jails, thereby perpetuating a state of hostilities; and its refusal to negotiate with Lebanon and Syria about an end to its occupation of the Golan Heights and with it a resolution of the disputed status of the corridor of land known as the Shebaa Farms, which Lebanon claims.</p>
<p>But there is an even bigger threat posed by the establishment of a commission. It might unearth evidence that the war against Lebanon was long planned, that it had nothing to do with the capture of two soldiers on the border, that it was coordinated with the United States, and that its ultimate goal was an attack on Iran.</p>
<p>Olmert, and Israel’s political and military leaders, do not need another Kahan Commission — or another embarrassment like its findings about Israel’s involvement with the Sabra and Shatilla massacre. Israel needs a free hand to strike unchallenged when the next stage of the war on terror takes shape. Olmert admitted as much in his coded observation that a commission of inquiry would distract from the central goal: “to focus on the future and the Iranian threat”.</p>
<p>A clue where Israel might be heading next emerged this week when Olmert’s trusted international ambassador, Shimon Peres, “revealed” that Iran is trying to transfer its nuclear know-how to terrorist organisations. Peres did not name Hizbullah but it is only time before the link is made and a new casus belli established.</p>
<p>JONATHAN COOK is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming “ <a href="" type="internal">Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State</a>” published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is <a href="http://www.jkcook.net/" type="external">www.jkcook.net</a></p>
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<p>&#160;</p> | Israeli Myths | true | https://counterpunch.org/2006/08/31/israeli-myths/ | 2006-08-31 | 4 |
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<p>The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday denied a request to list what would have been the first U.S. exchange-traded fund built to track bitcoin, the digital currency.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Investors Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss have been trying for more than three years to convince the SEC to let it bring the Bitcoin ETF to market. CBOE Holdings Inc's Bats exchange had applied to list the ETF.</p>
<p>The digital currency's price plunged, losing some 18 percent in trading immediately after the decision.</p>
<p>Bitcoin had scaled to a record of nearly $1,300 this month, higher than the price of an ounce of gold, as investors speculated that an ETF holding the digital currency could woo more people into buying the asset.</p>
<p>Bitcoin is a virtual currency that can be used to move money around the world quickly and with relative anonymity, without the need for a central authority, such as a bank or government.</p>
<p>Yet bitcoin presents a new set of risks to investors given its limited adoption, a number of massive cybersecurity breaches affecting bitcoin owners and the lack of consistent treatment of the assets by governments.</p>
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<p>"Based on the record before it, the Commission believes that the significant markets for bitcoin are unregulated," the SEC said in a statement posted online. "The Commission notes that bitcoin is still in the relatively early stages of its development and that, over time, regulated bitcoin-related markets of significant size may develop."</p>
<p>The regulators have questions and concerns about how the funds would work and whether they could be priced and trade effectively, according to a financial industry source familiar with the SEC's thinking.</p>
<p>"We remain optimistic and committed to bringing COIN to market, and look forward to continuing to work with the SEC staff," said Tyler Winklevoss, CFO of Digital Asset Services LLC.</p>
<p>"We began this journey almost four years ago, and are determined to see it through. We agree with the SEC that regulation and oversight are important to the health of any marketplace and the safety of all investors."</p>
<p>The Winklevoss twins are best known for their feud with Facebook Inc founder Mark Zuckerberg over whether he stole the idea for what became the world's most popular social networking website from them. The former Olympic rowers ultimately settled their legal dispute, which was dramatized in the 2010 film "The Social Network."</p>
<p>Since then they have become major investors in the digital currency, which relies on "mining" computers that validate blocks of transactions by competing to solve mathematical puzzles. The first to solve the puzzle and clear the transaction is rewarded with new bitcoins. Solutions to the puzzle come roughly every 10 minutes.</p>
<p>There are two other bitcoin ETF applications awaiting a verdict from the SEC. Grayscale Investments LLC's Bitcoin Investment Trust, backed by early bitcoin advocate Barry Silbert and his Digital Currency Group, filed an application last year.</p>
<p>SolidX Partners Inc, a U.S. technology company that provides blockchain services, also filed its ETF application last year.</p>
<p>(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt and Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss; Additional reporting by Sarah N. Lynch in Washington and John McCrank in New York; Editing by Leslie Adler and Sandra Maler)</p> | U.S. Regulators Reject Bitcoin ETF, Digital Currency Plunges | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/03/10/u-s-regulators-reject-bitcoin-etf-digital-currency-plunges.html | 2017-03-10 | 0 |
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<p>Blue-collar, clerical, transit and security workers turned out to speak about the lack of progress in their negotiations for new contracts.</p>
<p>And city councilors took action. They approved a vote of no confidence in City Hall’s chief union negotiator.</p>
<p>The vote is symbolic – simply an expression of the council’s opinion on Management Associates Inc., the company that handles talks with city unions.</p>
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<p>It was adopted on a 6-3 vote during Wednesday’s meeting, with Republican Dan Lewis joining the council’s five Democrats in favor.</p>
<p>Councilors Rey Garduño and Diane Gibson, both Democrats, say the company’s president, John Martinez, has an aggressive style that hasn’t served the city well. The city has paid the firm $422,000 since 2010, yet there’s been a stalemate of several years in talks with four city unions, they say.</p>
<p>“It’s time for a change in negotiator representing the city,” Gibson told her fellow councilors.</p>
<p>Philosophical disagreement</p>
<p>Rob Perry, the top administrator under Mayor Richard Berry, defended the work of Management Associates. The city hasn’t always had much money available for pay raises, he said, which contributed to stalled union talks.</p>
<p>There’s also a philosophical disagreement, Perry said, between the administration and union leaders on the practice of “union time,” in which union leaders draw city pay even if they handle union work during the day, rather than their regular city job.</p>
<p>“We think that representation should be paid for by the union,” Perry said.</p>
<p>The city does have agreements with three large unions, covering police officers, firefighters and mid-level managers. Each group agreed to cover union time by creating a pool of leave donated by employees.</p>
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<p>Lawsuit targeted</p>
<p>Gibson has another proposal on city unions, but councilors didn’t act on it Wednesday.</p>
<p>She wants the city to dismiss the lawsuit it filed this summer accusing some labor unions of “unjust enrichment.” The suit alleges the unions owe taxpayers over $927,000 for drawing city pay while handling union business.</p>
<p>Assistant City Attorney Kevin Curran said the city’s Legal Department would comply with whatever action the council takes. But he said the department “does have some serious issues” with Gibson’s proposal and wanted to brief the council in a closed session at some point.</p>
<p>Councilors agreed to postpone the bill until a future meeting.</p>
<p>Dan McKay can be reached at <a href="" type="internal">[email protected]</a>.</p>
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<p /> | Metro Beat: Council losing confidence in city negotiator | false | https://abqjournal.com/457106/council-losing-confidence-in-city-negotiator.html | 2 |
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<p>The Latest on President Donald Trump's plan to shrink two national parks in Utah (all times local):</p>
<p>6:30 p.m.</p>
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<p>Outdoor company Patagonia has sued to block President Donald Trump's cuts to Utah's Bears Ears National Monument.</p>
<p>Patagonia's lawsuit was filed Wednesday night, becoming the fourth legal challenge after Trump announced Monday he would shrink Bear Ears and the Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah.</p>
<p>The California-based company argues shrinking the monument by 85 percent is an "extreme overreach in authority" and strips much-needed protections from sacred tribal lands. It filed the suit on behalf of several organizations.</p>
<p>The lawsuit came after Patagonia replaced its usual home page with a stark message, "The President Stole Your Land."</p>
<p>Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke shot back by saying the claim is "nefarious, false and a lie."</p>
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<p>A coalition of five tribes has also sued to preserve Bears Ears. Two lawsuits have been filed to protect Grand Staircase.</p>
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<p>1:54 a.m.</p>
<p>More lawsuits are expected Wednesday over the Trump administration's plans to shrink several national monuments.</p>
<p>Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and outdoor retail giant Patagonia traded harsh words Tuesday — an opening salvo in an imminent legal battle that could last for years.</p>
<p>On Monday, President Donald Trump ordered drastic reductions to Utah's Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments. Three lawsuits had been filed by Tuesday night.</p>
<p>Trump said he was reversing federal overreach by drastically cutting the sprawling monuments named by Democratic presidents. But tribal leaders, environmentalists and others argue the president doesn't have that authority and his move jeopardizes a wealth of Native American artifacts, dinosaur fossils and rugged spaces.</p> | The Latest: Patagonia sues over Trump's monuments order | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/12/06/latest-patagonia-sues-over-trumps-monuments-order.html | 2017-12-06 | 0 |
<p>Adobe (NASDAQ:ADBE) disclosed weaker-than-expected third-quarter profits and revenue on Tuesday, but the tech company’s shares rallied around upbeat subscriber growth numbers.</p>
<p>The customer numbers, which revealed more than 1 million cloud subscribers, have grown in importance as Adobe shifts to a subscription-based business model.</p>
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<p>Shares of Adobe soared more than 5% in extended trading Tuesday afternoon, putting them on track to extend their impressive 12-month surge of 44%.</p>
<p>The company said it earned $83 million, or 16 cents a share, last quarter, compared with a profit of $201.36 million, or 40 cents a share, a year earlier.</p>
<p>Excluding one-time items, Adobe earned 32 cents a share, trailing the Street’s view by two pennies.</p>
<p>Revenue dipped 7.9% to $995.12 million, compared with consensus calls from analysts for $1.01 billion.</p>
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<p>Yet Wall Street zeroed in on Adobe saying stronger-than-expected enterprise adoption boosted Creative Cloud subscriptions by 331,000 quarter-over-quarter to 1.031 million.</p>
<p>Analysts polled by StreetAccount projected growth of 327,000 subscribers after Adobe added 221,000 subscribers in the second quarter.</p>
<p>“We exceeded one million subscriptions during Q3, demonstrating that the transition to Creative Cloud is happening sooner than expected,” Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said in a statement.</p>
<p>Shares of San Jose-based Adobe jumped 4.30% to $50.24 in extended trading on Tuesday.</p>
<p>Adobe has outperformed the markets since it last reported quarterly results on June 18, rallying 11% over that span, compared with a gain of just 2.8% for the S&amp;P 500.</p> | Adobe's Strong Subscriber Growth Overshadows 3Q Miss | true | http://foxbusiness.com/features/2013/09/17/adobe-reports-earnings.html | 2016-08-15 | 0 |
<p>Rep. Justin Amash (R-Michigan), a member of the House Tea Party Caucus, may be the one to begin the impeachment process against President Trump.</p>
<p>Amash apparently told Capitol reporters on Wednesday morning that if the Comey memo is true and its claims can be verified by Congress, it would be “grounds for impeachment,” according to a tweet sent by Katie Bo Williams, a reporter with The Hill.</p>
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<p>The Comey memo was initially reported on by the New York Times, which claimed that while it hadn’t seen the memo in person, an FBI agent close to Comey <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/us/politics/james-comey-trump-flynn-russia-investigation.html" type="external">read parts of it aloud to reporters</a>. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, has said <a href="http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/jason-chaffetz-says-he-is-ready-to-subpoena-comey-trump-memo" type="external">he may soon issue a subpoena</a> so the memo can be read by members of his committee.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most damning part of the memo — which Comey apparently wrote as a means of keeping a paper trail documenting the times the Trump White House tried to interfere in his agency’s Russia investigation — recounts a time when President Trump asked Comey to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/us/politics/james-comey-trump-flynn-russia-investigation.html" type="external">drop the FBI investigation</a> into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. around the time Flynn was fired from the White House for failing to disclose payments for work done on behalf of foreign governments.</p>
<p>Comey’s memo also detailed a conversation in which the president asked the former FBI director to prosecute and imprison journalists who reported on leaks coming from the White House. Comey was fired from his position last week.</p>
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<p>&#160;</p> | Republican Congressman says Comey memo ‘grounds for impeachment’ | true | http://resistancereport.com/politics/republican-congressman-impeachment/ | 2017-05-17 | 4 |
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<p>The crisp, sunny fall weather New Mexicans expect in October should be with us in abundance by Saturday and throughout next week, according to the National Weather Service.</p>
<p>The unsettled, muggy weather of recent weeks is expected to begin clearing out today, bringing some gusty winds this afternoon and into the evening.</p>
<p>Possibly heavy storms are forecast for much of northern and central New Mexico this morning and are expected to clear out by about 6 a.m.</p>
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<p>Mostly sunny skies and a high of 81 are expected later today.</p>
<p>But by the time the balloons ascend Saturday morning, visitors can expect clear, cool weather with temperatures in the upper 40s and little likelihood of rain. Highs in the mid- and upper 70s and sunny skies are forecast through the weekend.</p>
<p>“It looks pretty good,” said Kerry Jones, a metrologist with the National Weather Service in Albuquerque. “This active pattern we’ve been in the last couple of weeks is going to change to a much drier pattern.”</p>
<p>The “Albuquerque box,” a set of predictable wind patterns that can be used to navigate balloons, should be in place much of the week, Jones said.</p>
<p>Dry air and clear skies will allow cold air to settle overnight into the Rio Grande Valley and flow downhill from north to south – a pattern meteorologists call “drainage winds,” he said.</p>
<p>Gusty winds are likely to start later Monday as cooler air settles into central New Mexico, Jones said.</p>
<p>“It could definitely be a little breezy Monday afternoon and Monday evening,” he said, but winds are expected to subside by Tuesday morning, with a predicted low of 47 that morning.</p>
<p>Sunny weather is forecast into the week. Tuesday has a forecast high of 68 and a low of 41, and on Wednesday, a high of 72 is forecast.</p>
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<p /> | Weather looks promising for Balloon Fiesta | false | https://abqjournal.com/1074174/weather-looks-promising-for-balloon-fiesta-excerpt-clear-skies-calm-winds-forecast-for-saturday-much-of-next-week.html | 2 |
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<p>Harden became the first player in NBA history to have at least 50 points, 15 assists and 15 rebounds in a single game, according to information provided by the Rockets from the Elias Sport Bureau. He also tied Wilt Chamberlain for most points in a triple-double, set career highs for points and 3-pointers with nine, and matched his career best for assists.</p>
<p>The Knicks got within three several times in the fourth quarter, with the last time coming on a layup by Joakim Noah with about four minutes left. Harden responded to Noah’s basket with three free throws before dishing to Ryan Anderson for a 3-pointer that made it 119-111.</p>
<p>Brandon Jennings had a season-high 32 points for New York, which has dropped four straight.</p>
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<p>THUNDER 114, CLIPPERS 88</p>
<p>OKLAHOMA CITY — Russell Westbrook had 17 points, 14 assists and 12 rebounds for his NBA-best 16th triple-double of the season, leading the Thunder to the win.</p>
<p>Westbrook played just 28 minutes as Oklahoma City put away Los Angeles with a big first half. Enes Kanter had 23 points and eight rebounds, and Victor Oladipo added 15 points.</p>
<p>The Clippers played without Chris Paul, who was sidelined by a hamstring injury, and Blake Griffin, who is recovering from right knee surgery. Brandon Bass and Marreese Speights each had 18 points, and Austin Rivers finished with 14 on 3-for-11 shooting.</p>
<p>Alex Abrines drilled a half-court shot at the halftime buzzer, giving the Thunder a 69-40 lead at the break.</p>
<p>CAVALIERS 121, HORNETS 109</p>
<p>CHARLOTTE, N.C. — LeBron James scored 17 of his 32 points in the first quarter, and the Cavaliers won for the seventh time in eight games.</p>
<p>Kevin Love added 28 points and 10 rebounds for Cleveland, which played without Kyrie Irving after the point guard injured his right hamstring during Thursday’s 124-118 victory over Boston. Jordan McRae had 20 points and Kay Felder finished with 13.</p>
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<p>James was 6 for 7 from the field in the first quarter, including a perfect 3 for 3 from beyond the arc. Love scored 15 points in the second, helping Cleveland to a 71-59 lead at the break.</p>
<p>Kemba Walker scored 37 points for the Hornets, who had won five of six. Frank Kaminsky added 15 points and Nicolas Batum finished with 13 points and eight assists.</p>
<p>BUCKS 116, BULLS 96</p>
<p>CHICAGO — Giannis Antetokounmpo scored 35 points, Jabari Parker added 27 and Milwaukee used a strong finish to secure the victory.</p>
<p>The Bucks outscored the Bulls 36-20 in the fourth to break open a tight game and come away with a lopsided win after dropping four of six.</p>
<p>Malcolm Brogdon had 15 points, 12 assists and 11 rebounds for Milwaukee, and Greg Monroe added 15 points and 12 boards.</p>
<p>Chicago held out struggling point guard Rajon Rondo, hoping Michael Carter-Williams could provide a spark. But the Bulls lost for the eighth time in 11 games.</p>
<p>Jimmy Butler scored 26 points for Chicago, and Robin Lopez added 12 points and 10 rebounds.</p>
<p>GRIZZLIES 112, KINGS 98</p>
<p>SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Mike Conley had 22 points and eight rebounds, leading the Grizzlies to the road win.</p>
<p>JaMychal Green made four of Memphis’ 17 3-pointers and finished with 18 points. Zach Randolph and Vince Carter each scored 14, and Tony Allen and Troy Daniels had 11 points apiece.</p>
<p>The Grizzlies went 17 for 35 from long range while avenging an earlier home loss to the Kings.</p>
<p>DeMarcus Cousins had 26 points, eight assists and five steals for Sacramento, which has dropped two in a row after winning a season-high four straight. A frustrated Cousins, who finished with just four rebounds, got called for his eighth technical this season in the third quarter.</p>
<p>JAZZ 91, SUNS 86</p>
<p>SALT LAKE CITY — Rudy Gobert had 18 points and 13 rebounds, helping Utah to its third straight win.</p>
<p>Gordon Hayward added 18 points and nine rebounds for the Jazz, and Rodney Hood had 13 points.</p>
<p>Devin Booker scored 18 of his 20 points in the first quarter for Phoenix, and Eric Bledsoe added 19 points, eight rebounds and eight assists. The Suns dropped to 10-24, scoring just one basket over the final 6:45.</p> | NBA Capsules | false | https://abqjournal.com/918978/nba-capsules-4.html | 2 |
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<p>No one likes limp lettuce, mushy melons, bland brisket, or chewy chicken. And for more than two decades, Consumer Reports has surveyed hundreds of thousands of readers in search of the nation’s top grocery chains—stores that offer what consumers demand most: great fresh foods, fast and friendly service, competitive prices, and a sparkling shopping environment. It seems like a no-brainer, but finding a supermarket that’s top-notch all around remains elusive.</p>
<p>Success is easier to come by when you live near a boutique chain, such as the fabled gourmet grocers Citarella in New York City, Dorothy Lane Market in Dayton, Ohio, and Rice Epicurean Market in Houston. But a high level of quality and consistency is harder to achieve among companies that operate dozens, even hundreds, of stores.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>That’s especially true of food quality, and our new <a href="http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/supermarkets/buying-guide.htm?EXTKEY=AFOXDIG01" type="external">supermarket Ratings Opens a New Window.</a> prove the point&#160;(Read our new&#160; <a href="http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/supermarkets0514?EXTKEY=AFOXDIG01" type="external">report on supermarket shopping Opens a New Window.</a>.)&#160;Of the 55 chains in our survey, <a href="http://#six?EXTKEY=AFOXDIG01" type="external">just six Opens a New Window.</a>&#160;earned exemplary marks from more than 27,000 readers for the finest fare—succulent fruits and vegetables, and delectable meats.</p>
<p>What makes these supermarkets stand out? Here’s the inside story from several of the retailers.</p>
<p>“At Whole Foods, we are highly selective about what we sell, dedicated to strict quality standards and committed to responsible, transparent sourcing,” said Liz Burkhart, senior media relations specialist. “Whether it's chicken from a local rancher a mile away, or bananas from across the globe, no other retailer has higher quality standards, knows more about where and how their products were produced, or provides more transparency to their shoppers. Our strict quality standards ensure that our meat departments only offer excellent meat and poultry products from animals that were raised the way nature intended—without antibiotics, added hormones or animal by-product in feed—ever. When it comes to produce, our skilled buyers ensure that we offer the largest variety of high-quality natural and organic produce possible, including locally sourced and seasonal picks to fairly traded produce through our Whole Trade program."</p>
<p>Want to spend less on groceries? Try these&#160; <a href="http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/03/16-ways-to-save-at-the-supermarket/index.htm?EXTKEY=AFOXDIG01" type="external">16 ways to save at the supermarket Opens a New Window.</a>. And learn how to&#160; <a href="http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/04/7-ways-to-avoid-getting-tricked-at-the-supermarket.htm?EXTKEY=AFOXDIG01" type="external">avoid getting tricked when shopping Opens a New Window.</a>&#160;and <a href="http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/04/4-ways-to-save-time-at-the-supermarket/index.htm?EXTKEY=AFOXDIG01" type="external">save time at the supermarket Opens a New Window.</a>.</p>
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<p>“Produce drives our business at Sprouts, so we go to great lengths to guarantee that quality is there every step of the way,” said Doug Sanders, president and CEO of Sprouts Farmers Market. “This includes leveraging our regional buying teams to source product from a variety of local, regional, and national growers, providing our customers with the freshest produce at the best prices every day. Our meat departments are staffed by trained butchers who create ready-to-cook kabobs, pinwheels, stuffed roasts, and up to 20 varieties of chicken and pork sausage. Each batch is made from scratch using all-natural meats and wholesome ingredients.”</p>
<p>Maria Brous, director of public relations for Publix, said: “Our customers trust the Publix name and look to us to provide meal solutions. Our perishable departments address the question of ‘what’s for dinner?’ and we provide the products, services and information our customers are looking for.” One such initiative is the chain’s Seasons’ Peak Program, which identifies when various particular fruits and vegetables are at their flavorful best. Customers can even sign up for e-mail alerts, notifying them when their favorites, peaches, for example, are ripe and ready for harvest.</p>
<p>At Wegmans, according to Jo Natale, director of media relations, quality begins with having high standards. “We work very closely with our supplier-partners to see their facilities, operations, and products first hand,” she said. “And we invest in training and education of our employees about the products we sell, which enables them to monitor and maintain quality and share their knowledge with the customer.”</p>
<p>If you’re finicky about your perishables, check out the stores at the top of the class, which also include Raley's and Costco. Costco and Whole Foods are national chains, and thus more accessible to most shoppers. A caveat about Whole Foods. It’s not cheap, and in fact, ranked as one of the most expensive supermarkets in the Ratings.</p>
<p>—Tod Marks</p>
<p>Copyright © 2005-2014 Consumers Union of U.S., Inc. No reproduction, in whole or in part, without written permission. Consumer Reports has no relationship with any advertisers on this site.</p> | 6 supermarkets with the best food in America | true | http://foxbusiness.com/features/2014/04/10/6-supermarkets-with-best-food-in-america.html | 2016-03-05 | 0 |
<p>The future of Hartford's downtown arena still remains uncertain, despite last week's approval of $40 million in state bonding to help fix up the aging XL Center.</p>
<p>Besides those funds, Connecticut's new, two-year state budget includes one stipulation. There must be a "request for proposals" issued to determine whether any entity is interested in purchasing the coliseum complex, sidelining — at least for now — Democratic Gov. Dannel P. Malloy's original proposal to spend $250 million to totally upgrade the facility and keep it in government hands.</p>
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<p>The legislation requires the request be issued no later than June 30, 2019. But it will likely be released this spring, said Michael Freimuth, executive director of the Capital Regional Development Authority. The authority is a quasi-public agency created by the General Assembly to manage various Hartford development projects, including the XL Center, which is owned by the city.</p>
<p>At this point, the number of potential buyers for the arena is questionable.</p>
<p>"I think we're fooling ourselves if we think it's going to be a dramatic bidding process," said Freimuth, noting the roughly 40-year-old structure is "dated and it's tired" and still requires a major investment beyond the $40 million.</p>
<p>If there's no buyer, state and city officials will have to decide what to do next with the complex, including its' possible closure.</p>
<p>The governor proposed spending $250 million over several years to "enliven and modernize" the 16,000-seat facility. Malloy, who doubts a private buyer will be found, argues the XL Center needs an overhaul to attract and maintain University of Connecticut hockey and basketball games, the city's minor league hockey team, concerts and other events — all things crucial to the city's economy and to luring young people to the region.</p>
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<p>Malloy said the XL Center is relatively busy compared with similar venues. There are 130 to 150 events scheduled annually.</p> | Fate of Hartford arena uncertain as possible sale explored | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/12/03/fate-hartford-arena-uncertain-as-possible-sale-explored.html | 2017-12-03 | 0 |
<p>It's still not clear what happened at Syria's National Security headquarters today, but state media say that two senior government officials have been killed in a suicide bomb attack: <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/middle-east/syria/120718/daoud-rajha-syria-defense-minister-killed-suicide-bom" type="external">Daoud Rajha</a>, Defense Minister, and his deputy,&#160;Assef Shawkat.</p>
<p>If that's true, it makes Rajha the highest-ranking casualty of the Syrian crisis so far. Here's what we know about him.</p>
<p>Latest from GlobalPost: <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/middle-east/syria/120718/syria-damascus-bombing-kills-defense-minister-top-off" type="external">Syria live blog</a></p>
<p>According to Syria's state news agency,&#160; <a href="http://www.sana.sy/eng/21/2012/07/18/432178.htm" type="external">SANA</a>, Rajha wasn't just defense minister, he was also deputy commander-in-chief of the army and armed forces, deputy prime minister, and a general.</p>
<p>The 65-year-old Damascene is described as having a long and decorated military career, and served as the army's chief of staff before his <a href="http://www.sana.sy/eng/361/2011/08/08/362917.htm" type="external">appointment</a> to the Defense Ministry in August 2011.</p>
<p>According to the <a href="http://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/tg1517.aspx" type="external">US Treasury</a>, which imposed sanctions on him in March this year, he was apparently appointed for his loyalty to President Bashar al-Assad's regime.&#160;He was one of three ministers to keep their posts in last month's cabinet reshuffle, <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/syria-s-assad-forms-new-government-keeps-top-ministers-1.443355" type="external">Reuters</a>&#160;reported at the time.&#160;</p>
<p>More from GlobalPost: <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/middle-east/syria/120718/syrian-rebels-claim-damascus-attack-killed-defense-mi" type="external">Syrian rebels claim responsibility for Damascus bombing</a></p>
<p>Rajiha was an exception in other ways, too. He was reportedly a Greek Orthodox Christian, making him a rarity in Assad's mainly Alawite government.</p>
<p>According to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/19/world/middleeast/suicide-attack-reported-in-damascus-as-more-generals-flee.html?pagewanted=all" type="external">the New York Times</a>, as a high-profile minority figure, Rajha served the valuable public relations purpose of putting "a face of pluralism on the military and security services dominated by the same Alawite sect the president belongs to."</p>
<p>Rajha was no token appointment, however. A recent <a href="http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/07/18/uk-syria-crisis-power-idUKBRE86H06F20120718" type="external">Reuters analysis</a> described him as a member of the elite "military crisis unit" overseen by Assad himself and responsible for the regime's day-to-day handling of the crisis.</p>
<p>Rajha is accused of playing a direct role in the government's crackdown on its opponents. <a href="http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2011:136:0045:0047:EN:PDF" type="external">The EU</a>&#160;has had him on its list of designated officials since May 2011, citing him as "responsible for the military involvement in&#160;the crackdown on peaceful protesters."</p>
<p>Rajha has been replaced as defense minister by&#160; <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/middle-east/syria/120718/syria-new-defense-minister-general-fahad-jassim-al-fr" type="external">General Fahad Jassim al-Freij</a>, who succeeded him last year as the army's chief of staff.</p>
<p>In-depth from GlobalPost: <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/series/inside-syria" type="external">Inside Syria</a></p> | Daoud Rajha profile: Who was Syria's dead defense minister? | false | https://pri.org/stories/2012-07-18/daoud-rajha-profile-who-was-syrias-dead-defense-minister | 2012-07-18 | 3 |
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<p>Get to work, Americans! Globalization is coming home to roost, and you’re going to be getting very, very busy, with no rest in your dotage.</p>
<p>That’s the message from United Airlines and Old Europe this past week.</p>
<p>First Old Europe, where workers at a company at the Bosch car parts plant in France resignedly voted to accept a management demand that they increase their workweek (but not their pay) by an hour from the state mandated 35-hour week because of increased competition from abroad. That was followed by DaimlerChrysler in Germany, where workers agreed to return from a 35 to a 40-hour week, again with no increase in pay, under the threat of seeing plants outsourced to South Africa.</p>
<p>Other workers in France and Germany have been giving up two weeks of paid vacation and agreeing to increased workweeks after similar threats.</p>
<p>It appears that the 35-hour workweek, introduced only a few years ago as a pioneering reform in France, is on its deathbed, a victim of globalization. In the U.S., of course, the 40-hour week, once hailed generations ago as a great reform by the labor movement, died so long ago-sometime back in the Reagan years, I believe-that it is in severe rigor mortis at this point, with the average workweek hovering in the 42-hour range and rising.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, people in America aren’t just having to work longer to make ends meet–and increasingly just to keep their jobs; they can also forget about retiring at 65-and even about getting a pension.</p>
<p>Virtually all American employers long ago did away with so-called defined benefit pension plans-the ones that established a certain level of monthly benefits and then paid those benefits based on the number of years a worker was employed-and replaced them with so-called defined payment plans, where workers (and sometimes employers) paid into a plan and then the pension, upon retirement, would be based on how much was paid in, and on how well the company managed to invest those paid-in moneys.</p>
<p>Now many companies are trying to weasel out of those meager pension plans too. One way has always been to drop workers before their plans are “vested”, usually after five years of employment. If that happens, the worker keeps what she or he has invested in a plan, but the company can keep what it contributed. Many workers, particularly at the lower end of the pay scale, but increasingly in higher paying white-collar jobs too, shuttle through a series of short-term jobs and never manage to get vested, in the process getting robbed of a lifetime’s worth of employee contributions to their never earned pensions. Corporate lobbyists have managed to prevent Congress from ever passing legislation making pensions fully portable from job to job-an obvious bit of basic decency that seems to elude even Democratic politicians. Another way of avoiding pensions, growing in popularity in management suites, is to hire contract workers and temps to do jobs once done by employees, since the outsourced jobs don’t get any benefits.</p>
<p>But it gets worse. United Airlines just announced that it wants to terminate its pension payments, and going forward, possibly cancel its pension program altogether. The company claims it needs to take this drastic step to remain competitive. Of course, to “remain competitive” with United, other airlines will argue that they have to do the same thing. (Did anyone say collusion?)</p>
<p>As this screw-the-worker movement spreads, as inevitably it will, like a wildfire, what we can expect to wind up with is American workers putting in 9-hour days, maybe adding a sixth day to the work week, and an end to retirement, since people will have to stay on the job until they die to keep paying for rent, food and medical care.</p>
<p>Welcome to the 19th Century.</p>
<p>Can child labor be far behind? Actually, they’ve actually been tinkering with the law here in Pennsylvania, where you’ll find children under 16 working in supermarkets and fast food joints under new “liberalized” labor laws (no doubt this is going on in other enlightened states too). Adding factory jobs and coal mining is just a matter of degree.</p>
<p>And yet they keep saying globalization is good, because “free trade” brings us cheaper goods and services.</p>
<p>Now, finally, we are seeing the seamy downside of all this. Corporations do just fine with globalization. They get to produce where it’s cheapest, sell the same goods back to us at huge mark-ups, and extort us into surrendering hard-won gains in pay, working hours, and retirement benefits, just to stay employed.</p>
<p>For the people though, globalization is just a form of governmentally sanctioned extortion, and until the working people of America massively return to trade unions, and insist that politicians respond to human, instead of corporate needs, it will only get worse.</p>
<p>DAVE LINDORFF is the author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1567512283/counterpunchmaga" type="external">Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal</a>. His new book of CounterPunch columns titled “ <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1567512984/counterpunchmaga" type="external">This Can’t be Happening!</a>” to be published this fall by Common Courage Press. Information about both books and other work by Lindorff can be found at <a href="http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/" type="external">www.thiscantbehappening.net</a>.</p>
<p>He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:[email protected]" type="external">[email protected]</a></p>
<p>&#160;</p> | Wake Up! Globalization’s Coming | true | https://counterpunch.org/2004/07/27/wake-up-globalization-s-coming/ | 2004-07-27 | 4 |
<p />
<p>Image source: LinkedIn.</p>
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<p>LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD) CEO Jeff Weiner thinks that traditional four-year college degrees are overrated. As the company prepares to join forces with Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), Weiner is not resting on his laurels but trying to make a more perfect job-hunting beast.</p>
<p>As it turns out, he is not alone. Is the job search market about to make a dramatic turn in a new direction, powered by deep data analysis?</p>
<p>In a presentation given at the Recode Code Enterprise conference, Weiner explained why he isn't a big fan of hiring decisions based on college diplomas.</p>
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<p>"Historically here, there's been a tremendous amount of weight that's been given to four-year university degrees and not nearly enough weight in my opinion is given to vocational training facilities and vocational training certifications," he said. "We would do much better if we stopped ensuring that everyone had to have a four-year degree to get certain types of jobs and started being open to the fact that there's a much broader array of talents and skills and perspectives and experiences that people can be successful."</p>
<p>You could argue that this was a self-serving statement. After all, LinkedIn recently <a href="http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/05/19/linkedin-corps-integration-of-lyndacom-is-lookin-2.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">acquired Opens a New Window.</a> Lynda.com in a $1.5 billion deal, giving the company access to a respected library of skills-training classes and videos. Refocusing the hiring narrative on single skills instead of complete college degrees can help LinkedIn make the most of this expensive but promising asset.</p>
<p>That's a fair point, but far from the whole story.</p>
<p>Weiner's comments fit right into a much larger industry trend.</p>
<p>When Netherlands-based staffing specialist Randstad <a href="http://www.fool.com/investing/2016/08/09/why-monster-worldwide-inc-stock-shot-up.aspx?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">bought American job search veteran Monster Worldwide Opens a New Window.</a>, it was the end of an era. The best spin management could put on Monster's 2015 performance was that the company's market share was stabilizing as compared to Monster's "traditional competitors."</p>
<p>That watered-down progress report said nothing of the "traditional" job search market's struggles against new and disruptive competitors.</p>
<p>It's easy enough to set up a database of available jobs and another of applicant resumes and then run simple matches across those two halves. But that model breaks down when both job hunters and employers start to figure out that many crucial job skills do not follow automatically from selecting the right college degree. Monster's revenues fell from $890 million in 2012 to $667 million in 2015. That 25% drop over three years shows how hard it is to squeeze green blood out of that tired old stone.</p>
<p>So Randstad picked up a struggling asset at a low price, getting a quick growth-to-acquisition boost at a discount.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, staffing specialist Robert Half (NYSE: RHI) has always taken the time to run hands-on evaluations of each prospective job applicant.</p>
<p>That commitment to human-powered analysis and a deeper understanding of each positions show in the company's financial results. Robert Half's annual revenues have increased by 24% over the same period where Monster's shrunk by 25%. At the same time, Robert Half shares have gained 26% since the end of 2012. Monster investors lost 40% instead, and that includes a generous buyout premium from Randstad.</p>
<p>Image source: Getty Images.</p>
<p>That's far from the only value-added approach, of course. Elsewhere, companies with access to rich data on both sides of the job-matching process have started to apply next-generation computerized data analysis to the market.</p>
<p>The exact strategies vary.</p>
<p>SAP (NYSE: SAP) attacks this problem from the perspective of a data collection and analysis veteran. The SAP HANA 2 platform tries to merge the staffing problem right into fundamental business analysis processes. It's like throwing raw computing horsepower at a human issue. As SAP's artificial intelligence tools improve over time, so will its staffing abilities.</p>
<p>LinkedIn brings more of a social media strategy to the table. The company's job-hunting and position-filling muscle depends on direct input from its users and a massive network effect. The way to improve this platform is by adding more users on both sides of the staffing equation and by providing motivation to feed more data into LinkedIn's information vaults.</p>
<p>And there are hybrid strategies between these extremes, too.</p>
<p>For example, enterprise-grade staffing specialist 1-Page maintains a database of over 350 million professionals and active relationships with a stable of large employers.</p>
<p>"We built actual intelligence, or really AI, on top of our own database," said 1-Page founder and CEO Joanna Riley in a phone interview with The Motley Fool. "So when any of our clients come and say that they want to hire a data scientist in Silicon Valley, our system is going to be able to match that client's specific requirements to our database and really pick up on the nuances through AI, through intelligent analysis."</p>
<p>1-Page aims to hand its clients a short list of highly qualified candidates, saving their HR department from wading through oceans of kinda-sorta qualified applicants. The company takes the data gathering of a LinkedIn-style social network and marries it to the deep artificial intelligence analysis of an SAP.</p>
<p>In short, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner is on to something here. The right job skills for a particular position are not always the same thing as having the right college diploma, and it's a good idea to start selling the value of highly specific training to both sides of the job search process.</p>
<p>And merging LinkedIn's social tools to the well-established number-crunching powers of Microsoft might just pay off in unexpected ways, too. Maybe I'm drinking too much of Weiner's Kool-Aid, but the whole Microsoft transaction is starting to make a ton of sense from this angle.</p>
<p>Forget the 2016 Election: 10 stocks we like better than LinkedIn Donald Trump was just elected president, and volatility is up. But here's why you should ignore the election:</p>
<p>Investing geniuses Tom and David Gardner have spent a long time beating the market no matter who's in the White House. In fact, the newsletter they have run for over a decade, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has tripled the market.*</p>
<p>David and Tom just revealed what they believe are the <a href="http://infotron.fool.com/infotrack/click?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fool.com%2Fmms%2Fmark%2Fecap-foolcom-bbn-election%3Faid%3D8867%26source%3Disaeditxt0000468%26ftm_cam%3Dsa-bbn-evergreen%26ftm_pit%3D6454%26ftm_veh%3Dbbn_article_pitch&amp;impression=15d76143-8332-4f9f-9510-84396ca93ab3&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">ten best stocks Opens a New Window.</a> for investors to buy right now... and LinkedIn wasn't one of them! That's right -- they think these 10 stocks are even better buys.</p>
<p><a href="http://infotron.fool.com/infotrack/click?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fool.com%2Fmms%2Fmark%2Fecap-foolcom-bbn-election%3Faid%3D8867%26source%3Disaeditxt0000468%26ftm_cam%3Dsa-bbn-evergreen%26ftm_pit%3D6454%26ftm_veh%3Dbbn_article_pitch&amp;impression=15d76143-8332-4f9f-9510-84396ca93ab3&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">Click here Opens a New Window.</a> to learn about these picks!</p>
<p>*Stock Advisor returns as of November 7, 2016</p>
<p><a href="http://my.fool.com/profile/TMFZahrim/info.aspx" type="external">Anders Bylund Opens a New Window.</a> has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Robert Half International. The Motley Fool also owns shares of both LinkedIn and Microsoft. 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>.</p>
<p>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> | You Won't Believe What LinkedIn, Inc. CEO Jeff Weiner Said About College Degrees | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2016/11/19/wont-believe-what-linkedin-inc-ceo-jeff-weiner-said-about-college-degrees.html | 2016-11-20 | 0 |
<p>A car bomb went off on Sunday in Nigeria, at a military checkpoint in the city of Damaturu, <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/05/us-nigeria-violence-idUSBRE8740EV20120805?feedType=RSS&amp;feedName=worldNews&amp;utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Reuters%2FworldNews+%28Reuters+World+News%29" type="external">Reuters reported</a>. "The lone suicide bomber detonated the bomb before the car he was in could be stopped, killing the six soldiers and one civilian," Patrick Egbmuniwe, the police commissioner for Yobe State, told Reuters. Egbmuniwe did not want to provide a hard figure for the death toll, <a href="http://dailytimes.com.ng/article/suicide-bomber-kills-5-damaturu" type="external">Daily Times Nigeria reported</a>, but Reuters counted at least eight deaths.&#160;</p>
<p>More from GlobalPost: <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/business/120601/when-the-brics-crumble" type="external">When the BRICs crumble</a></p>
<p>Witnesses said that the suicide bomber rammed his car into a military vehicle as he was being chased by troops, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-19140828" type="external">BBC News reported</a>. While no group has claimed responsibility for the bomb, a likely suspect is the Islamist group Boko Haram, which has frequently attacked Damaturu. The group wants Islamic law to be imposed in Nigeria.&#160;</p> | Nigeria: Suicide bomb kills soldiers | false | https://pri.org/stories/2012-08-05/nigeria-suicide-bomb-kills-soldiers | 2012-08-05 | 3 |
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<p>The chief election officers in two of the state’s largest counties are now considering whether to refer cases to local prosecutors for potential perjury charges or violations of election law. Officials in many other areas say they will simply let the mistakes go, citing widespread confusion among poll workers and voters.</p>
<p>The Texas law requires voters to show one of seven approved forms of identification to cast ballots. It was softened in August to allow people without a driver’s license or other photo ID to sign an affidavit declaring that they have an impediment to obtaining required identification.</p>
<p>Even after the affidavits were introduced, voters who possess an acceptable photo ID were still required to show it at the polls.</p>
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<p>The revelations come as President Donald Trump makes frequent claims that the nation’s voting systems are vulnerable to fraud. The president has repeatedly said, without citing any evidence, that he would have won the popular vote if not for 3 million to 5 million immigrants in the country illegally who voted for his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.</p>
<p>An Associated Press analysis of roughly 13,500 affidavits submitted in Texas’ largest counties found at least 500 instances in which voters were allowed to get around the law by signing an affidavit and never showing a photo ID, despite indicating that they possessed one.</p>
<p>Others used the sworn declarations to lodge protest statements against the law.</p>
<p>One affidavit from Hidalgo County, along the Texas-Mexico border, read: “Did not want to ‘pander’ to government requirement.” In Tarrant County, an election judge noted on an affidavit: “Had photo ID but refused to show it.”</p>
<p>“If we see that somebody blatantly says ‘I have ID’ and refused to show it, we’re going to turn that over to the D.A.,” said Stephen Vickers, chief deputy elections administrator for Tarrant County, which includes Fort Worth. “If they tried to use the affidavit to get around the system, yeah, I see that as a violation.”</p>
<p>The disclosures came as top Texas Republicans cheered the case of a Mexican national who was sentenced to eight years in prison for illegal voting. Rosa Maria Ortega was convicted earlier this month on two felony counts of illegal voting over allegations she improperly cast a ballot five times between 2005 and 2014 in Tarrant County. Her attorney has said Ortega was a permanent U.S. resident who mistakenly thought she was eligible to vote.</p>
<p>Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, both Republicans, cited the case as proof that voter fraud is real and requires preventative measures. Abbott crowed via Twitter: “In Texas you will pay a price for Voter Fraud.”</p>
<p>His office did not return a request for comment from the AP.</p>
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<p>Questionable affidavits were identified in more than 20 counties around the state.</p>
<p>Tarrant County alone had at least two dozen. In Bexar County, home to San Antonio, the top election official estimated that a large chunk of the nearly 600 affidavits submitted should have been declined and voters instructed to cast provisional ballots instead.</p>
<p>Travis County, which includes Austin, identified 70 such cases out of roughly 2,300 affidavits.</p>
<p>In Fort Bend County, a suburb of Houston, more than 15 percent of voters who submitted 313 affidavits said they possessed a photo ID, but they were not required to show it.</p>
<p>Under a court order issued last year, election officials were not allowed to question a voter’s reason for signing an affidavit.</p>
<p>The cases do not amount to voter fraud because people still had to be registered to vote to qualify for an affidavit, said John Oldham, Fort Bend County’s elections chief.</p>
<p>Poll workers were trained to “err on the side of letting people use the affidavit instead of denying them the chance to vote,” Oldham said.</p>
<p>“We don’t consider it something that we want to go out and prosecute people over,” Oldham said. “But I wish we didn’t have this affidavit process. It makes the whole photo ID law entirely meaningless.”</p>
<p>The affidavit process was adopted after an appeals court ruled that the voter ID law discriminated against minorities. The change was intended to help voters who could not obtain identification for a variety of reasons, including disability or illness, lack of transportation or conflicts with work schedules.</p>
<p>Nearly 9 million Texans cast ballots in the presidential election, according to state data, and Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by more than 800,000 votes statewide. That means the hundreds of disputed ballots could never have made a difference in the outcome at the top of the ticket.</p>
<p>New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice estimated that more than 16,000 affidavits were submitted statewide in Texas. The director of the center’s voting rights and elections project said it would be difficult to prove voters intentionally tried to thwart the system by using an affidavit.</p>
<p>“As far as I’m concerned, these are the better part of almost 20,000 voters that would not have been able to participate in this election,” Myrna Perez said. “This is just a scratch on the surface.”</p>
<p>In August, Paxton warned that voters could be criminally prosecuted for signing an affidavit during the election if they had been issued driver’s licenses or other IDs in the past. But a Paxton spokesman was far less harsh this week, saying “only local prosecutors can pursue those who perjured themselves by wrongfully voting with the reasonable impediment declaration.”</p>
<p>There will probably be some cases forwarded to prosecutors in Texas’ largest county, which includes Houston.</p>
<p>Stan Stanart, who oversees Harris County elections, said he believes some people who signed affidavits committed perjury and lied about forgetting their photo ID.</p>
<p>“I suspect there were a number of people purposely breaking the law,” he said. “Can you prove it in a court? Probably not without a serious investigation or a lot of legwork.”</p> | AP Exclusive: Hundreds of Texans may have voted improperly | false | https://abqjournal.com/953386/ap-exclusive-hundreds-of-texans-may-have-voted-improperly.html | 2017-02-20 | 2 |
<p>Enel SpA (ENEL.MI) on Monday said that its third-quarter net production fell on year, driven by double-digit decreases in production in Italy and the Europe and North Africa region.</p>
<p>The Italian energy company said third-quarter net production was 63,306 gigawatt hours, down 6%, with nuclear seeing an 18% decrease and oil and gas seeing a 15% decrease. Production of other renewables grew 11%, it added.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>Net production in its Iberia region, its largest market in terms of production, grew 1%.</p>
<p>Total installed capacity more than doubled to 83,856 megawatts for the January-September period.</p>
<p>Write to Marc Bisbal Arias at [email protected]</p>
<p>(END) Dow Jones Newswires</p>
<p>October 24, 2017 03:46 ET (07:46 GMT)</p> | Enel 3Q Production Falls | true | http://foxbusiness.com/features/2017/10/24/enel-3q-production-falls.html | 2017-10-24 | 0 |
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<p>The Turquoise Trail restaurant at Buffalo Thunder will be holding a “Party Like a Rock Star” event on New Year’s Eve. (Courtesy of Buffalo Thunder)</p>
<p>ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Another year is making its way out and a new year is getting ready to begin. Celebrate the arrival of 2014 at a number of casinos around the state, which are offering special New Year’s promotions.</p>
<p>Check out the local round-up of New Year’s Eve events in today’s Venue. But, if you’re looking to take a short road trip outside of Albuquerque, you’re in luck.</p>
<p>BUFFALO THUNDER RESORT &amp; CASINO: The party gets started on the casino floor on Tuesday, Dec. 31 for Buffalo Thunder’s New Year’s Eve celebration. Be part of the festivities on the casino floor for party beads, favors and a countdown to midnight. Beginning at 11 a.m., Buffalo Thunder is giving away $20,000 cash. Play for your chance to win $1,000 from 11 a.m.-9 p.m., $2,000 at 10 p.m., $3,000 at 11 p.m. and $4,000 right after the stroke of midnight. Those who want to ring in the New Year with some great music, cocktails and fun have two places to let loose at Buffalo Thunder.</p>
<p>Club Warehouse will be celebrating its “White Affair” New Year’s Eve Party with DJ Flo Fader. Dance the night away in your best all-white attire. Dress to impress and bring in the new year in style.</p>
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<p>If you’re looking to hear some of those great songs you remember growing up, then head over to Turquoise Trail for its “Party Like a Rock Star With Oldskool.” The venue offers good American food favorites, a large wrap-around bar and a dance floor where you can show off your best dance moves.</p>
<p>SKY CITY CASINO HOTEL: On Sunday, Dec. 29, take part in the “Pick a Snowflake” promotion. Two lucky patrons will be randomly chosen each hour between 5-9 p.m. to win $100 to $500 in free play. All you have to do to be part of the game is earn 20 points on your Winners Circle Club members card.</p>
<p>On Monday, Dec. 30, Sky City will hold its “Bingo Says Goodbye to 2013” promotion. Sky City will be giving patrons a chance to win an extra $200 to $800 cash. To enter to win, all you need is a cash spend of $20 or more on any admission pack for a regular bingo session using your Winners Circle Club card.</p>
<p>Join Sky City for its family-friendly New Year’s Eve celebration on Tuesday, Dec. 31. Bee Bee the Clown, face painting, balloons, snacks and a kids’ party complete with a DJ will be featured from 9 p.m.-1 a.m. in Piñon Rooms A, B and C. Also, check out the Full Country Band in Club 102 from 9 p.m.-1 a.m. Shake things up with some hot Latin music with Micky Cruz and his band from 10 p.m.-1 a.m. in the Sky City VIP Showroom.</p>
<p>There will be plenty of fun on the gaming floor as well. Take part in the New Year’s Eve Countdown to 2014 cash giveaway on Tuesday. Patrons have a chance to win a share of $200 to $2,014 in cash from 2 p.m.-12:30 a.m.</p>
<p>INN OF THE MOUNTAIN GODS RESORT &amp; CASINO: Oldies but goodies hits will fill the Inn of the Mountain Gods this New Year’s Eve during its American Pie celebration on Tuesday, Dec. 31. The event is a tribute to Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens, as well as a special performance dedicated to the Big Bopper Jr.</p>
<p>Prior to the rock ‘n’ roll show, enjoy a special, festive menu of smoked salmon, oysters on the half shell, shrimp and red crab claws, prime rib and dessert.</p>
<p>Doors open at 7 p.m. and dinner will be served at 8 p.m. Tuesday. The first show starts at 9 p.m. and there will be a countdown to midnight.</p>
<p>Tickets are $125, plus fees and can be purchased by calling 575-464-7053 or visit <a href="http://ticketmaster.com" type="external">ticketmaster.com</a>.</p>
<p>Happy New Year and may 2014 be a lucky one.</p>
<p /> | Get away & try your luck: Casinos have parties – and incentives – planned for New Year’s Eve | false | https://abqjournal.com/326689/all-in-rozanna-m-martinez-21.html | 2 |
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<p>Talisman Energy</p>
<p />
<p>With <a href="" type="internal">government agencies</a>, <a href="" type="internal">documentaries</a>, and even <a href="" type="internal">celebrities</a> taking aim, fracking has been getting a bad rap these days. So it’s no wonder that oil and gas companies are working hard to change the tone of the debate surrounding the controversial method of reaping natural gas.</p>
<p>The latest in their PR efforts? <a href="http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11170/1154547-28.stm" type="external">A children’s coloring book</a>. Published by oil and gas producer <a href="http://www.talisman-energy.com/" type="external">Talisman Energy</a> and distributed for free, <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/58317334/Talisman-Terry" type="external">the 24-page text</a> follows the adventures of a “Friendly Fracosaurus” named Talisman Terry. Throughout the book, he leads his readers through a natural gas extraction saga—explaining the benefits of the substance, and how it’s found, drilled, and delivered.</p>
<p />
<p>Missing from the narrative, though, is the term “fracking,” or any of its synonyms. The coloring book alludes to the process, without ever actually naming it. (Talisman Terry says that natural gas is “set free from underground rocks.”) Ah, semantics.</p>
<p>The book also doesn’t talk about any of the complications that can come from natural gas drilling—be those <a href="" type="internal">leaking rigs</a>, or <a href="" type="internal">water source contamination</a>. By listing the benefits of natural gas drilling while glossing over its potential drawbacks, the book sends a message to kids that when it comes to natural gas extraction, it’s a win-win:</p>
<p />
<p>For more in the energy sector coloring book genre, check out Chesapeake Energy’s <a href="http://www.pegasusnews.com/news/2008/jul/23/chesapeake-coloring-book-stresses-patriotism-and-a/?refscroll=206" type="external">natural gas coloring book</a>, or—courtesy of the coal industry— <a href="http://www.families4pacoal.org/includes/cbook_online_v2.html" type="external">Eyes For Frosty</a>.</p>
<p /> | New in Natural Gas Hype: A Fracking Coloring Book | true | https://motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/fracking-coloring-book-talisman-energy/ | 2011-06-21 | 4 |
<p />
<p>Image source: Juniper Networks.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>What:Shares of Juniper Networks fell as much as 10% early Tuesday after the networking specialist issued disappointing preliminary first-quarter 2016 results.</p>
<p>So what:Juniper Networks now expects quarterly revenue of $1.09 billion to $1.10 billion, below its most recent guidance for revenue of $1.15 billion to $1.19 billion. Primarily to blame, Juniper Networks says, was weak demand from Enterprise and the timing of certain U.S. and EMEA Tier 1 Telecom deployments. As a result, Juniper also anticipates adjusted net income per diluted share of $0.35 to $0.37, below previous guidance for adjusted EPS of $0.42 to $0.46.</p>
<p>Analysts, on average, were modeling first-quarter revenue of $1.18 billion and adjusted earnings of $0.45 per share.</p>
<p>Now what: AsCEO Rami Rahim noted, "Although we expect results to be lower than our initial guidance for the first quarter, we remain constructive on fiscal 2016 and expect growth from new products to contribute to our top line, coupled with our ongoing focus on cost discipline to drive non-GAAP operating margin expansion for the full year."</p>
<p>With that in mind, Juniper Networks' stock could prove a bargain for investors willing to snap it up after today's pullback, especially trading at a reasonable 14.4 times trailing-12-month earnings and just 10 times next year's estimates.</p>
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<p>At the same time, those estimates could fall as analysts have time to full digest today's news. And given Juniper Networks' sluggish growth and underwhelming start to the year, it's hard to blame the market for bidding the stock down.</p>
<p>The article <a href="http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/04/12/why-juniper-networks-inc-stock-plunged-today.aspx" type="external">Why Juniper Networks Inc. Stock Plunged Today Opens a New Window.</a> originally appeared on Fool.com.</p>
<p><a href="http://my.fool.com/profile/TMFSymington/info.aspx?source=eptfxblnk0000004" type="external">Steve Symington 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 Juniper Networks Inc. Stock Plunged Today | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2016/04/12/why-juniper-networks-inc-stock-plunged-today.html | 2016-04-12 | 0 |
<p>Veeva Systems(NYSE: VEEV) is known for its cloud-based software solutions for the life-sciences. industry. But now, the company is eyeing up other industries. In this clip from <a href="https://www.fool.com/podcasts/industry-focus?&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">Industry Focus: Healthcare Opens a New Window.</a>, Veeva's president gives investors insight into the company's strategy for entry into the quality management space.</p>
<p>A full transcript follows the video.</p>
<p>Continue Reading Below</p>
<p>10 stocks we like better than Veeva SystemsWhen investing geniuses David and Tom Gardner have a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, the newsletter they have run for over a decade, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has tripled the market.*</p>
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<p><a href="http://infotron.fool.com/infotrack/click?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fool.com%2Fmms%2Fmark%2Fe-foolcom-sa-bbn-dyn%3Faid%3D8867%26source%3Disaeditxt0010449%26ftm_cam%3Dsa-bbn-evergreen%26ftm_pit%3D6312%26ftm_veh%3Dbbn_article_pitch&amp;impression=1a6f8cc9-1e7b-4487-aae2-26335b8fdff5&amp;utm_campaign=article&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_source=foxbusiness" type="external">Click here Opens a New Window.</a> to learn about these picks!</p>
<p>*Stock Advisor returns as of February 6, 2017</p>
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<p>This video was recorded on March 15, 2017.</p>
<p>Kristine Harjes:One ofthe most exciting parts of your latest earnings report and conference call was some caller on the expansion of the product outside of life sciences. What's the latest on that opportunity?</p>
<p>Matt Wallach:We took several months to figure out what the right opportunity would be. We realized, it's really a couple years ago that the Vault platform was going to be a unique asset, really unique, the ability to blend content management in the cloud with data management applications. To do that on a single platform was really unique. And other companies started hearing about us, so we were getting inbound from companies that were asking us, "Hey, I know that you guys just do life sciences, but we have this really bad problem, could you help us with this?" So, rather than bleeding into other industries in and uncoordinated fashion, last spring, almost a year ago, we decided to do it for real and to put together a small, targeted team to figure out what the right strategy would be. So we took time last year to figure out the strategy and just announced it recently on the earnings call, as you said.What we're going to go after is the quality management space.</p>
<p>Quality management is something that we do within life sciences, who are big manufacturers. Quality management to us has two flavors. One is all of the documents that are stored and captured and utilized during quality and manufacturing operations. This is something like the document that gives you instructions for how to clean a machine between batches. It's a highly controlled document, you don't want people just going in and changing it, and you actually want to know every time it's printed or emailed or opened or downloaded. So it's all kinds of control around documents. So it's those quality documents in manufacturing, and actually, it's all standard operating procedure that the employees would access around the world. It's that read and understood functionality that we have in lots of regulated industries. The other side of quality management we call QMS, or quality management system, is all the data around what you have to do if something goes wrong.</p>
<p>The first thing is a deviation; something goes wrong. You have to document it and make sure the right people know. Sometimes you have to actually tell the regulatory authorities about it. Then you have to put together a plan, acorrective action or preventive action plan; we call those CAPAs in the industry. This is the plan for how you're going to make sure that doesn't happen again. Then you have change control, which is now, you have a plan to make sure that that deviation is not going to happen again, you have to go implement it. All of these things are heavily regulated. There's lots of approval processes, sometimes regulatory bodies associated.</p>
<p>That's what we do in life sciences. But it turns out that across lots of discreet and process manufacturing industries, these things look pretty much the same. So we thought this was a perfect opportunity for us to go into a huge market, well over $1 billion in additional opportunity for us, but a huge market that has been underserved by technology providers, basically forever. If you're sitting in Silicon Valley, you're doing artificial intelligence and machine learning and internet of things and Big Data, social media. That's what Silicon Valley is excited about today. We're excited about quality management in big, old, slow companies everywhere around the world, because it's important and they've been underserved, and I think the Vault platform is a really unique platform, because we can do both those two pieces that I described, the document management part and the data management part. That's something we're really excited about. We're starting with a small, focused team to make sure we get the early adopters live and happy this year so that we can start reference selling in the future. But it's something that we think is going to be an important growth driver for Veeva over the long term.</p>
<p><a href="http://my.fool.com/profile/TMFAnchor/info.aspx" type="external">Kristine Harjes Opens a New Window.</a> has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Veeva Systems. 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> | Veeva Systems Bold Leap Outside of Life Sciences | true | http://foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/04/04/veeva-systems-bold-leap-outside-life-sciences.html | 2017-04-04 | 0 |
<p>Donald Trump is proned to say some controversial and outlandish things from time to time, but making a mistake like the following one is not the norm for his campaign.</p>
<p>Actually, this mistake was made by an overzealous supporter and not by the actual Trump campaign.</p>
<p>According to Kevin Cooper, who happens to speak Ebonics, Yiddish and Hebrew, and whose smackdown of the mistake is screencaptured, the literal translation of the word Trump is “Haverman.”</p>
<p>Top line of the yard signs says “Haverman” which is the literal translation of the word Trump, and that “Trump’s name in hebrew is spelled דונלד טראמפ”</p>
<p>Only in Florida. Oy Vey!!!!!!</p>
<p /> | Donald Trump Supporter Screws Up Hebrew Translation Of His Name | true | http://shark-tank.com/2016/07/06/donald-trump-supporter-screws-up-hebrew-translation-of-his-name/ | 0 |
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