LAW ENFORCEMENT ON HIGH ALERT Following Threats Against Cops And Whites On 9-11By #BlackLivesMatter And #FYF911 Terrorists [VIDEO]

No comment is expected from Barack Obama Members of the #FYF911 or #FukYoFlag and #BlackLivesMatter movements called for the lynching and hanging of white people and cops. They encouraged others on a radio show Tuesday night to turn the tide and kill white people and cops to send a message about the killing of black people in America.One of the F***YoFlag organizers is called Sunshine. She has a radio blog show hosted from Texas called, Sunshine s F***ing Opinion Radio Show. A snapshot of her #FYF911 @LOLatWhiteFear Twitter page at 9:53 p.m. shows that she was urging supporters to Call now!! #fyf911 tonight we continue to dismantle the illusion of white Below is a SNAPSHOT Twitter Radio Call Invite #FYF911The radio show aired at 10:00 p.m. eastern standard time.During the show, callers clearly call for lynching and killing of white people.A 2:39 minute clip from the radio show can be heard here. It was provided to Breitbart Texas by someone who would like to be referred to as Hannibal. He has already received death threats as a result of interrupting #FYF911 conference calls.An unidentified black man said when those mother f**kers are by themselves, that s when when we should start f***ing them up. Like they do us, when a bunch of them ni**ers takin one of us out, that s how we should roll up. He said, Cause we already roll up in gangs anyway. There should be six or seven black mother f**ckers, see that white person, and then lynch their ass. Let s turn the tables. They conspired that if cops started losing people, then there will be a state of emergency. He speculated that one of two things would happen, a big-ass [R s?????] war, or ni**ers, they are going to start backin up. We are already getting killed out here so what the f**k we got to lose? Sunshine could be heard saying, Yep, that s true. That s so f**king true. He said, We need to turn the tables on them. Our kids are getting shot out here. Somebody needs to become a sacrifice on their side.He said, Everybody ain t down for that s**t, or whatever, but like I say, everybody has a different position of war. He continued, Because they don t give a f**k anyway. He said again, We might as well utilized them for that s**t and turn the tables on these n**ers. He said, that way we can start lookin like we ain t havin that many casualties, and there can be more causalities on their side instead of ours. They are out their killing black people, black lives don t matter, that s what those mother f**kers so we got to make it matter to them. Find a mother f**ker that is alone. Snap his ass, and then f***in hang him from a damn tree. Take a picture of it and then send it to the mother f**kers. We just need one example, and then people will start watchin . This will turn the tables on s**t, he said. He said this will start a trickle-down effect. He said that when one white person is hung and then they are just flat-hanging, that will start the trickle-down effect. He continued, Black people are good at starting trends. He said that was how to get the upper-hand. Another black man spoke up saying they needed to kill cops that are killing us. The first black male said, That will be the best method right there. Breitbart Texas previously reported how Sunshine was upset when racist white people infiltrated and disrupted one of her conference calls. She subsequently released the phone number of one of the infiltrators. The veteran immediately started receiving threatening calls.One of the #F***YoFlag movement supporters allegedly told a veteran who infiltrated their publicly posted conference call, We are going to rape and gut your pregnant wife, and your f***ing piece of sh*t unborn creature will be hung from a tree. Breitbart Texas previously encountered Sunshine at a Sandra Bland protest at the Waller County Jail in Texas, where she said all white people should be killed. She told journalists and photographers, You see this nappy-ass hair on my head? That means I am one of those more militant Negroes. She said she was at the protest because these redneck mother-f**kers murdered Sandra Bland because she had nappy hair like me. #FYF911 black radicals say they will be holding the imperial powers that are actually responsible for the terrorist attacks on September 11th accountable on that day, as reported by Breitbart Texas. There are several websites and Twitter handles for the movement. Palmetto Star describes himself as one of the head organizers. He said in a YouTube video that supporters will be burning their symbols of the illusion of their superiority, their false white supremacy, like the American flag, the British flag, police uniforms, and Ku Klux Klan hoods.Sierra McGrone or Nocturnus Libertus posted, you too can help a young Afrikan clean their a** with the rag of oppression. She posted two photos, one that appears to be herself, and a photo of a black man, wiping their naked butts with the American flag.For entire story: Breitbart News

1real

Did they post their votes for Hillary already?

1real

UNBELIEVABLE! OBAMA’S ATTORNEY GENERAL SAYS MOST CHARLOTTE RIOTERS WERE “PEACEFUL” PROTESTERS…In Her Home State Of North Carolina [VIDEO]

Now, most of the demonstrators gathered last night were exercising their constitutional and protected right to peaceful protest in order to raise issues and create change. Loretta Lynch aka Eric Holder in a skirt

1real

Bobby Jindal, raised Hindu, uses story of Christian conversion to woo evangelicals for potential 2016 bid

A dozen politically active pastors came here for a private dinner Friday night to hear a conversion story unique in the context of presidential politics: how Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal traveled from Hinduism to Protestant Christianity and, ultimately, became what he calls an “evangelical Catholic.” Over two hours, Jindal, 42, recalled talking with a girl in high school who wanted to “save my soul,” reading the Bible in a closet so his parents would not see him and feeling a stir while watching a movie during his senior year that depicted Jesus on the cross. “I was struck, and struck hard,” Jindal told the pastors. “This was the Son of God, and He had died for our sins.” Jindal’s session with the Christian clergy, who lead congregations in the early presidential battleground states of Iowa and South Carolina, was part of a behind-the-scenes effort by the Louisiana governor to find a political base that could help propel him into the top tier of Republican candidates seeking to run for the White House in 2016. Known in GOP circles mostly for his mastery of policy issues such as health care, Jindal, a Rhodes Scholar and graduate of the Ivy League’s Brown University, does not have an obvious pool of activist supporters to help drive excitement outside his home state. So he is harnessing his religious experience in a way that has begun to appeal to parts of the GOP’s influential core of religious conservatives, many of whom have yet to find a favorite among the Republicans eyeing the presidential race. Other potential 2016 GOP candidates are wooing the evangelical base, including Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence. But over the weekend in Lynchburg — a mecca of sorts for evangelicals as the home of Liberty University, founded in the 1970s by the Rev. Jerry Falwell — Jindal appeared to make progress. In addition to his dinner with the pastors, he delivered a well-received “call to action” address to 40,000 Christian conservatives gathered for Liberty’s commencement ceremony, talking again about his faith while assailing what he said was President Obama’s record of attacking religious liberty. The pastors who came to meet Jindal said his intimate descriptions of his experiences stood out. “He has the convictions, and he has what it takes to communicate them,” said Brad Sherman of Solid Rock Christian Church in Coralville, Iowa. Sherman helped former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee in his winning 2008 campaign for delegates in Iowa. Another Huckabee admirer, the Rev. C. Mitchell Brooks of Second Baptist Church in Belton, S.C., said Jindal’s commitment to Christian values and his compelling story put him “on a par” with Huckabee, who was a Baptist preacher before entering politics. The visiting pastors flew to Lynchburg over the weekend at the invitation of the American Renewal Project, a well-funded nonprofit group that encourages evangelical Christians to engage in the civic arena with voter guides, get-out-the-vote drives and programs to train pastors in grass-roots activism. The group’s founder, David Lane, has built a pastor network in politically important states such as Iowa, Missouri, Ohio and South Carolina and has led trips to Israel with Paul and others seeking to make inroads with evangelical activists. The group that Lane invited to Lynchburg included Donald Wild­mon, a retired minister and founder of the American Family Association, a prominent evangelical activist group that has influence through its network of more than 140 Christian radio stations. Most of the pastors that Lane’s organization brought to Lynchburg had not met Jindal. But they said he captured their interest recently when he stepped forward to defend Phil Robertson, patriarch of the “Duck Dynasty” television-show family, amid a controversy over disparaging remarks he made about gays in an interview with GQ magazine. Throughout his Lynchburg visit, Jindal presented himself as a willing culture warrior. During his commencement address Saturday, he took up the cause of twin brothers whose HGTV reality series about renovating and reselling houses, “Flip It Forward,” was canceled last week after a Web site revealed that they had protested against same-sex marriage at the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte. The siblings, Jason and David Benham, both Liberty graduates, attended the graduation and a private lunch with Jindal, who called the action against them “another demonstration of intolerance from the entertainment industry.” “If these guys had protested at the Republican Party convention, instead of canceling their show, HGTV would probably have given them a raise,” Jindal said as the Liberty crowd applauded. He cited the Hobby Lobby craft store chain, which faced a legal challenge after refusing to provide employees with insurance coverage for contraceptives as required under the Affordable Care Act. Members of the family that owns Hobby Lobby, who have become heroes to many religious conservatives, have said that they are morally opposed to the use of certain types of birth control and that they considered the requirement a violation of their First Amendment right to religious freedom. The family was “committed to honor the Lord by being generous employers, paying well above minimum wage and increasing salaries four years in a row even in the midst of the enduring recession,” Jindal told the Liberty graduates. “None of this matters to the Obama administration.” But for the pastors who came to see Jindal in action, the governor’s own story was the highlight of the weekend. And in many ways, he was unlike any other aspiring president these activists had met. Piyush Jindal was born in 1971, four months after his parents arrived in Baton Rouge, La., from their native India. He changed his name to Bobby as a young boy, adopting the name of a character on a favorite television show, “The Brady Bunch.” His decision to become a Christian, he told the pastors, did not come in one moment of lightning epiphany. Instead, he said, it happened in phases, growing from small seeds planted over time. Jindal recalled that his closest friend from grade school gave him a Bible with his name emblazoned in gold on the cover as a Christmas present. It struck him initially as an unimpressive gift, Jindal told the pastors. “Who in the world would spend good money for a Bible when everyone knows you can get one free in any hotel?” he recalled thinking at the time. “And the gold lettering meant I couldn’t give it away or return it.” His religious education reached a higher plane during his junior year in high school, he told his dinner audience. He wanted to ask a pretty girl on a date during a hallway conversation, and she started talking about her faith in God and her opposition to abortion. The girl invited him to visit her church. Jindal said he was skeptical and set out to “investigate all these fanciful claims” made by the girl and other friends. He started reading the Bible in his closet at home. “I was unsure how my parents would react,” he said. After the stirring moment when he saw Christ depicted on the cross during the religious movie, the Bible and his very existence suddenly seemed clearer to him, Jindal told the pastors. Jindal did not dwell on his subsequent conversion to Catholicism just a few years later in college, where he said he immersed himself in the traditions of the church. He touched on it briefly during the commencement address, noting in passing that “I am best described as an evangelical Catholic.” Mostly, he sought to showcase the ways in which he shares values with other Christian conservatives. “I read the words of Jesus Christ, and I realized that they were true,” Jindal told the graduates Saturday, offering a less detailed accounting of his conversion than he had done the night before with the pastors. “I used to think that I had found God, but I believe it is more accurate to say that He found me.”

0fake

SATAN 2: Russia unvelis an image of its terrifying new ‘SUPERNUKE’ – Western world takes notice

The RS-28 Sarmat missile, dubbed Satan 2, will replace the SS-18 Flies at 4.3 miles (7km) per sec and with a range of 6,213 miles (10,000km) The weapons are perceived as part of an increasingly aggressive Russia It could deliver a warhead of 40 megatons – 2,000 times as powerful as the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 By LIBBY PLUMMER and GARETH DAVIE S Russia has unveiled chilling pictures of its largest ever nuclear missile, capable of destroying an area the size of France. The RS-28 Sarmat missile, dubbed Satan 2 by Nato, has a top speed of 4.3 miles (7km) per second and has been designed to outfox anti-missile shield systems. The new Sarmat missile could deliver warheads of 40 megatons – 2,000 times as powerful as the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Scroll down for video Russian President Vladimir Putin is reportedly planning to replace the country’s older SS-18 Satan weapons with the new missiles amid a string of recent disagreements with the West. The Kremlin has stepped up the rhetoric against the West and carried a series of manoeuvres that has infuriated politicians in the US and UK. The pictures were revealed online by chief designers from the Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau. A message posted alongside the picture said: ‘In accordance with the Decree of the Russian Government ‘On the State Defense Order for 2010 and the planning period 2012-2013’, the Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau was instructed to start design and development work on the Sarmat. ‘ The RS-28 Sarmat missile is said to contain 16 nuclear warheads and is capable of destroying an area the size of France or Texas, according to Russian news network Zvezda, which is owned by Russia’s ministry of defence. The weapon is also able to evade radar. It is expected to have a range of 6,213 miles (10,000 km), which would allow Moscow to attack London and FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE CLICK LINK

1real

About Time! Christian Group Sues Amazon and SPLC for Designation as Hate Group

All we can say on this one is it s about time someone sued the Southern Poverty Law Center!On Tuesday, D. James Kennedy Ministries (DJKM) filed a lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the charity navigation organization GuideStar, and Amazon, for defamation, religious discrimination, and trafficking in falsehood. The SPLC listed DJKM as a hate group, while GuideStar also categorized it in those terms, and Amazon kept the ministry off of its charity donation program, Amazon Smile. We embarked today on a journey to right a terrible wrong, Dr. Frank Wright, president and CEO at DJKM, said in a statement Tuesday. Those who knowingly label Christian ministries as hate groups, solely for subscribing to the historic Christian faith, are either woefully uninformed or willfully deceitful. In the case of the Southern Poverty Law Center, our lawsuit alleges the latter. The SPLC has labeled DJKM an anti-LGBT hate group for its opposition to same-sex marriage and transgenderism. These false and illegal characterizations have a chilling effect on the free exercise of religion and on religious free speech for all people of faith, Wright declared. After having given the SPLC an opportunity to retract, we have undertaken this legal action, seeking a trial by a jury of our peers, to preserve our own rights under the law and to defend the religious free speech rights of all Americans, the DJKM president concluded.The lawsuit laid out charges against the SPLC, GuideStar, and Amazon.Read more: PJM

1real

DR BEN CARSON TARGETED BY THE IRS: “I never had an audit until I spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast.”

DR. BEN CARSON TELLS THE STORY OF WHAT HAPPENED WHEN HE SPOKE OUT AGAINST OBAMA:

1real

HOUSE INTEL CHAIR On Trump-Russia Fake Story: “No evidence of anything” [Video]

1real

Sports Bar Owner Bans NFL Games…Will Show Only ‘True American’ Sports: ‘I’d like to speak for rural America’ [Video]

The owner of the Ringling Bar, located south of White Sulphur Springs, is standing behind his Facebook post that criticizes NFL players who take a knee during the national anthem to protest police brutality. The post was made on the Ringling Bar s Facebook page Tuesday night and has since received hundreds of comments and shares. The post reads: The Ringling Bar will no longer show any NFL games. This will allow us to air the PBR, Rodeo and NASCAR events whose competitors are true Americans! Sorry for any inconvenience. Ringling Bar Co-owner Kurt Bekemans, who grew up in the Paradise Valley, published the post and said he doesn t care if the post turns some customers away. Seriously, I would not care if non-Americans didn t patronize the place, said Bekemans. I d like to speak for rural America: I bet you wouldn t see any farmers or ranchers in our whole country take a knee such as these guys do, I bet you couldn t find one. They appreciate what our great nation has given them and I think that s the least you could do to give thanks to our country is stand for the flag and the anthem. As of Wednesday morning, a majority of the comments were in support of the bar. We all love ya for this, I ll be by with as many people I can round up!! said one commenter.Another person was critical, writing: Ha Ha of course NASCAR is not protesting the treatment of minority s because they don t care about them!!! Read more: krtv

1real

Latest Pipeline Leak Underscores Dangers Of Dakota Access Pipeline

FILE – In this Sept. 15, 2005 file photo, the marker that welcomes commuters to Cushing, Okla. is seen. (AP Photo/The Oklahoman, Matt Strasen, File) Underscoring once again the dangers of America’s unreliable fossil fuel infrastructure, a significant U.S. oil pipeline has been shut down after a leak was reported Monday morning. Enterprise Products Partners said Monday it had shut its Seaway Crude Pipeline, a 400,000-barrel per day conduit that transports crude oil from Cushing, Oklahoma to Gulf coast refineries. The leak occurred Sunday night in an industrial area of Cushing. The company did not provide an estimate of the volume spilled, but said there was no danger to the public. “Seaway personnel continue to make progress in cleaning up the spill, substantially all of which has been contained in a retention pond at Enbridge’s facility,” the company said in a news release (pdf), explaining that the pipeline is a “50/50 joint venture” between Enterprise and Enbridge Inc. “Vacuum trucks are being used to recover the crude oil and return it to storage tanks on-site.” “The impacted segment of the legacy pipeline has a capacity of 50,000 barrels,” the release added, “however the actual amount of crude oil released will be significantly less and won’t be determined until recovery efforts are complete.” The incident comes after another pipeline rupture in Pennsylvania early on Friday, where 55,000 gallons of gasoline poured into the Susquehanna River, and about one month after a major gasoline pipeline run by Colonial Pipeline Co. had to halt pumping for a couple of weeks due to a spill in Alabama . Meanwhile, UPI reports that “[t]he release from the Seaway pipeline is the second associated with the Cushing storage hub in less than a month. Plains All American Pipeline reported problems with infrastructure from Colorado City [Texas] to Cushing earlier this month.” Environmentalists, Indigenous people, and energy companies are in the midst of a heated debate over pipeline safety . Water protectors and their allies along the proposed route of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) have been saying for months that the project threatens their right to safe drinking water. “Oil pipelines break, spill, and leak—it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of where and when,” 13-year-old Anna Lee Rain YellowHammer, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, wrote in a recent appeal. “With such a high chance that this pipeline will leak,” she wrote of the Enbridge-backed DAPL , “I can only guess that the oil industry keeps pushing for it because it doesn’t care about our health and safety. The industry seems to think our lives are more expendable than others’.” Indeed, referring to the Cushing leak, one observer tweeted on Monday: “That’s why we’re screaming #NoDAPL ! They always break!” Seaway Crude pipeline system shut after Cushing, OK spill. That's why we're screaming #NoDAPL ! They always break! https://t.co/oXiLXcBRly — Deanna Rilling (@DeannaRilling) October 24, 2016

1real

GOP Senator Just Smacked Down The Most Punchable Alt-Right Nazi On The Internet

The most punchable Alt-Right Nazi on the internet just got a thorough beatdown from Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) on Twitter during an epic tweetstorm. Richard Spencer, the Alt-Right leader who has become a human punching bag, just got the racism smacked out of him by the Republican Senator on Thursday after the white nationalist tweeted that only goober conservatives blame Russia for racial divisions in the United States. Spencer was responding to a tweet Sasse sent out on Wednesday.Sen. Ben Sasse had shared an article regarding Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who explained that Russian internet trolls helped fuel divisions in a controversy which Donald Trump ignited over NFL athletes who choose to kneel rather than stand during the national anthem in protest of racial inequality and police brutality.No one loves American-vs-American fighting more than Putin. His intel agencies stoke both sides of every divide.https://t.co/H6BwjHzokH Ben Sasse (@BenSasse) September 28, 2017Spencer responded by writing, In the minds of goober conservatives, the Russians are to blame for racial divisions. In the minds of goober conservatives, the Russians are to blame for racial divisions. https://t.co/CzpGfL6u4M Richard ?Spencer (@RichardBSpencer) September 28, 2017Sasse tore into Spencer, calling him a clown and one of the brown-shirt-pajama-boy Nazis. 1/Oh let goobers & nongoobers agree on this: Racists like you are to blame. But Putin's agencies also love using you as their divisive tool https://t.co/DaD4XaNvI5 Ben Sasse (@BenSasse) September 28, 20172/Don t get me wrong: we ll always have brown-shirt-pajama-boy Nazis like you & your lonely pals stoking division. But here s America 101: https://t.co/SboVZmOuu2 Ben Sasse (@BenSasse) September 28, 20173/You don t get America. You said: You do not have some human right, some abstract thing given to you by God or something like that. https://t.co/ScXDGFcbGp Ben Sasse (@BenSasse) September 28, 20174/Actually, that's exactly what America declares we do have: People are the image-bearers of God, created with dignity& inalienable rights. https://t.co/d4orBrHJMw Ben Sasse (@BenSasse) September 28, 20175/Sadly, you don't understand human dignity. A person's skin, ancestry, and bank balance have nothing to do with their intrinsic value. https://t.co/5JsyVAKQRL Ben Sasse (@BenSasse) September 28, 20176/This declaration of universal dignity is what America is about. Madison called our Constitution "the greatest reflection on human nature" https://t.co/NQluVs1KvA Ben Sasse (@BenSasse) September 28, 20177/You talk about culture but don't know squat about western heritage which sees people not as tribes but as individuals of limitless worth https://t.co/VKNvDUXLtT Ben Sasse (@BenSasse) September 28, 20178/The celebration of universal dignity IS our culture, & it rejects your "white culture" crybaby politics. It rejects all identity politics https://t.co/Adlj9AvNPR Ben Sasse (@BenSasse) September 28, 20179/Sometime after moving back into your parents' basement, you knock-off Nazis fell in love with reheated 20th century will-to-power garbage https://t.co/XDTeATVGSe Ben Sasse (@BenSasse) September 28, 201710/Your "ideas" aren't just hateful, un-American poison they're also just so dang boring. The future doesn't belong to your stupid memes. https://t.co/bNHSlf1uOx Ben Sasse (@BenSasse) September 28, 201711/11Get a real job, Clown. Find an actual neighbor to serve. You'll be happier.Have a nice day. https://t.co/ToREd7VwDM Ben Sasse (@BenSasse) September 28, 2017Jake Tapper weighed in to say, Wherein a piece of garbage is thrown into a receptacle with grace and artistry. Wherein a piece of garbage is thrown into a receptacle with grace and artistry https://t.co/L09bBy8gHh Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) September 28, 2017This is how Donald Trump should have responded to the violent rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which, by the way, was organized by Richard Spencer.Spencer previously said that he felt proud after Trump blamed many sides for the violence at the hate-rally which resulted in the murder of Heather Heyer, and left at least 19 others injured. Spencer is one of Trump s very fine people who just got smacked down on Twitter by a Republican.You don t have to like his politics to admire that Sasse was among the Republicans who joined civil rights leaders and Democrats who reacted angrily when Trump said that he condemned this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides on many sides. Of course, if Sasse would call out Roy Moore over his bigoted remarks, that would be nice to see, too.Photo: Chip Somodevilla via Getty images.

1real

May Brexit offer would hurt, cost EU citizens - EU parliament

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Theresa May s offer of settled status for EU residents is flawed and will leave them with fewer rights after Brexit, the European Parliament s Brexit coordinator said on Tuesday. A family of five could face a bill of 360 pounds to acquire the new status, Guy Verhofstadt told May s Brexit Secretary David Davis in a letter seen by Reuters a very significant amount for a family on low income . Listing three other concerns for the EU legislature, which must approve any treaty on the March 2019 exit, Verhofstadt told Davis: Under your proposals, EU citizens will definitely notice a deterioration of their status as a result of Brexit. And the Parliament s aim all along has been that EU citizens, and UK citizens in the EU-27, should notice no difference. Verhofstadt, a former Belgian prime minister, wrote in response to Davis, who had written to him after Parliament complained last week that there remained major issues to be settled on the rights of the 3 million EU citizens in Britain. On Tuesday, he told reporters that Parliament was determined that expatriates should not become victims of Brexit . May had unveiled more details last week of a system aimed at giving people already in Britain a quick and cheap way of asserting their rights to stay there indefinitely. The issue, along with how much Britain owes and the new EU-UK border across Ireland, is one on which the EU wants an outline agreement before opening talks on the future of trade. Verhofstadt said lawmakers were not dismissing British efforts to streamline applications but saw flaws in the nature of settled status itself. As well as the cost, which is similar to that of acquiring a British passport, he cited three others: - Europeans should simply declare a whole household resident, without needing an application process; the burden of proof should be on the British authorities to deny them rights. - more stringent conditions on criminal records could mean some EU residents, including some now with permanent resident status, being deported for failing to gain settled status . - EU residents would lose some rights to bring relatives to Britain as the new status would give them the same rights as British people, who now have fewer rights than EU citizens.

0fake

Schumer calls on Trump to appoint official to oversee Puerto Rico relief

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Charles Schumer, the top Democrat in the U.S. Senate, called on President Donald Trump on Sunday to name a single official to oversee and coordinate relief efforts in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico. Schumer, along with Representatives Nydia Velàzquez and Jose Serrano, said a “CEO of response and recovery” is needed to manage the complex and ongoing federal response in the territory, where millions of Americans remain without power and supplies. In a statement, Schumer said the current federal response to Hurricane Maria’s impact on the island had been “disorganized, slow-footed and mismanaged.” “This person will have the ability to bring all the federal agencies together, cut red tape on the public and private side, help turn the lights back on, get clean water flowing and help bring about recovery for millions of Americans who have gone too long in some of the worst conditions,” he said. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Democrats contended that naming a lone individual to manage the government’s relief efforts was critical, particularly given that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is already stretched thin from dealing with other crises, such as the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in Texas and the wildfires in California. The severity of the Puerto Rico crisis, where a million people do not have clean water and millions are without power nearly a month after Hurricane Maria made landfall, demand a single person to focus exclusively on relief and recovery, the Democrats said. Forty-nine people have died in Puerto Rico officially, with dozens more missing. The hurricane did extensive damage to the island’s power grid, destroying homes, roads and other vital infrastructure. Now, the bankrupt territory is struggling to provide basic services like running water, and pay its bills. “It’s tragically clear this Administration was caught flat footed when Maria hit Puerto Rico,” said Velàzquez. “Appointing a CEO of Response and Recovery will, at last, put one person with authority in charge to manage the response and ensure we are finally getting the people of Puerto Rico the aid they need.” On Thursday, Trump said the federal response has been a “10” on a scale of one to 10 at a meeting with Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello. The governor has asked the White House and Congress for at least $4.6 billion in block grants and other types of funding. Senator Marco Rubio called on Congress to modify an $18.7 billion aid package for areas damaged by a recent swath of hurricanes to ensure that Puerto Rico can quickly access the funds.

0fake

WATCH: HILARIOUS AD Calls Into Question Health Of Aging Clinton Crime Family Bosses

After watching this telling video, you ll wonder if instead of working so hard to get back into the White House, Hillary s time would be better spent looking into an assisted living situation for her and Bill

1real

No Change Expected for ESPN Political Agenda Despite Huge Subscriber Decline - Breitbart

As more and more sports fans turn off ESPN to protest the network’s social and political agenda, parent company Disney’s decision to extend current CEO Bob Iger’s contract through 2019 means the “world’s leader in sports entertainment” will continue on its merry way of alienating a large segment of Americans. [Breitbart reported in November that ESPN lost 3. 2 million subscribers in just over a year. Moreover, for the last few years the sports network has lost 300, 000 subscribers a month. In October alone, the beleaguered network lost 621, 000 subscribers. The decision to keep Iger instead of moving in another direction, such as promoting COO Thomas Staggs to the spot, has a number of substantial business implications for ESPN. Awful Announcing reports: From the outside, at least, it seems like Iger is quite satisfied with ESPN’s leadership and with the network’s path on most fronts. Specifically, he’s regularly spoken about how important it is for ESPN to be in “skinny bundles” (including streaming options from Sling, DirecTV and more) and about ESPN’s forthcoming offering. Those views wouldn’t necessarily be shared by a different CEO Staggs, for example, spoke much more about the importance of the traditional bundle, so a Disney CEO with his views might focus more on that side, or conversely, another Disney CEO might want ESPN to quickly go into in a larger way (standalone access to all ESPN content, including TV channels) rather than starting with the light approach Iger seems to be promoting. Putting those circumstances aside, the crux of ESPN continuing on in its political and social agenda derives from the fact that Iger is a strident lifelong Democrat. One so committed, in fact, that the Disney stalwart a Hillary Clinton fundraiser last summer along with supporters such as entertainment Mogul Haim Saban, Chernin Group chairman and CEO Peter Chernin, and entertainment and sports executive Casey Wasserman. To get an idea of Iger’s taste on social issues, one of his proposed “entertainment” ideas is a filmic version of Girls, a popular television show starring Lena Dunham. Somewhat surprisingly, and to the chagrin of many of his supporters and shareholders, Iger is serving on President Donald Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum council of CEOs. Iger agrees with Trump on shutting down certain tax loopholes and strongly supports lowering corporate tax rates (no surprise there). Earlier this month, Iger reportedly defended his participation in Trump’s mastermind group, asserting, “I think there is an opportunity for me to express views that I think … are of value to the company and its shareholders. ” Insisting that he won’t be Iger informs that he will be “adversarial to the view of the administration,” which includes “immigration. ” Yet, the CEO argues that claims asserting ESPN is politically slanted are “just a complete exaggeration. ” With that said, it looks like ESPN’s cable subscription downward spiral will persist as long as Iger remains as Disney’s top executive.

0fake

Billionaire Odebrecht in Brazil scandal released to house arrest

RIO DE JANEIRO/SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Billionaire Marcelo Odebrecht, the highest-profile executive imprisoned in Brazil s massive graft scandal, was released from jail on Tuesday to continue his sentence for corruption under house arrest, according to a federal court. The former chief executive officer of Odebrecht SA [ODBES.UL], Latin America s largest construction firm, was arrested in 2015 during an investigation dubbed Car Wash that exposed billions of dollars in kickbacks to politicians and executives at state-run companies in exchange for inflated contracts. Odebrecht was set to travel to Sao Paulo to begin his house arrest under electronic surveillance on Tuesday, according to the federal court in Parana. A representative for the former executive said he remained committed to collaborating with authorities under a leniency deal. Odebrecht was first sentenced to 19 years in prison in one of the many cases related to Car Wash. That was reduced to 10 years after he signed a leniency deal last December in exchange for paying a nearly $2 billion fine, admitting guilt and providing evidence to authorities. He has already served two-and-a-half years in prison. Under the deal, he must serve another two-and-a-half years under house arrest. He will then be permitted to leave his home for work for another two-and-a-half years. He will then be required to do community service for the rest of his 10-year sentence. Separately Tuesday, Brazil s antitrust watchdog Cade said it was investigating two alleged cartels involved in bidding for Sao Paulo infrastructure projects after receiving information provided by Odebrecht executives.

0fake

BRITISH WOMAN LOSES VIRGINITY To Asylum Seeking Rapist On Her Way To Church

Europe is likely not going to be a top destination for families with young daughters, and they have no one to blame but themselves for this idiocy. Political correctness will be the death of Europe as we know it. Do Americans have the fortitude to stop the bleeding here, before the invasion of foreigners on our soil is officially out of control? PREDATORY asylum seeker who chillingly raped a 21-year-old devout Christian woman next to a church was starting a 10 year jail sentence today.Eritrean-born Mebrehtom Abrha, 25, stalked the vulnerable virgin for 10 minutes as she walked through Liverpool city centre to her boyfriend s house at 6am last July 19.Liverpool Crown Court heard he dragged her off the pavement and into a grassy area before raping her twice in a harrowing four-minute ordeal.The terrifying attack left the devout Christian angry at God and fearing she had contracted HIV, an appalled judge was told.Abrha, who lived in Liverpool before fleeing to Birmingham, was arrested following a BBC Crimewatch appeal on October 12.Today he started an extended sentence of 10 years imprisonment with a further five years on licence as his victim told the court: I felt ashamed, dirty and unclean. Going to church has always been in an important part of my life but since the attack I was not able to go to church for many months. I was angry at God and I was angry at myself for feeling this way. The victim also admitted the attack caused her to end her relationship with her boyfriend, adding: I have lost any desire to do anything in my life. I feel terrified in the shower. I get the feeling that someone is going to get me and I start to panic. The victim who cannot be named for legal reasons had been out clubbing on Saturday July 18 last year and agreed to meet her boyfriend the following morning.Prosecutor David McLachlan told the court she could not get a taxi so opted to walk the mile-and-a-half route.Despite warnings to not cut through the park from her boyfriend, she did and was confronted by the East African man who dragged her off into a wooded area nearby.He then subjected her to a horrific attack, ripping open her dress before raping her and chillingly walking away.Afterwards the woman covered in dirt and with injuries to her back and neck ran to her boyfriend s house and he raised the alarm.Michael O Brien, defending Abhra, read out part of a letter of apology from his client, which went: This was an un-Christian act and I did a horrible thing to this woman. I ask for forgiveness. Ahbra was granted asylum for five years in June 2014 after claiming he was forced to flee his native country after being conscripted to the Eritrean army aged 18.Ahbra, who has no previous convictions and spoke through a Tigrignan interpreter, claimed he had no memory of the attack as he was too inebriated.Ahbra held his hand to his eyes as David Aubrey QC sentenced him before he made the sign of the cross as he was led down in to custody.Judge Aubrey told him: You watched her, you followed her, pursued her, threatened her and raped her before, somewhat chillingly, walking away calmly. I cannot ignore the tragic irony of this case that you attacked her next to a church. Afterwards Merseyside Police Det Insp Terry Davies said: There is no doubt that this had had a significant impact on his young victim, who will now have to live with this for the rest of her life. Via: Express UK

1real

U.N. seeks humanitarian pause in Sanaa where streets "battlegrounds"

GENEVA (Reuters) - The United Nations called on Monday for a humanitarian pause in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa on Tuesday to allow civilians to leave their homes, aid workers to reach them, and the wounded to get medical care. Jamie McGoldrick, U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Yemen, said in a statement that the streets of Sanaa had become battlegrounds and that aid workers remain in lockdown . Thus, I call on all parties to the conflict to urgently enable a humanitarian pause on Tuesday 5 December, between 10:00 a.m. and 16:00 p.m. to allow civilians to leave their homes and seek assistance and protection and to facilitate the movement of aid workers to ensure the continuity of life-saving programs, he said. McGoldrick warned the warring parties that any deliberate attacks against civilians, and against civilian and medical infrastructure, are clear violations of international humanitarian law and may constitute war crimes .

0fake

MAJOR LIBERAL RAG RELUCTANTLY PUBLISHES Article On President Trump’s Outstanding Accomplishments…It’s How They Explain His Successes That Has Everyone Laughing

The Atlantic, a publication that wouldn t know unbiased journalism if it bit them in the a$$ published what appears to be a reluctant piece on President Trump s outstanding accomplishments during his first 6 months in office. Most of the people reading this piece by The Atlantic are fans of their writing because they ve bought into the progressive, anti-American sentiment they were fed like crack cocaine in college. Almost like the patch that smokers wear to help them get through the withdrawal of nicotine while going through a cessation program, The Atlantic provides their readers with enough anti-Trump propaganda to keep them in business, while acting like a support group for their readers, who fear every anti-American piece of legislation Barack Obama worked so hard to implement, is all unraveling, thanks to this guy who foolishly wants Make America Great Again . Of course, in the eyes of The Atlantic reader, America was never great to begin with.The parts where The Atlantic talks about President Trump s accomplishments are italicized and the comments the writer makes to counter Trump s successes have been highlighted.The Atlantic starts out the article by giving credit to Trump s shadow government , as somehow being responsible for his amazing successes in his first 6 months. According to The Atlantic, the actual government is the fake news stories and the obsession with negative chatter surrounding Trump s presidency, while President Trump s accomplishments have been hidden in the shadows .The Atlantic Imagine, if you will, that there is a shadow government.The actual government, the administration of Donald Trump, is coming off the worst week of his presidency, although there haven t been any smooth weeks. Trump s top legislative priority, repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, seems dead for the moment. (Tax reform? Forget it.) His administration has set a new standard for chaos and dysfunction, rolling through staffers the way other administrations run through, well, legislative initiatives. Trump s foreign policy remains inchoate and ineffective. Meanwhile, a special counsel investigation looms over the entire administration, threatening both its legitimacy and legal jeopardy for some of its members.Things are going considerably better for the shadow government. With the Trump administration s chaos sucking up all the attention, it s been able to move forward on a range of its priorities, which tend to be more focused on regulatory matters anyway. It is remaking the justice system, rewriting environmental rules, overhauling public-lands administration, and greenlighting major infrastructure projects. It is appointing figures who will guarantee the triumph of its ideological vision for decades to come. let s consider the Trump administration s accomplishments. Spoiler alert: like climate change, they re real.One of the two biggest victories has come on border security, which was one of Trump s top campaign priorities. Border crossings have already plummeted, suggesting that rhetoric making it clear to immigrants that they are not welcome is effective in its own right. Customs and Border Protections report that apprehensions of unauthorized people are down nearly 20 percent from the same time in 2016. (Trump continues to radically exaggerate these figures, though.) This decline has occurred despite Trump being foiled on his actual policy proposals at the border. Construction hasn t begun on his border wall yet, and federal courts have repeatedly smacked down his Muslim travel ban.That said, he did get one good result in courts and that points to a second area of success. The Supreme Court allowed parts of the travel ban to go forward, in a victory that would not have happened without Neil Gorsuch on the court, filling a seat that under all previous customs would have been filled by Barack Obama s appointee Merrick Garland. Given his legislative struggles, the most enduring Trump victories are likely to come in the judicial branch.Trump may get to appoint several more justices to the high court. And in the meantime, he s filling up lower courts with lifetime appointees. As the veteran Democratic official Ron Klain wrote recently, A massive transformation is underway in how our fundamental rights are defined by the federal judiciary. For while President Trump is incompetent at countless aspects of his job, he is proving wildly successful in one respect: naming youthful conservative nominees to the federal bench in record-setting numbers. There are the quiet, far-reaching changes. Getting back to Pruitt, the environment is one of the places where the Trump administration has had its largest impact. The most prominent move was Trump s June 1 announcement that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris climate accord. But the EPA is moving on other fronts as well. It s working to dismantle Barack Obama s Clean Power Plan, a signature policy aimed at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. In June, following a February executive order from Trump, the EPA began the process of rescinding the 2015 Waters of the United States rule, which aimed at protecting smaller bodies of water and streams in the same way that larger ones had been. In December, in the closing weeks of his administration, Obama banned drilling in the Arctic and parts of the Atlantic Ocean; the Trump administration promptly set about undoing that ban. (How interested oil companies will be remains to be seen.)The New York Times found in June that Pruitt s EPA has moved to undo, delay or otherwise block more than 30 environmental rules, a regulatory rollback larger in scope than any other over so short a time in the agency s 47-year history. And it might have done more if not for constraints imposed by judges. EPA tried to abandon an Obama-era rule on methane emissions, but a court on Monday forced it to continue enforcing the rule.Other agencies are also in on the environmental deregulation act. The State Department reversed an Obama-era decision, clearing the way for the Keystone XL pipeline to begin construction. The Interior Department is considering reversing a rule on fracking on public lands, and might also reverse some equipment regulations on offshore drilling equipment implemented after the 2010 Gulf oil spill. The department has rolled back a ban on coal mining on public lands.Although the Justice Department had staunchly opposed a Texas voting law that has repeatedly been smacked down by courts as discriminatory, Sessions switched the department s position, and it has now told courts the law ought to be allowed to remain. The attorney general has also sought to cut off funding to so-called sanctuary cities, though his legal authority to do so is disputed.Curiously, since he campaigned as an atypically LGBT-friendly Republican, Trump has also made a range of changes on gay issues. Last week alone, the Justice Department announced that sexual orientation was not covered by Section VII, and the president said that transgender people would not be allowed to serve in the military. The administration has also rejected Obama-era protections for transgender students.

1real

Second judge says Clinton email setup may have been in 'bad faith'

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A second federal judge has taken the rare step of allowing a group suing for records from Hillary Clinton’s time as U.S. secretary of state to seek sworn testimony from officials, saying there was “evidence of government wrong-doing and bad faith.” The language in Judge Royce Lamberth’s order undercut the Democratic presidential contender’s assertion she was allowed to set up a private email server in her home for her work as the country’s top diplomat and that the arrangement was not particularly unusual. He described Clinton’s email arrangement as “extraordinary” in his order filed on Tuesday in federal district court in Washington. Referring to the State Department, Clinton and Clinton’s aides, he said there had been “constantly shifting admissions by the Government and the former government officials.” Spokesmen for Clinton did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The case is a civil matter, but the order adds to the legal uncertainty that has overshadowed Clinton’s campaign to be the Democratic nominee in the Nov. 8 presidential election. The FBI is also conducting a criminal inquiry into the arrangement after it emerged that classified government secrets ended up in Clinton’s unsecured email account. Clinton has said she does not think she will be charged with a crime. Lamberth’s order granted the request by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group suing the department under open records laws, to gather evidence, including sworn testimony. The group has filed several lawsuits, including one seeking records about the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. “Where there is evidence of government wrong-doing and bad faith, as here, limited discovery is appropriate, even though it is exceedingly rare in FOIA (freedom-of-information) cases,” Lamberth noted in his order. The government is normally given the benefit of the doubt that it properly searched and produced records. Since the email arrangement came to public knowledge a year ago, the State Department has found itself defending Clinton in scores of lawsuits from groups, individuals and news outlets who say they were wrongly denied access to Clinton’s federal records. Clinton left the department in 2013, but did not return her email records to the government until nearly two years later. Last month, Judge Emmet Sullivan, who is overseeing a separate Judicial Watch lawsuit over other Clinton-related records, allowed a similar motion for discovery. (Story refiles to fix date of presidential election, paragraph 6.)

0fake

America gives Grand Piano to horse

Wednesday 9 November 2016 by Lucas Wilde America gives Grand Piano to horse America has given a grand piano to a horse and is expecting some quality tunes. “I’m particularly looking forward to Beethoven’s Ninth,” beamed horse supporter and piano enthusiast, Jay Cooper. “A horse has never been given a piano before because, frankly, the establishment wouldn’t allow it. “Now, at last, change has come, and America will change for the better. “There are a lot of doubters out there, and those doubters will soon be silenced by the graceful notes of Chopin, Mozart and maybe even Little Richard.” Horse, Dobbin Williams, said, “I’m not really sure what’s expected of me here. “I’m a horse. I am absolutely not qualified to play a piano. “I mean… Look at these hooves and the way I am in general. I can’t even sit on the chair properly. “Why on earth did anyone think this was a good idea?” Cooper grinned, “We did it. We’ve made pianos great again.” Democrat, Elizabeth King, said “We wanted to get a pianist of low-to-medium standard for the piano. “She wouldn’t have thumped out anything exciting, but it would have been perfectly reasonable background music. “But the people have spoken, and the people wanted a horse. “God Bless America.” Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently witterings below - why not add your own?

1real

Hillary’s crime family: End of days for the U.S.A

Hillary’s crime family: End of days for the U.S.A Based on the foregoing, SOMEONE got to Comey—somewhere along the line By Daily Coin - November 8, 2016 An investor in Dave’s fund emailed him asking which way Colorado would vote tomorrow. He replied: “Depends on who counts the votes. I don’t believe this is a fair election. I think the Clinton crime machine, with the help of George Soros and a few others, have everything under their control now.” After taking the better part of a year to sift through 55,000 emails in analyzing Hillary Clinton’s behavior with regard to conducting classified Government business on her private server – which apparently was accessible to hackers and, surreptitiously, by Anthony Wieners porn laptop – Jim Comey determined in 8 days that 650,000 emails downloaded from Hillary’s private server were not relevant. Sorry Jim, that’s impossible to believe. One highly plausible is that operatives in the Deep State shut down the FBI investigation in order to preserve the treasure trove of material that will give it power over Clinton’s Presidency. The SoT was perplexed by this, so we asked John Titus his take on this. His answer was quite compelling: Here’s what I’m reasonably sure of, based on experience. (1) Jim Comey looked sick when, at the conclusion of round one, and having proven beyond all doubt that Hillary violateed 18 U.S.C 793(f), he said no reasonable prosecutor would charge her. He wasn’t acting. Bad acting comes right through camera lens, and that man looked like he was about to vomit when he left that dais; (2) it took the FBI a year to conclude round one of its investigation, which was based on its review of 55,000 emails; (3) Comey had promised to get back to congress should more info arise, and when 650,000 unexpected emails showed up, he made good on his word by letting congress know; and (4) the FBI terminated its investigation LONG before reviewing 650,000 emails. I once reviewed 250,000 documents on a case, Based on the foregoing, SOMEONE got to Comey—somewhere along the line. For all I know, though, the whole thing was scripted from start to finish, and Comey read his script at every point along the way, even when it physically disgusted him in round one. So while you might be right about the time, I think if the Deep State made a move on Comey, it happened awhile ago. That’s wholly speculative on my part. You could well be right that they got to him just recently. I just doubt it. I think he’s the Company Man because he’s a company man. For DAMN SURE you’re right about holding Hillary hostage, but she’s so evil it’s like throwing a pedophile into a daycare center with no supervision, the shades drawn and the doors locked. With that as the preface, today’s episode of the Shadow of Truth discussed the latest development in the HRC Crime Family saga:

1real

Sean Spicer Baffles Reporters, Claims Trump Isn’t Responsible For Hiring Flynn (VIDEO)

On Tuesday, White House Propaganda Minister Sean Spicer once again baffled reporters and other thinking individuals by once again saying the dumbest thing imaginable.Asked why the White House refuses to provide documents related to former National Security Advisor and registered foreign agent Michael Flynn s hiring, Spicer took the tried-and-true route of blaming President Obama.Spicer explained that the Trump White House isn t responsible for anything related to Flynn s hiring because the documents were filled out during the Obama administration and those are not documents that the White House would ever possess. Everything that the White House has been asked to do, the only documents that were made available to [Congress] that they asked for were the ones that the Department of Defense had, Spicer said, explaining that he doesn t feel that the White House has an obligation to provide the information Congress has requested. How about these calls made where [Flynn] was working during the transition on behalf of a future President Trump? CBS s Major Garrett asked. Aren t those things that you should have some responsibility or obligation to provide if you can? It s a question [of] if you can, Spicer said. To ask for every call a national security adviser made is pretty outlandish. Those calls were made on behalf of the Trump transition were they not? Garrett asked. Spicer, of course, told him that Trump isn t responsible for anything that happened before January 20 even if it was done by a member of the Trump transition team. When? Spicer asked. We started this administration on Jan. 20. All the information that they re talking about occurred prior to him being at the White House. Working for the transition! Garrett pressed. Not at the White House! Spicer snapped. Everything that is being questioned occurred prior to Jan. 20th. Trump and his White House are absolutely responsible for Flynn which is not good, as even Hillary Clinton witch hunter, Congressman Jason Chaffetz, admits that Flynn likely committed crimes.Watch this all happen below:Featured image via screengrab

1real

UNHOLY ALLIANCE: Hillary Clinton’s Saudi Sponsors Support Terrorism, Islamist Extremism

21st Century Wire says Amid the tossing and turning of media hit pieces and partisan mud slinging in advance of the US presidential vote in November, very little focus is given on the actual record and policies of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.With this week s damning revelations regarding Gulf Arab monarchs buying access into the US State Dept via the Clinton Foundation, a clearer picture is now emerging about how the sponsorship of religious extremism, as well as geopolitical instability in the Middle East and beyond links directly back to the Clinton global network of international oligarchs. Watch this week s ABC News segment: Based on this line of inquiry, what will four years of a Clinton presidency bring in terms of US foreign policy? A few answers to this question from Global Research Andre Vltchek Global ResearchIf the West in general and the United States in particular, left the Arab and Muslim world alone and in peace, we would most likely never see all those terrorist attacks, which are rocking the world from Indonesia to France. There would be no Mujahedeen and its mutation into al-Qaeda; in Afghanistan or elsewhere. There would be no traces of the ISIS (or ISIL or I.S. or Daesh or however you choose to call it), in Syria, Iraq, Libya or anywhere else.And the super-conservative Wahhabi Islam, that outdated, freak Saudi mutant, would remain in the religious schools of the ultra-regressive Kingdom, instead of gaining ground all over Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa.Secular IslamBut the West embarked on a brutal, Machiavellian path: it decided to destroy socialist Islam that (historically) moderate, compassionate and progressive religion. It smashed once secular Egypt; it overthrew the government in socialist Iran and then in near-Communist Indonesia, implanting in all these places horrifically degenerate and fully outdated religious concepts. It used extremists to destroy healthy patriotism and socialism. Like the Brits in the 19th Century ( You can control people s brains, while we will control your natural resources ), the West embraced Wahhabi teaching, because it was able to guarantee full obedience, dictatorial (pro-Western) governance and oppressive feudalism.Islam has been used and abused, manipulated and virtually stripped of its essence. The process has gone so far that two leading Iranian scholars, during my visit last-year to Tehran, declared to me: In so many parts of the world, the West created an absolutely new religion. We don t recognize it, anymore. It has nothing to do with Islam. If the West in general and the United States in particular, left the Arab and Muslim world alone and in peace, we would most likely never see all those terrorist attacks, which are rocking the world from Indonesia to France Correct. Like a naughty, spoiled and heartless child, the West, after destroying the Soviet Union, painstakingly constructed its new enemy militant Islam so it could continue indulging in its favorite activity, which is perpetual conflict, endless wars and plunder.It is as simple as that.The greatest oppressors of the Muslim people, those in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Indonesia have all been closely allied to the West. The most terrible terrorist Muslim organizations, from Al-Qaida to ISIS, have been created, armed and supported by the West and its cronies.In Europe and in the United States, the fear of terrorists is fully exploited by the Western regime a global class alliance of plutocrats, in actuality, with headquarters in Washington, where the main military and media muscle reside. It still clings to power mainly thanks to such fear implanted in the brains of ordinary people .And what about the War on Terror ? Yes, there really is such war, but the West is not the one who fights it. As this goes to print, the war against terrorism is being fought by Russia, Iran, China, Syria, Hezbollah and their allies!The West is still closely collaborating with the terrorists. It miraculously avoids targeting them when fighting wars against them ; it financially supports some and trains others. It criticizes and antagonizes those who are actually fighting the extremist militant groups.Extremists have been unleashed, like Rottweiler fighting dogs, against almost all progressive governments in the Middle East, but also against China and Russia. Extremist Muslims, extremist Christians, even extremist Buddhists!In turn, the politicians in the United States are regularly supported, financially, by the regimes (including those of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, etc.) that are spreading, relentlessly, throughout the world, the most intolerant and grotesquely violent religious concepts.Despite their essential servility and cowardice, even some North American mainstream media outlets are now actively discussing various schemes involving the financing of the Clinton Foundation by Saudi Arabia (alongside several leading transnational corporations and Wall Street s largest banks).On its Breaking News , as far back as in 2008, CNN reported:The donations to the William J. Clinton Foundation include amounts of $10 million to $25 million from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and real estate mogul Stephen Bing, a personal friend of the Clintons.The Clintons came under intense pressure during Hillary Clinton s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination to release the names of donors to both the Foundation and to the Clinton presidential library in Arkansas.Bill Clinton agreed to the release of the list after President-elect Barack Obama nominated Hillary Clinton to become Secretary of State.The governments of Kuwait and Qatar are also on the list, as is Saudi businessman Nasser Al-Rashid, who has close ties to the Saudi royal family. Saudi Sheikh Mohammed H. Al-Amoudi, reputed to be one of the richest men in the world, is among the donors as well. Both Saudis contributed in the $1 million to $5 million range. A group called Friends of Saudi Arabia and the Dubai Foundation appear in the same category. As recently as on August 20th, 2016, The New York Times wrote something similar, essentially reconfirming the validity of the earlier reports, while adding many more details and adjusting the figures: The kingdom of Saudi Arabia donated more than $10 million. Through a foundation, so did the son-in-law of a former Ukrainian president whose government was widely criticized for corruption and the murder of journalists. A Lebanese-Nigerian developer with vast business interests contributed as much as $5 million.For years the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation thrived largely on the generosity of foreign donors and individuals who gave hundreds of millions of dollars to the global charity. But now, as Mrs. Clinton seeks the White House, the funding of the sprawling philanthropy has become an Achilles heel for her campaign and, if she is victorious, potentially her administration as well. Long time Clinton s top aide, Huma Abedin (who spent part of her childhood in Saudi Arabia) has been an intermediary between the former Secretary of State and pro-Saudi interests. She also negotiated financial support for Ms. Clinton from Mr. Chagouri and other individuals, organizations and businesses originating from the Middle East.The accusations and evidence keep coming in, from different media outlets, both left wing and right wing. On August 1st, 2016, the conservative Breitbart News stated: Khizr Khan, the Muslim Gold Star father that the mainstream media and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have been using to criticize Donald J. Trump, has deep ties to the government of Saudi Arabia and to international Islamist investors through his own law firm. In addition to those ties to the wealthy Islamist nation, Khan also has ties to controversial immigration programs that wealthy foreigners can use to essentially buy their way into the United States and has deep ties to the Clinton Cash narrative through the Clinton Foundation. Hillary s Saudi SponsorsHillary Clinton s dependence on Saudi sponsors has been strongly influencing her decision to maintain a foreign policy in the service of Riyadh and support for various terrorist groups controlled by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, in and beyond the Middle East region [including those currently active in Syria and Iraq].In reality, she is simply representing continuity of an already existing, deadly trend. The regime has been evolving for decades, but especially since the Ronald Reagan years. Republicans or Democrats: it truly matters very little. Both parties spread terror all over the world. True, George W. Bush invaded Iraq, but people like Bill Clinton are close friends and supporters of Paul Kagame, the Rwandese butcher of Congo , with the blood of some 10 million people on his hands. Democrat and moderate , Bill Clinton, was also responsible for the criminal bombing and destruction of socialist Yugoslavia. And so it goes But under Barack Obama s rule, the last hope for an independent Middle East and the Arab world has virtually evaporated. Libya has been destroyed; the Syrian civil war was launched from Washington, London and Paris. Saudis bathed rebellious Yemen in blood using UK and US produced weapons. Virtually all Arab Spring revolutions were infiltrated and diverted. And in Bahrain, the Shi a majority was literally raped by Saudi Arabia and its own ruthless rulers, with British advisors standing-by.The US and Europe have kept selling arms to the Gulf, building new military bases while supporting the most appalling and bloodthirsty regimes.The Obama/ (Hilary) Clinton Era has greatly improved the symbioses of Western imperialism, big business, and pro-Western fascist regimes worldwide, but particularly in the Middle East and Africa.This toxic embrace has proved fatal to millions of people in these two parts of the world. Hopes for self-governance have been ruined. Corpses keep piling up in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and elsewhere.The West does not care, as long as it stays in charge of the show , and for as long as hundreds of billions of dollars are made by weapons producers. Even if millions are dying, there is still an uninterrupted flow of raw materials to the West and Japan. Therefore, it is business as usual . Un-people and their lives are worth nothing.At one point, Russia, Iran, China and others have said enough is enough; let s fight against the true terrorists! Let s fight ISIS and other bigots! Let s give a hand to the independence-minded, socially-oriented patriots .Predictably,. this led to total outrage in Washington, London, and Paris (and Tokyo). Disobedience and rebellion against the global (Western) order could not be tolerated! It had to be crushed, even at the cost of new and deadly world war.NATO, Washington, Europe, Japan, and South Korea all started a direct confrontation policy against Russia, China, Iran, North Korea (DPRK) and other members of the Coalition of Daring . Brazil, an important member of BRICS, was recently destroyed by the extreme-right coup supported by the West.Even the Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump, in his rare moments of sanity, is clearly aware of the danger. He does not wish to confront Russia. He is obviously not willing to sacrifice tens of millions of human lives for some grotesque dreams of total world domination by a market fundamentalism backed by the white (or Western) supremacist dogmas.But Trump s moments of sanity are defined as madness by the mainstream propaganda. Not surprisingly! As was correctly stated by the great Indian thinker, Arundhati Roy, some several years ago: now war is called peace and black is called white . Orwellian indeed, with a vengeance.The Clinton CampaignThe Clinton campaign has gone into overdrive. It attempts to distract attention from its own funding scandals, by accusing Donald Trump s aides of receiving financing from abroad. Trump is now described as Russia s agent .This game it is all self-serving: nothing to do with the interests of the world, or even the interests of the common American people .For as long as the general political trend of the West does not radically change, or for as long as the West is not stopped by outside forces, perpetual wars will continue. Monstrous genocides in Africa, the destruction of entire states and regions in the Middle East, all this could easily spread to other parts of the Planet.It is clear now that if provoked and confronted, countries like China, Russia and Iran would not hesitate to fight back. They also may fight for others for their tortured allies.The Western implants and their buddies, Mujahedeen/Al-Qaida, have already destroyed Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. ISIS, another mutant unleashed by the West and its allies, have been devastating Iraq, Syria, Libya and now what is left of Afghanistan.These movements have really nothing to do with Islam. They were manufactured in Washington, Riyadh, London, and Doha (and most likely even in Tel Aviv), for several concrete purposes, all of them thoroughly foul.They are making sure to ruin the socialist nature of Islam, insisting exclusively on the implementation of outdated, medieval fundamentalist interpretations.Huma Abedin s mother, Dr. Saleha Mahmood Abedin, is one of the founding members of the Muslim Sisterhood, and chairperson of the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child (IICWC). She is also a well known writer and editor based in Saudi Arabia. Her organization (IICWC) had repeatedly argued that laws banning female circumcision should be revoked, as well as laws prohibiting child marriage and marital rape. During her visit to KSA, Hillary Clinton spoke at the Islamic college of Dar El-Hekma (where Dr. Saleha Abedin was a vice-dean) shoulder-to-shoulder with her favorite aide Huma.Was this just an insignificant episode? Like those millions of dollars in Saudi Arabian funding for Clinton s foundation? Like the US foreign policy in the Gulf and in the Middle East, like spreading Muslim extremist groups to all corners of the world, from Africa, the Middle East, to Southeast Asia and even China? Like unleashing conservative Islam against socialist Muslim countries?Too many episodes ! Too much blood It is time to say what is by now obvious: The US establishment is not fighting Muslim terrorism or even extremism ; it is manufacturing it, and injecting it everywhere. The only real enemy that Washington, London and Paris have, for decades, even for centuries, is the anti-colonialist struggle, and the burning desire of people, worldwide, to terminate the West s global dictatorship. Philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist, Andre Vltchek has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His latest books are: Exposing Lies Of The Empire and Fighting Against Western Imperialism . Discussion with Noam Chomsky: On Western Terrorism. Point of No Return is his critically acclaimed political novel. Oceania a book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about Indonesia: Indonesia The Archipelago of Fear . Andre is making films for teleSUR and Press TV. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and the Middle East. He can be reached through his website or Twitter account.

1real

Even Trump’s Best Friend Joe Scarborough Can’t Handle His ‘Disqualifying’ KKK Support (VIDEO)

Recently, Joe Scarborough has found himself the subject of, shall we say, criticism because of his insanely pro-Trump bias something that bothers pretty much everyone at MSNBC. In fact, their relationship has traditionally been so strong that Scarborough bragged about giving The Donald debate tips. Recently Scarborough was busted revealing his pro-Trump bias in hot mic comments captured during a commercial break. The Morning Joe host can be heard steering Mika Brzezinski away from tougher topics like immigration in his effort to provide the billionaire with a softball interview.Following Trump s repeated refusals to disavow the Ku Klux Klan something that would be easy for anyone who did not depend so heavily on them for support Scarborough expressed what can only be referred to as disgust during a segment of the show on Monday: It s breathtaking. That is disqualifying right there. To say you don t know about the Ku Klux Klan? Scarborough said. You don t know about David Duke? On Sunday, Trump acknowledged his heavy support from white supremacists, including former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke, but said it would be unfair to renounce the White Power Rangers supporting him until he has more information. Just so you understand, I don t know anything about David Duke, OK? Trump told CNN s Jake Tapper. I don t know anything about what you re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists. I have to look at the group. I mean, I don t know what group you re talking about, he added despite Tapper s repeated clarifications that he was talking about the Ku Klux Klan. You wouldn t want me to condemn a group that I know nothing about. I d have to look. Scarborough called this course of action stunning in that it isn t buying him a single vote : I mean is he really so stupid that he thinks Southerners aren t offended by the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke? Is he really so ignorant of Southern voters that he thinks this is the way to their heart to go neutral, to play Switzerland when you re talking about the Klan? And to say he doesn t know enough information about the Klan to condemn them exactly what does Donald Trump expect to learn in the next 24 hours about the Klan. Watch the segment below:Featured image via screengrab

1real

BOOM! Danish Government Considers Seizing Migrant’s Valuables To Pay For Benefits

Is the European gravy train finally coming to an end?The Danish parliament is considering a bill to seize migrants valuables to pay for their benefits.The leftists are very upset about this commonsense legislation. Daily Sabah reported:A controversial Danish bill to seize migrants valuables to pay for their stay in asylum centers looks set to pass in parliament after the government on Tuesday secured a parliamentary majority.Parliament was set to begin a series of debates on the bill yesterday, ahead of a vote on Jan. 26. Faced with a storm of criticism, Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, whose right-wing Venstre party is behind the plan, called it the most misunderstood bill in Denmark s history. His minority government and its right-wing allies, the far-right Danish People s Party (DPP), the Liberal Alliance and the Conservative People s Party, reached an agreement on the bill on Tuesday with the opposition Social Democrats, meaning it is now supported by a majority of parties in parliament.The amended bill would allow Danish authorities to seize migrants cash exceeding 10,000 kroner ($1,450), as well as any individual items valued at more than 10,000 kroner.Via: Gateway Pundit

1real

Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Texas on Voter ID Case - The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court rejected on Monday an appeal from Texas officials seeking to restore the state’s strict voter ID law. As is the court’s custom, its brief order in the case, Abbott v. Veasey, No. gave no reasons for turning down the appeal. But Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. issued an unusual statement explaining that the Supreme Court remains free to consider the case after further proceedings in the lower courts. The Texas law, enacted in 2011, requires voters seeking to cast their ballots at the polls to present photo identification, like a Texas driver’s or gun license, a military ID or a passport. Federal courts have repeatedly ruled that the law is racially discriminatory. The Texas law was at first blocked under Section 5 of the federal Voting Rights Act, which required some states and localities with a history of discrimination to obtain federal permission before changing voting procedures. After the Supreme Court effectively struck down Section 5 in 2013 in Shelby County v. Holder, an Alabama case, Texas officials announced that they would start enforcing the ID law. After a trial in 2014, Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos of Federal District Court in Corpus Christi struck down the law on Oct. 9 in a opinion. She said that it had been adopted “with an unconstitutional discriminatory purpose” and that its effect was to disenfranchise “a disproportionate number of and Hispanics. ” In 2015, a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, vacated part of the ruling concerning the law’s purpose but affirmed the part concerning its effect. Last July, the full Fifth Circuit largely adopted the panel’s distinctions and reasoning, and it returned the case to the trial court to consider an appropriate remedy. Texas officials nonetheless asked the Supreme Court to review the appeals court’s ruling immediately. The people and groups challenging the law, the officials said, “presented no evidence that the law resulted in diminished minority political participation or prevented even a single person from voting. ” The challengers responded that about 600, 000 registered voters in Texas, or about 5 percent of all registered voters in the state, lacked the required forms of ID. The law, they said, “disproportionately affects minority voters at a statistically significant rate. ” On Monday, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the case would be better suited for Supreme Court review after the lower courts completed their work. Ken Paxton, Texas’ attorney general, said he was disappointed that the court “did not immediately take our case. ” “Chief Justice Roberts made it very clear that the case will be an even stronger posture for Supreme Court review after further proceedings in lower courts,” Mr. Paxton said in a statement. “Texas enacted a common sense voter ID law to safeguard the integrity of our elections, and we will continue to fight for the law. ” J. Gerald Hebert of the Campaign Legal Center, which represents voters challenging the law, said he was pleased that “the justices recognize that this case does not merit review at this time. ” “Texas, which ranks poorly in voter participation, should work to ensure that every eligible voter in the state is able to cast a ballot going forward,” Mr. Hebert said in a statement.

0fake

Islamic State driven out of last stronghold in northern Iraq

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi forces announced on Thursday they had captured Islamic State s last stronghold in northern Iraq, leaving the militant group holed up near the Syrian border as its self-proclaimed caliphate shrinks further. The town of Hawija and the surrounding areas fell in an offensive by U.S.-backed Iraqi government troops and Iranian-trained and armed Shi ite paramilitary groups known as Popular Mobilisation. Some fighting took place to the north and east of the town where the militants were surrounded. With the fall of Hawija, which lies near the Kurdish-held oil city of Kirkuk, the only area that remains under control of Islamic State in Iraq is a stretch alongside the western border with Syria, where the militant group is also in retreat. The capture of Hawija was a boost for the Iraqi government, which faces a separate crisis in the north of the country, where the Kurdish minority last month voted overwhelmingly in support of independence for their autonomous region. In Hawija, state TV showed footage of Iraqi forces raising flags in one of the town's squares while Humvees patrolled empty streets littered with car wrecks, houses riddled with bullets and shattered storefronts. (Graphics on 'Iraqi Kurds' independence push' - here) The army s 9th armored division, the Federal Police, the Emergency Response division and ... Popular Mobilisation liberated Hawija, said a statement from the joint operations commander, Lieutenant-General Abdul Ameer Rasheed Yarallah. Thick black smoke rose from areas surrounding Hawija, from oil wells set on fire by the militants to prevent air detection. The capture of Hawija brings Iraqi forces into direct contact with Kurdish Peshmerga fighters who control Kirkuk, a multi-ethnic region claimed by both Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). Kirkuk shaped up as a flashpoint last month when the KRG included the city in the referendum on Kurdish independence in northern Iraq. We don t want any aggression or confrontations but the federal authority must be imposed in the disputed areas, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi told a news conference in Paris with French President Emmanuel Macron. Macron offered to mediate between the Iraqi government and Kurdish regional authorities, and promised to maintain a military presence there until Islamic State was defeated. The Iraqi government has imposed sanctions in response to the independence vote, but Abadi said he could understand the Kurds aspirations , provided they were expressed in accordance with the constitution. The outcome of the referendum has raised concerns in Iraq and abroad that a conflict might break out there along ethnic lines, potentially weakening the campaign against Islamic State. Turkey, which is battling a three-decade-old insurgency by its own Kurdish militants, has led regional opposition to the Iraqi Kurds independence hopes. Stepping up his rhetoric on the issue, President Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey would soon close its border with northern Iraq and shut its air space in response to the referendum. He added that Turkey, Iran and Iraq would jointly decide on closing the flow of oil from northern Iraq, a vital source of earnings for Iraqi Kurdistan. On Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose country has big energy interests in Kurdistan, said it was in no one s interest to cut off oil supplies from the territory. But Erdogan said that if a decision will be made on closing oil taps in the region, that will be made by us. Turkey, Iran and Iraq s central government will do so together . Erdogan s stance has been backed by Iran. After meeting Erdogan in Tehran on Wednesday, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Iran and Turkey should prevent the Iraqi Kurds from declaring independence. Relations have been cool between Shi ite Iran and mainly Sunni Turkey. But both have been alarmed by the independence vote, fearing it will encourage separatism among their own Kurdish populations. The Kurds are the region s fourth-largest ethnic group, spread across Iran, Turkey, Syria and Iraq, all of which oppose any moves towards a Kurdish state. Iraq launched an offensive on Sept. 21 to dislodge Islamic State from the Hawija area, where up to 78,000 people were estimated to be trapped, according to the United Nations. The militants control the border town of al-Qaim and the region surrounding it. They also hold parts of the Syrian side of the border, but the area under their control is shrinking as they retreat in the face of two different sets of hostile forces - a U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led coalition and Syrian government troops with foreign Shi ite militias backed by Iran and Russia. Islamic State s cross-border caliphate effectively collapsed in July, when U.S.-backed Iraqi forces captured Mosul, the group s de facto capital in Iraq, in a grueling battle which lasted nine months. The militants leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who declared the caliphate from Mosul in mid-2014, released an audio recording last week that indicated he was alive, after several reports he had been killed. He urged his followers to keep up the fight despite setbacks.

0fake

Senators Propose Giving States Option to Keep Affordable Care Act - The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Several Republican senators on Monday proposed a partial replacement for the Affordable Care Act that would allow states to continue operating under the law if they choose, a proposal meant to appeal to critics and supporters of former President Barack Obama’s signature health law. But the plan was attacked by Democrats as a step back from the Affordable Care Act’s protections, and it was unlikely to win acceptance from conservative Republicans who want to get rid of the law and its tax increases as soon as possible. If anything, the proposal — by Senators Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a medical doctor, and Susan Collins of Maine, a moderate Republican — may show how difficult it will be for Republicans to enact a replacement for the Affordable Care Act. Legislation that can pass muster in the more conservative House may not win enough support in the Senate. A bill with broad appeal in the Senate may fail in the House. Under the proposal, states could stay with the Affordable Care Act, or they could receive a similar amount of federal money, which consumers could use to pay for medical care and health insurance. “We are moving the locus of repeal to state government,” Mr. Cassidy said. “States should have the right to choose. ” The proposal shares some features with House Republican proposals: It would encourage greater use of health savings accounts and eliminate the requirement for most Americans to have insurance or pay a tax penalty. But the option for states to keep the Affordable Care Act alive will rankle the most conservative Republicans who have been trying for nearly seven years to blow it up. “Obamacare is flawed, failing and not fixable, and it needs to be fully repealed,” said Representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina, the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus. A stalemate between the House and Senate would leave in place Mr. Obama’s health law, but efforts by President Trump and Congress to undermine it could send health insurance markets into a tailspin. On Friday, as one of his first official acts as president, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that could allow officials to ease up on enforcement of the mandate requiring most Americans to have insurance. Supporters of the Affordable Care Act panned the proposal. “Millions of Americans would be kicked off their plans, costs and deductibles for consumers would skyrocket, and protections for people with conditions, such as cancer, would be gutted,” said the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer of New York. Ronald F. Pollack, the executive director of Families USA, a consumer group, said the bill “falls way short of providing the protections and coverage people have under the Affordable Care Act. ” Ms. Collins said the bill would allow states to “keep the Affordable Care Act if it is working for their residents. ” But she predicted that most states would choose something different. Under the bill, states could enroll people who would otherwise be uninsured in health plans providing basic coverage. These health plans are intended to protect consumers against catastrophic medical expenses. They would cover generic versions of prescription drugs, and they would also have to cover recommended childhood immunizations without . States would contract with one or more insurers to offer this coverage. Consumers could buy “more robust coverage” if they want, Mr. Cassidy said, but they could be automatically enrolled, by default, in the health plans providing basic coverage. “A state could say, ‘All those eligible are enrolled unless they choose not to be,’” he explained. This “passive enrollment” would provide insurers with a large pool of customers, including many healthy people, without the coercion of an “individual mandate,” Mr. Cassidy said. “We think that we could cover more people than Obamacare,” Mr. Cassidy said, although he acknowledged that the effects of his bill had not been analyzed by the Congressional Budget Office, which serves as Capitol Hill’s official scorekeeper. If a state opts out of the Affordable Care Act, many of the federal insurance standards established under the law would no longer apply. The bill would repeal federal benefit mandates that “often force Americans to pay for coverage they don’t need and can’t afford,” Mr. Cassidy said. But some protections would remain in place. Parents would still be allowed to keep children on their insurance until the age of 26, and insurers could not impose annual or lifetime limits on benefits. The bill, called the Patient Freedom Act, would eliminate not only the unpopular individual mandate, but also the federal requirement for larger employers to offer coverage to employees. Mr. Cassidy said that Senators Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Johnny Isakson of Georgia, both Republicans, were also sponsors of the bill. The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, and the No. 2 Senate Republican, John Cornyn of Texas, were sponsors of a similar bill that Mr. Cassidy introduced in 2015. But the legislative landscape is different now. Republicans in Congress can repeal the Affordable Care Act, with support from Mr. Trump. In the Senate, they will need help from Democrats to adopt a replacement because Republicans are eight votes shy of the 60 needed to stop a filibuster.

0fake

Do You Belong To An Extraterrestrial Lineage?

According to Sitchin’s interpretation of Mesopotamian iconography and symbolism, outlined in his 1976 book The 12th Planet and its sequels, there is an undiscovered planet beyond Neptune that follows a long, elliptical orbit, reaching the inner solar system roughly every 3,600 years. This planet is called Nibiru (although Jupiter was the planet associated with the god Marduk in Babylonian cosmology).According to Sitchin, Nibiru (whose name was replaced with MARDUK in original legends by the Babylonian ruler of the same name in an attempt to co-opt the creation for himself, leading to some confusion among readers) collided catastrophically with Tiamat (a goddess in the Babylonian creation myth the Enûma Eliš), which he considers to be another planet once located between Mars and Jupiter. This collision supposedly formed the planet Earth, the asteroid belt, and the comets. Sitchin states that when struck by one of planet Nibiru’s moons, Tiamat split in two, and then on a second pass Nibiru itself struck the broken fragments and one half of Tiamat became the asteroid belt. The second half, struck again by one of Nibiru’s moons, was pushed into a new orbit and became today’s planet Earth. According to Sitchin, Nibiru (called “the twelfth planet” because, Sitchin claimed, the Sumerians’ gods-given conception of the Solar System counted all eight planets, plus Pluto, the Sun and the Moon) was the home of a technologically advanced human-like extraterrestrial race called the Anunnaki in Sumerian myth, who Sitchin states are called the Nephilim in Genesis. He wrote that they evolved after Nibiru entered the solar system and first arrived on Earth probably 450,000 years ago, looking for minerals, especially gold, which they found and mined in Africa. Sitchin states that these “gods” were the rank-and-file workers of the colonial expedition to Earth from planet Nibiru. There is a lot of confusion about the origin of the word Nephilim and what it means. In Hebrew it literally means to fall. As in fallen angel. The Bible, the Talmud and the Koran (where they are referred to as Djinn) all speak of fallen angels. In the Book of Genesis in the Bible it relates how the Nephilim produced children with humans. One was even depicted as killing Japheth, Noah’s son, and taking his place whereupon he fathered many children with Japheth’s unsuspecting wife which eventually populated much of Northern Europe. In the following video, journey into the world of Fallen Angels, Satan, Shadow People, Aliens, Demons, Anunnaki, Archons, Ancient Giants, “Ancient Aliens” & Genetic Hybrids. Almost all of what we know about the Nephilim comes from the Holy Bible in Genesis Chapter 6. If you’ve studies or looked into the Nephilim at all, or even if you haven’t, I’m sure you’ll find the video below refreshingly different than many other videos on the topic. I certainly did, and I’ve seen a ton. WATCH THE VIDEO: Locklip SOURCE

1real

Zimbabwe's Mugabe appears in public for first time since coup

HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe arrived at a university graduation ceremony in the capital on Friday, his first public appearance since a military seizure of power that political sources say is aimed at ending his 37 years in office. Wearing a blue and yellow academic gown and mortar board hat, the 93-year-old sat in large wooden chair at the front the hall. He was greeted by ululations from the crowd as he declared the ceremony open.

0fake

Credit Suisse Boss Faces Revolt From Bankers Over Strategy Shift - The New York Times

When Tidjane Thiam took over at Credit Suisse last July, he laid out a new direction for a financial giant with a storied investment banking history: Do less investment banking. And he used forceful language in doing so. He has referred to once core businesses — such as trading in distressed bonds and derivatives — as “ugly ducklings. ” He has suggested publicly that traders increased their investments in risky debt without his knowledge. Instead, Mr. Thiam said, the firm should dedicate itself to cultivating billionaires in China, Indonesia and Africa. The message: The future for the company is in managing the wealth of others. One year in, Credit Suisse stock is down 50 percent. And the investment bank, the second largest in Switzerland after UBS, is in open revolt. Credit Suisse has a wide range of businesses, like overseeing the fortunes of billionaires and managing initial public offerings for technology companies. But for decades, the bank has been dominated, both culturally and financially, by a richly paid banking elite. These deal makers in New York and London are now furious at Mr. Thiam, not just for cutting their pay but also because they resent his blaming them for the $6 billion in losses that the firm has suffered on his watch. Across Europe, banking giants like Barclays, Deutsche Bank, UBS and Royal Bank of Scotland have, to varying degrees, moved away from traditional investment banking activities because of increased regulation and volatile markets. Sluggish growth in large European economies — not to mention the remarkable phenomenon of negative interest rates — have not helped matters, either. But what makes the situation at Credit Suisse stand out is that Mr. Thiam appears to have done little to cloak his disdain for these activities. The question is not whether Mr. Thiam is right to grab power and capital from these declining businesses but whether his blunt, domineering style as a change agent will end up alienating bankers instead of winning them over. “It is never easy to tell people that whole parts of the business that have put bread on their table and bought them a second house have become uneconomic,” said Guy Moszkowski, a longtime securities analyst at Autonomous Research. By any measure, Mr. Thiam is an unconventional choice to lead an investment bank. Born to a prominent family in Ivory Coast, he cut short a career at McKinsey Company in Paris in 1994 to join a government in his home country as a top banker and minister. Following a military coup in 1999, Mr. Thiam returned to McKinsey, and in 2009, he was named chief executive of Prudential, the British insurance conglomerate — becoming the first African to head a major listed company in Britain. and snugly tailored, Mr. Thiam has an air about him of not suffering fools. He had a successful run at Prudential (no relation to an American company with a similar name) overcoming an uproar following a failed bid to buy the Asian operations of the American International Group. Along the way, he became one of London’s more celebrated executives and a regular on the circuit of global . That he has not bent to the complaints of bankers and traders in unprofitable businesses should not come as a surprise. “There needs to be a cultural change,” he said in a televised interview in March, in which he argued that bankers were pursuing risky trades to justify their high pay. “A lot of the problems in the investment bank are that people are trying to generate revenue at all costs. ” In turn, deal makers in London and New York, who have seen their bonuses slashed by nearly 40 percent, are not hiding their dislike of the man. More than any other bank on Wall Street, Credit Suisse restricts the cash portion of its bonuses, allocating large chunks in company stock, which has halved in value. So when their new chief executive gave a speech in May and said that Credit Suisse’s stock price “reflected reality,” bankers, especially the many who have worked at the firm for decades, could not believe it. On Credit Suisse’s newly renovated trading floor in New York, several bankers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, grumbled that Mr. Thiam had “lost the building,” which is Wall Street parlance for chief executives who no longer command the respect of their traders. And when he has appeared on television in recent months, employees loudly vented their frustrations at the screen, according those bankers, who witnessed the events but were not authorized to speak publicly. Mr. Thiam was hailed during his first visit to the trading floor in New York last year, but the reception during a more recent appearance was chillier, said two employees who were on the floor during his visits but were not authorized to speak publicly. In particular, many at Credit Suisse find Mr. Thiam’s personal style to be jarring at a time when thousands are being laid off and the stock is trading at a multiyear low. This is particularly true when compared with Brady W. Dougan, his predecessor: Mr. Thiam’s own dealings with the media are handled by a British firm, Powerscourt. He enjoys a robust social life and has been seen doing the rounds at clubs in London and Davos, Switzerland. And he recently purchased a luxury home in Herrliberg, an exclusive lakeside enclave in Zurich. To be sure, analysts agree that Credit Suisse can no longer rely on trading derivatives with firms like Deutsche Bank as a profit center. Instead, Mr. Thiam is encouraging his deal makers to support the firm’s private bankers in Asia, by providing loans to magnates in Indonesia or helping billionaire clients in China with initial public offerings. Mr. Thiam is clearly enamored with the prospect of tapping growth markets in emerging economies. He has been to China and broader Asia at least four times in his new capacity, and his business cards carry a Mandarin translation on the back. Mr. Thiam’s defenders say that with the future of Credit Suisse in doubt, he has no choice but to make these painful changes and that resistance from traders and bankers should not deter him. And it is also true that wealth managers in Switzerland and Asia, where Mr. Thiam is adding resources, are embracing the new strategy. Following last year’s losses, he also asked his board for a 40 percent cut in his bonus, taking in $4. 5 million for the six months he worked last year. To date, the Credit Suisse board appears to be standing with Mr. Thiam. Indeed, having had two Wall Street chiefs since 2001, the board clearly believes that only a prominent nonbanker like Mr. Thiam can wean the firm off a line of business that has so long defined it. Nevertheless, directors were not happy with his televised comments in March when Mr. Thiam suggested that traders at the bank were hiding losses from him. Mr. Thiam quickly corrected himself at a conference that same day and said no limits were breached, though not without taking another dig at his traders by questioning their judgment. Mr. Thiam also called these traders and offered what a spokeswoman for the bank said was a “clarification” of his remarks. “The board is 100 percent behind the strategy, Tidjane and the executive board,” said Richard E. Thornburgh, a former Credit Suisse banker with 30 years of experience at the firm who is now chairman of the board’s risk committee. With morale in New York at a low point, Mr. Thornburgh has had recent meetings with top bankers and traders, hearing them out and urging them to remain focused on their clients. For many, though, this is easier said than done. It is unusual, after all, for an incoming chief executive to be so publicly critical of employees responsible for a quarter of a firm’s revenue. That is particularly true on Wall Street, where punctured vanities can quickly harm a firm, as productive bankers head for the exits in droves. Over the last six months, at least 18 bankers and traders have left the firm, with many of these coming from Credit Suisse’s once prestigious technology unit in San Francisco. The culture clash at Credit Suisse recalls a similar dispute at Morgan Stanley a decade ago. Like Mr. Thiam, Philip J. Purcell was a former whiz kid consultant from McKinsey who preferred slow and steady brokers over bankers with big egos and even bigger paychecks. A uprising forced Mr. Purcell’s departure, since power on Wall Street was then still in the hands of deal makers and traders. With wealth managers now ascendant, Mr. Thiam seems willing to accept the wounded cries of his own bankers as a painful necessity if his grand plan is to succeed. “Is there a vision. Is there a direction?” Mr. Thiam asked aloud last year in a speech introducing his strategy. “The Germans say that the horrible end is better than horror without end. ”

0fake

THE ROBBING OF INNOCENCE: 12 Yr Old Students Given CDC Survey About Transgender, Gay And Oral Sex

The left believes these are all perfectly acceptable topics to discuss with our young children. Whatever you do, just don t mention God!A public hearing is taking place Wednesday morning in the Massachusetts State House to look into a controversial sex survey given to middle school and high school students.Developed by the Centers for Disease Control and called the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, the survey asks students as young as 12 a series of very personal and highly ideological questions.The survey asks students if they are homosexual and if they are transgender. It also asks if they have had oral or anal sex and if they have performed such acts with up to six people.Whether or not they have carried a gun, smoked cigarettes, consumed alcohol and how much also appear on the questionnaire, as well as whether they have taken drugs, such as OxyContin, Percocet, and Vicodin. It asks how often their guardian uses a seat belt, if the youngster has a sexually transmitted disease, and where they sleep.The group MassResistance says the survey is psychologically distorting and will lead the child to think he is abnormal if he is not doing it all. The group stated that having children reveal personal issues about themselves and their family can have emotional consequences. They also complain that the survey results are used by radical groups from Planned Parenthood to LGBT groups to persuade politicians to give more taxpayer money [to] these groups. Though students fill out the survey anonymously, MassResistance warns that they are administered by the teacher in the classroom and there is often pressure for all kids to participate. The test is given nationally and not without controversy. The Chicago Tribune reported two years ago that a Chicago teacher was reprimanded for telling students they had a constitutional right not to fill out the survey.Via: Breitbart News

1real

Schaeuble to head German parliament, unblocking coalition talks

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany took a first decisive step on Wednesday toward forming a new government when its veteran finance minister, conservative Wolfgang Schaeuble, agreed to become president of the parliament, clearing the way for another party to take his job. Chancellor Angela Merkel will hope that Schaeuble, deeply respected in Germany for helping to steer the euro zone through its debt crisis, can stamp his authority on a fractious Bundestag lower house that will include two more parties after Sunday s federal election. Merkel must assemble Germany s first three-way coalition since the 1950s after her conservatives lost support and a far-right party, the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD), entered parliament for the first time in half a century. In a sign of the challenges ahead, Andrea Nahles, the Social Democrats newly elected parliamentary leader, told reporters her party would hit conservatives squarely in the jaw after four years as junior partner in a Merkel-led grand coalition . Merkel s most realistic coalition option now is a deal with the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP), returning to parliament after a four-year hiatus, and the Greens. But the parties disagree on issues such as energy, Europe and migration, complicating the path to a so-called Jamaica coalition - a reference to the parties colors: black, yellow and green, which are also those of the Jamaican flag. Schaeuble, 75, who emerged as one of Europe s most influential politicians during the euro zone crisis, will bring unprecedented weight to the role of Bundestag president, normally a low-profile position. His willingness to quit as finance minister after eight years in the post makes it easier for the FDP to join a Merkel-led coalition. The FDP, who are as fiscally hawkish as Schaeuble, have said they want his old job. As an outstanding personality Wolfgang Schaeuble possesses a natural authority that is of particular importance in these times, said FDP leader Christian Lindner, himself seen as a likely successor at the finance ministry. Lindner s deputy, Wolfgang Kubicki, another possible candidate for the post, told the RND newspaper chain that Schaeuble s move showed Merkel s openness to a Jamaica coalition. He also underscored his party s call for a shift in fiscal policy. Schaeuble was criticized in southern Europe, especially Greece, for his insistence on tax hikes and spending cuts at a time of deep recession, but is popular at home for balancing the books and presiding over high growth and low unemployment. European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, speaking in Munich, said he did not think Schaeuble s departure would soften the EU s approach to heavily indebted Greece. The austerity measures will be continued by those who carried them out together with Wolfgang Schaeuble, he said. The Free Democrats, with a voter support base among Germany s small and medium-sized businesses, are as committed to budgetary discipline as Schaeuble but less pro-European, meaning Wednesday s news drew a mixed reception from the euro zone. I don t think there will be radical changes in German economic policy if the FDP replaces him, said one official close to euro zone policy-making. The FDP are also hardliners on deficits. But another euro zone official said the euro zone was losing one of the most pro-European politicians I know and instead getting a party markedly cooler on political integration. Italian Finance Minister Pier Carlo Padoan told the Handelsblatt newspaper he would miss Schaeuble s steady hand. Wolfgang Schaeuble was a loyal discussion partner, serious, competent and also a good friend, he said. Merkel emerged from Sunday s election a weakened figure after her conservatives, still the largest bloc in the Bundestag, bled support to the AfD. But the exit of Schaeuble, the most powerful counterweight to the long-serving chancellor, could paradoxically strengthen her position. As Bundestag president, Schaeuble will not be involved in coalition negotiations, removing one strong-minded negotiator from the table and potentially giving Merkel a freer hand. Coalition negotiations will only begin in earnest after Oct. 15, when the conservatives hope to wrest power from the Social Democrats in a state election in Lower Saxony. By law, the new parliament must convene for its first session 30 days after the election, so by Oct. 24 at the latest.

0fake

At U.S.-China summit, Trump presses Xi on trade, North Korea; progress cited

PALM BEACH, Fla. (Reuters) - President Donald Trump pressed Chinese President Xi Jinping to do more to curb North Korea’s nuclear program and help reduce the gaping U.S. trade deficit with Beijing in talks on Friday, even as he toned down the strident anti-China rhetoric of his election campaign. Trump spoke publicly of progress on a range of issues in his first U.S.-China summit – as did several of his top aides – but they provided few concrete specifics other than China’s agreement to work together to narrow disagreements and find common ground for cooperation. As the two leaders wrapped up a Florida summit overshadowed by U.S. missile strikes in Syria overnight, Xi joined Trump in stressing the positive mood of the meetings while papering over deep differences that have caused friction between the world’s two biggest economies. Trump’s aides insisted he had made good on his pledge to raise concerns about China’s trade practices and said there was some headway, with Xi agreeing to a 100-day plan for trade talks aimed at boosting U.S. exports and reducing China’s trade surplus with the United States. Speaking after the two-day summit at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson also said that Xi had agreed to increased cooperation in reining in North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs – though he did not offer any new formula for cracking Pyongyang’s defiant attitude. Trump had promised during the campaign to stop what he called the theft of American jobs by China. Many blue-collar workers helped propel him to his unexpected election victory on Nov. 8 and Trump is under pressure to deliver for them. The Republican president tweeted last week that the United States could no longer tolerate massive trade deficits and job losses and that his meeting with Xi “will be a very difficult one.” On Friday, the unpredictable Trump not only set a different tone but also avoided any public lapses in protocol that Chinese officials had feared could embarrass their leader. “We have made tremendous progress in our relationship with China,” Trump told reporters as the two delegations met around tables flanked by large U.S. and Chinese flags. “We will be making additional progress. The relationship developed by President Xi and myself I think is outstanding. “And I believe lots of very potentially bad problems will be going away,” he added, without providing details. Xi also spoke in mostly positive terms. “We have engaged in deeper understanding, and have built a trust,” he said. “I believe we will keep developing in a stable way to form friendly relations ... For the peace and stability of the world, we will also fulfill our historical responsibility.” “Well, I agree with you 100 percent,” Trump replied. China’s official Xinhua news agency said Xi had encouraged the United States to take part in the “One Belt, One Road” plan, Xi’s signature foreign policy imitative aimed at infrastructure development across Asia, Africa and Europe, seen in some policy circles as a partial answer to the pivot to Asia strategy of Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama. Xi also hailed military to military exchanges and said China and the United States should “make good use of the dialogue mechanism to be established between the two countries’ joint staffs of the armed forces”, although Xinhua did not give further details. Chinese state media on Saturday cheered the meeting as one that showed the world that confrontation between the two powers was not inevitable and established the tone for the development of U.S.-China relations. But in a sign that rough spots remained, Tillerson afterwards described the discussions as “very frank and candid.” “President Trump and President Xi agreed to work in concert to expand areas of cooperation while managing differences based on mutual respect,” he said. After the meeting, Trump took Xi on a walk around the manicured grounds of his lavish Spanish-style complex. Trump could be seen chatting and gesturing to Xi, who did the same. Tillerson said Trump had accepted Xi’s invitation to visit China and that they also agreed to upgrade a U.S.-China dialogue by putting the two presidents at the head of the forum. U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said the Chinese had expressed an interest in reducing China’s trade surplus as a way of controlling their own inflation. “That’s the first time I’ve heard them say that in a bilateral context,” he said. Ross declined to say whether the United States was ready to designate China a currency manipulator, however, referring to an upcoming report in which that issue would be addressed. Although Trump during the presidential election campaign had pledged to label China a currency manipulator on the first day of his administration, he has refrained from doing so. The highly anticipated U.S.-China summit was upstaged by U.S. missile strikes overnight against a Syrian air base from which Trump said a deadly chemical weapon attack had been launched earlier in the week. It was the first direct U.S. assault on the Russian-backed government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in six years of civil war. The swift action in Syria could be interpreted as a signal especially to defiant nuclear-armed North Korea – and by extension, its ally China – as well as other countries like Iran and Russia of Trump’s willingness to use military force. North Korea is developing missiles capable of hitting the United States. Tillerson said Xi agreed with Trump that North Korea’s nuclear advances had reached a “very serious stage.” He said Trump also raised U.S.concerns about China’s activities in the South China Sea. Beijing is building and fortifying islands in pursuit of expansive territorial claims in the strategic waterway.

0fake

Clinton extends lead over Trump to 7 points: Reuters/Ipsos

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s lead over Republican rival Donald Trump increased to more than 7 percentage points in a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Tuesday, from less than 3 points on Thursday. The shift came as Trump struggled to reset his campaign following a stretch of controversies. About 42 percent of likely voters favored Clinton and about 35 percent preferred Trump, according to the Aug. 4-8 online poll of 1,152 likely voters, which had a credibility interval of plus or minus 3 percentage points. The others would either pick another candidate, would not vote, or “don’t know/refused.” The results reflected a decline in support for Trump, rather than a boost for Clinton: In last Thursday’s poll, 42 percent of likely voters favored Clinton and about 39 percent favored Trump. Among registered voters over the same period, Clinton held a lead of nearly 13 percentage points, up from about 5 percentage points on Thursday, according to the poll. The five-day survey concluded on a mixed day for the Trump campaign. After squabbles last week with party leaders and the parents of a Muslim American soldier killed in Iraq, Trump sought to turn the page with a speech outlining an economic platform of tax breaks and regulatory rollbacks. But in what was surely unwelcome news for Trump’s campaign, 50 heavyweight Republican national security officials, in a letter published on Monday, said that Trump would be “the most reckless president in American history.” Trump hit back, saying the signatories “deserve the blame for making the world such a dangerous place.” Trump faced more dissent within his party on Monday. A former CIA officer, Evan McMullin, announced he would run as an independent alternative to Trump for conservative Republicans, and Republican Senator Susan Collins said she would not vote for Trump. In a separate Reuters/Ipsos survey that gave respondents the option to choose from Clinton, Trump, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein, Clinton leads Trump by about 6 percentage points. Of the alternative party candidates, Johnson came in third with nearly 8 percentage points, up from 6 points on Thursday. Stein has about 2 percentage points. The Aug. 4-8 survey of 1,154 likely voters had a credibility interval of 3 percentage points. McMullin was not an option in the poll.

0fake

JOE BIDEN’S SHOCKING ANNOUNCEMENT: “What the hell, man?” [Video]

VP Joe Biden: Yeah, I m going to run in 2020. Reporter: For what? Biden: For president! What the hell, man? https://t.co/fsRl25AD12 pic.twitter.com/GMco1PkJiL CNN (@CNN) December 6, 2016

1real

Comment une petite fille russe de 4 ans a appris à parler 7 langues

langues , enfants En octobre dernier, Bella est devenue célèbre du jour au lendemain grâce au projet Personnes extraordinaires présenté par la chaîne de télévision Rossiya 1. La vidéo dans laquelle la petite fille répond aux questions, chante des chansons et parle dans plusieurs langues a suscité un grand intérêt sur les réseaux sociaux. « Je me sens stupide par rapport à cet enfant » , écrivaient les internautes dans les commentaires. Ioulia Deviatkina, la mère de Bella, affirme que sa fille n’est pas un enfant prodige, ses parents accordant simplement beaucoup d’attention à son développement. « Les enfants n’ont pas forcément besoin de parler sept langues, mais chaque petit est capable de maîtriser deux ou trois langues » , assure Ioulia. Les parents de Bella sont conscients que dans la vraie vie, la petite fille n’utilisera pas les sept langues activement : c’est tout simplement impossible. « Quand elle ira à l’école, nous nous concentrerons sur l’anglais, le français et le chinois » , précise la mère de la petite fille. « Nous n’avons pas peur que Bella s’ennuie en classe non plus. Elle possède les connaissances obligatoires pour tout enfant de quatre ans. Simplement, elle est capable de parler sur ces sujets « enfantins » dans plusieurs langues différentes » . Le gazouillis en français La mère de la petite fille est linguiste de formation et enseigne l’anglais aux enfants depuis sept ans. Son père travaille à l’Institut de recherche Radio. C’est une famille de classe moyenne. Cependant, pour les parents de Bella, le développement de leur fille est l’investissement le plus important. Окт 18 2016 в 3:35 PDT Initialement, les parents de Bella voulaient qu’elle parle couramment l’anglais. Ainsi, dès la naissance, sa mère lui parlait en deux langues, les alternant jour après jour. Elle veillait à ce que les langues ne se mélangent pas et interdisait à sa fille d’utiliser des mots russes dans les conversations en anglais. Quand Bella a eu 10 mois, ses parents ont rajouté le français. Elle ne savait pas parler, mais pouvait montrer du doigt les objets nommés par les adultes. Lire aussi : De jeunes mères russes racontent comment leur enfant a bouleversé leur vie Bella a appris à lire avant de commencer à parler. Dès l’âge de cinq mois, ses parents lui apprenaient à lire grâces à des cartes spéciales. Par exemple, quand on montrait à Bella, âgée de neuf mois, le mot « main » en russe ou en anglais, elle montrait sa main. Avant l’âge d’un an, la petite fille a appris 60 de ces cartes avec ses parents. Elle a commencéà lire couramment à l’âge de deux ans. Dessins animés en chinois À deux ans, Bella savait parler avec des phrases courtes et lire avec aisance dans trois langues. Avant l’âge de trois ans, ses parents ont rajouté le chinois au « programme » . Ioulia raconte que la petite fille montrait un grand intérêt pour la nouvelle langue. Elle demandait même qu’on lui mette des dessins animés en chinois . Окт 5 2016 в 5:26 PDT À l’âge de 3 ans et 2 mois, la petite Bella étudiait volontiers l’espagnol et l’allemand, mais aussi la danse, le violon et le chant . Puis, on a rajouté l’arabe. Bella se promène, joue à cache-cache et lit des livres pour enfants, mais elle le fait en plusieurs langues différentes. Tous ses cours se déroulent sous forme de jeu. Ses parents organisent des voyages ludiques avec des locuteurs natifs, elle fréquente un club de théâtre en anglais, apprend le dessin en français, la danse en espagnol et suit des cours de patinage avec un locuteur allemand. Par ailleurs, ses parents lui organisent régulièrement des cours collectifs avec des amis qui sont également élevés dans un milieu multilingue. Lire aussi : Le russe, cinquième langue dans les écoles de l’UE Outil de développement du cerveau Les chercheurs confirment que la capacitéà parler plusieurs langues et de passer de l’une à l’autre dépend de l’interaction entre différentes zones du cerveau. Elles se mettent en marche en fonction des caractéristiques phonétiques de la langue, de son système grammatical, de l’imagerie linguistique et même de la tonalité de la prononciation. « Chaque nouvelle expérience se reflète dans le cerveau par l’émergence de connexions nerveuses. L’hippocampe, responsable de la mémoire, stimule la croissance de nouveaux neurones. Le volume de certaines zones du cerveau croît littéralement » , explique la psychologue Tatiana Diatchenko. Окт 16 2016 в 1:18 PDT « Le multilinguisme a une influence positive sur le développement général de l’enfant, même s’il peut provoquer un retard du développement du langage à cette étape, par rapport aux enfants qui n’apprennent qu’une seule langue » , explique Kira Ivanonva, spécialiste de l’Institut de recherches linguistiques auprès de l’Académie russe des sciences. Cependant, un apprentissage précoce ne garantit pas que l’enfant parlera couramment la langue plus tard. « Je connais une mère qui ne parlait qu’anglais avec son enfant à partir de l’âge de trois ans. Aujourd’hui, ce petit n’est même pas capable de maîtriser le programme d’une école normale, non-spécialisée » , raconte Maria Molina, chercheuse à l’Institut de linguistique auprès de l’Académie russe des sciences. Lire aussi :

1real

Emboldened NRA Threatens New York Times: ‘We’re Coming For You’ (VIDEO)

The NRA has a new favorite toy, but there are no bullets involved except maybe the bullet points they include in their scripts. Dana Loesch has transformed herself from useful Fox News idiot to darling of the Second Amendment, and the NRA is more than happy to put her stern but beautiful face on camera.Earlier this year, Loesch and the NRA put out a video recruiting ad they called The Clenched Fist of Truth. It accused the left of assassinating real news and using wedge issues like homophobia, racism, and sexism to stifle the views of conservative Americans. In the video, schoolchildren are depicted on a playground just before Loesch says they re being indoctrinated to believe Trump is another Hitler. In short, it s disgusting. Civil rights activist DeRay McKesson summed it up:This NRA ad is an open call to violence to protect white supremacy. If I made a video like this, I'd be in jail. pic.twitter.com/LD65yMUMVn deray mckesson (@deray) June 29, 2017But the backlash was short-lived, and in an environment as rich with news as the Trump era, it was quickly forgotten, despite its gross, dangerous message.Now Dana and the NRA are back with a new ad, equally violent, this time aimed at the New York Times. Loesch carefully phrases her threats as a shot across the proverbial bow of the Times, so as to avoid being accused of outright incitement. But the accusations in the video mirror perfectly the paranoia, suspicion, and resentment of Trump fans who want to believe that news they don t like is fake. And the final phrase in the video We re coming for you is as menacing as anything else the NRA has done.In a near-derailing of the conversation, a few pundits misheard Loesch s use of the word Fisk (a verb-ing of the last name of a writer considered easily debunked by right-wingers who disagree with him), thinking instead that she had said fist. If that seems like a silly thing to get hung up on, the context clears it up:We re going to fisk the New York Times and find out just what deep rich means to this old gray hag.If you thought that said fist, the meaning is changed considerably. Their mistake wasn t just one of hearing, though the tweet from the NRA accompanying the video uses the hashtag #ClenchedFistOfTruth. The mistake is understandable. Loesch didn t think so: She blew up at a few notable tweeters who made the error.The new, Orwellian video says, in part:We ve had it with your constant protection of your Democrat overlords, your refusal to acknowledge any truth that upsets the fragile construct that you believe is real life.Somebody is confused about what s real and what s not and it s not the New York Times.Watch the video here:.@DLoesch has a message for the @nytimes: We're coming for you. One non-#fakenews story is not enough. #NRA #ClenchedFistofTruth pic.twitter.com/Hm1QkJi5Tp NRATV (@NRATV) August 3, 2017Featured image via Alex Wong/Getty Images

1real

Noam Chomsky GOES OFF On Donald Trump: ‘He’s A CLOWN!’ (VIDEO)

It s no secret that world-renowned political theorist Noam Chomsky does NOT want Donald Trump in the White House, and thinks it s an absolute tragedy that the presumptive Republican nominee has even managed to get as far as he has.In an interview with Art Is Power, the author and MIT professor criticized The Donald for using generalized anger and his racist white supporters fear of becoming a minority to his advantage, knowing full well that it was a strategy that would work in the polls. Chomsky also likened Trump s hateful rhetoric to Adolf Hitler as he explained Trump s formula for success: So every time Trump makes a nasty comment about whoever, his popularity goes up. Because it s based on hate, you know, hate and fear. And it s unfortunately kind of reminiscent of something unpleasant: Germany, not many years ago. Chomsky pointed out how interesting this year s presidential primaries had been not in a good way and used the business mogul as a prime example. He s a clown literally, he could be in the circus. He s getting huge support from people who are angry at everything. Mostly white males. Working-class, middle-class, poor white males. And their wives and traditional families. They are furious about everything. In his analysis of Trump s campaign, Chomsky explained that all the disgraced candidate had done was tap into America s nativism. In the past, Americans had been worried about being replaced by Germans or Irish immigrants. All Trump did was change the words to make his racist supporters scared of Muslims and Mexican immigrants and he did a great job fear mongering and relentlessly attacking those specific minorities to achieve his goals.You can watch Chomsky rip Trump below:Chomsky has expressed his disgust over the presidential candidate before, when he called the GOP the most dangerous organization in human history , criticizing it for creating the kind of hostile, extremist political environment that would allow a joker like Trump to rise.Featured image via William B. Plowman and Spencer Platt / Getty Images

1real

5 Ways The Media Responded With Butthurt To Donald Trump’s Victory

The media doesn’t even try to hide its shameless pro-Socialist bias these days. Since nobody really pays attention to them anymore, you might have missed some of the more entertaining butthurt spouted by shameless propagandists posing as journalists. 2016 election night coverage on the propaganda news channels is a lesson in hilarity when examining the reaction of lamestream media talking heads. What is most entertaining about Trump’s ascendancy to the Oval Office is that it was totally unexpected, catching cocksure Marxists at CNN and other alphabet channels completely off guard. Let’s go over some of the more entertaining reactions last Tuesday. 5. Hillary Shill Martha Raddatz Breaks Down In Tears Over at ABC, the wrinkled old Hillary shill Martha Raddatz was at a loss for words as she attempted to perform an off the cuff hamster rationalization to fellow Clinton operative George Staphylococcus, explaining why The Bitch lost the election. Raddatz looked like her mother just died as victory turned into defeat for the criminal Hillary Clinton. She’s sure to be moving from a pack of smokes a day to two packs a day as the reality of the election continues to settle into her pea brain over the next 4 years. Her tears say more than her boilerplate language ever could. 4. Bernstein Plays The Race Card To the mainstream media, white people voting in accordance with their own self-interest is racist. In fact, white people acting in any other manner than total subservience is racist to CNN. Washington Post “journalist” Carl Bernstein even went so far as to say Trump’s election is “tragic and dangerous” as despondent and quite possibly drugged CNN propagandists looked on. Bernstein seemed most upset about Trump’s immigration policy proposals, in which Mexico will no longer be able to flagrantly let its citizens violate U.S. immigration law. Bernstein completely forgot the racism white people have endured all year long at the hands of Black Lives Matter, La Raza and other black and brown supremacist groups. 3. Chris Matthews Goes Into Hamster Rationalization Mode Hamster rationalizations are usually reserved for women, but effeminate, low-T manlets like Chris Matthews also have them. His first spin of the hamster wheel makes him say Hillary won the debates. She didn’t. Then he says she had the best ad campaign. Nobody believes advertising or anything you say, anymore Chris. Then Matthews says she had the best ground game. She might have, but she was a terrible candidate. The half-man, half-alligator James Carville looked ready to give Chris a hug as the reality of Hillary’s defeat began to settle in on MSNBC. 2. The Racist Van Jones Whines About White People Van Jones looked like he needed a change of underwear as he fell back on tired, old leftist talking points from the 1960s about the evil white male —especially white males that haven’t been turned into geldings. He then goes on with an emotional overreaction to say families will be afraid to have breakfast the next day because whitey got back into office. LMFAO. Really, dude? He then says immigrants are afraid now that Trump is going to be President. No Van, immigrants aren’t afraid. Illegal hordes who figuratively if not literally say “Fuck you!” to U.S. immigration law are afraid, as they should be. Jones then goes on to make a supremely ironic quote as he talks about a so-called white-lash: He says Trump’s campaign was based on “Throwing away some of us to appeal more deeply to others.” Umm, isn’t that what the entire platform of the Democratic party is, Van? Throwing away, nay, crucifying white men to appeal more deeply to others ? Your entire career is based on just that, Mr. Jones. 1. CBS Does A Mea Culpa CBS published an article admitting how badly the press is biased CBS was so stunned it did a full mea culpa on the network’s shoddy coverage of the 2016 election. This stunning article entitled “The Unbearable Smugness of the Press” needed to be written 10 years ago. Better late than never. CBS actually echoed what we in the manosphere and alt-right have been saying since day one with the Op-Ed piece. This is all symptomatic of modern journalism’s great moral and intellectual failing: its unbearable smugness . Had Hillary Clinton won, there’d be a winking “we did it” feeling in the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic. The Eyeball network even admitted the contempt the network has for men like us. So much for that. The audience for our glib analysis and contempt for much of the electorate, it turned out, was rather limited. This was particularly true when it came to voters, the ones who turned out by the millions to deliver not only a rebuke to the political system but also the people who cover it. Trump knew what he was doing when he invited his crowds to jeer and hiss the reporters covering him. They hate us, and have for some time. And can you blame them? Journalists love mocking Trump supporters. We insult their appearances. We dismiss them as racists and sexists. We emote on Twitter about how this or that comment or policy makes us feel one way or the other, and yet we reject their feelings as invalid. Damn. At least some people over there know why we hate them. (That includes this former mainstream media news anchor who defected!) Shameless Activism Got Marxism? It’s the guiding philosophy of the alphabet channels Anyone who has the capacity to perform an iota of critical thinking knows the mainstream media is NOT on the side of the average American. It hates and seethes at traditionalists and works to tear down every institution of Western civilization while attempting to impale the most hated of creatures on this planet, the Evil White Male. The rebuke of a sorry candidate like Hillary when the socialist shills thought she was a shoe-in caught the smug son of a bitches off guard. Their reactions are priceless, and need to be documented and remembered. These reactions are undeniable proof that blogs like Return Of Kings and web sites like Breitbart and Drudge are sorely needed, indispensable resources in this day and age. We have not been getting the truth from media for generations. And now, as alternative voices appear, the rift between the two versions of reality grows wider and deeper. The once mainstream media have become nothing but shameless activists for New World Order socialism. The election night “horror show” only solidifies this point. We should be proud to be activists pushing our own agenda, if nothing else to balance the scales. The media are NOT friends of the American public. Ultimately, the tired old Socialist media must be dismantled in order for freedom and traditionalism to survive . Read More: Did The Anti-Donald Trump Riot In Chicago Help Trump Cruise To Victory On Tuesday?

1real

Iran, Russia and Turkey Agree to Enforce Syria Cease-Fire, but Don’t Explain How - The New York Times

ASTANA, Kazakhstan — Two days of talks over the Syrian civil war concluded on Tuesday with an agreement by Iran, Russia and Turkey to enforce a fragile partial . But neither the Syrian government nor the rebel fighters — who briefly met face to face for the first time in nearly six years of war — signed the agreement. While the three powers agreed to establish a mechanism to monitor and enforce the nearly they did not say what the mechanism should look like, deferring that issue for now. The statement, at least on paper, brought Iran on board with recent new cooperation between Russia and Turkey, and it strengthened Turkey’s commitment to separating rebel groups it supports from jihadist groups. But representatives of the Syrian delegations — both from the government and opposition — immediately expressed reservations. They emphasized that they had not signed on to a document that had been brokered by the main sponsors of the warring sides in the country, but not by Syrians themselves. Russia is the most powerful backer of the Syrian government, which is also closely allied with Iran, while Turkey has been among the main supporters of rebel groups. Despite the supposed new clashes were reported in Wadi Barada, a besieged area and source for most of the drinking water for Damascus, the Syrian capital. Water supplies have been cut off for weeks, and the government and rebel sides have blamed each other. The agreement among Iran, Russia and Turkey was announced a day after the Syrian factions exchanged harsh words at the start of the talks, held in Astana, capital of Kazakhstan. A main result of the meeting was to firm up Russia’s growing role in the Syria diplomacy, establishing the Astana talks as a part of, but not a replacement for, the Geneva process that has been spearheaded for years by the United Nations and the United States. The new document said meetings in Astana, a capital five time zones east of Geneva with close ties to Turkey but firmly within Russia’s sphere of influence, would be a forum to discuss specific issues that come up within the Geneva framework. There had been tentative hopes among some rebel negotiators that Russia might be ready to take on a more active role in seeking a political compromise. But there was no concrete progress on political issues, which were excluded from the narrowly focused talks. Iran, Russia and Turkey affirmed their commitment “to the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic as a multiethnic, multireligious, nonsectarian and democratic state,” and their conviction “that there is no military solution to the Syrian conflict and that it can only be solved through a political process. ” Those sentiments echo principles that the United Nations Security Council has laid out. The countries also reiterated “their determination to fight jointly” against the Islamic State and against Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, formerly known as the Nusra Front, pledging to “separate” them from armed opposition groups. That could be an important provision, since the Syrian government led by President Bashar tends to classify all the opposition fighters indiscriminately as terrorist groups, and many have been unable or unwilling to separate themselves from forces of the former Nusra Front on the battlefield. The agreement did not specify how such a separation might occur, however. In Astana, government representatives said that they still considered the rebel fighters to be terrorists and were waiting to see if Turkey followed through on the agreement. Rebel negotiators said the meetings had given them hope that Russia might be open to hearing rebel concerns and become more willing to press the Syrian government for a political resolution, but such optimism did not extend to Iran, which had stuck to a harder line. Staffan de Mistura, the special United Nations envoy for Syria who had been invited to the Astana talks, said in an interview after the joint statement was issued that in the interactions he had watched between Russia and opposition commanders, “The body language was of people who were seriously talking to each other and taking each other seriously. ” At the same time, rebels are concerned that the new agreement puts Iran in the position of taking part in a that its own militias have been accused of violating. The next round of talks between the Syrian government and the opposition will occur on Feb. 8 in Geneva, according to the announcement by the three countries. But diplomats in Astana said it was unclear if that date was firm. Bashar the Syrian ambassador to the United Nations who led his government’s delegation to the talks in Astana, said an offensive by the government and its allied troops would continue, arguing that “terrorist groups” controlled Ain a town in Wadi Barada. Residents in Wadi Barada say that some fighters from the former Nusra Front are present there, but that they are at most a tiny minority. Also on Tuesday, United Nations officials appealed for more than $8 billion in funding this year to help millions of people displaced by the Syrian conflict. The United Nations refugee agency is asking for $4. 6 billion to help at least 4. 8 million people who have fled abroad, mainly to Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, and around $3. 4 billion for an estimated 13. 5 million internally displaced Syrians.

0fake

BREAKING: OBAMA POISED To Exact Revenge On PUTIN With Unprecedented Cyber Attack For Allegedly Exposing Hillary Emails…While Campaigning For Hillary

Putin Tells Russian Army To Prepare For WWWIII With U.S While Obama whines about Trump campaigns for Hillary Is our Community Organizer In Chief actually willing to put our nation s security at risk because he believes Putin is responsible for Hillary s email hacks? What kind of sick, reckless and vengeful clown do we have running our nation? The Obama administration is contemplating an unprecedented cyber covert action against Russia in retaliation for alleged Russian interference in the American presidential election, U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News.Current and former officials with direct knowledge of the situation say the CIA has been asked to deliver options to the White House for a wide-ranging clandestine cyber operation designed to harass and embarrass the Kremlin leadership.The sources did not elaborate on the exact measures the CIA was considering, but said the agency had already begun opening cyber doors, selecting targets and making other preparations for an operation. Former intelligence officers told NBC News that the agency had gathered reams of documents that could expose unsavory tactics by Russian President Vladimir Putin.Vice President Joe Biden told Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd on Friday that we re sending a message to Putin and that it will be at the time of our choosing, and under the circumstances that will have the greatest impact. When asked if the American public will know a message was sent, the vice president replied, Hope not. Retired Admiral James Stavridis told NBC News Cynthia McFadden that the U.S. should attack Russia s ability to censor its internal internet traffic and expose the financial dealings of Putin and his associates. NBC NewsFULL REPORT: @NBCNews has learned the CIA is preparing a major unprecedented cyber-strike against Russia. @CynthiaMcFadden reports pic.twitter.com/MjxKrdL7zS NBC Nightly News (@NBCNightlyNews) October 14, 2016Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a flamboyant veteran lawmaker known for his fiery rhetoric, told Reuters in an interview that Trump was the only person able to de-escalate dangerous tensions between Moscow and Washington.Americans should vote for Donald Trump as president next month or risk being dragged into a nuclear war, according to a Russian ultra-nationalist ally of President Vladimir Putin who likes to compare himself to the U.S. Republican candidate.By contrast, Trump s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton could spark World War Three, said Zhirinovsky, who received a top state award from Putin after his pro-Kremlin Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) came third in Russia s parliamentary election last month.Zhirinovsky s comments coincide with deep disagreements between Washington and Moscow over Syria and Ukraine and after the White House last week accused Russia of a campaign of cyber attacks against Democratic Party organizations.Even as WikiLeaks released another trove of internal documents from Clinton s campaign on Wednesday, Putin insisted his country was not involved in an effort to influence the U.S. presidential election. Via: Reuters

1real

True. Hillary needs a distraction and what better than a real "wag the dog" with Russia.

1real

Trump says Brexit to be 'a great thing', wants quick trade deal with UK

LONDON (Reuters) - U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said that Brexit would turn out to be a great thing and other countries would follow Britain out of the European Union but promised to strike a swift bilateral trade deal with the United Kingdom. Speaking in an interview with The Times of London newspaper five days before his inauguration, Trump described himself as a big fan of Britain and endorsed last year’s vote to leave the European Union. “I think Brexit is going to end up being a great thing,” Trump said. “I’ll tell you, the fact that your pound sterling has gone down? Great. Because business is unbelievable in a lot of parts in the UK.” The June 23 vote took many investors and chief executives by surprise, triggering the deepest political and financial turmoil in Britain since World War Two and the biggest ever one-day fall in sterling against the dollar. Sterling has since fallen further against the U.S. dollar as traders, businesses and investors fret about the type of relationship Britain will have with its biggest single trading partner after it leaves the bloc. Trump’s election campaign seized on the Brexit vote as an example of disillusioned voters rising up against the political establishment, and he forged a friendship with leading Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage - a fierce critic of Prime Minister Theresa May. Trump’s election has raised questions over the future of the so called ‘special relationship’ that has underpinned close British-American ties for decades. But in Sunday’s interview Trump played up his ancestral ties to Britain, saying his Scottish mother was “so proud” of Queen Elizabeth, and said he was eager to get a trade deal done. “We’re gonna work very hard to get it done quickly and done properly. Good for both sides,” Trump said. “I will be meeting with [May]. She’s requesting a meeting and we’ll have a meeting right after I get into the White House ... we’re gonna get something done very quickly.” However, he predicted that more countries would seek to follow Britain’s example and quit the EU. “I believe others will leave,” he said. “If refugees keep pouring into different parts of Europe . . . I think it’s gonna be very hard to keep it together because people are angry about it.” He singled out German Chancellor Angela Merkel - whose open-door policies have allowed about 1.1 million refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere into Germany since mid-2015 - calling her immigration policy a catastrophic mistake.

0fake

Sekulow: Expect ‘Whining Testimony’ from Comey ‘He Needs to ‘Grow up and Act Like an Adult’

Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice joined Breitbart News Daily SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam on Wednesday to discuss the coming testimony of former FBI Director James Comey and the case of Reality Winner, who was arrested for leaking secrets from the National Security Agency. [Said Sekulow on Comey, “He’s not exactly a credible witness,” while pointing out several previous issues with testimony he’s given that has to be corrected later. As for what to expect now, said Sekulow, “You don’t want to be left alone with the President of the United States? Well, that’s why you’re not the FBI director. Grow up and act like an adult. ” “It’s going to be whining testimony,” added Sekulow, saying he’s not sure what the intelligence community is even going to gain from the testimony. Comey is already leaking parts of his testimony and is said to not believe Trump tried to obstruct justice. Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a. m. to 9:00 a. m. Eastern. LISTEN:

0fake

Mayday on the Carolina Queen - The New York Times

The seven fishermen aboard the Carolina Queen III, a scalloping boat that set out from Norfolk, Va. had been at sea for four days when the skies darkened off the coast of the Rockaways. A powerful storm system that had already lashed the East Coast, bringing tornadoes, thunder, lightning, high winds and heavy rains, was barreling down on them. Homes had been flattened, vehicles had been tossed like Tinkertoys and trees had been ripped from their roots. At least seven people had died. The crew knew they were in for nasty weather, but they were scallopers. Weather comes with the job. As night fell on Feb. 24, the winds started to blow across New York City. At 8:45 p. m. a large section of a facade collapsed on Fordham Street in the Bronx. At 9:19, a was blown over on the upper level of the George Washington Bridge. By midnight, there were reports of downed trees and power lines around the region. Off the coast, winds were gusting up to 69 miles an hour, according to data collected by the National Weather Service. The men on the Carolina Queen had a decision to make. One successful scalloping trip can pull in a profit of $500, 000. Each fisherman can make $40, 000 on a good voyage. The crew was fishing, about 30 miles off the coast, as the storm approached. The men decided to steer the vessel closer to shore — past a predetermined demarcation line that would stop the clock on their allotted yearly limit at sea. The Carolina Queen had only 50 bags of scallops — 60 pounds per bag — on ice in the hold. With the scallop season drawing to a close, this trip was the crew’s last chance for a major haul. When the skies cleared, they expected, they would get back to business. But shortly after 2 a. m. on Feb. 25, the vessel, battered by wind and waves, ran aground. Soon, one of its generators failed and the Carolina Queen issued a desperate mayday, setting in motion a harrowing rescue operation. In the next few hours, a Coast Guard boat capsized and Fire Department vessels were unable to reach the stranded scallop boat because of the weather. Ultimately, the Coast Guard decided to undertake a daring airlift operation by a crew dispatched from Atlantic City. “Nothing about this really was routine,” said Deputy Chief George Healy of the New York Fire Department. “This was a very treacherous operation. ” The airmen and women at Coast Guard Air Station Atlantic City keep a goldfish in their “survival shop,” where they gear up before missions. The swimmer, as they call it, is named Ashton, a reference to Ashton Kutcher in his role as a Coast Guard rescue swimmer in the widely mocked, 2006 movie “The Guardian” — and a wry acknowledgment that the Coast Guard is not always accorded the kind of respect reserved for other branches of the military. But the Coast Guard plays a vital role in protecting the nation’s maritime interests. Since it was absorbed into the Department of Homeland Security, combating terrorism has been added to the sprawling mission carried out by its 88, 000 reserve, civilian and auxiliary men and women serving around the world. Despite the expanded responsibilities, its budget has been buffeted in his 2015 State of the Coast Guard Address, Adm. Paul F. Zukunft, the Coast Guard commandant, said 40 percent of the acquisition budget had been slashed over the previous four years. “I’m concerned that aging platforms and crumbling infrastructure continue to hinder mission success,” Admiral Zukunft said. “Today we’re seeing significant increase in demand across all of our daily activities, and it limits our ability to respond to major contingencies. Indeed, we are facing a time like none other in our nearly 225 years of service. ” Air Coast Guard Station Atlantic City, at the William J. Hughes Federal Aviation Administration Technical Center at the Atlantic City International Airport, is the closest air station to New York City. It was formed in 1998 when Coast Guard Air Station Brooklyn and Group Air Station Cape May, New Jersey, were merged. The squadron comprises 10 Dolphin helicopters. Its crews are responsible for covering hundreds of miles of coastline in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia — as well as interior bays and rivers such as Chesapeake Bay, the Delaware and Hudson Rivers and Long Island Sound. Two helicopters are always ready to be airborne within 30 minutes. Lt. Mark Bruno, 31, was the aircraft commander on duty on Feb. 25 when the call came in that a fishing vessel off the coast of the Rockaways was in trouble. At 4:30 a. m. his team was dispatched to New York City. The Dolphin helicopter can fly faster than 160 m. p. h. but it would still take about 45 minutes to reach the Carolina Queen. The helicopter crew members — including Lt. j. g. Maggie Champlin, 32, the Petty Officer Second Class Kensuke Caldwell, 34, the flight mechanic and Petty Officer Third Class Joe 27, the rescue swimmer — took off in darkness shortly before 5 a. m. knowing very little about what they might find. “We knew it was a fishing vessel, and fishing vessels are always tricky,” Lieutenant Bruno said. There are lines and riggings to contend with, and there often is very little room for error, especially when trying to pluck someone off the deck. And it can be more complicated when the vessel is no longer afloat. “Normally, when a boat is on the waves, it has a certain rhythm,” Lieutenant Bruno said. That is not the case when it has run aground. As the crew sped north, it was in communication with the Fire Department, which arrived on the scene shortly before 5 a. m. It was soon clear that this would not be a straightforward operation. The first distress signal to the outside world from the Carolina Queen was an emergency flare that lit up the sky shortly after 4:30 a. m. Aaron Bell, 25, a UPS worker who lives in an apartment near the water on Beach 56th Place in Queens, said it was so windy and foggy “you couldn’t even see the ocean” from the shore. But someone spotted the flare. Chief Healy said the first 911 call came in at 4:42 a. m. Emergency responders were on the scene at 4:47. Chief Healy has 25 years on the job. He has seen all sorts of disasters and is not one for overstatement. The ship was not more than 80 yards from shore. But once contact was made with those on board, it was clear that the ship and its crew were in dire trouble. “We directed the captain and crew to put on exposure suits,” Chief Healy said. “We had a fear that the boat was going to capsize. ” Waves were cresting as high as 14 feet and breaking on the ship. The scallopers were as stranded as they might have been in the open ocean. As the Fire Department was responding, a Coast Guard rescue boat was also racing to the scene. Dispatched by Coast Guard Station Jones Beach, the boat capsized in the rough waters near East Rockaway Inlet before it reached the Carolina Queen. Its crew members had to save themselves, swimming to shore. The team aboard the helicopter learned of that accident as they made their way up the coast. “You get a little nervous hearing that,” Lieutenant Bruno said. “But it was good to know they were safe. ” That part of the incident is still under investigation the Coast Guard declined to answer questions about what might have gone wrong. The Fire Department had rescue boats to deploy, but the seas were so severe that the F. D. N. Y. decided to wait for air support. A Fire Department helicopter, only a short distance away at Floyd Bennett Field, was grounded because of the heavy fog. The crew of the Carolina Queen would have to wait. Scallop fishing may not conjure up the of those catching crabs in the icy waters of the Bering Strait or the exploits of tuna fisherman chronicled on shows like “The Deadliest Catch. ” But the most dangerous fishing grounds in America remain those off the Northeast Coast — more dangerous than the Bering Sea, according to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. From 2000 to 2009, the years covered by the agency’s data, 504 people died while fishing at sea and 124 of them were in the Northeast. The scallop industry had the rate of fatalities: 425 deaths per 100, 000 workers. Among all workers in the United States over the same period, according to the C. D. C. there were four deaths per 100, 000 workers. The size of the crew and the time at sea contribute to the dangers. Drew Minkiewicz, a lawyer who represents the Fisheries Survival Fund, said that since 2010, the number of vessels permitted to fish for scallops has been limited, and with fewer unregistered ships at sea, there have been fewer accidents. The Atlantic sea scallop — Placopecten magellanicus — has been popular since the 1950s, when Norwegian immigrants first scoured the seas south of New Bedford, Mass. The supply could swing between scarcity and plenty, but in the 1980s huge algae blooms known as brown tides appeared several years in a row and threatened to destroy the scallops’ ecosystem on the East Coast. Even after those tides passed, the industry almost did itself in by overfishing. Only after regulations were passed in the 1990s and the industry banded together with the scientific community to improve fishing techniques did the fisheries rebound. Now, scalloping along the Atlantic Coast from Maine to North Carolina is among the most lucrative fishing in the world. In 2014, the catch was estimated to be worth more than $424 million. Most of the ships that fish these waters are registered with the National Marine Fisheries Service, including the Carolina Queen. The ship is owned by the Wells Scallop Company, a family operation that stretches back four generations. Bill Wells, who runs the company, declined to talk about the incident. Through an industry spokesman, he said he wanted to thank both the Coast Guard and the New York City emergency responders and said that the incident had been classified as an accident, with no fault found on the part of the crew and no fines issued against his company. The industry operates under strict guidelines, many aimed at ensuring sustainability of the fisheries. To fish some areas with known scallop beds, a permit is needed, and the haul is capped. fishing, on the other hand, is restricted only by the annual limit. The clock is always ticking. “We get so few days to go out, we have to find every efficiency to maximize our days at sea,” said Joe Gilbert, who owns Empire Fisheries and, as captain of a boat called the Rigulus, is part of the scalloping community. In preparation for the Carolina Queen’s voyage, the crew would have spent days getting ready, buying $3, 000 in groceries, loading more than 20, 000 pounds of ice and prepping the equipment on the vessel. The vessel steamed north from the Chesapeake Bay, traveling 15 hours to reach the coast off New Jersey, where the crew would probably have started fishing. Then the work would begin. It is pretty standard for a crew to work eight hours on and take four hours off, but in reality it often is more like nine hours on and three off. If you are a good sleeper, you are lucky to get two hours’ before heading back on deck. The huge tows scouring the ocean bed for scallops dredge for about 50 minutes and are then hauled up, their catch dumped on deck before the tows are reset and plunged back into the water, a process that can be done in as little as 10 minutes. While the dredge did its work, the crew on duty on the Carolina Queen sorted through the muddy mix of rocks and sand and other flotsam on the ship’s deck, looking for the wavy round shells of the scallops. “The biggest danger is handling the gear on deck,” Mr. Gilbert said. “It is very heavy gear on a pitching deck, and you get a lot of injured feet, injured hands. ” Once the scallops are sorted, according to industry regulations, they must be shucked by hand. The crew spends hours opening the shells and slicing out the abductor muscle of the mollusks — the fat, tasty morsel that winds up on plates at a restaurants like Oceana in Midtown Manhattan, where a plate of sea scallops à la plancha costs as much as $33. A single boat can haul 4, 000 pounds in a day. By the time the Carolina Queen ran aground, it was carrying only around 3, 000 pounds. As the Coast Guard helicopter circled overhead, however, the scallops on ice below deck were not the most pressing concern. It was around 5:30 a. m. “It was definitely a dangerous situation they were in,” Lieutenant Bruno said. “They had lost their generator and were taking on water, and I think that is when they made the decision that they had to come off. ” But how? As the helicopter approached the Rockaways, the Coast Guard, in consultation with the Fire Department on shore, had come up with a plan. By then there were dozens of emergency workers on the beach. Petty Officer the rescue swimmer, would be lowered into the surf to assess the situation, and if all went well, swim each stranded fisherman to shore. The fog was still thick as the helicopter made its first sweeping pass overhead. Circling around a second time, the fog had cleared enough to put Petty Officer into the water. Petty Officer had joined the Coast Guard knowing he wanted to become a rescue swimmer. He had made up his mind after spending a summer working as an ocean lifeguard in Kitty Hawk, N. C. He completed Aviation Survival Technician A School in December 2014 and is now, at 27, a fully qualified rescue swimmer. In the course of his training, he had been part of scores of rescue drills. But he had never drilled on a ship that had run aground. As soon as he splashed down in the churning surf, it was clear that putting the fishermen into the water would not work. “I swam in to shore, where the helicopter picked me up and then subsequently deployed me to the bow of the boat,” he said. “It was really rocking, bouncing back and forth. ” “The ship was listing 45 degrees to port,” he said. “The crew was all dressed in their survival suits when I landed on the bow of the boat. They were very cooperative. Several of them had small black garbage bags filled with personal effects that they asked if they could bring with them. They definitely seemed ready to leave. ” Even if the rescuers had managed to rig some wires from ship to shore, which the Fire Department was prepared to do, the scallopers would have had to leap 25 to 30 feet into the water and then contend with waves more than 12 feet high. “It had looked different from the air, but once I was on the ship it was clear that that plan would not work,” Petty Officer said. The Coast Guard decided to lift each of the seven stranded men from the boat using a rescue basket — a delicate operation. “Water was already in the hull, and the ship was moving in a way separate from the way the ocean was moving,” recalled Petty Officer . Lieutenant Bruno hovered the helicopter some 40 feet above the vessel as Petty Officer loaded the scallopers, one by one, into the basket. And one by one, they were ferried to shore, where the Fire Department was waiting. As morning broke, the helicopter had been airborne for more than two hours, and there were still fishermen on the ship. Fuel was running dangerously low. Time was running out. The seventh man — the captain — wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, was the last to leave the ship. He asked about remaining with the vessel but agreed in the end that it was best to go. “His life being more valuable than a piece of equipment,” Petty Officer noted. As the captain was loaded into the basket, Lieutenant Bruno looked at his fuel gauge. He had four minutes left. With the captain safely deposited on shore and the mission complete, Lieutenant Bruno flew to Floyd Bennett Field and set the helicopter down. All seven fishermen were safe and were transported to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center for observation. None was seriously injured. The ship, too, was salvaged. It is now being repaired at a shipyard in Massachusetts. Even the scallops on board were saved. They were sold to a dealer based in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Petty Officer reflecting on the rescue, said it was both the easiest and the hardest he had ever taken part in. “It was my first,” he said.

0fake

Illinois House passes $5 billion tax package, spending plan

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Illinois’ Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed big, permanent increases in income tax rates and a $36 billion fiscal 2018 spending plan on Sunday with the help of some Republican votes as the cash-strapped state scrambled to stave off a bond rating downgrade to junk. The $5 billion tax package, which passed in a 72-45 vote and drew an immediate veto threat from Republican Governor Bruce Rauner, would boost the personal income tax rate to 4.95 percent from 3.75 percent and the corporate rate to 7 percent from 5.25 percent. It would also close tax loopholes and expand tax credits. The spending plan won passage in a 81-34 vote. Both bills now head to the Democratic-led Senate, which returns to session on Monday, for concurrence votes. The country’s fifth most populous state began an unprecedented third-straight fiscal year on Saturday without a complete budget. A fiscal stalemate between Illinois’ governor and Democrats who control the legislature has pounded the state’s credit ratings to a step above junk and ballooned its unpaid bill backlog to $15 billion. The pair of decisive House votes set Democrats on a collision course with Rauner, who vowed to veto the 32 percent personal income tax hike he pinned to House Speaker Michael Madigan. “The legislature could have passed a no reform budget like this one two years ago,” Rauner said in a statement. “Instead, they allowed Mike Madigan to play his political games, passed phony budgets, racked up our debt and inflicted pain on the most vulnerable.” Rauner has insisted for two years that a budget be coupled with a property tax freeze and legislative term limits, among other things. In order for Rauner to match his tough words with results, he will have to persuade at least two of the 15 House Republicans to switch their yes votes in favor of the tax hike legislation. The measure passed the House with one more vote than the threshold necessary to override a gubernatorial veto. In his own statement after the votes, Madigan praised how Republicans and Democrats together took a “crucial step toward reaching a compromise that ends the budget crisis by passing a fully funded state budget in a bipartisan way.” The tax legislation would give the state a revenue boost to support a full-year budget and start paying down the bill pile that was on track to grow even larger after a federal judge on Friday ordered increased payments on Medicaid provider bills. In giving Democratic supporters the narrow margin to move the legislation to the state Senate, some House Republicans shed tears during debate, predicted their tax votes could topple them politically in next year’s elections and delivered a pointed challenge to Rauner to set aside his budgetary preconditions and do what was right for the state’s fiscal health. “I say to the governor, if these bills pass the House and Senate, the revenue bill and expenditure bill, we will have sent you a balanced budget. Have the courage to do what is right and sign the bills,” said State Representative David Harris, who was among 15 Republicans to side with Democrats. “Bring this madness to an end.” Their defiance came after House Republican Leader Jim Durkin, a Rauner ally, noted the deal was not negotiated with the governor and did not represent “an exercise in good faith,” given that negotiations involving some of the governor’s non-budgetary priorities were shunted to the sidelines.

0fake

AT&T, Time Warner and the Death of Privacy

AT&T, Time Warner and the Death of Privacy By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan AT&T plans to buy Time Warner for $85.4 billion. ( Mark Lennihan / AP ) It has been 140 years since Alexander Graham Bell uttered the first words through his experimental telephone, to his lab assistant: “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you.” His invention transformed human communication, and the world. The company he started grew into a massive monopoly, AT&T. The federal government eventually deemed it too powerful, and broke up the telecom giant in 1982. Well, AT&T is back and some would say on track to become bigger and more powerful than before, announcing plans to acquire Time Warner, the media company, to create one of the largest entertainment and communications conglomerates on the planet. Beyond the threat to competition, the proposed merger—which still must pass regulatory scrutiny—poses significant threats to privacy and the basic freedom to communicate. AT&T is currently No. 10 on the Forbes 500 list of the U.S.‘s highest-grossing companies. If it is allowed to buy Time Warner, No. 99 on the list, it will form an enormous, “vertically integrated” company that controls a vast pool of content and how people access that content. Free Press, the national media policy and activism group, is mobilizing the public to oppose the deal. “This merger would create a media powerhouse unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. AT&T would control mobile and wired internet access, cable channels, movie franchises, a film studio and more,” Candace Clement of Free Press wrote. “That means AT&T would control internet access for hundreds of millions of people and the content they view, enabling it to prioritize its own offerings and use sneaky tricks to undermine net neutrality.” Net neutrality is that essential quality of the internet that makes it so powerful. Columbia University law professor Tim Wu coined the term “net neutrality.” After the Federal Communications Commission approved strong net neutrality rules last year, Wu told us on the Democracy Now! News hour, “There need to be basic rules of the road for the internet, and we’re not going to trust cable and telephone companies to respect freedom of speech or respect new innovators, because of their poor track record.” Millions of citizens weighed in with public comments to the FCC in support of net neutrality, along with groups like Free Press and The Electronic Frontier Foundation. They were joined by titans of the internet like Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Arrayed against this coalition were the telecom and cable companies, the oligopoly of internet service providers that sell internet access to hundreds of millions of Americans. It remains to be seen if AT&T doesn’t in practice break net neutrality rules and create a fast lane for its content and slow down content from its competitors, including the noncommercial sector. Another problem that AT&T presents, that would only be exacerbated by the merger, is the potential to invade the privacy of its millions of customers. In 2006, AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein revealed that the company was secretly sharing all of its customers’ metadata with the National Security Agency. Klein, who installed the fiber-splitting hardware in a secret room at the main AT&T facility in San Francisco, had his whistleblowing allegations confirmed several years later by Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks. While that dragnet surveillance program was supposedly shut down in 2011, a similar surveillance program still exists. It’s called “Project Hemisphere.” It was exposed by The New York Times in 2013, with substantiating documents just revealed this week in The Daily Beast. In “Project Hemisphere,” AT&T sells metadata to law enforcement, under the aegis of the so-called war on drugs. A police agency sends in a request for all the data related to a particular person or telephone number, and, for a major fee and without a subpoena, AT&T delivers a sophisticated data set, that can, according to The Daily Beast, “determine where a target is located, with whom he speaks, and potentially why.” Where you go, what you watch, text and share, with whom you speak, all your internet searches and preferences, all gathered and “vertically integrated,” sold to police and perhaps, in the future, to any number of AT&T’s corporate customers. We can’t know if Alexander Graham Bell envisioned this brave new digital world when he invented the telephone. But this is the future that is fast approaching, unless people rise up and stop this merger. Advertisement

1real

An Architect Who Built His Career on Resuscitating New York Landmarks - The New York Times

Grand Central Terminal, the main building on Ellis Island and the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory at the New York Botanical Garden — all among the greatest New York City landmarks — look better today than they have since their earliest years. Many hands were responsible. John Belle was the common denominator. Mr. Belle, the retired founding partner of Beyer Blinder Belle, an architectural and planning firm that has specialized in preservation, restoration and contextual design, died last week at 84. With his death, the city has lost an architect who conveyed a genial joy in resuscitating the masterworks of his predecessors. That made him an appealingly modest figure in a room full of big architectural egos, since he was at his best when his own interventions were least obvious. New York has also lost a link to the intellectual crucible of the 1960s, when Jane Jacobs and others demanded that architects stop obliterating the past and, instead, take time to understand the many ways in which people were well served by older buildings and neighborhoods. “Preservation is one of the highest forms of good citizenship,” Mr. Belle said on his firm’s website. “As a witness to the aftermath of the urban renewal movement in New York, I was determined to find a different way. ” For her part, Ms. Jacobs held Beyer Blinder Belle in high regard. “They were looking at the fabric of the community,” she said in an interview in 1998. “That was very welcome and very exciting, that there were professionals who were, at last, doing that. ” She added: “A community can’t just come by waving a wand. It has history. History was, to the modernists, an enemy. So this was a very radical realization. And an important one. ” John Belle was born on June 30, 1932, in Cardiff, Wales. His father, Arthur, was a clerk at a Lyons tea shop in Cardiff. His mother, Gladys, was a housewife. Mr. Belle received diplomas from the Portsmouth School of Architecture in England and the Architectural Association in London before moving to the United States in 1959. Once in America, Mr. Belle worked for Josep Lluís Sert and Victor Gruen before starting his own firm in 1968 with Richard L. Blinder and John H. Beyer. Mr. Blinder died in 2006. Mr. Beyer is still active. Mr. Belle’s early work included community planning projects in Manhattan. With the addition of James Marston Fitch to the practice in 1979, Beyer Blinder Belle began moving to the forefront of architecture. The firm attracted wide attention in 1990 with its renovation and restoration of the abandoned Ellis Island immigration station into the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration. The vaulted ceiling in the former Registry Room, made of 28, 258 Guastavino tiles, was cleaned until it looked — as Mr. Belle aptly put it — like . Where modern interventions were needed, they were made as inconspicuous and respectful as possible. When the Haupt Conservatory at the botanical garden in the Bronx was restored in 1997, Herbert Muschamp, who was then the architecture critic at The New York Times, said it could “once again hold its sparkling glass head up high amid the great architectural symbols of New York. ” Though critics have faulted Beyer Blinder Belle’s conservatism, it is worth recalling that the firm was associated in 1998 with the daring architect Santiago Calatrava in what proved to be a losing bid to redesign the James A. Farley Building, also known as the General Post Office, as a Pennsylvania Station annex. Penn Station was not where Mr. Belle was to win his greatest renown. That was at Grand Central. You almost had to have been there in the 1970s and ’80s to believe how far the terminal had fallen into decrepitude, even after its status as a landmark was upheld by the United States Supreme Court in 1978. Travelers shared Grand Central with a large homeless population. “The building was divided into turf claimed by different drug dealers,” Mr. Belle and Maxinne R. Leighton wrote in “Grand Central: Gateway to a Million Lives. ” “Commuters were scared to take trains there at night. Parents warned their children not to use the dangerous bathrooms. ” In 1990, a design and engineering consortium led by Beyer Blinder Belle began work. Their strategic first strike was to demolish a billboard called the Kodak Colorama, which had blocked daylight into the main concourse for 40 years. “It was as if life were being breathed back into the building,” Mr. Belle and Ms. Leighton wrote. “Many commuters stopped in their tracks, speechless and amazed at the change that had so instantly brought back the majesty of the space. ” Their astonishment increased as the concourse ceiling was cleaned by workers on a scaffold that was rolled slowly through the room over a period. The mud brown sky turned a startling teal, with stars, constellations and zodiac signs popping out in contrast. Besides restoring the past, Beyer Blinder Belle made fundamental changes, too, starting with the construction of an entirely new marble staircase to the east balcony. It echoed, but did not replicate, the ornate western staircase. Some preservationists hated the idea. But the firm prevailed before city and state preservation agencies after it uncovered a plan by the original architects, Warren Wetmore, that showed a staircase to the east balcony. That proved, Mr. Belle and Ms. Leighton wrote, that the idea “was not an ploy to have our personal imprint on the building, but that in fact our goal was to complete the original design. ” Mr. Muschamp, the architecture critic, approved. “The new eastern staircase, which threatened to diminish the room’s amplitude, has the opposite effect of magnifying it,” he wrote in 1998, as the $425 million renovation neared completion. He continued, “Even more impressive is the uncovering of the ramps, located just behind the ticket windows, that lead down to the lower level and its fabled Oyster Bar. ” “Beyer Blinder Belle’s greatest accomplishment,” Mr. Muschamp said, “has been to reveal that Grand Central is above all a monument to movement. ” Mr. Belle’s first wife, Wendy Adams Belle, an artist and teacher, died in 1974. His second wife, Anne Belle, a documentary filmmaker, died in 2003. He died on Thursday in Remsenburg, N. Y. where he had a home. He also lived in Manhattan. The cause was Lewy body disease, said his son David Belle, who survives him, along with another son, Sebastian three daughters, Amelia, Fenella and Antonia Chapman and eight grandchildren. Mr. Belle knew his work would never fully be done. “The act of restoring a building to its original state is only half the battle,” he and Ms. Leighton wrote. “The other half is to guard against its denigration throughout its future existence. ”

0fake

American dream, revisited

by Pepe Escobar for the Strategic Culture Foundation Will Trump pull a Brexit times ten? What would it take, beyond WikiLeaks, to bring the Clinton (cash) machine down? Will Hillary win and then declare WWIII against her Russia/Iran/Syria “axis of evil”? Will the Middle East totally explode? Will the pivot to Asia totally implode? Will China be ruling the world by 2025? Amidst so many frenetic fragments of geopolitical reality precariously shored against our ruins, the temptation is irresistible to hark back to the late, great, deconstructionist master Jean Baudrillard. During the post-mod 1980s it was hip to be Baudrillardian to the core; his America , originally published in France in 1986, should still be read today as the definitive metaphysical/geological/cultural Instagram of Exceptionalistan. By the late 1990s, at the end of the millennium, two years before 9/11 – that seminal “before and after” event – Baudrillard was already stressing how we live in a black market maze. Now, it’s a black market paroxysm. Global multitudes are subjected to a black market of work – as in the deregulation of the official market; a black market of unemployment; a black market of financial speculation; a black market of misery and poverty; a black market of sex (as in prostitution); a black market of information (as in espionage and shadow wars); a black market of weapons; and even a black market of thinking. Way beyond the late 20 th century, in the 2010s what the West praises as “liberal democracy” – actually a neoliberal diktat – has virtually absorbed every ideological divergence, while leaving behind a heap of differences floating in some sort of trompe l’oeil effect. What’s left is a widespread, noxious condition; the pre-emptive prohibition of any critical thought, which has no way to express itself other than becoming clandestine (or finding the right internet niche). Baudrillard already knew that the concept of “alter” – killed by conviviality – does not exist in the official market. So an “alter” black market also sprung up, co-opted by traffickers; that’s, for instance, the realm of racism, nativism and other forms of exclusion. Baudrillard already identified how a “contraband alter”, expressed by sects and every form of nationalism (nowadays, think about the spectrum between jihadism and extreme-right wing political parties) was bound to become more virulent in a society that is desperately intolerant, obsessed with regimentation, and totally homogenized. There could be so much exhilaration inbuilt in life lived in a bewildering chimera cocktail of cultures, signs, differences and “values”; but then came the coupling of thinking with its exact IT replica – artificial intelligence, playing with the line of demarcation between human and non-human in the domain of thought. The result, previewed by Baudrillard, was the secretion of a parapolitical society – with a sort of mafia controlling this secret form of generalized corruption (think the financial Masters of the Universe). Power is unable to fight this mafia – and that would be, on top of it, hypocritical, because the mafia itself emanates from power. The end result is that what really matters today, anywhere, mostly tends to happen outside all official circuits; like in a social black market. Is there any information “truth”? Baudrillard showed how political economy is a massive machine, producing value, producing signs of wealth, but not wealth itself. The whole media/information system – still ruled by America – is a massive machine producing events as signs; exchangeable value in the universal market of ideology, the star system and catastrophism. This abstraction of information works as in the economy – disgorging a coded material, deciphered in advance, and negotiable in terms of models, as much as the economy disgorges products negotiable in terms of price and value. Since all merchandise, thanks to this abstraction of value, is exchangeable, then every event (or non-event) is also exchangeable, all replacing one another in the cultural market of information. And that takes us to where we live now; Trans-History, and Trans-Politics – where events have really not happened, as they get lost in the vacuum of information (as much as the economy gets lost in the vacuum of speculation). Thus this quintessential Baudrillard insight; if we consider History as a movie – and that’s what it is now – then the “truth” of information is no more than post-production synch, dubbing and subtitles. Still, as we all keep an intense desire for devouring events, there is immense disappointment as well, because the content of information is desperately inferior to the means of broadcasting them. Call it a pathetic, universal contagion; people don’t know what to do about their sadness or enthusiasm – in parallel to our societies becoming theaters of the absurd where nothing has consequences. No acts, deeds, crimes (the 2008 financial crisis), political events (the WikiLeaks emails showing virtually no distinction between the “nonprofit” Clinton cash machine, what’s private and what’s public, the obsessive pursuit of personal wealth, and the affairs of the state) seem to have real consequences. Immunity, impunity, corruption, speculation – we veer towards a state of zero responsibility (think Goldman Sachs). So, automatically, we yearn for an event of maximum consequence, a “fatal” event to repair that scandalous non-equivalence. Like a symbolic re-equilibrium of the scales of destiny. So we dream of an amazing event – Trump winning the election? Hillary declaring WWIII? – that would free us from the tyranny of meaning and the constraint of always searching for the equivalence between effects and causes. Shadowing the world Just like Baudrillard, I got to see “deep” America in the 1980s and 1990s by driving across America. So sooner or later one develops a metaphysical relationship with that ubiquitous warning, “Objects in this mirror may be closer than they appear.” But what if they may also be further than they appear? The contemporary instant event/celebrity culture deluge of images upon us; does it get us closer to a so-called “real” world that is in fact very far away from us? Or does it in fact keep the world at a distance – creating an artificial depth of field that protects us from the imminence of objects and the virtual danger they represent? In parallel, we keep slouching towards a single future language – the language of algorithms, as designed across the Wall Street/Silicon Valley axis – that would represent a real anthropological catastrophe, just like the globalist/New World Order dream of One Thought and One Culture. Languages are multiple and singular – by definition. If there were a single language, words would become univocal, regulating themselves in an autopilot of meaning. There would be no interplay – as in artificial languages there’s no interplay. Language would be just the meek appendix of a unified reality – the negative destiny of a languidly unified human species. That’s where the American “dream” seems to be heading. It’s time to take the next exit ramp. The Essential Saker: from the trenches of the emerging multipolar world $27.95

1real

Fear of Iranian general left Iraqi Kurdish oil fields deserted

BAGHDAD/LONDON (Reuters) - When the Iraqi army and Iranian-backed Shi ite militia entered a key oil processing facility in Iraq s north to retake it from Kurdish Peshmerga forces last week, the installation was deserted and its alarm bells ringing. Engineers and workers on the facility, which processes oil from two major fields in the Kirkuk area of predominantly Sunni Kurdistan, had fled, fearing the military advance. No one wanted to risk their life and decided to evacuate as stories about the Shi ite militia and Qassem Soleimani were spreading fast, said a senior Kurdish oil industry source, referring to the head of foreign operations for Iran s elite Revolutionary Guards. The source declined to be identified. Iraqi engineers arrived to the sound of alarm bells warning about system malfunctions, prompting them to immediately shut down wells. Now, they need passwords and expertise from their Kurdish counterparts to restore oil output fully. The loss of control of Kirkuk oil fields is likely to starve the KRG of vital oil revenue and cause deep concern to global trading houses such as Vitol and Glencore, which have granted the semi-autonomous government billions of dollars in loans against future oil sales. Baghdad s lightning military offensive into northern Iraq came after the Kurdistan Regional Government held an independence referendum last month. Major-General Soleimani, one of the most influential military figures in the Middle East, with reach in Syria and Lebanon, issued tough warnings to Kurdish leaders ahead of the Iraqi military advance. We went inside the oilfield facilities after Kurdish workers fled and we found overalls and safety boots thrown on the ground, said an engineer from the Baghdad-run North Oil Company, who declined to be named because he was ordered not to speak publicly about the issue. It seems that workers took them off and escaped very quickly. NOC crews entered oil facilities in the Bai Hassan and Avana fields on Oct. 17 for the first time since 2014, when Peshmerga forces drove Islamic State from the area and found all crude oil stations unmanned. Peshmerga fighters had also withdrawn. After we discovered that some of the key equipment was missing and the control panel was ringing alarms of crude processing malfunction, we immediately shut down oil wells, the NOC engineer said. A week after the operation, Iraqi engineers are still struggling to resume Kirkuk s oil production, saying they had yet to understand how to operate the equipment processing some 350,000 barrels per day. The military offensive more than halved Kurdistan s oil output and cut its exports to global markets via Turkey by two thirds. The drop in exports has deprived the region of more than $200 million in revenues over the past week, a Kurdish oil industry source familiar with loadings told Reuters. It has also dealt a further blow to the region s finances already stretched by a fight against Islamic State and a budget crisis caused by a fall in oil prices. The United States has called on both sides to resume dialogue, saying the tensions hamper efforts to fight Islamic State. Resuming normal oil production and exports will be challenging and will take at least another week and will only succeed if Iraqi and Kurdish engineers agree to cooperate, according to both sides. On Tuesday, NOC officials asked Kurdish engineering firm Kar Group to send back its workers, according to sources on both sides. Iraqi engineers need guidance on how to operate recently installed equipment at Bai Hassan and Avana, the sources said. The pumping and operational stations for both oil fields are located in the city of Dahuk, which unlike Kirkuk is still under the control of the Peshmerga forces. Energy facilities in Kirkuk are more like a locked box and only their crew have the password, the Iraqi engineer said. Kar Group has, however, so far refrained from going back without security guarantees, according to sources close to the engineering company. Kirkuk, one of the oldest and best known oil areas in the Middle East, had long been under the control of Iraqi forces until it was over-run by Islamic State. In 2014, it was retaken by the Peshmerga, the official security forces of the KRG, as part of their advance on Islamic State. That allowed Kurdistan to regain control of an area it believes is historically Kurdish and ramp up exports from the oil fields while borrowing billions of dollars from trading houses and Russian state oil major Rosneft. We need to figure out who gets what when the fields resume production. At the moment the potential split of revenues is far from clear, said the Kurdish oil industry source. Before the referendum, Kurdistan was exporting some 600,000 bpd of crude via Turkey, which it said had made it almost totally economically independent as it could pay its own bills without the need to wait for budget transfers from Baghdad. Under the deal with Baghdad, Kurdistan was exporting 540,000 bpd on behalf of the government in the city of Erbil and some 60,000 bpd on behalf of NOC. With the loss of control of the Kirkuk area, Kurdistan will be in theory left with only 250,000-300,000 bpd of its own output, less than it needs to cover its debt obligations. Vitol, Glencore, Petraco and Trafigura have loaned Kurdistan some $2.5 billion and Russia s Rosneft has loaned some $1.2 billion. Glencore s boss Ivan Glasenberg said last week he could not rule out a rescheduling of the payments.

0fake