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FILE - In this May 25, 2017, file photo, U.S. President Donald Trump, right, speaks to British Prime Minister Theresa May during in a working dinner meeting at the NATO headquarters during a NATO summit... (Associated Press)
FILE - In this May 25, 2017, file photo, U.S. President Donald Trump, right, speaks to British Prime Minister Theresa May during in a working dinner meeting at the NATO headquarters during a NATO summit of heads of state and government in Brussels. Trump initially responded to May’s criticism of his... (Associated Press)
LONDON (AP) — The Latest on the furor over President Trump's retweeting of British far-right group (all times local):
1:30 p.m.
British Prime Minister Theresa May says President Donald Trump's retweets from a far-right group were "the wrong thing to do."
May says the group, Britain First, is "a hateful organization" that runs counter to "common British decency."
May has been under pressure to condemn Trump directly over the retweets of anti-Muslim videos. Her spokesman has already said the retweets were wrong.
Speaking in Amman, Jordan, May said Britain and the U.S. have a special relationship but she is not afraid to criticize friends when they get things wrong.
Asked about a tweet by Trump urging her to focus on Islamic extremist violence rather than on him, May said Britain takes the danger of extremism very seriously.
___
10:40 a.m.
The mayor of London has added his voice to calls for President Donald Trump's state visit to Britain to be canceled over his retweets of a British far-right group.
Sadiq Khan says Trump has promoted "a vile, extremist group" and an official visit by him to Britain "would not be welcomed."
Trump's retweeting of anti-Muslim videos from far-right group Britain First has been widely condemned in Britain. Prime Minister Theresa May's official spokesman said the president was wrong to have done it.
In response, Trump urged May to focus on "the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom," rather than on him.
Downing St. and the White House both say a state visit by Trump is planned, but no date has been set. ||||| Image copyright AFP/Getty Image caption Thousands marched through London on 21 January to voice their opposition to President Trump
Downing Street has rejected calls to cancel President Donald Trump's proposed state visit to the UK after a US clampdown on immigration.
A source said a rejection would be a "populist gesture", adding that the invitation had been accepted and scrapping it would "undo everything".
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said PM Theresa May would be failing the people if she failed to postpone the visit.
A petition to stop it has gathered more than 900,000 signatures since Saturday.
Only 100,000 signatures are needed for Parliament to consider debating a petition.
The visit was announced during PM May's trip to the US - no date has been set but it is expected to take place later this year.
However, on Friday Mr Trump signed an executive order halting the US refugee programme for 120 days, indefinitely banning all Syrian refugees and suspending the entry of all nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries.
Moves to implement the measure have triggered anger and protest across the world.
Buckingham Palace has declined to comment on the row.
The Downing Street source told the BBC: "America is a huge important ally. We have to think long term."
But Shadow Attorney-General Shami Chakrabarti said the government's position "sounds like appeasement".
Mr Corbyn, who has urged followers to support the petition, tweeted on Sunday: "@Theresa_May would be failing the British people if she does not postpone the state visit & condemn Trump's actions in the clearest terms."
"@realDonaldTrump should not be welcomed to Britain while he abuses our shared values with shameful #MuslimBan & attacks on refugees & women," he added.
Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron backed the call. He said: "Any visit by President Trump to Britain should be on hold until his disgraceful ban comes to an end.
"Otherwise Theresa May would be placing the Queen in an impossible position of welcoming a man who is banning British citizens purely on grounds of their faith."
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Protesters have gathered at airports across the US to demonstrate against the executive order
Alex Salmond, the SNP's foreign affairs spokesman, said he thought the state visit was "a very bad idea".
Also appearing on Sky News' Sophy Ridge, he said: "You shouldn't be rushing into a headlong relationship with the President of the United States."
Mr Salmond said reports Mr Trump was reluctant to meet Prince Charles during the visit were "an indication of the sort of enormous difficulties you get into when you hold somebody tight who is unpredictable, who has a range of views you find unacceptable."
And Mayor of London Sadiq Khan said the visit should not happen while the executive order was in place.
He told Sky News: "I am quite clear, this ban is cruel, this ban is shameful, while this ban is in place we should not be rolling out the red carpet for President Trump."
Leeds solicitor Graham Guest, who started the petition, said he wanted it to "put the spotlight" on Mr Trump.
He told the Press Association: "A state visit legitimises his presidency and he will use the photo opportunities and being seen with the Queen to get re-elected.
"The wording in the petition is quite precise as I actually say that he should come here as the head of government to do government-to-government business.
"At the end of the day he is still the president and we've just got to live with that. But there's no reason why he should get all the pomp and publicity of a state visit."
'British values first'
Former shadow cabinet member Chuka Umunna also backed the calls to cancel the trip.
"State visits happen at the instigation of governments and, of course, you have got a prime minister who you want to have a decent working relationship with a US president.
"But they need to understand, just as they will put America first, we will put British values first."
Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Conservatives, said she hoped Mr Trump would reconsider his position on immigration "immediately".
"State visits are designed for both the host, and the head of state who is being hosted, to celebrate and entrench the friendships and shared values between their respective countries," she said.
"A state visit from the current president of the United States could not possibly occur in the best traditions of the enterprise while a cruel and divisive policy which discriminates against citizens of the host nation is in place."
Paddy Ashdown, former leader of the Liberal Democrats, questioned the state visit on Twitter.
He wrote: "Am I alone in finding it impossible to bear that in pursuit of her deeply wrong-headed policies our PM is now forcing THAT MAN on our Queen?"
Conservative MP for Totnes, Sarah Wollaston, earlier tweeted that the US President should not be invited to address the Houses of Parliament, saying Westminster Hall "should be reserved for leaders who have made an outstanding positive difference in the world". ||||| Khan accused Trump of promoting a "vile, extremist group that exists solely to sow division and hatred" | John Phillips/Getty Images London mayor calls for UK to cancel Trump visit after retweets Sadiq Khan called Donald Trump’s retweets of a far-right group a ‘betrayal’ of the two countries’ relationship.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan called on the U.K. government to cancel any official state visit by Donald Trump after the U.S. president retweeted a series of videos posted by the leader of a far-right British political group.
The videos, which sought to portray Muslims as violent and dangerous, were originally posted to Twitter by Jayda Fransen, deputy leader of the extreme-right, ultranationalist group Britain First. Fransen was found guilty last year of religiously aggravated harassment of a Muslim woman. In a statement Thursday, Khan accused Trump of promoting a “vile, extremist group that exists solely to sow division and hatred.”
“After this latest incident, it is increasingly clear that any official visit at all from President Trump to Britain would not be welcomed,” Khan said.
The U.K. government had previously issued an invitation to Trump for 2018 which was accepted, but the details and timing had not yet been arranged. After Trump’s retweets, Prime Minister Theresa May condemned his actions but stopped short of rescinding the state visit offer.
Trump later pushed back, telling May on Twitter “don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism.”
Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable also demanded on Thursday that May not meet Trump, whom the party called an “evil racist” in a statement.
Khan also said “many Brits who love America” will see Trump’s actions as a “betrayal of the special relationship” between the two countries.
Ann Coulter, the right-wing American commentator who is one of just 45 people Trump follows on Twitter, could have been the source of his seeing the Britain First tweet. She said that she did not know what Britain First was when she retweeted the videos herself, but that she doesn’t “think it really matters, it’s a video.”
“A video is a video is a video,” Coulter said. ||||| Prime minister says ‘UK takes a different approach’ but defends invitation despite growing outrage over US travel ban
Theresa May defended the decision to invite Donald Trump on a state visit as thousands of protesters took to the streets across the UK and more than 1.5 million people signed a petition to try to stop the trip from going ahead.
The prime minister made the briefest of responses to the domestic uproar over the US president’s attempt to ban travellers from seven Muslim-majority countries, insisting that the “UK takes a different approach”.
Thousands protest across UK in wake of US travel ban – politics live Read more
Addressing the issue during a joint press conference with the Irish taoiseach, Enda Kenny, May stood by the red carpet invitation she had made during her meeting with Trump in the White House on Friday.
“The United States is a close ally of the United Kingdom. We work together across many areas of mutual interest and we have that special relationship between us,” she said. “I have issued that invitation for a state visit for President Trump to the United Kingdom and that invitation stands.”
However, she refused to go further and criticise her American counterpart despite mass condemnation of his decision to bar nationals from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen for 90 days. At the same press conference, Kenny voiced disagreement with the executive order announced by Trump.
The comments came as Downing street advisers did not deny claims that May had been informed about Trump’s plans to impose the travel ban when she met the president.
Thousands took to the streets in cities across the UK, including Manchester, Cardiff, Glasgow, Edinburgh and in London. Crowds gathered just metres from the gates of Downing Street, chanting: “Shame on May.”
The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, wrote to the prime minister to urge her to listen to more than a million Britons who had called on her to cancel the state visit, in which Trump could address both houses of parliament. “This world defeated segregation, we defeated apartheid and we will defeat this nasty policy created to sow division and hatred,” he said. “His invite should be withdrawn until the executive orders are gone and every element of them repealed.”
Some shadow cabinet members joined protestors, including Diane Abbott, the shadow home secretary.
Earlier, Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, warned MPs not to demonise Trump or compare him to Adolf Hitler in a statement on the escalating row.
Johnson told parliament that British passport holders with dual nationalities would now not be affected by the US travel ban after further conversations with senior figures within the White House.
Following confusion caused by a US embassy notice telling UK dual nationals from the affected countries not to travel to the US, he said: “I’m able to provide the following clarification: the general principle is that all British passport holders remain welcome to travel to the US.
“We have received assurances that this executive order will make no difference to any British passport holder irrespective of their country of birth or if they hold another passport.”
Johnson said he believed that the US decision to implement the so-called extreme vetting for nationals from the seven countries was “divisive, discriminatory and wrong”.
But he argued that Trump was right to say that it did not amount to a ban on Muslims. Johnson repeatedly defended the new American leader and suggested his “bark is considerably worse than his bite”. He accused Labour of “pointlessly demonising” him.
The foreign secretary said it was right that a close and important ally was welcomed to a state visit, pointing out that such an invitation was even extended to Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu. A number of Conservative backbenchers urged the British government not to interfere in American domestic policy, with Julian Lewis MP saying the Atlantic alliance was critical to security in the UK.
MPs from all parties took to their feet to express alarm at Trump’s executive order, with many offering repeated references to the the politics of the 1930s.
Dennis Skinner, the veteran Labour MP known for his combative outbursts on the floor of the Commons chamber, used the debate to brand Trump a fascist. “Will the foreign secretary just for a moment try to recall how I hid under the stairs as two fascist dictators – Hitler and Mussolini – rained bombs on towns and cities in Britain?” he asked.
“Now this government is hand in hand with another fascist: Trump. Do the decent thing and ban the visit. This man is not fit to walk in the footsteps of Nelson Mandela.”
Theresa May was right to see Donald Trump. But she must condemn him too | Jack Straw Read more
Mike Gapes, a Labour MP, called the prime minister “Theresa the appeaser”, sparking an angry reaction from some MPs.
Ben Howlett, a Conservative backbencher, quoted a speech by Winston Churchill about countries remaining neutral in the war, saying: “Each ones hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough the crocodile will eat him last.”
He said: “This dangerous trend towards nationalism which we have not seen since the 1930s inflicting itself on the western world has wrongly been defined as populism. It is clear this executive order needs to be condemned.”
Johnson hit back at the comparisons, arguing that they were inappropriate. “I completely agree we must stand up against bigotry and nationalism. But I do draw the line at the comparison made relentlessly this afternoon between the elected government of our closest and most important ally, a great democracy, and the anti-democratic cruel and barbaric tyrannies of the 1930s,” he said. “Continually to use the language of appeasement demeans the horror of the 1930s and trivialises our conversation.”
The warnings about rising nationalism came amid a string of other interventions from Conservatives angry about the US policy, including a plea from the Iraqi-born MP Nadhim Zawahi, who urged Trump to reconsider as a compassionate Christian.
Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary, led Labour’s response, demanding more action from the government to protect UK residents from the seven countries affected by the ban, citing examples of people stranded and held at airports.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Labour MP Yvette Cooper was shaking as she made an emotional intervention. Photograph: PA
She also pressed Johnson on Downing Street’s slow response to the order, with the government only promising to intervene on behalf of UK nationals 27 hours after it came into force.
“In their discussions about terrorism and security, was this imminent order mentioned? I don’t know what’s worse, that the president would have such little respect for the prime minister that he wouldn’t think of telling her, or that he did and she didn’t think it sounded wrong,” she said.
Yvette Cooper, who chairs parliament’s home affairs select committee, was shaking as she made an emotional intervention, saying: “One of our closest allies has chosen to ban refugees and target Muslims and all [Johnson] can say is that it wouldn’t be our policy. That is not good enough.”
She responded to reports that May was told about the travel ban during her meeting with Trump, asking why she did not condemn the policy during a later press conference in Turkey.
Johnson argued that May’s trip to the US was a success, stressing the importance of the relationship between the two countries, and saying that the government was not afraid of criticising its friend.
After many had called on the government to take a firmer line, the Speaker of the House, John Bercow, gave the green light to an emergency, three-hour debate on Trump’s executive order.
That debate culminated in the Commons unanimously passing an emergency motion from former Labour leader Ed Miliband that condemned “Trump’s discriminatory, divisive & counterproductive ban”.
A former head of the Foreign Office has said that May’s invitation to Trump had put the Queen in a “very difficult position”. Lord Ricketts, who was permanent secretary at the Foreign Office from 2006-10 before becoming David Cameron’s national security adviser, said in a letter to the Times that the offer was “premature” and it was unprecedented for a US president to be given a state visit in their first year in the White House. ||||| British Prime Minister Theresa May speaks during a news conference with President Donald Trump in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Friday, Jan. 27, 2017. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) (Associated Press)
British Prime Minister Theresa May speaks during a news conference with President Donald Trump in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Friday, Jan. 27, 2017. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) (Associated Press)
British Prime Minister Theresa May speaks during a news conference with President Donald Trump in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Friday, Jan. 27, 2017. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) (Associated Press) British Prime Minister Theresa May speaks during a news conference with President Donald Trump in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Friday, Jan. 27, 2017. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) (Associated Press)
LONDON (AP) — A state visit to Britain by President Donald Trump later this year will go ahead, the prime minister's office said Monday, despite increasing calls for it to be canceled over his temporary ban on residents of seven majority-Muslim countries entering the U.S.
Furor over the travel ban has tarnished what British officials had considered a highly successful trip to Washington by Prime Minister Theresa May. She met Trump at the White House on Friday and announced that he had been invited to come to Britain later this year as the guest of Queen Elizabeth II.
May's Downing St. office said Monday that "an invitation has been extended and accepted," and the visit is still on.
No date has been announced for the state visit, which involves lavish pomp and ceremony, generally with a stay at Buckingham Palace.
The visit was hailed by government officials as a sign of the close trans-Atlantic relationship, which was also reflected in May's invitation to meet Trump just a week after his inauguration.
But criticism of May's wooing of Trump erupted when — only hours after the prime minister had left the White House — the president signed an executive order suspending all travel to the U.S. of citizens of Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and Libya for 90 days. The order also bars all refugees entering the country for 120 days.
Britain's three biggest opposition parties have all called for Trump's state visit to be canceled and an online petition opposing the trip has more than 1 million signatures. Protests against the travel ban are planned Monday in London and other British cities.
Any petition with more than 100,000 signatures must be considered for a debate in Parliament, though not a binding vote.
Last year, Parliament debated whether to ban Trump, then a presidential candidate, from visiting Britain after a similar online petition was filed.
Trump's travel ban sparked protests at airports across the U.S., along with expressions of condemnation and concern from around the world.
There was widespread confusion about whether the ban applied to dual nationals. Somali-born British Olympic champion runner Mo Farah said he feared it would prevent him returning to the U.S., where he lives.
Late Sunday, Britain's Foreign Office said U.S. authorities had clarified that the ban didn't apply to British citizens who are also nationals of one of the seven countries. Canada's foreign minister said he had been told the same about Canadian dual nationals.
However, the website of the U.S. Embassy in London advised nationals of the seven countries — "including dual nationals" — not to book visa appointments, saying their applications would not be processed.
The U.S. Embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The British exemption didn't end the storm of opposition, with prominent members of May's Conservative Party joining in calls for Trump's visit to be scrapped.
Sayeeda Warsi, a former government minister and Conservative member of the House of Lords, said it was "sending out a wrong signal" to invite Trump, a leaders whose values "are not the same as British values."
Conservative lawmaker Sarah Wollaston said Trump should not be invited to address both houses of Parliament, an honor given to many visiting foreign leaders.
She said that "those who wish to fawn over him" should do so elsewhere.
Former U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, a Trump ally, said "British politicians are sheer hypocrites" to oppose the travel ban as they had not objected when President Barack Obama imposed what Farage called a six-month ban on Iraqis.
In 2011 the U.S. imposed stringent checks on Iraqi refugees after two Iraqis were charged with terrorism offenses in Kentucky. It did not ban all travelers from Iraq, however. | – President Trump fired back at Theresa May on Wednesday after the British prime minister condemned his decision to retweet a far-right group's anti-Muslim videos—but he started with the wrong Theresa May. "Don't focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom. We are doing just fine!" Trump tweeted at a Twitter account belonging to a British woman named Theresa Scrivener, who has six followers and has tweeted nine times in eight years. Around 20 minutes later, he deleted the tweet and replaced it with one tagged with the British prime minister's official account, the Telegraph reports. May, who the AP describes as having "been under pressure to condemn Trump directly" while on a surprise trip to the Middle East, on Thursday called Trump's retweets "the wrong thing to do." After Trump tweeted the videos from ultranationalist group Britain First, some British lawmakers called for his state visit to be called off; Politico reports London Mayor Sadiq Khan called it "increasingly clear that any official visit at all from President Trump to Britain would not be welcomed." But a May spokesman told reporters plans had not changed, saying the US "is one of our oldest and closest allies." The AP looks at the stickiness that would be involved in rescinding the invitation—the queen would have to do so—but notes one potential route: delaying the visit due to the queen's busy spring, with a new great-grandchild expected and Prince Harry's wedding scheduled. Trump's tweet was also condemned by both Democrats and Republicans, with GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch describing May as "one of the great world leaders." |
"Causal nexus" is key. Meanwhile, Samsung's jury misconduct claim is a nonstarter
FORTUNE -- Apple (AAPL) lost an important ruling Monday night when a U.S. federal judge denied its request for a permanent ban on a collection of Samsung products that Apple charged -- and a jury ruled -- had willfully infringed Apple's patents.
Samsung, for its part, lost what most court watchers believed was a long-shot bid for a retrial based on what it claimed was evidence of jury misconduct on the part of the foreman.
The two rulings were the first in a series expected from Judge Lucy Koh on post-trial issues stemming from last August's closely-watched Apple v. Samsung case.
Koh has yet to rule on whether the $1.05 billion the jury ordered Samsung to pay will be increased by more than $500 million, as Apple requested, or reduced considerably, as Samsung hopes.
But for companies as rich as these two, the money is the least of it.
The judge's decision not to ban the infringing products takes much of the sting out of Samsung's sweeping loss last summer. Her ruling turned on what has come to be known as the "causal nexus" question. It's not enough for Apple to prove that Samsung infringed its patents, according to Koh. To show that it suffered "irreparable harm" Apple must also prove that those specific infringements caused consumers to choose, say, a Samsung Galaxy S II over an iPhone 4.
Apple is expected to appeal. It argues that the causal nexus hurdle sets the bar too high for any patent holder to win an import ban in the U.S.
On the jury misconduct issue, Judge Koh didn't even bother to order evidentiary hearings. It's not clear whether Samsung intends to pursue that claim any further.
Meanwhile, Samsung announced Tuesday that it will drop all its suits against Apple in Europe based on so-called standard essential patents. Samsung had tried to ban the sale of Apple products in several European countries -- a move that triggered a European Union antitrust investigation into whether Samsung was violating its pledge to license its patents on "fair and reasonable" terms. ||||| Judge Lucy Koh has denied Apple's request for a permanent injunction against Samsung smartphones, Reuters reported.
Apple had been awarded $1.05 billion in damages in an August verdict. The trial's jury found that Samsung willfully copied features of Apple's iPhone and iPad.
The Cupertino, Calif. company also sought a permanent sales ban on the smartphones in question — a formidable list of 26 devices.
Judge Koh decided against the ban, claiming that the features Samsung had infringed upon were only "a small fraction" of the phones' features.
"Though Apple does have some interest in retaining certain features as exclusive to Apple, it does not follow that entire products must be forever banned from the market because they incorporate, among their myriad features, a few narrow protected functions," Koh wrote in her Monday verdict.
But there was also good news for Apple on Monday. Judge Koh decided against Samsung's request for a new trial due to an alleged jury bias, meaning that the $1.05 billion verdict still stands.
Image courtesy of Samsung | – A victory for Samsung in its long-running feud with Apple: A judge has refused to ban 26 of the South Korean firm's smartphones, as Apple wanted. A jury this summer found that Samsung had knowingly infringed on Apple's patents, but that's not sufficient grounds for a ban, Judge Lucy Koh says. Instead, Apple would have to prove "irreparable harm" by demonstrating that customers were choosing specific Samsung devices over the Cupertino company's own, Forbes reports. Koh also noted that just "a small fraction" of Apple's features suffered infringement, and "it does not follow that entire products must be forever banned from the market," Reuters reports. Apple is likely to appeal the move, Forbes notes. In better news for the US firm, Koh nixed Samsung's call for a new trial over jury bias—leaving the $1.05 billion ruling in place, Mashable notes. Meanwhile, Samsung is ditching its bids for injunctions against Apple in Europe, where the European Commission in January planned an antitrust probe over Samsung patents. "We strongly believe it is better when companies compete fairly in the marketplace, rather than in court," the company said in a statement to the Verge. |
As much as we love Missy Elliott, the best part of Katy Perry’s Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday, Feb. 1 was reserved for the dancing sharks that accompanied her during the melody of her hits “California Gurls” and “Teenage Dream.”
PHOTOS: Katy Perry's craziest style moments
Though many tried to take credit for the ocean-dwelling dancers (including Snoop Dogg, who tweeted, “If you were wondering that was me in tha Shark costume!!”), one of Perry’s beach pals has now been accounted for.
Donning a blue and white shark costume was the “Roar” singer’s longtime backup dancer Scott Myrick, who quickly took to Twitter and Instagram to celebrate his meme-worthy performance.
PHOTOS: Katy's memorable music video looks
“And that everyone, is what it feels like to have your heart explode. I've never been more proud to be a part of something in my life,” he tweeted, following halftime. “Tonight was a feeling and moment in time that I will never, ever forget. Thank you for all the support everyone. Thanks be to Jesus, aka @katyperry for this shark takeover. You called it gurllllll.”
Kevin Mazur/WireImage
In addition to retweeting several images from the buzzed-about performance, Myrick also Instagrammed a picture of himself in the costume with Perry writing, “BREAK THE SUPER BOWL.”
PHOTOS: Biggest celeb feuds
Myrick was also featured on the November 2013 Entertainment Weekly cover with Perry, which he happily shared on Instagram, writing, “LOOK, Momma made me a model! @KatyPerry.”
LOOK, Momma made me a model! ???? @KatyPerry A photo posted by Scott Myrick (@scott_myrick) on Nov 2, 2013 at 12:51pm PDT
Oh, and did we mention he has the most chiseled six-pack in the world? Myrick enjoys going shirtless on Instagram, and for that, we thank him.
PHOTOS: Taylor's song lyrics decoded
But it turns out that in addition to being extremely attractive, Myrick also appears to be one of the reasons Perry and Swift are currently in the middle of a highly publicized feud. It all started back in 2011 when Myrick performed on Perry’s California Dreams world tour. After the gig wrapped, he auditioned for Swift’s Red Tour, and received a spot.
Kevin Mazur/WireImage
According to an Examiner interview with Myrick’s fellow backup dancer Lockhart Brownlie, Perry’s camp reached out in the middle of Swift’s tour to see if the dancers would leave to perform on her Prismatic World Tour. Myrick and two others left Swift’s tour for Perry’s and now there’s some “Bad Blood.”
Swift referenced the incident (without directly naming Perry) in a September interview with Rolling Stone, saying, “She did something so horrible. I was like, 'Oh, we're just straight-up enemies.' And it wasn't even about a guy! It had to do with business. She basically tried to sabotage an entire arena tour. She tried to hire a bunch of people out from under me.”
Whichever side you take in the Perry/Swift feud, be sure to check out the video of Myrick dancing to Ariana Grande’s “Break Free” below — after watching him dance in a shark costume for several hours, that is. ||||| CLEVELAND, Ohio - Katy Perry spent Sunday night delivering a dazzling Super Bowl halftime show featuring Missy Elliott and Lenny Kravitz. And now, all gossip websites can talk about is the possible dig Perry made towards rival Taylor Swift.
Immediately following Perry's performance, some fans took to Twitter to point out that Perry's backup dancers were wearing polka dot bikinis similar to the ones Swift is most known for wearing:
I might be reading too much into this #HalftimeShowKatyPerry pic.twitter.com/0K38kM4BYZ -- Smiler For Life (@mileyfan2014) February 2, 2015
Perry also flipped a few tutting hand signs, similar to the ones Swift playfully makes in her video for "Shake It Off."
To put this into context, Swift and Perry had serious beef in 2014 after Swift took a subtle shot at Perry during her Rolling Stone interview last year. The rift stems from Perry allegedly stealing Swift's backup dancers.
The Rolling Stone interview led to Perry posting a subliminal dig on Twitter referencing "Mean Girls" and apparently referring to Swift as Regina George (the villain from the film).
That has led to speculation that Perry was indeed mocking Swift during the Super Bowl halftime show. In fact, Hollywood Life reported last month that Perry had plans to diss Swift all along.
In Swift's defense, she has stepped up her swimsuit game, posting a recent photo on Instagram donning a more modern suit. ||||| Truth rating: 0
By Daniel Gates
HollywoodLife, a site that manufactures fake stories, repeatedly claimed Katy Perry would “diss” Taylor Swift during the Super Bowl Halftime Show. Of course, it didn’t wind up happening, because HollywoodLife is a site that manufactures fake stories. But rather than admit its fabrication (or, better yet, shut up), HollywoodLife decided to keep going with its ridiculous premise, manufacturing a “diss” out of Perry’s background dancers’ polka dot bikini costumes. We wish we were joking.
“OMG! In the midst of her incredible Super Bowl halftime performance, Katy Perry managed to get a very subtle dig at Taylor Swift!” declares the webloid. HollywoodLife then shows a side-by-side comparison, submitted by some random fan, of Perry’s dancers’ swimsuits during “California Gurls” and the polka dot bikini Swift wore during an outing with Conor Kennedy… back in August 2012.
Ah, yes. Perry decided to “diss” Swift by singing a five-year-old song about bikinis and having her dancers wear similar (but not identical) polka dot swimsuits to one that Swift wore two and a half years ago. Even the fan whose tweet inspired the entire HollywoodLife story knows it’s a stretch, admitting, “I might be reading to (sic) much into this.” Um, you think so?
HollywoodLife makes a big deal out of the fact that the bikinis are high-waisted, like Swift’s. Except… Perry herself wore a high-waisted costume in the original “California Gurls” video. And, more recently, Swift made headlines when she revealed her belly button, which she’d previously kept hidden, during a beach outing in Hawaii.
Here’s what happened: HollywoodLife spent January predicting that Perry would “diss” Swift at the Super Bowl. Perry did no such thing. HollywoodLife decided to turn a completely innocuous, unrelated costume choice into a “diss.” A source close to the situation tells Gossip Cop, “This can’t be serious.” Unfortunately, it is. HollywoodLife manufactures fake stories. The end. ||||| OMG! In the midst of her incredible Super Bowl halftime performance, Katy Perry managed to get a very subtle dig at Taylor Swift! Click to SEE!
Katy Perry’s Super Bowl halftime performance had everything — dancing sharks, a Transformers-like lion and a Taylor Swift, 25, diss! The 29-year-old “Roar” singer added a little T-Swift shade during her performance of “California Gurls” just like HollywoodLife.com told you! Check it out!
Katy Perry Disses Taylor Swift Halftime Performance — See The Subtle Dig
Take a look:
HollywoodLife.com told you first in Jan. 2015 that Katy had planned to diss Taylor at the Super Bowl!
Katy seemed to deliberately put the high-waisted polka dot bikinis on backup dancers. Backup dancers were reportedly the cause of Katy and Taylor’s feud in the first place. Ouch.
I might be reading to much into this #HalftimeShowKatyPerry pic.twitter.com/0K38kM4BYZ — Smiler For Life (@mileyfan2014) February 2, 2015
The understated dig is also pretty much a direct reference to Taylor’s Cape Cod summer with Conor Kennedy in 2012. The “Blank Space” singer was frequently spotted out with the dashing gentleman and we’d never forget that red, high-waisted polka dot bikini she wore that summer.
Taylor and Conor broke up in Oct. 2012. Could Katy have been taking aim at T-Swift’s love life, too?
Katy has been pretty vocal about what she’d do if someone tried going after her reputation. “If somebody is trying to defame my character, you’re going to hear about it,” she told Billboard after being asked about her beef with Taylor.
Katy’s Super Bowl halftime performance was wild in the best way possible. She rode in on a gigantic robotic lion while singing “Roar.” Yes, really.
She hit up guest performer, Lenny Kravitz to her first hit single, “I Kissed A Girl.” Then, Katy teamed up with Missy Elliott. The beloved rapper performed “Get Ur Freak On,” “Lose Control” and “Work It” for the show. Such a throwback!
HollywoodLifers, what did you think of Katy’s subtle diss? Did you even notice it? Let us know!
— Avery Thompson ||||| Katy Perry admitted that she hopes to finally end her long-simmering beef with Taylor Swift. "I'm ready to let it go. Absolutely, 100 percent," Perry said.
Related Katy Perry Vs. Taylor Swift: Pop Stars' Beef History Explained From stolen dancers to passive aggressive tweets, here's a look back at the source of the alleged "Bad Blood"
The singer's comments came during a conversation Saturday with Arianna Huffington that featured on Perry's weekend-long YouTube live stream session in support of her new album Witness.
"I forgive [Swift], and I'm sorry for anything I ever did, and I hope the same from her, and I think it's actually... I think it's time," Perry said of the feud (via Entertainment Tonight).
"There are bigger fish to fry, and there are bigger problems in the world. I love her and I want the best for her, and I think she's a fantastic songwriter, and like, I think that if we both, her and I, can be representatives of strong women that come together despite their differences, I think the whole world is going to go, like, 'Yeah, we can do this.'"
The singer's long feud – which reportedly began in 2012 when Perry poached Swift's backup dancers to join her own tour – resulted in songs like "Bad Blood" and Witness' "Swish Swish," but neither artist spoke about the beef until Perry recently opened up about the Swift rift.
"I'm not Buddha – things irritate me," Perry said in a recent interview. "I wish that I could turn the other cheek every single time, but I'm also not a pushover, you know? Especially when someone tries to assassinate my character with little girls. That's so messed up!"
The latest chapter in the feud came when Swift ended her years-long streaming service embargo the moment Perry's Witness was released digitally, a move that Swift's reps said was purely coincidence.
On Saturday, Perry seemed determined to end the pop stars' beef. "Maybe I don't agree with everything she does, and maybe she doesn't agree with everything I do, but like... I really, truly, want to come together, and in a place of love and forgiveness, and understanding and compassion," Perry said.
The pop star dedicated a portion of her live stream to airing a therapy session with Dr. Siri Singh, wherein she talked about dealing with depression and suicidal thoughts. "I feel ashamed that I would have those thoughts, feel that low and that depressed," Perry said in reference to the lyrics from her 2013 Prism ballad, "By the Grace of God."
"You can be right or you can be loved," she added. "I just want to be loved."
Perry got a visit from pal James Corden on Sunday, and the Carpool Karaoke host was able to get the pop star to open up on a different topic: her exes. In a game of "Spill Your Guts or Fill Your Guts," Corden gave Perry the option of either eating a thousand-year-old egg or ranking three of her exes based on their performance in bed.
After playing coy for a bit, Perry finally acquiesced, naming Diplo as the least impressive, Orlando Bloom as her second-place pick, and John Mayer as the top contender. "They're all amazing lovers and I would have sex with all of them after I got out of this place!" she made sure to note. ||||| Katy Perry’s Super Bowl halftime show was fairly low on surprises — she didn’t even insult frenemy Taylor Swift in a new song, as was the Internet’s favorite rumor. However, the performance still raised several very important questions.
1) Did she ride on a lion or tiger when she arrived at the stadium singing “Roar”?
Twitter was very much divided on this issue — after all, the song mentions she’s got the eye of the tiger, but she’s going to roar louder than a lion. (For the record, we say lion.)
If @katyperry is singing about the eye of a tiger why is she riding a lion? #SuperBowI #HalftimeShowKatyPerry — Robb Lippitt (@lippesq) February 2, 2015
That is clearly a lion that Katy Perry is riding, not a tiger. — SwimSwam (@swimswamnews) February 2, 2015
Tiger. Of course. Lion would have been better. @katyperry — Pop Market Music (@PopMarketMusic) February 2, 2015
Ok the giant gold lion is pretty cool. Oh wait, I think it's a tiger. #roar #SB49 @katyperry — Jennifer Leigh (@JenLeighWFLA) February 2, 2015
2) Were those singing sharks (during “Teenage Dream”) the best part of the entire Super Bowl so far?
They just looked so happy!
Shout out to Katy Perry's sharks. Good to see sea creatures represented at #sb49: pic.twitter.com/wqk8K8i3TZ — Polly Mosendz (@pollyNYC) February 2, 2015
3) Was Missy Elliott the real star of the show?
Hearing “Get Ur Freak On,” “Work It” and “Lose Control” in a row pretty much overshadowed all of Perry’s songs, even her “I Kissed a Girl” duet with Lenny Kravitz.
(Photo by Christopher Polk/Getty Images)
4) Is Perry allowed to have a sweatshirt openly rooting for another team?
At least, that’s why we’re assuming she had a shirt that said “49”…she is from California, after all. (UPDATE: It could also be, um, because it’s Super Bowl 49. But we like conspiracy theories.)
5) She definitely got inspiration for the “Firework” shooting star from “The More You Know” icon, right?
Knew that star looked familiar RT @steventurous: Katy Perry, The More You Know #SuperBowI pic.twitter.com/E3Jmq5oZeu — Abraham White (@abwhite7) February 2, 2015
RELATED: An illustrated history of every Super Bowl halftime show | – Katy Perry will never forget performing at last night's 49th Super Bowl—because after her halftime show was over, she got XLIX tattooed on her finger, the Daily Mail reports. "I thought it would be appropriate to draw blood tonight," Perry captioned an Instagram picture of the tattoo artist at work on her. A follow-up picture shows the inked finger. As for the show itself, though it may have initially appeared Perry did not diss Taylor Swift as expected, the gossip media is busily attempting to disprove that: While performing "California Gurls," Perry's backup dancers wore high-waisted polka-dot bikinis, which Hollywood Life (and some Twitter users) think was a subtle reference to the very similar bikini Swift wore while on Cape Cod with Conor Kennedy in the summer of 2012. "Perry also flipped a few tutting hand signs, similar to the ones Swift playfully makes in her video for 'Shake It Off,'" Cleveland.com reports. And, during that same "California Gurls" medley, one of Perry's dancing sharks was Scott Myrick, one of the reasons Perry and Swift are feuding in the first place. Myrick was a dancer on Perry's 2011 tour, later scored a spot on a Swift tour, then quit that gig to go back to Perry, Us reports. That incident is apparently what prompted Swift's song "Bad Blood." But "a source close to the situation" tells Gossip Cop the whole idea that Perry dissed Swift is complete nonsense. Either way, Perry most definitely talked about Swift before the Super Bowl. |
Women And The Generational Divide Between Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders
Enlarge this image toggle caption Rob Brown/AP Rob Brown/AP
Stephanie Hundley is an enthusiastic Bernie Sanders supporter. The 28-year-old from Waterloo is also enthusiastic about the fact that she's not going to vote for Hillary Clinton just because she's a woman.
"I don't think she's the woman to be representative of women," Hundley said. She ticked off a list of Clinton criticisms: the "damn emails," the "flip-flops," her vote to go to war in Iraq. Citing Sanders' record of supporting women's rights, Hundley said his overall views embody hers more than Clinton's do. "It's weird that an old, white guy would represent women better than an actual woman."
Many millennial women, like Hundley, want to deal a repeat upset to Clinton in the Hawkeye State. Eight years ago, Clinton lost the women's vote in Iowa to another candidate promising change in Washington. Entrance polls showed that the only group who favored her were the oldest women — those over 65. A similar pattern could emerge again this year. Iowa women do prefer Clinton, according to the final Des Moines Register poll before the Iowa caucuses, but that support is strongest among women over 45.
The split has exposed a fault line around feminism in America, between women who grew up in an era when they weren't allowed to wear pants to work, for example — and young women who have never known the kind of discrimination and stereotypes their mothers faced.
A recent poll even found that young women supported Sanders in greater numbers than young men. A January online survey of young voters from USA Today and Rock the Vote showed that women under 35 supported Sanders by an almost 20-point margin, compared to men's 4-point margin.
Dueling Identities: 'Young' Vs. 'Woman'
Enlarge this image toggle caption Rick Loomis/LA Times via Getty Images Rick Loomis/LA Times via Getty Images
Katherine Hillicker is a freshman at Michigan State who came down to Iowa to canvass for Sanders. She sees near-universal support for Sanders among their peers at Michigan State, and she thinks she knows why.
Young people, she said, "have grown up in this situation where the economy has been crap, and we're going to college, and it's costing a ton of money." She and her friend, fellow Michigan State student Mackenzie Pollick, say they think Sanders appeals more to young people on those economic issues.
As for gender? It was an afterthought for them. "I think you need to care more about the issues than the gender," Hillicker said.
Pollick added, "As much as I'd love a woman to be president, it doesn't affect my views much."
The age gap is stark. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that Sanders bests Clinton among 18- to 44-year-olds, 78 percent to 21 percent. But support for Clinton seems to grow with age: 53 percent of 45- to 64-year-olds chose her, along with 71 percent of people 65 and older.
Both Clinton and Sanders have made a point of appealing to both women, on issues of reproductive rights and equal pay, as well as young voters, on student debt. However, the Sanders campaign's promises of sweeping change seems to have helped him win over Iowa's youngest voters, and he's doing everything he can to capitalize on that popularity.
In addition to hitting young people's economic worries hard in his speeches, the Sanders campaign has also been working to mobilize the youngest Iowa voters on caucus night. In its "Go Home for Bernie" push, the campaign is driving young people away from college towns, like Ames and Iowa City, to their smaller Iowa hometowns, to better spread his support all over the state. That's important in a caucus state that won't report raw vote, but shares of delegates.
'There's Going Go Be A Lot More Elections In Our Lifetime'
Some young voters say it would be nice to have the first female president — but that's about as excited as they get.
"We're still young," said Olivia Vogel, an Iowa State student, "and there's going to be a lot more elections in our lifetime, that right now I wouldn't choose just because she's a woman."
Enlarge this image toggle caption Andrew Harnik/AP Andrew Harnik/AP
Vogel attended a Clinton rally in Ames on Saturday, but isn't supporting a candidate yet.
"I feel like I grew up in a pretty equitable society where I think men and women are based fairly," said Vogel's friend Julia Zappa, a sophomore at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul. Though she was at the Clinton event, she said she supports Republican Chris Christie. "I think for a younger generation, we don't need to rush for a woman to become president, because I feel like it'll happen, so I don't want to rush."
The long string of presidential elections ahead of them is full of the possibility — or even the probability, as Zappa sees it — of a female president. That means other issues feel much more pressing right now.
"I don't think voting for a woman is particularly novel for them," said Dianne Bystrom, director of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University. "The fact that the nation elected its first African-American candidate in 2008, it's kind of taken the edge out of those narrow parameters of who can be president."
If that's true, the gender card — which Clinton is playing more forcefully this year than in 2008 — may be less effective now for some young voters.
But their minds may change as they age.
"I think younger women will face some discrimination in their lives, but when they're young, they probably haven't," Bystrom said. Older women, meanwhile, "feel that it's about time to have a woman president," she added.
Of course, the reasons anyone supports Clinton (or Sanders) are far more nuanced than voting for a gender. Many women — old or young, supporting Clinton or Sanders — say that gender isn't a factor at all in choosing a candidate.
And some Sanders-supporting women say they considered the draw of caucusing for a woman, but it ultimately couldn't sway them. Likewise, for many Clinton supporters, who are drawn in by her gender, it's simply one of many reasons.
However, it is a reason that amps up their enthusiasm.
"It's about time we caught up with the rest of the civilized world," said Maureen Ekeland of West Des Moines, who attended a Clinton speech in Ames with her daughter and granddaughter. All three are Clinton supporters.
"It's don't think it's the only thing, and it might not be the main thing. But absolutely — it would be an amazing thing," said Jennifer Ruggle of Waukee, Ekeland's daughter.
For Older Women, The Time For A Female President Is Now
Enlarge this image toggle caption Andrew Harnik/AP Andrew Harnik/AP
At the other end of the spectrum from the college students attending the event, who feel they have a lifetime to put a woman in the White House, there are the women who say time is running out. One Clinton volunteer said those women motivate her.
"There are so many children that need to grow up in a situation where it's normal to have a female president," said Kim Frederick of Houston. Frederick told NPR's Tamara Keith the story of an elderly woman she met at a Clinton rally in 2008, when Frederick was also a volunteer.
"And she said, 'Please, I'm 94 years old,' " Frederick said. "I can't get out there and volunteer. Can you please make this happen? And I promised her I would. And it didn't happen in 2008, and she's probably not around anymore, but there's another 94-year-old woman in a wheelchair that I have to do that for this time. And we're going to make it happen."
Gender Matters In The General
Importantly, it's not that supporting Sanders means rejecting Clinton. Many female Sanders supporters who spoke to NPR said they'd support Clinton as a general-election candidate (and many of her supporters say the same of Sanders).
Enlarge this image toggle caption Andrew Harnik/AP Andrew Harnik/AP
And general elections make it clear that it doesn't make sense to talk about the "woman voter," as the Atlantic reported in 2012. While it's true that women tended to support Obama in the past two presidential elections, there are factors beyond gender at work here. Single and minority women have tended to support Obama, for example, while white and married women went for Mitt Romney.
Once the Democratic candidate is chosen, that's when the battle for women's votes will get even more important, Bystrom pointed out.
"I think gender always factors into elections and typically for the Democrats," she said. "For a Democrat to be president, there has to be a large number of women" who turn out. ||||| Supporters of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders listen as he speaks Tuesday at the Claremont Opera House in Claremont, N.H. (Matthew Cavanaugh/Getty Images)
While Hillary Clinton barely edged Bernie Sanders to win the Iowa caucuses, one thing became clear Monday night: The race for the Democratic nomination is turning into a battle of the ages.
The dividing line was 45 years old — voters that age or older went decisively for Clinton, while those younger flocked to Sanders. Voters under 30 were the most emphatic, with an astonishing 84 percent backing the 74-year-old senator from Vermont, according to entrance surveys.
Clinton, 68, appears to face a similar problem in New Hampshire, which holds the first-in-the-nation primary next week.
She kicked off her post-Iowa efforts here by touting her razor-thin caucus victory with a midday rally at Nashua Community College, but despite the academic setting, the 1,100-person crowd tilted older.
“Hillary just isn’t trustworthy,” said Amanda Delude, 22, who was headed to her car instead of the rally after class. She said she is likely to vote for Sanders, who she said strikes many in her generation as an uncommonly candid politician.
Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton addresses supporters in Hampton, N.H., on Tuesday. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
Chloe Bruning, a 21-year-old Boston University student who attended Tuesday’s rally, said she and other members of the group BU for Hillary were struggling to convince pro-Sanders classmates to give Clinton a new look.
“Clinton fatigue is a thing,” she said. “It really is.”
Younger voters were a problem for Clinton in 2008 as well, when they emerged as a key element of the support base that helped Barack Obama defeat her for the Democratic nomination. In Iowa that year, Obama beat Clinton among caucus-goers under 30, 57 percent to 11 percent.
Clinton’s campaign has said it intends to rebuild the Obama coalition, which included blacks, Hispanics, liberals and young people, while tapping into additional excitement among women over the possibility of the first female president.
Typically, younger voters do not turn out as reliably as older ones. But Monday night’s entrance polls and other opinion surveys suggest a massive advantage for Sanders among those who do turn out — young women and men alike. Ninety-three percent of caucus-goers under 30, for instance, said Sanders shared their values, compared with 53 percent who felt that way about Clinton, helping Sanders surge past Obama’s performance in that age bracket eight years earlier, according to the entrance surveys.
If Clinton wins the nomination, reaching younger voters could be a challenge for her in the fall, particularly if the Republicans nominate 44-year-old Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.).
Her husband, former president Bill Clinton, told NBC News on Tuesday that Sanders has built a following among young people because he offers them “emotionally satisfying” promises.
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders split the Iowa caucuses nearly evenly — but how? (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)
“If you vote for me, I’ll break up the big banks, tax the millionaires and give you free college, cut the cost of health care — end of story,” Bill Clinton said, recapping Sanders’s pitch. He suggested that his wife, on the other hand, would appeal to young people’s sense of realism. “You tell them what you think will really work and what we can afford that will solve the problem, and ask for their help in doing it, and it takes longer,” he said.
Hillary Clinton campaign officials noted that she performed well among many important groups, including minorities and self-described Democrats.
“Her coalition reflects all parts of the Democratic Party, and her agenda of making college affordable, tackling climate change and reforming our criminal justice system speaks to all parts of the Democratic Party, especially younger voters,” said campaign spokeswoman Jesse Ferguson. “She will continue reaching out to them to earn their support.”
In terms of age breakdowns, Clinton won among older voters, and especially older women, on her way to squeaking out her Iowa victory.
A number of young people here, including some Clinton supporters, said Sanders’s appeal has gone beyond the issues. He has managed to capture an intangible quality unexpected for a rumpled grandfather figure with bad hair who has served in Congress for 25 years: He’s cooler than Clinton.
In contrast, the former secretary of state has been in the middle of partisan battles for all their lives.
Emma Sands, 21, another Clinton backer from Boston University, said that campus social media is dominated by Sanders talk. And while the BU group has more women than men, Sands said it offends many young women’s sense of gender equality to suggest gender as a reason to back Clinton.
“I have an issue with the argument that you should like Hillary just because she’s a woman,” she said.
Amy Chapman, 43, who came to hear Clinton speak but said she remains undecided, said she is disturbed by the candidate’s ties to Wall Street banks, which have donated millions to her presidential campaign and from which she and her husband have earned major speaking fees.
“How can you be completely unbiased when you’re taking huge amounts of money from them?” asked Chapman, adding that she may wind up voting for Clinton anyway, out of fear that Sanders would be a weak general-election candidate.
Sonia Almeida, 40, a physician’s assistant from Bedford, N.H., came to the rally with an undecided co-worker. Almeida said she’s convinced that Clinton is the better choice on education, health care and foreign affairs. But she had one piece of advice for the campaign: “They need to be on social media more,” she said. “You didn’t think he’d be so cool there.”
Her co-worker, Celia Ortiz, 36, said Sanders seemed “more genuine.” Ortiz said she works in New Hampshire but lives in Massachusetts, which holds its primary March 1, and was also considering Clinton because she liked the idea of electing a female president.
Clinton enjoys a lot of support at her own alma mater, the all-female Wellesley College in Massachusetts. But there, too, Sanders dominates online, said Laura Prebble, 19, and Juliette Sander, 18, freshmen at the school who said they support Clinton.
“People are always putting up Bernie pictures or Bernie quotes,” said Prebble, who grew up in Wisconsin.
Sander, an international student from France, said some of her classmates liked the idea of a newcomer to the presidential field.
“They like the idea that he’s not part of ‘the Clinton family,’ ” she said.
But the two students agreed that the idea of electing the first female president is powerfully moving to them.
“For me, that’s incredibly meaningful,” Prebble said.
Abby Phillip in New Hampshire contributed to this report. ||||| The other day in Manhattan, Hillary Clinton supporters met for lunch at the home of the media executive Geraldine Laybourne. A group of 50, mostly women, was determined to generate excitement for Clinton’s campaign for president. They were frustrated to see her lagging again among younger voters, and their invited speaker was Kenyatta Cheese, a young Obama campaign veteran and internet impresario.
Why Hillary Clinton is losing young women | Letters Read more
The debate sparring that night between Clinton and Bernie Sanders over who belongs to the establishment was another reflection of how perilous it is to be an insider this American political season. And it is galling for politically seasoned women to watch Sanders caricature Clinton as an establishmentarian worshipping at the altar of Goldman Sachs. “When you are in the White House, you’re going to be connected to the establishment,” says Sarah Kovner, who served in the Clinton administration and was at Laybourne’s lunch. “That’s just a fact.”
Sanders put Hillary Clinton on notice last summer, when no one was paying him much heed. “All over this country,” he declared, “ordinary people, working people, elderly people are moving in our direction because they do want a candidate to take on the establishment.”
During that most recent Democratic debate in South Carolina, I read texts about Clinton by some students at Harvard, where I teach, and talked to some afterwards. Although Clinton’s difficulties with young voters have been much written about, their comments revealed a more acute ennui.
“Hillary, can you excite us?” asks Osaremen Okolo, a 21-year-old African-American who supports Clinton but “misses feeling fired up” as she was for Barack Obama and as some of her friends feel about Sanders.
Hillary Clinton, Snapchat, selfies and the road to wooing millennials Read more
“Young people like Bernie because he sounds like a revolutionary,” she says. But Okolo prefers Clinton’s experience and positions on issues like equal pay for equal work and criminal justice reform. “Hillary sounds pragmatic, which can come across as stuffy to young people. Her experience can almost count against her.” She adds: “Sanders seems bold, even if none of his ideas can happen.”
Shattering “that highest, hardest glass ceiling”, as Clinton so elegantly put it in her 2008 concession speech, doesn’t seem revolutionary to some younger women. Income inequality is a bigger concern in what may turn out to be a post-gender election.
Kara Lessin is a 23-year-old in her final year at Harvard who has volunteered for Sanders but was excited by Clinton eight years ago. “The ‘I’m a woman and it’s OK to vote with your uterus’ message is tired,” she said. “Bernie really understands systemic oppression. Her neo-liberal politics is pretty tired.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Clinton at Wellesley in her student protest days. ‘With Sanders on her heels, any day now I expect her to talk about the summer she worked at a law firm whose lead partner was a former Communist.’ Photograph: Sygma/Corbis (left); Lee Balterman/Life Picture Collection via Getty (right)
I first met Clinton, then Hillary Rodham, in 1978. I was struck by her directness and that she spoke in perfect paragraphs. She was a sincere feminist and activist, but pragmatic. To help her husband win back the governor’s office, after he lost in 1980, she took Vernon Jordan’s advice to add Clinton to her name.
She’s also been a source. In the 1980s, she headed a women’s commission of the ultra-establishment American Bar Association that called for promotion of more women lawyers and judges, something that was just beginning to happen. Although I was a reporter, a species she inherently distrusts, she provided some useful information for my first book about women lawyers.
In early 1993, when the Clintons moved into the White House, I was covering a reception in the ballroom of the Mayflower Hotel for women appointees in the new administration. To wild cheering, she proclaimed that, in the important government jobs, “there have never been women like us”. She was using code for feminists.
'Give us a dream': Hillary Clinton supporters look to her for aspirations Read more
Lately Clinton has been talking about her activism at Wellesley and Yale Law. With Sanders on her heels in both Iowa and New Hampshire, any day now I expect her to talk about the summer she worked at an Oakland law firm whose lead partner was a former Communist married to Jessica Mitford. But that’s another story.
At an Iowa rally on Thursday, trying to broaden her appeal to younger women, Clinton was introduced by the singer Demi Lovato. There was an older crowd in New Hampshire the next day, when she got a standing ovation at a Naral Pro-Choice America event celebrating the anniversary of Roe v Wade. Earlier, Sanders had said groups like Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign that have endorsed Clinton were “part of the establishment”. Clinton’s retort came quickly: “We need someone in the White House who understands that Naral and Planned Parenthood aren’t part of the establishment.”
I am so frustrated with dialogue around Hillary among my peers. It feels so gendered, even from women, so harshly sexist Lena Dunham
This fight over who belongs to the establishment reminded me of a brilliant article by David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker. He explained how a “Joshua generation” of younger black leaders like Obama had evolved from an older Moses generation. We may be witnessing a similar evolution with Clinton and women.
Laybourne, 68, is Clinton’s age and, like the woman for whom she held that lunch the other day, became politically active during the first wave of feminism. Clinton is doing well with the Layborne generation. Her troubles are with the Lenny generation.
Lenny is a newsletter for younger women founded by the writer and actress Lena Dunham, the star of HBO’s Girls. Dunham, 29, has campaigned hard for Clinton and interviewed her for Lenny’s first issue a few months ago.
“I am so frustrated with the dialogue around Hillary among my peers,” Dunham told me in an email. “It feels so gendered, even from women, so harshly sexist. We never throw claims of too establishment or too stiff or even too selfish at male politicians. It’s unfair in the deepest sense.”
If she wins the Democratic nomination, Clinton needs to bridge the Laybournes and the Lennys, as Obama did with the Joshua and Moses generations. She must satisfy Okolo, one of her Harvard supporters:
Hillary, can you excite us? ||||| “There are all sorts of sensible reasons not to run for the White House,” says Larry Sanders, aged 81, the cautious older brother of US presidential hopeful Bernie, 74. “Bernard wouldn’t have stood if he didn’t think it was necessary.”
Across the world people are “feeling the Bern” and heralding a political revolution brought to them by Democratic presidential candidate Sanders, and his British based brother is taking the blame. “I used to babysit him and talk about the political books I was reading, so it’s my fault,” he jokes in a low rumble of a voice that is similar to Bernie’s.
Bernie has taken America and Hillary Clinton by surprise, winning Tuesday night’s primary in New Hampshire with 82 per cent of women under 30 supporting him, and coming close in Iowa last week, with 46.9 per cent of the vote, compared with Clinton’s 49.9.
It reflects a global polarisation of politics, with young people rallying behind socialist underdogs. Over here we have Jeremy Corbyn’s army of hipsters and in the US Bernie is big with the under-30s. “There are comparisons with Corbyn and if Bernard wins we will have a special relationship with him,” says Larry.
Thanks to Bernie, Larry is voting in the US elections this year for the first time since 1968, when he left Brooklyn for Hammersmith with his first wife, Margaret, who died in 1983.
He now lives with his partner Janet in Oxford, where he worked as a county councillor and social worker. Larry has a “Bernie” sticker on his fridge at home and tries to speak to his brother every other Sunday. Last autumn Larry spent five weeks campaigning with Bernie — “it was exciting to be part of the discussions about strategy changes”.
So why are young people supporting older socialist men? “There must be a reason why young people are going to the Left. Middle-aged people have some stability and security whereas younger people trying to get started find that the system isn’t working for them. The biggest similarity between Corbyn and Bernard is their approach to austerity; the idea that the crimes of the bankers in the 2008 crash should be paid for by reducing benefits of poor people and breaking up the NHS.”
Is it relevant that Sanders and Corbyn are both old and white? “They are a factor but no one thinks you should be elected just because of one factor. Clinton doesn’t think someone should be elected just because they are female.”
He continues: “People like my brother and Corbyn developed their ideas in their younger years and stuck to them, whereas people like Hillary Clinton were more cautious and are mired in what’s gone wrong. Part of it has to do with the number of people who feel the political system hasn’t worked for them and in that sense there is a similarity between support for Bernard and Trump.”
Sanders’s rival Hillary Clinton is “a capable woman” but “she is geared to the politics where you shift your views to accommodate what is popular in the polls and as a result she has been involved in some dangerous and unpleasant things.” He talks about her involvement in changing benefit provisions and the war in Iraq.
His brother is interested in Thomas Piketty’s message that economic inequality has increased but hasn’t read Piketty’s book — “he isn’t terribly interested in theory, he is trying to make a practical difference. His friend asked him about Piketty and he said you got 30 seconds to explain it.” This philosophy extends to Twitter, where he is “quick-minded”.
Larry doesn’t fancy Corbyn’s chances here. “It is unlikely that he will be Prime Minister. The established Labour Party would sooner lose than give up control. He would be the best Prime Minister of any party leader except Caroline Lucas.” Larry stood as a Green Party candidate for Oxford and West Abingdon in the general election last year, coming fifth. His brother supported him via Skype at a meeting. “I should have asked his advice because he was better at running than me. Next time.”
Bernie “wasn’t keen to stand”. “He was talking about it for a year before he announced and if anyone had come in with similar politics he would have been happy to let them stand, say Elizabeth Warren [the academic and senator for Massachusetts].” His greatest fear wasn’t the attention — “he is a tough cookie who can cope with being humiliated” — but “if he ran and did it badly then nobody with those kind of ideas could win, they would be damaged and people who need those ideas will be damaged”.
He told his brother a week before he announced his candidacy. “It was very emotional,” says Larry. “It made me think of how proud our parents would be.” Their mother, Dorothy, died aged 46 when Bernie was 18 and Larry 24. Their father died three years later.
He calls his brother Bernard, which is their maternal grandfather’s name. “He was Bernie from the beginning of his political career and I tried it but it felt wrong.”
US Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders speaking during the primary night rally in Concord, New Hampshire
The Sanders brothers grew up in Brooklyn, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland. Bernie is the first Jewish-American to win a primary. Their father came over aged 17, not speaking a word of English, and became a paint salesman. Larry says: “We lived in a small apartment but were not deprived in any sense of the word.” They weren’t ambitious. “The only thing we knew was that we didn’t want to work for somebody else. That might have been a premonition for Bernard. He has never worked for anybody.”
After the initial “disappointment” of his brother being too small to play, they became friends. “Bernard was a sweet child. He was a little too truthful and gullible. He came home from school and said his friend told him about Martians, and his friend would not have lied to him. But he was a quick learner.”
He was popular and a good athlete; even now he “has kept his figure, weighing almost the same as he did at 18”. They went to musicals together but “he was slow with girls, like his brother. He is puritanical about drink, although he isn’t teetotal, but he did smoke pot.”
Their parents spoke about losing their families in the Holocaust and “it made a big impression. That people you would have been friends with were killed just for being Jewish meant we were aware of an underlying sense of politics. A kind of politics in the sense that a lot of children grow up to think politics is someone else’s problem and not interesting but we knew it was life and death.”
There was “a glimmer” of political promise, when Larry saw his brother speak on a student politics panel and “I have some idea where his values came from” but “I don’t know when he became capable of not minding even fierce opposition. He acquired the capacity to speak out vigorously even if he was going to have everyone coming down hard on him.”
The Sanders brothers grew up together in Brooklyn, New York
It will be useful if he becomes president. “If he wins he will come up against the whole political and economic establishment.” Barack Obama, who is more moderate, has struggled to implement his healthcare reforms. “It will be a tough job. He won’t wait for politics to change, he’s going try to make it change so he will be in many ways a perpetual campaigner.”
He adds: “Bernie has said it will not solve anything but it will be the first stage in what he is calling a political revolution. It will only work if people remain engaged after the election. It may be that the country has gone too far towards what he called an oligopoly, where a small number of people use their power and money to control the political structure. But it is worth a shot because it is wrong to have people in rich countries suffering when the country can afford to help them.”
He says his brother’s programmes — including a living wage of $15 an hour, universal healthcare and a renewables infrastructure project to create new jobs — are “possible and will make a big difference. The consequences of not doing them will be bad.”
Larry has faith in his brother. “Selection is the hardest part but the way things have gone in the last couple of weeks leads me to think he can do it. The general election is easier.”
Polls give Sanders, who is also senator of Vermont, a 40 per cent chance of winning the nomination. What if he loses? “He will fight to the end. If loses, he has a job that he loves so it won’t be the end of the world.
“I don’t think much will come of Mrs Clinton having shifted her ideas to accommodate his because given the opportunity she will shift in another direction, but this large core of young people supporting him will carry on and make politics an important part of their life.”
Both brothers’ “greatest pleasure is the grandchildren”. Larry’s daughter Anna is 43 and son Jacob is 46. Bernie has a son called Levi and three step-children. Bernie’s house in Vermont is “modest, if it were up to him he’d have nothing on the walls. His wife is increasingly interested in furniture” but he has a huge garden — “even if he wasn’t busy he wouldn’t weed it”.
He enjoys walking in the countryside and does the food shopping, going for organic, and “his culinary skill is barbecuing — he cooks steak”. He reads political biographies and history; like Corbyn, he enjoys folk music “but he is unmusical”. Rapper Killer Mike recently proclaimed his support for him and while Bernie “he thinks he’s a great guy” he isn’t familiar with his work.
Larry is too settled to move back to the US but “I’ll accept an offer to stay at the White House. We could do a barbecue, they have a nice garden.”
Follow Susie on Twitter: @susannahbutter ||||| Seven years after she left the presidential stage thanking supporters for putting “18 million cracks” in the highest glass ceiling, Hillary Clinton kicked off her campaign Saturday with a wink to her past, pointing out that she was launching under blue Manhattan skies, “with absolutely no ceilings.”
With 1 World Trade Center rising behind her podium on New York City’s Roosevelt Island, Clinton embraced the historic nature of her run explicitly, stating with pride that while she isn’t the youngest candidate in the race, “I will be the youngest woman president in the history of the United States, and the first grandmother as well.”
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In a 45-minute speech that often felt more like a State of the Union address than a rousing campaign rally, Clinton ranged widely, throwing in homages to past Democratic presidents, attacks on today’s Republicans, appeals to women, LGBT groups, climate activists, workers, and a hodge-podge of other traditional progressive causes.
If there was a clear theme to Clinton’s remarks, it was the “four fights” she vowed to wage on behalf of “everyday Americans”: building an economy for tomorrow, strengthening America and our core values, and revitalizing our democracy, in the campaign’s boiled-down language.
Her candidacy, she said, would be a battle “for everyone who’s been knocked down but refused to be knocked out.”
Dressed in a royal blue pantsuit, Clinton pitched herself — to a crowd of what the campaign said was around 5,500 supporters — as a reliably progressive alternative to Republican candidates with outdated ideas, and the best chance for Americans to have a “new beginning.”
“It’s not 1941, or 1993, or even 2009,” she said. “We face new challenges in our economy and our democracy.”
But she also looked backward enough to hail the administrations of President Barack Obama and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, lauding both men as “guided by the fundamental American belief that real and lasting prosperity must be built by all and shared by all.”
Quoting from the lyrics of The Beatles’ “Yesterday,” the 67-year-old Clinton painted Republicans as the party of the past.
“They’re all singing the same song,” she said, characterizing her opponents’ views as hostile to middle-class workers, gays, women, and the poor. “They believe in yesterday.”
“Fundamentally,” she said, “they reject what it takes to build an inclusive economy. It takes an inclusive society.”
When Republicans were running the country, she charged, they favored the wealthy over everyone else. “What happened?” she asked, and the crowd booed.
Clinton hit on most key planks of the Democrats’ longstanding policy agenda while providing few details, promising to roll out specific proposals in the months ahead.
She vowed to fight to raise the minimum wage, but didn’t say by how much.
She said she would work for paid family leave and affordable college education, and called climate change “one of the defining threats of our time.”
She repeated her call for a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and get big money out of politics.
She promised to “re-write the tax code” so it rewards “hard work and investments here at home, not quick trades or stashing profits overseas.”
She praised “the rise of global trade” but said it had “also displaced jobs and undercut wages for millions of Americans.”
And she employed the populist rhetoric that she has been testing out in roundtables on the trail. “While many of you are working multiple jobs to make ends meet,” she said, “you see the top 25 hedge fund managers making more than all of America’s kindergarten teachers combined. And, often paying a lower tax rate.”
She said she was fighting not just for the middle class but for the poor, “for the factory workers and food service workers who stand on their feet all day. For the nurses who work the night shift. For the truckers who drive for hours and the farmers who feed us. For the veterans who serve our country. For the small business owners who took a risk.”
Her biggest applause line, however, came in blasting pro-life Republicans. “They shame and blame women, rather than respect our right to make our own reproductive health decisions,” she said.
Clinton’s first rally and major vision speech came two months to the day after she officially entered the race with a YouTube video announcing her candidacy.
The address was delayed into June, in part because fundraising concerns took priority over generating enthusiasm with a big rally, and in part because her advisers were waiting for a clear moment with no Republican entering the race and stealing the spotlight.
For the past eight weeks, Clinton has spent most of her time attending house party fundraisers and traveling to the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada to participate in small, controlled roundtables, where she asked more questions than she answered.
She has also for the most part steered clear of the press, answering only a handful of questions posed by the large press corps that has been following her early campaign stops. Republicans, meanwhile, have sought to capitalize on a perception that she is untrustworthy and to keep in the headlines controversies surrounding the Clinton Foundation and her email use at the State Department that have vexed her campaign.
A stormy forecast had threatened Clinton’s big kickoff event until late in the week, and the backup plan for the re-launch party was only to hope it wouldn’t rain.
The campaign got lucky: Saturday morning was a sunny day, and New Yorkers came dressed down in shorts, some even wearing Clinton-Gore 1992 T-shirts.
An overflow area where supporters could watch the speech on a large screen, however, remained empty. Many of Clinton’s senior staff members, including Huma Abedin and communications director Jennifer Palmieri, gathered in the back to watch the candidate on the big screen.
While campaign operatives previewed the speech as a bold, progressive vision for the country’s future, some left-leaning groups said they were left disappointed.
“This was mostly a typical Democratic speech,” said Adam Green, co-founded of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “Clinton’s allusions to reining in Wall Street, ending corporate tax havens, and addressing inequality open the door to a corporate accountability agenda [are welcome] — but Americans needs to see specifics.”
One of Clinton’s opponents in the Democratic primary was also quick to criticize her speech as offering little in new ideas.
“Democrats, and in fact, our nation, will not make progress with status-quo thinking,” said Bill Hyers, senior strategist for former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley’s campaign.
Clinton was joined on stage after her speech by Bill Clinton, as well as Chelsea Clinton and her husband, Marc Mezvinsky.
In typical Bill Clinton fashion, he stayed shaking hands and feeding off the energy of the crowd for at least 30 minutes after the candidate had wrapped up her speech. ||||| Young voters in Iowa favored Sanders by a margin of six to one, while older voters went overwhelmingly for Clinton—revealing a party split along generational lines.
Bernie Sanders answered two important questions with his strong showing in Iowa. But, despite his impressive finish, he’ll need to answer two more to truly threaten Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. The most powerful lesson from the Iowa caucus results is that Democrats are facing not just a generation gap, but a Grand Canyon-sized chasm. As I wrote this week, age has emerged as the single most important dividing line in the struggle between Sanders and Clinton. In the Iowa entrance poll (which questions voters on the way into a caucus, rather than on their way out the door, like “exit polls” in primaries) Sanders amassed astounding margins among young people. He crushed Clinton by an almost unimaginable six to one—84 percent to 14 percent—among voters younger than 30. For those tempted to dismiss that as just a campus craze, he also routed her by 58 percent to 37 percent among those aged 30 to 44. But Clinton’s margins were almost as impressive among older voters: she beat Sanders 58 percent to 35 percent among those aged 45-64, and by 69 percent to 26 percent among seniors. That’s an even wider age gap than Iowa produced in the 2008 contest between Clinton and Barack Obama. In that Iowa caucus, Clinton also was routed among younger voters, but Obama stayed more competitive than Sanders did among those older than 45. On both sides, John Edwards, as a strong third contender, also somewhat muted the contrasts. In 2008, Clinton ran 34 percentage points better among seniors than with those under 30; this week, the gap was 55 points.
Obama beat Clinton by 20 percentage points among voters younger than 30, while she beat him by 25 points among voters older than 65, according to a cumulative analysis of the results of all the exit polls in the 2008 Democratic primary conducted by ABC pollster Gary Langer. Voters in the middle-aged groups divided more narrowly: Obama carried those aged 30-44 by 11 points, and Clinton carried the near retirement generation (45 to 64) by seven, according to Langer’s analysis. But when it comes to piling up votes, one of these demographic advantages is much more useful than the other. Across all of the 2008 contests, according to Langer’s calculations, voters older than 45 cast fully 61 percent of Democratic votes, while those younger than 45 cast 39 percent. That’s an advantage for Clinton. And it’s a slightly worrisome note for Sanders—a cloud passing on an otherwise sunny day—that young voters cast a slightly smaller share of the total Iowa Democratic vote in 2016 than 2008. Still, Sanders’s overwhelming margins among Iowa’s younger voters—which exceeded even Obama’s 2008 showing—affirmatively answered the first critical question for the Vermont senator’s campaign: Would the connection with young voters evident at his rallies translate to the ballot box? The second question that Iowa answered is whether Sanders could become more than just what I’ve termed a “wine track” candidate. Sanders started the 2016 race fitting the profile of brainy Democratic contenders from Eugene McCarthy to Gary Hart to Paul Tsongas to Bill Bradley, who relied mostly on support from younger voters and upscale white liberals. All of them lost to rivals who mobilized the competing “beer track” coalition of blue-collar whites and minorities. Obama represented a variation on the theme: He married the backing of those upscale whites with support from African Americans. That allowed him to narrowly beat Clinton’s modified “beer track” coalition of working-class whites and Hispanics.
In Iowa, Sanders did very well with the wine-track constituencies. Besides his overwhelming showing among younger voters, he stayed close to Clinton among college-educated whites: He carried college-educated white men by 12 percentage points and lost college-educated white women by the same margin. In Iowa, in fact, both college-educated white men and women divided almost exactly as they did in the cumulative results between Clinton and Obama in 2008. But in Iowa, Sanders expanded beyond that beachhead to run evenly with Clinton among non-college whites. If that pattern persists, it would represent a huge change in the Democratic landscape. In 2008, across all the exit polls, Clinton dominated Obama among non-college white women (carrying 66 percent of them) and non-college white men (56 percent). But in Iowa, Sanders narrowly carried those blue-collar white men and held down his losses among the blue-collar white women: Clinton only carried just over half of them. Class and age shaped the gender gap in Iowa. That gap was modest: Clinton last night won 50 percent of women and 44 percent of men. That almost exactly matched her total in the cumulative 2008 results against Obama, when gender was also somewhat muted: In that race Clinton carried 52 percent of women and 43 percent of men. Clinton benefits from that pattern because women cast most of the Democratic votes (57 percent in all the primaries last time, the same number as in Iowa last night). And her overall advantage among women could rise as African American women, who usually vote more heavily than black men, weigh in. But in Iowa, Sanders signaled he could remain competitive enough among women (particularly younger woman) to prevent Clinton’s advantage there from becoming insurmountable.
It’s yet to be seen whether Clinton’s performance with blue-collar whites eroded because those voters are responding to Sanders’s full-throated economic populism—or simply because she’s not running again against an African American with an Ivy League pedigree. But, either way, if Sanders can sustain the competitive showing among blue-collar whites he displayed in Iowa, he can contest metal-bending Rust Belt states (like Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin) that previous wine-track candidates could only rarely threaten. But to win those states—and the other big racially-diverse states that will almost certainly decide the Democratic race—Sanders must answer two other questions Iowa did not resolve. The first is whether he can win minority voters. Minorities comprised only 9 percent of the voters in Iowa last night (up just slightly from 2008), but they will likely cast between 35 to 40 percent of the total vote in the 2016 Democratic primaries. As I noted on Monday, minorities are especially plentiful in the big states that will award the most delegates, including New York (where minorities cast just under one-third of the 2008 vote), Florida (about one-third), Virginia and New Jersey (about two-fifths), Illinois (over two-fifths) California (nearly half) and Georgia and Texas (over half). The sample in Iowa was small, but Sanders won only about one-third of non-white voters there, compared to about three-fifths for Clinton. She polls even better among minorities in most national surveys. The next contest in New Hampshire, whose Democratic electorate in 2008 was 95 percent white, won’t provide much guidance on whether Sanders can shatter that wall. The real signals will come later in February from Nevada (where Hispanics and blacks each cast about one-sixth of the 2008 vote) and South Carolina (where African Americans cast a 55 percent majority of the 2008 vote). | – Bernie Sanders didn't just defeat Hillary Clinton among the under-30 set in Iowa, he trounced her by an incredible margin of 6:1. And that holds true when looking solely at young female voters. What gives? Some related coverage: Clinton "has aggressively reached out to young women with the promise of breaking a glass ceiling that the women’s movement has worked for decades to shatter. The newest generation of feminists is responding with a shrug." The Los Angeles Times takes a deeper look, suggesting that millennials see Clinton more as "overcautious mother" than "trailblazer." Former New York Times editor Jill Abramson thinks it's because the idea of breaking the glass ceiling "doesn’t seem revolutionary to some younger women." In fact, this might be a "post-gender election." Read her piece at the Guardian. "The split has exposed a fault line around feminism in America, between women who grew up in an era when they weren't allowed to wear pants to work, for example—and young women who have never known the kind of discrimination and stereotypes their mothers faced." NPR also takes a look. The sentiment isn't unanimous. To read a passionate, all-caps rant against the Hillary backlash going on among young women—written by a young woman herself—see this post at Pajiba. "YES, I'M EMOTIONAL AND I'M YELLING." An Atlantic analysis looks beyond gender in examining the age differences of Clinton and Sanders supporters: Essentially, he got the younger ones and she got the older ones. "Democrats are facing not just a generation gap, but a Grand Canyon-sized chasm." The dividing line in this contest? Age 45, observes the Washington Post. |
President Donald Trump alleged in a tweet storm early Saturday that former President Barack Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower before his election win in November — an accusation that a senior U.S. official told NBC News is baseless.
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Trump did not provide any evidence for the claims, which followed an interview on Fox News in which the allegation came up.
In response, Obama spokesman Kevin Lewis roundly rejected Trump's claims that the previous administration had ordered surveillance at his New York City residence.
Neither @barackobama nor any WH official under Obama has ever ordered surveillance on any US Citizen. Any suggestion is unequivocally false pic.twitter.com/qF04X3NUvq — Kevin Lewis (@KLewis44) March 4, 2017
“A cardinal rule of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice,” Lewis said. “As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.”
A senior U.S. official in a position to know told NBC News that Trump's allegations have no merit, and the president did not consult with people within the U.S. government who would know the validity of the charge before making claims on his favored communications platform.
"Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” Trump wrote as part of a series of tweets Saturday morning.
Is it legal for a sitting President to be "wire tapping" a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017
How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017
An FBI spokeswoman said the bureau would not comment on the tweets.
NBC News reached out to the White House for comment, but did not immediately hear back.
Ben Rhodes, former deputy national security adviser to Obama, said in a tweet that presidents can't simply order wiretaps as Trump suggests.
No President can order a wiretap. Those restrictions were put in place to protect citizens from people like you. https://t.co/lEVscjkzSw — Ben Rhodes (@brhodes) March 4, 2017
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said Trump's tweets displaying a worrying trend.
"If there is something bad or sick going on, it is the willingness of the nation's chief executive to make the most outlandish and destructive claims without providing a scintilla of evidence to support them," Schiff said in a statement.
On Friday, Fox's Brett Baier asked House Speaker Paul Ryan whether he was concerned "that the Obama administration may have been surveilling members of the Trump campaign in a pretty detailed investigation during the election?"
Ryan responded by saying: "I don't think that's the case."
Trump, who is spending the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, frequently tweets about topics that have appeared in conservative media outlets.
NBC News has found no evidence to support Trump's claims about wiretapping, which appear to stem from conservative media outlets, such as Breitbart, and anonymously sourced reports in British blogs. According to those reports, U.S. officials obtained a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to investigate contacts between computers at a Russian bank and a server inside Trump's campaign headquarters at Trump Tower.
A FISA warrant would allow the FBI to intercept communications outside of the normal criminal process, but they would likely require the permission of a magistrate judge to extensively wiretap Trump Tower.
There have been reports that communications between Trump associates and Russians were picked up by intelligence agencies during the campaign as part of routine surveillance of the Russians. Trump and his aides have denied there were any improper contacts.
After a rowdy town hall in Clemson, South Carolina, on Saturday, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said that if true, the allegations would be the "biggest political scandal since Watergate" and vowed to get to the bottom of Trump's claims.
He later told NBC News that there are three possibilities for what occurred: "It’s all a misunderstanding, the Obama administration went way out of line or some judge somewhere said there’s something to the idea of the Trump Russia ties," Graham said.
Republican Sen. Ben Sasse called on Trump to provide evidence for the explosive wiretapping claim. He said that if the alleged wiretap Trump was referring to was without authorization of the FISA court, “the President should explain what sort of wiretap it was and how he knows this.”
"We are in the midst of a civilization-warping crisis of public trust, and the President’s allegations today demand the thorough and dispassionate attention of serious patriots," Sasse said in a statement. "A quest for the full truth, rather than knee-jerk partisanship, must be our guide if we are going to rebuild civic trust and health."
Trump's allegations about Obama were part of a flurry of early-morning tweets that also defended Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Just out: The same Russian Ambassador that met Jeff Sessions visited the Obama White House 22 times, and 4 times last year alone. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017
Sessions is under fire for not disclosing during his confirmation hearing that he met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Sessions was a senator at the time and an adviser to the Trump campaign.
"The first meeting Jeff Sessions had with the Russian Amb was set up by the Obama Administration under education program for 100 Ambs......"
"The same Russian Ambassador that met Jeff Sessions visited the Obama White House 22 times, and 4 times last year alone," Trump tweeted.
News of the meetings drew fire from critics who said Sessions had misled the Judiciary Committee in his January confirmation hearings.
Sessions recused himself from overseeing any Justice Department investigation into alleged Russian election interference earlier this week.
On Friday, he said he would submit amended testimony and respond to senators' questions over his contacts with Russia's ambassador.
Sessions faces calls for his resignation over the issue but Trump has backed his attorney general, saying he did nothing wrong.
In recent days, Trump has swiped back at allegations about the communications between members of his team and Russian officials during and after the campaign.
He lashed out at Democrats Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi Friday, tweeting a picture of Schumer meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2003.
We should start an immediate investigation into @SenSchumer and his ties to Russia and Putin. A total hypocrite! pic.twitter.com/Ik3yqjHzsA — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 3, 2017
He also retweeted a Politico article which revealed Pelosi had met the Russian ambassador in 2010 despite her claims to the contrary.
Trump said both Democrats should also be investigated for their ties to Russia.
Schumer responded on the social network: “Happily talk re: my contact w Mr. Putin & his associates, took place in '03 in full view of press & public under oath. Would you & your team?”
On Feb. 13, National Security Adviser Michael Flynn resigned shortly after The Washington Post first reported that the Justice Department had informed the White House that Flynn might be subject to blackmail by Moscow.
Trump acknowledged in January that Russia had a role in a series of cyberattacks on America, but says it didn't impact the election. ||||| President Donald Trump on Saturday called it a “fact” that Obama had tapped Trump Tower phones. | Getty Lawmakers stunned, baffled by Trump’s wiretap allegations The White House, meanwhile, is pushing for a probe of the Obama administration.
Congressional Republicans were flummoxed Sunday by President Donald Trump's and his White House’s continued assertions — provided without evidence — that President Barack Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower during the 2016 presidential campaign.
A day after Trump made the charge, Hill Republicans were largely mute, and those who spoke out were perplexed at the source of Trump’s information, which the White House has yet to disclose.
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Sen. Marco Rubio said Sunday he had seen “no evidence” to back up Trump’s wiretap claims. Rubio is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Trump’s ties to Russia and has received classified briefings on the issue.
“I'd imagine the president and the White House in the days to come will outline further what was behind that accusation,” the Florida Republican said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “The president put that out there, and now the White House will have to answer as to exactly what he was referring to.”
Rubio’s comments came a day after Nebraska GOP Sen. Ben Sasse, a longtime Trump critic, said Trump owed it to the public to share more details about his allegation. Other Republican lawmakers who have clashed with Trump made similar demands for more information.
“It would be more helpful if he turned over to the intelligence committee any evidence that he has,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, on CBS' "Face the Nation."
Trump suggested Saturday that “a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!” In a separate tweet, he wrote “Just found out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”
Trump’s allegations raised questions about whether federal authorities had obtained a legal warrant to tap Trump's or his associates’ calls, perhaps through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which can authorize wiretaps against potential foreign spies. Those orders are typically classified, and Trump’s comments sent Washington scrambling to understand his allegations.
One lawmaker who did support his call for an investigation was Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the head of the House intelligence panel. "The Committee will make inquiries into whether the government was conducting surveillance activities on any political party’s campaign officials or surrogates, and we will continue to investigate this issue if the evidence warrants it,” he said in a statement.
But otherwise, even some of Trump's strongest supporters were cautious about rushing to his defense.
On "Fox News Sunday," Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said he had no evidence that what Trump said was true: "It doesn't mean that none of these things have happened, just means I haven't seen them yet."
Part of the confusion stems from the fact that, according to GOP sources, the White House gave no advance notice to congressional Republicans that Trump would be raising the issue of wiretaps this weekend, leaving both sides scrambling to figure out what Trump was referring to and how to respond publicly.
Meanwhile, congressional Democrats said Trump’s flailing at his predecessor is a sign that he’s feeling squeezed by the federal investigation into his associates’ ties to Russia. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said Trump’s charge, if proved false, is proof he “doesn’t know how to conduct himself.” And if it’s true, “it’s even worse,” because it means federal authorities saw a legal basis to authorize a wiretap, which requires a judge’s signoff.
“Either way … the president is in trouble,” Schumer said on “Meet the Press.”
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Trump’s allegation about Obama was a classic diversion tactic.
“This is called a wrap-up smear,” she said. “You make up something, then you have the press write about it, then you say everybody is writing about this charge. It’s the tool of an authoritarian, to just have you always be talking about what you want them to be talking about it.”
Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence panel, was also highly critical: "For a president of the United States to make such an incendiary charge — and one that discredits our democracy in the eyes of the world — is as destructive as it was baseless."
Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence panel, said Sunday that he’ll be visiting with intelligence officials this week for an “unprecedented” look at the intelligence behind allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and potential connections to Trump associates. The Virginia lawmaker added that he had seen no evidence — despite Trump’s claims — that federal officials had authorized a wiretap of Trump Tower, Trump’s campaign headquarters.
“We are early into this investigation,” he said, praising Republican colleagues on the committee like Rubio, Collins and Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt for cooperating with Democrats on the probe.
Warner’s comments followed a similar assertion by former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who said “I can deny” that there was any request by the FBI for a warrant to tap phones in Trump Tower.
"It's in everyone's interest — the current president's interest, Democrats' interest, Republicans' interest, the country's interest — to get to the bottom of all this, because it's such a distraction. Certainly the Russians have to be chortling at the success of their efforts to sow dissension in this country," he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Clapper added that he continues to believe that Russia meddled in the election on Trump's behalf, as U.S. intelligence agencies concluded in a declassified January report, but that "no evidence of collusion" between Moscow and Trump aides has been discovered.
Trump aides were caught Sunday defending the president’s accusation about Obama without any evidence to back them up. And they sought to shift the focus to Congress, by calling on the House and Senate intelligence committees — already probing potential Trump ties to Russia — to include an investigation of any illegal wiretapping by the Obama administration.
“I think what is necessary is Congress doing its job. Let them investigate,” said deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders in an interview on ABC’s “This Week.”
Sanders presented no evidence of any improper actions by the Obama administration, and she refused to repeat Trump’s explosive Saturday tweets accusing Obama of spying on him and his team. Pressed repeatedly by host Martha Raddatz, Sanders said Trump was merely wondering about illegal wiretapping — despite Trump declaring it as fact just a day earlier.
“I think he is going off of information that he’s seeing that has led him to believe this is a very real potential,” she said, adding, “He’s talking about: ‘Could this have happened?’”
Trump on Saturday said that Obama had tapped Trump Tower phones, despite no evidence of his predecessor’s involvement. His claim appeared to be based on right-wing media reports raising questions about whether Trump associates had been surveilled. On Sunday, the press secretary stated: "President Donald J. Trump is requesting that as part of their investigation into Russian activity, the congressional intelligence committees exercise their oversight authority to determine whether executive branch investigative powers were abused in 2016."
Obama White House spokesman Josh Earnest insisted Sunday that any wiretaps authorized against Trump or his associates arose only from legal law enforcement authority.
“The president of the United States does not have the authority to unilaterally order the wiretapping of an American citizen,” he said, noting that such taps are approved by judges based only on evidence in a criminal or counterintelligence investigation.
Earnest said the White House kept FBI investigations at arm’s length and didn’t attempt to “influence or dictate” how those probes were conducted.
The Trump administration’s call for Congress to investigate wiretaps targeting Trump or his associates comes as the House and Senate intelligence committees have already launched probes into whether top Trump allies had contacts with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign. Nunes has also emphasized that he intends to probe leaks of classified information that have made their way into media reports since the election.
The general consensus Sunday was that the controversy indicated that more light needs to be shined on Russian meddling in the election.
"It underscores the necessity, and indeed the inevitability, of an independent investigation," Tom Donilon, Obama's national security adviser from 2010 to 2013, told Fareed Zakaria on CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS."
Rebecca Morin contributed to this report. | – A spokesperson for Barack Obama says President Trump's accusations about Obama wiretapping Trump Tower are "simply false," NBC News reports. "Neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any US citizen," Kevin Lewis says. The Obama camp wasn't the only one denying the veracity of Trump's claim, which came in a flurry of tweets Saturday morning and was presented without evidence. A senior US official says Trump didn't speak to anyone in the government who would have knowledge of a wiretap. And a former deputy national security adviser says presidents don't have the power to order wiretaps on citizens. Nancy Pelosi responded to Trump's tweets by calling him the "deflector-in-chief" and demanding an independent investigation into his alleged Russia connections, USA Today reports. According to CBS News, Howard Dean pointed out that if Trump Tower was actually wiretapped, it means a judge found probable cause of Trump being involved in something criminal. And Paul Ryan says he doesn't believe the Obama administration was conducting surveillance on Trump. But Lindsey Graham said he was concerned about the accusations and promised "to get to the bottom of this" during a town hall meeting Saturday. In recent days, right-wing media has started accusing Obama of leading a "silent coup" to take down Trump. |
Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born Islamic militant cleric who became a prominent figure in al-Qaida's most active branch, using his fluent English and Internet savvy to draw recruits to carry out attacks in the United States, was killed Friday in the mountains of Yemen, American and Yemeni officials said.
FILE - In this file image taken from video and released by SITE Intelligence Group on Monday, Nov. 8, 2010, Anwar al-Awlaki speaks in a video message posted on radical websites. Yemen's Defense Ministry... (Associated Press)
File - This October 2008 file photo by Muhammad ud-Deen shows Imam Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. Yemen's Defense Ministry said in a statement Friday Sept. 30, 2011 the U.S.-born al-Qaida cleric Anwar al-Awlaki... (Associated Press)
The Yemeni government and Defense Ministry announced al-Awlaki's death, but gave no details. A senior U.S. official said American intelligence supports the claim that he had been killed. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.
Yemeni security officials and local tribal leaders said the was killed in an airstrike on his convoy that they believed was carried out by the Americans. They said pilotless drones had been seen over the area in previous days.
Al-Awlaki would be the most prominent al-Qaida figure to be killed since Osama bin Laden's death in a U.S. raid in Pakistan in May. In July, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the Yemeni-American was a priority target alongside Ayman al-Zawahri, bin Laden's successor as the terror network's leader.
The 40-year-old al-Awlaki had been in the U.S. crosshairs since his killing was approved by President Barack Obama in April 2010 _ making him the first American placed on the CIA "kill or capture" list. At least twice, airstrikes were called in on locations in Yemen where al-Awlaki was suspected of being, but he wasn't harmed.
Al-Awlaki, born in New Mexico to Yemeni parents, was believed to be key in turning al-Qaida's affiliate in Yemen into what American officials have called the most significant and immediate threat to the Untied States. The branch, led by a Yemeni militant named Nasser al-Wahishi, plotted several failed attacks on U.S. soil _ the botched Christmas 2009 attempt to blow up an American airliner heading to Detroit and a foiled 2010 attempt to main explosives to Chicago.
Known as an eloquent preacher who spread English-language sermons on the internet calling for "holy war" against the United States, al-Awlaki's role was to inspire and _ it is believed _ even directly recruit militants to carry out attacks.
U.S. officials believe he went beyond just being an inspiring spiritual leader to become involved in operational planning for al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, as the Yemen branch is called. Yemeni officials have said al-Awlaki had contacts with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the accused would-be Christmas plane bomber, who was in Yemen in 2009. They say the believe al-Awlaki met with the 23-year-old Nigerian, along with other al-Qaida leaders, in al-Qaida strongholds in the country in the weeks before the failed bombing.
In New York, the Pakistani-American man who pleaded guilty to the May 2010 Times Square car bombing attempt told interrogators he was "inspired" by al-Awlaki after making contact over the Internet.
Al-Awlaki also exchanged up to 20 emails with U.S. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, alleged killer of 13 people in the Nov. 5, 2009, rampage at Fort Hood. Hasan initiated the contacts, drawn by al-Awlaki's Internet sermons, and approached him for religious advice.
Al-Awlaki has said he didn't tell Hasan to carry out the shootings, but he later praised Hasan as a "hero" on his Web site for killing American soldiers who would be heading for Afghanistan or Iraq to fight Muslims. The cleric similarly said Abdulmutallab was his "student" but said he never told him to carry out the airline attack.
In a statement, the Yemeni government said al-Awlaki was "targeted and killed" 5 miles (8 kilometers) from the town of Khashef in the Province of al-Jawf. The town is located 87 miles (140 kilometers) east of the capital Sanaa.
The statement says the operation was launched on Friday around 9:55 a.m. It gave no other details.
The Yemeni Defense Ministry also reported the death, without elaborating, in a mobile phone SMS message.
Local tribal and security officials said al-Awlaki was travelling in a two-car convoy with two other al-Qaida in Yemen operatives from al-Jawf to neighboring Marib province when they were hit. They said the other two operatives were also believed dead. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the press.
Yemen, the Arab world's most impoverished nation, has become a haven for hundreds of al-Qaida militants. The United States has been deeply concerned that militants will take advantage of the country's political turmoil to strengthen their positions. In recent months, militants have seized control of several cities in Yemen's south.
A previous attack against al-Awlaki on May 5, shortly after the May raid that killed Osama bin Laden, was carried out by a combination of U.S. drones and jets.
The operation was run by the U.S. military's elite counterterrorism unit, the Joint Special Operations Command _ the same unit that got bin Laden. JSOC has worked closely with Yemeni counterterrorism forces for years, in the fight against al-Qaida.
Top U.S. counterterrorism adviser John Brennan says such cooperation with Yemen has improved since the political unrest there. Brennan said the Yemenis have been more willing to share information about the location of al-Qaida targets, as a way to fight the Yemeni branch challenging them for power. Other U.S. officials say the Yemenis have also allowed the U.S. to fly more armed drone and aircraft missions over its territory than ever previously, trying to use U.S. military power to stay in power. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss matters of intelligence.
____
AP correspondent Matt Apuzzo in Washington contributed to this report. ||||| Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni-American preacher who has emerged in recent years as a recruiter for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, was killed at around 10:00 local time in Yemen this morning, according to Yemen and unnamed US officials.
In a brief statement, Yemen's foreign ministry said Awlaki was killed five miles outside of Kashef, in al-Jawf province, about 80 miles east of Sanaa, the capital. Yemen didn't say who carried out the attack, but early indications are that Awlaki was killed in an airstrike, which would almost certainly point to the US. Reuters reports that an unidentified US official confirmed the death.
The Obama administration, in concert with President Ali Abdullah Saleh, has been running an intense air campaign against Islamist militants in Yemen for the past year, and Yemen has negligible air assets of its own. The US also quickly said it was "fairly certain" that Awlaki is dead, implying some inside knowledge of the situation. The US had tried and failed to kill Awlaki with drone strikes in the past.
Awlaki would appear to be the first US citizen to fall at the hands of a targeted killing from the government since the "global war on terror" started 10 years ago. He became a particular target for the US after Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan murdered 12 of his comrades in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, in November 2009. Major Hassan had been in email contact with Awlaki, and the preacher has been cited as an inspiration for Hassan's attack. US officials said Awlaki had also met with failed underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian who sought to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner in December of 2009.
The value of Awlaki
The importance of Awlaki to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is debatable. The group itself has become of particular concern to the US, particularly after it took credit for smuggling two bombs onto cargo planes bound from Yemen to the US in October 2010. The bombs were found and defused on a layover in the UK.
But Awlaki's main value has been in propaganda (thanks in part to the publicity created by America's public focus on him) and in his presumed ability to reach out to an English-speaking Muslim audience – individuals who, Washington worries, are better able to blend into the communities they aimed to attack. In recent years, he's been the driving force behind the Al Qaeda's English-language magazine "Inspire."
In testimony before Congress in February, director of the National Counterterrorism Center Michael Leiter said "I actually consider al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, with Awlaki as a leader within that organization, probably the most significant risk to the US homeland. I'm hesitant to rank them too carefully – but certainly up there." As for Awlaki himself, Leiter said: "He certainly is the most well-known English speaking ideologue who is speaking directly to folks here in the homeland. There are several others who we're concerned with, but I think Awlaki probably does have the greatest audience on the Internet and the like."
Awlaki's path
In his years as a preacher in San Diego and Falls Church, Va., he also crossed paths with other militants. The 9/11 Commission report released in 2004 said he had met two of the 9/11 hijackers at his mosque in Virginia. He was also courted by US officials; on at least one occasion, he was brought in to speak at the Pentagon.
Awlaki left the US in 2002 and after some time in London, arrived in Yemen in 2004. His now defunct website (taken down after the Fort Hood attack) claimed he was working at the time as a lecturer in Islam at the University of Sanaa.
It also made clear why US officials consider him a danger. It hosted an article of his, "The 44 Ways To Support Jihad," that urged Muslims to carry out violence against the "infidels."
Before his site was taken down, he praised Hassan. "The Muslim organizations in America came out in a pitiful chorus condemning Nidal’s operation," he wrote. "Nidal has killed soldiers who were about to be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in order to kill Muslims. The American Muslims who condemned his actions have committed treason against the Muslim Ummah and have fallen into hypocrisy."
Why Awlaki's death is largely irrelevant in Yemen
For Yemen itself, a country in a simmering civil war that saw President Saleh almost assassinated in June (he returned home last week after three months of convalescing in Saudi Arabia) Awlaki's death is largely irrelevant. Popular demands for Saleh's ouster will continue, as will low level fighting.
Writing for the Council of Foreign Relations earlier this month, Princeton's Gregory Johnsen outlined the dire situation in the country. "Lined up against Salih and his heirs is a creaky alliance of former foes and defected generals who agree on only one single point: Salih can [no] longer be president. Nearly half of the regular army is in rebellion under the command of Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar, a general from Salih’s own tribe. But this is much more than a two-sided fight between old comrades-in-arms. Various militia groups have taken advantage of the fracturing of state authority to further their own sectarian agendas," he wrote.
As for AQAP, Johnsen argued that increased drone attacks are insufficient to cripple the group in the large portions of Yemen that are mostly outside of central government control. "Airpower alone is not enough to defeat AQAP... Even more worrisome, this is al-Qaeda’s second incarnation in the country. The gains of 2002 and 2003 have been forfeited by years of neglect when U.S. policy bounced from one crisis to the next without an overarching structure."
A feather in Saleh's cap?
It seems likely that Saleh will seek to place a feather in his cap over the killing of Awlaki. He's been strongly supported by Saudi Arabia, but the US has been more coy, continuing to work together in targeting militants but well aware of the popular demands for political change in the country.
Saleh has frequently sought to position his enemies as "Al Qaeda" in recent years, and himself as the only bulwark against the group. Last week, for instance, he told the Washington Post and Time Magazine that: "We are pressurized by America and the international community to speed up the process of handing over power. And we know to where the power is going to go. It is going to Al Qaeda." | – American-born al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki has been killed by an airstrike in eastern Yemen, according to Yemeni and US officials. The radical preacher, a high-ranking member of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, has been a most-wanted terror suspect for years. He is the biggest target to go down since Osama bin Laden. Tribal elders in the area say an airstrike, apparently from a US drone, hit an al-Qaeda convoy, the AP reports. Previous reports of Awlaki's death have turned out to be mistaken, but the New York Times quotes senior administration officials as confirming. Awlaki's online lectures have been connected to several terror attacks in the US and across the world, including the Fort Hood shooting, the would-be underwear bomber, and the would-be Times Square bomber of last year. He also had the distinction of being the first American placed on the CIA's "kill or capture" list. But a US official says his influence went beyond propaganda. “First and foremost, we’ve been looking at his important operational role,” the official tells the Times. “To the extent he’s no longer playing that role is all to the good.” |
Because life is short, I try generally to avoid irrelevant joke candidacies (particularly ones whose views have a slightly sinister tinge) in this space, but it seems worth noting that the semi-coherent Jimmy McMillan of "The Rent Is Too Damn High Party" fame is attempting to take his black-gloved act national.
He announced his campaign for the presidency on the libertarian-leaning Revolution Radio yesterday.
The tag line: "Tell Obama I'm coming after his black ass." ||||| Despite losing his bid to become the Governor of New York, Jimmy McMillan—the most prominent member of the The Rent Is Too Damn High party—hasn’t lost an ounce of steam. The man roared his way through an interview on Revolution Radio yesterday, where he made a surprise announcement: He’s planning to run against President Obama in 2012. And he’s going to do it as a Republican. And it’s going to be awesome.
Or at least he makes it sound like it’ll be awesome, mainly because he plans to somehow incorporate martial arts into his campaign. When sizing up his opponent, he concedes that Obama is “a good-looking young guy, and I’m a handsome old dude. So there’s gonna be some competition there. He plays basketball, I teach karate.” Say no more!
Of course, he said much more:
“If you don’t do your job right, I am coming at you. I know Barack Obama is an Internet hog. I know he knows that I am out there. But what he hasn’t heard yet is that Jimmy McMillan is running for President of the United States of America. Well Barack Obama, you might as well turn your Internet up. Go to the website, President. I want you to look at all the hits Sarah Palin got. I ate her up. Look at all the hits John McCain got. I chewed him up. Look at all the hits Hillary Clinton had, I swallowed her, chewed her up and spit her out. Jimmy McMillan is well-known.”
He added that he’s already registered as a Republican so that he wouldn’t have to “bump heads” with Obama in a Democratic primary, a move that either highlights or undermines his gravitas—anyone’s guess, really. You can watch the outspoken McMillan announce his run in the video below.
[Via The Observer]
Have a tip we should know? [email protected] | – It's on. Jimmy McMillan of the Rent Is Too Damn High fame says he's running for president in 2012, reports Ben Smith at Politico (who says he normally avoids fringe candidates but couldn't resist this one). "Tell Obama I'm coming after his black ass," the former New York gubernatorial candidate told Revolution Radio. McMillan also pointed out a key difference between him and the president: "He plays basketball, I teach karate," notes Mediaite, which provides audio from the interview. (It's in the gallery.) |
Providence Journal photo / Frieda Squires Governor Chafee
PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Gov. Lincoln Chafee intends to run for re-election as a Democrat, according to reports in the Washington Post and Politico.com.
Both outlets quote unnamed sources saying that Chafee, who quit the Republican party and won his first gubernatorial term as an independent, has decided to join the Democrats.
Politico said Chafee had told Democratic party officials of his intent.
There has been no official, on-the-record confirmation from the party or Chafee's office.
Chafee could potentially face Providence Mayor Angel Taveras and General Treasurer Gina Raimondo in a three-way Democratic primary for the seat. ||||| Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee, right, after signing the the Marriage Equality Act at the State House in Providence, R.I., on May 2. (Jessica Rinaldi/Reuters)
Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee (I) intends to run for reelection as a Democrat, according to two people familiar with his decision, a move that suggests that the first-term governor does not see a path to reelection as an independent.
Chafee, a former Republican senator, won the governorship in 2010 in a competitive three-way race. His prospects for a second term have looked dim, as polling shows his numbers are downright bad. Chafee's made no secret about the fact that he has been considering switching to the Democratic Party. His decision signals that he believes his best chance for survival is competing in what is expected to be a competitive Democratic primary.
Chafee is expected to announce his decision shortly, possibly as soon as this week, the people familiar with his decision say.
The Democratic Governors Association has said it will not endorse a candidate in the primary, opting instead to simply support the eventual nominee, whomever it ends up being. Treasurer Gina Raimondo and Providence Mayor Angel Taveras are expected to enter the Democratic race, and each looks like a stronger option for the general election than Chafee.
When asked about the governor's future plans, Chafee spokeswoman Christine Hunsinger would not confirm or deny that Chafee will become a Democrat. "I just don't have anything for you on it," she said.
Chafee's decision is good for Democrats for a couple of reasons. One, it takes off the table the threat of a vote split between the Democratic nominee and the governor, something that could open the door for the Republican to win, even in a Democratic-leaning state. If Chafee loses the Democratic nomination — and it is hard, at least at this point, to see him winning — then he is out of the picture altogether. Of course, if he wins, Democrats would have to back a pol with a struggling image in the eyes of Republicans.
Without saying he supports Chafee in the Democratic primary, Obama welcomed his former Senate colleague and key political ally to the party with open arms on Wednesday.
“I’m delighted to hear that Governor Chafee is joining the Democratic Party,” Obama said in a statement distributed by the Democratic National Committee. “For nearly 30 years, Linc Chafee has served his beloved Rhode Island as an independent thinker and leader who’s unafraid to reach across party lines to get things done. I enjoyed working with Linc when he was a Republican in the United States Senate, and I look forward to continuing that collaboration on the issues that matter not just to the Democratic Party, but to every American.”
DGA Chairman Peter Shumlin of Vermont welcomed Chafee, but said the DGA plans to support whichever candidate wins the Democratic nomination.
"We are excited to welcome Governor Chafee to the ranks of Democratic governors and look forward to enthusiastically supporting whoever emerges as the Democratic nominee in Rhode Island," Shumlin said in a statement.
Chris Cillizza contributed to this report.
Updated at 4:26 p.m. ||||| Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee will formally switch his party registration Thursday, abandoning his status as an independent and joining the Democratic Party, the governor’s office told POLITICO.
Chafee quietly informed President Barack Obama of his intention to affiliate as a Democrat after reaching that decision in private, Chafee spokeswoman Christine Hunsinger said. The governor’s office confirmed Chafee’s plans after POLITICO reported that the governor had notified national Democrats that he’d be joining the party.
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reset McConnell's aggressive campaign: GOP guide for 2014?
A former Republican who served with Obama in the Senate, Chafee has struggled with perilously low job approval ratings and faces a difficult reelection fight in 2014.
(PHOTOS: Lincoln Chafee's career)
Hunsinger said politics had nothing to do with Chafee’s decision to sign up with Obama’s party.
“What you’re seeing in him affiliating as a Democrat is a recognition that there’s strength in numbers – that the Democratic Party and the president, he shares their agenda and the policy beliefs of the party,” she said. “It really is a matter of conviction with this governor. It’s been a long road from when he first left the Republican Party to here.”
The senior Chafee aide said the switch in registration would not change Chafee’s governing agenda.
“He’s fairly progressive on social issues. He’s about efficient and honest government and every move he’s made when in elected office has been to achieve that on behalf of the taxpayer,” Hunsinger said. “For anybody to imply that affiliating as a Democrat is simply about politics or about winning an election, doesn’t know Gov. Chafee.”
(Also on POLITICO: Lincoln Chafee DNC speech)
Chafee’s party switch increases the odds that the Rhode Island governorship will be in Democratic hands after 2014, though not necessarily his. His polling numbers are weak and multiple up-and-coming Rhode Island Democrats have already stepped up to challenge him.
In an encouraging sign for Chafee, the White House publicly embraced him as a soon-to-be-minted Democrat on Wednesday, issuing a statement from Obama praising Chafee as “an independent thinker and leader” who hasn’t been constrained by party labels.
“I enjoyed working with Linc when he was a Republican in the United States Senate, and I look forward to continuing that collaboration on the issues that matter not just to the Democratic Party, but to every American,” Obama said. “I’m thrilled to welcome Linc to the party of Jefferson and Jackson, Roosevelt and Kennedy – and I look forward to working with him in the years ahead.”
(PHOTOS: Pols who’ve switched states)
It’s no surprise that Chafee would win a warm reception from Obama: The ex-Republican campaigned for the president in 2008 and 2012 and spoke at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte last summer. | – It looks like Democrats will be adding another governor to their ranks. Rhode Island's Lincoln Chafee plans to switch to the party before he launches his bid for re-election in 2014, reports Politico. Chafee used to be a Republican senator, but he won the governor's seat in 2010 as an independent. The governor's office hasn't confirmed the news yet, but the Washington Post also has it, and considers the switch good news for Democrats. For one thing, it means an independent Chafee won't be splitting the vote with a Democrat and potentially opening the way to a GOP win in a mostly Democratic state, writes Sean Sullivan. It doesn't mean, however, that victory will be a slam dunk for Chafee, who has lackluster approval ratings. In fact, he might end up being an underdog in his new party's primary, which the Providence Journal says will include Providence Mayor Angel Taveras and state treasurer Gina Raimondo. |
"Last Week Tonight" host John Oliver questioned actor Dustin Hoffman at a Tribeca Film panel on Dec. 4 about sexual harassment allegations made against him. (The Washington Post)
NEW YORK — HBO host John Oliver hammered Dustin Hoffman about allegations of sexual harassment and the actor fired back with a ferocious defense, as a seemingly benign screening became an explosive conversation about Hollywood sexual misconduct on Monday night.
“This is something we’re going to have to talk about because … it’s hanging in the air,” Oliver said to Hoffman at the discussion, an anniversary screening of the film “Wag the Dog.” He was alluding to an allegation made by Anna Graham Hunter last month that Hoffman groped her and made inappropriate comments when she was a 17-year-old intern on the set of the 1985 TV movie “Death of a Salesman.”
“It’s hanging in the air?” Hoffman said. “From a few things you’ve read, you’ve made an incredible assumption about me,” he noted, adding sarcastically, “You’ve made the case better than anyone else can. I’m guilty.”
The “Last Week Tonight” personality was moderating a 20th-anniversary screening panel at the 92nd Street Y on behalf of the Tribeca Institute, with stars Hoffman, Robert De Niro, producer Jane Rosenthal and director Barry Levinson on the stage. About halfway through the hour-long talk, Oliver brought up the issue to Hoffman, saying he found the actor’s statements about the matter wanting. Nearly the entire rest of the discussion was then dominated by Oliver, Hoffman and the subject of sexual harassment.
Hoffman had offered a conditional apology at the time of the allegation, and on Monday he underscored an “if” included in that statement, noting several times that he didn’t really believe he had done anything wrong. He said that he had not engaged in groping, that he didn’t recall meeting Graham Hunter and that all his comments on set were simply how members of “a family” talked to one another.
“I still don’t know who this woman is,” Hoffman said. “I never met her; if I met her, it was in concert with other people.”
[Ballet chief Peter Martins under investigation after sexual harassment allegations]
Oliver dismissed that as insufficient, then cited Hoffman’s response at the time of the allegation that the actor’s behavior on set was “not reflective of” who he really is.
“It’s ‘not reflective of who I am’ — it’s that kind of response to this stuff that pisses me off,” Oliver said. “It is reflective of who you were. If you’ve given no evidence to show it didn’t [happen] then there was a period of time for a while when you were a creeper around women. It feels like a cop-out to say ‘It wasn’t me.’ Do you understand how that feels like a dismissal?”
Hoffman accused Oliver of “putting me on display” and said he felt blindsided because neither Oliver nor Tribeca organizers had told him that the moderator would raise the subject.
Several times, however, Oliver sought to move on and talk about the film, but Hoffman returned to the subject of harassment, growing testy as he said Oliver was not keeping an “open mind” while unquestionably believing accusers.
“Do you believe this stuff you read?” Hoffman asked.
“Yes,” Oliver replied. “Because there’s no point in [an accuser] lying.”
“Well, there’s a point in her not bringing it up for 40 years,” Hoffman said.
“Oh, Dustin,” Oliver said disapprovingly, putting his head in his hand.
At one point, Rosenthal tried to jump in and defuse the situation.
“You also have the way men and women worked together [in the past]; you are in a situation where ‘that was then, this is now,’” Rosenthal said. “[And] what difference is all this going to make? … This conversation doesn’t do any good. We have a platform here. How are we moving [the issue] forward?”
Oliver, though, said he felt it was imperative to talk about it. “This isn’t fun for me,” the TV personality noted. “[But] there’s an elephant in the room because, this particular incident, a conversation has not been had.” He noted that the film they were gathering to discuss, “Wag The Dog,” dealt with sexual misconduct by a powerful man.
Rosenthal then said of the film, “It wasn’t produced by Weinstein or Miramax…Kevin Spacey wasn’t starring in it. Let’s look at real sexual criminal predators.”
“That’s a low bar,” Oliver retorted.
The back-and-forth mainly centered on the Graham Hunter allegations, and also at times invoked an accusation by Hoffman’s “The Graduate” co-star Katharine Ross that he had groped her on the set of the classic film. It did not manifestly address another claim, by the writer Wendy Riss Gatsiounis, that Hoffman had propositioned her inappropriately in a pitch meeting in 1991.
The showdown happened as sexual harassment issues continue to roil the entertainment world, with a growing number of men falling under suspicion and being held to account, often publicly. The exchange, however, marked a rarity in the post-Harvey Weinstein era, which has seen accused harassers generally offer short statements in response to allegations, if they respond at all. Very few have engaged in long public conversations about it, and almost none have sounded as defiant as Hoffman did Monday night.
After the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke, more women and men have come forward against a growing list of well-known male figures with similar stories of harassment and assault. (Erin Patrick O'Connor,Nicki DeMarco/The Washington Post)
The conversation grew increasingly angry as it wore on. When Hoffman began talking about his long career, Oliver interjected with “Oh, Jesus.”
“So now I can’t even finish a sentence?” Hoffman asked.
Hoffman also cited “Tootsie” as evidence of his feminist bona fides.
“I would not have made that movie if I didn’t have an incredible respect for women,” Hoffman said. “The theme of the movie is he became a better man by having been a woman.”
He said he had an awakening of sorts when, dressed as a woman for that film, he was ignored by some men on the set. “I said when I came home to my wife that I never realized men were that were brutal, that men are that obvious,” Hoffman recounted. “They didn’t find me attractive and they just erased me.”
He added, “What makes me sad is that I grew up in an environment in which we were taught to want the girls on the covers of magazines, the models, and I said to my wife ‘Look at how many interesting women I passed up … look at how many women were erased by me because of the generation I was born.’ That was a very strong reason for me wanting to make that movie.
“It’s shocking to me you don’t see me more clearly,” he then said to Oliver. “That you go by a couple of things you read.”
As the panel went on some in the crowd became involved.
“Move on. Let it go,” one woman could be heard shouting to Oliver. She was soon drowned out by other people, one of whom said “Shame on you.” Another yelled to Oliver, “Thank you for believing women,” to loud cheers.
Oliver said that he considered not addressing the subject at what was intended as a genial chat but then decided he bore an obligation.
“I can’t leave certain things unaddressed,” the host said. “The easy way is not to bring anything up. Unfortunately that leaves me at home later at night hating myself. ‘Why the … didn’t I say something? No one stands up to powerful men.’”
“Am I the powerful man?” Hoffman asked.
The actor asked why the questioner wouldn’t hear his side. “Keep a kind of open mind if you can, John.”
“I’m trying,” Oliver said.
“Well I’m trying harder than you are,” Hoffman shot back.
Tensions did not cool throughout the session.
“You weren’t there,” Hoffman said to Oliver about the “Salesman” set.
“I’m glad [I wasn’t],” the host replied.
Read more:
Lobbyist says California lawmaker pursued her into a bathroom and exposed himself
A teen went missing for days — and was found with a soccer coach hundreds of miles from home ||||| In a striking and raw demonstration of the angst that has accumulated over Hollywood’s sexual harassment scandals, HBO host John Oliver sparred with Dustin Hoffman during an awkward 45-minute Q&A intended as a prologue to a 20th-anniversary screening of the film Wag the Dog. (Check out the video of the exchange below, courtesy of the Washington Post.)
Tonight’s event at the 92nd Street Y, a benefit for the Tribeca Film Institute, featured Hoffman, Robert De Niro, producer Jane Rosenthal and director Barry Levinson in an onstage discussion. About half of the talk surfaced somewhat familiar but nonetheless interesting material about the way the film’s sardonic, David Mamet-scripted take on public-image management and politics has gained new relevance during the Trump Era. In other words, typical Q&A material.
Then, about 20 minutes in, Oliver brought up the current climate around sexual harassment in show business, saying he was going to go “around the room” to gauge all panelists’ sentiments. (Later, when Hoffman would complain about having been ambushed, Oliver said it was “on the organizers” for not conveying his stated intention to bring up the ultra-hot-button topic.)
Levinson managed a thoughtful response about the current atmosphere, but it was quickly eclipsed by what followed. Seated next to him was Hoffman, who earlier this fall issued an apology following accusations that he inappropriately touched production assistant Anna Graham Hunter, then 17, during the making of a TV movie version of Death of a Salesman in 1985.
Warning it was “likely to be the tensest part of the evening,” Oliver started in with Hoffman. The tension would linger for 30 agonizing minutes as the two engaged in an anguished back and forth centering on the actor’s deeds and the response to his response to the allegations. “You’ve made one statement in print,” Oliver said. “Does that feel like enough to you?” Hoffman replied, “First of all, it didn’t happen, the way she reported.” He said his apology over the incident, offered, he said, at the insistence of his reps, was widely misconstrued “at the click of a button.” But the Last Week Tonight host seized on the portion of the actor’s public apology, in which Hoffman said the events that happened on set didn’t reflect who he is as a person.
“It’s that part of the response to this stuff that pisses me off,” Oliver said. “It is reflective of who you were. You’ve given no evidence to show that it didn’t happen. There was a period of time when you were a creeper around women. It feels like a cop-out to say, ‘Well, this isn’t me.’ Do you understand how that feels like a dismissal?”‘
Hoffman shot back, “You weren’t there.” Oliver responded, “I’m glad,” drawing gasps from the well-heeled audience, many of whom had paid hefty ticket prices. Heightening the spectacle was the fact it was occurring in the Y’s wood-paneled Kaufmann Concert Hall, an august Upper East Side venue that had last seen an uproar like this when John Ashbery dared to read a poem in free verse.
After a two-month exegesis of the industry (and other parts of society) confronting decades of sexual misconduct and abuse, what made this exchange unique was the fact that Hoffman came back energetically at Oliver to both defend his reputation and decry the current climate. Accused perpetrators by the dozens have been issuing statements — or, in extreme cases like Harvey Weinstein’s, engaging in legal maneuvers–but an A-list star revealed in this environment has not responded as vigorously as this.
“You’ve put me on display here,” Hoffman told Oliver, seething but never raising his voice or leaving his seat. “You have indicted me. … That’s not innocent until proven guilty.”
Hoffman tried to put it in historical context, saying sometimes the atmosphere on set decades ago involved sexually charged banter, which he said was not meant in an offensive way. ‘I don’t love that answer either,” Oliver said, cringing. “What response do you want?” Hoffman demanded. “It doesn’t feel self-reflective in the way it seems the incident demands,” Oliver explained, adding, “I get no pleasure from this conversation. But you and I are not the victims here.”
When Oliver quoted from an account Hoffman’s accuser wrote, the actor asked Oliver, incredulous, “Do you believe this stuff you’re reading?” Oliver said he did “because she would have no reason to lie.”
As this went on, the other panelists largely stayed mum. The audience seemed divided — some in the crowd, looking forward to a breezier night re-living a Clintonian satire, took offense at Oliver staying on the issue. “Move on!” one person shouted. “He thinks it’s funny,” sputtered one man as he escorted his wife out of the theatre. Others applauded when Oliver expressed his view. “Thank you for believing women!” one woman called out. The spasms of conflict and accusation were followed by long stretches of silence, during which no one in the theatre knew quite what to do.
Rosenthal at one point decided to enter the conversation, “as the only women here on this panel.” She turned the focus to the larger struggle and issues like pay inequality and the need for more female representation on boards and executive suites. “We’ve got to start moving that conversation forward,” she said, drawing applause. Oliver would not let it go. “We’re about to watch a movie where sexual harassment is an under-plot and there’s an elephant in the room because this conversation is not being had,” he said, explaining his interest in pursuing the topic.
Rosenthal fired back, “It wasn’t produced by Weinstein Co. or Miramax, so you don’t have a really big conversation. Kevin Spacey wasn’t starring in it. Let’s look at real sexual criminal predators.”
After about 15 minutes, Hoffman appeared to have persuaded some in the crowd, but he voluntarily returned to the topic and re-engaged with Oliver. When Levinson and Oliver agreed that social media has distorted politics and culture, Hoffman interjected, “Well, it’s affected you in terms of your feelings about me.” While the audience applauded, the line began a gut-wrenching 15-minute sequence that closed the night.
“The so-called, alleged comments that are made are truth now,” Hoffman fumed. “And if you try to defend it, you’re guilty.” Oliver granted, “I see where you’re coming from,” but insisted, “it’s a little more complicated than that.” Several times, he expressed anxiety over ruining the audience’s night and the experience of watching the film again. And yet, “I can’t leave certain things unaddressed,” Oliver conceded. “That leads to me at home later tonight hating myself, asking, ‘Why the f–k didn’t I say something? No one stands up to powerful men.'” Hoffman asked Levinson, “Am I the powerful man?” Levinson said, “I wasn’t sure what the reference was, which powerful men.”
Hoffman then offered examples of the empathy he had always tried to show for characters and colleagues during his 50-year career. “Have you seen Tootsie?” he asked Oliver at one point. When Oliver insisted that he had and that he enjoyed Hoffman’s performance in it, Hoffman told a detailed story about staying in makeup and costume as Dorothy, the film’s title character, after shooting had ended one night and experiencing misogyny first-hand. “How could I have made that movie if I didn’t have incredible respect for women?” he asked. “It’s shocking to me that you don’t see me more clearly.”
Here’s the exchange: | – As far as Dustin Hoffman is concerned, allegations about him sexually harassing a teen assistant on a movie set in the mid-'80s are a whole lot of nothing—but John Oliver made it into something Monday night. Oliver, host of HBO's Last Week Tonight, was moderating a 20th-anniversary screening of Hoffman's movie Wag the Dog in New York City. The panel—which included those two, plus director Barry Levinson, producer Jane Rosenthal, and Robert De Niro—stuck to what Deadline labels "typical Q&A material" and industry talk for the first half of the 45-minute discussion. But then Oliver noted the sexual misconduct claims were "something we're going to have to talk about because ... it's hanging in the air," per the Washington Post. To which a "defiant" Hoffman replied, "It's hanging in the air? From a few things you've read, you've made an incredible assumption about me." "You weren't there," Hoffman continued, to which Oliver replied: "I'm glad." The back-and-forth, which more or less took over the rest of the talk, became "increasingly angry," with Hoffman insisting he didn't recall even meeting his accuser, saying he felt ambushed by both Oliver and event organizers, and pointing to his movie Tootsie as evidence of his "incredible respect for women." "There's no point in [an accuser] lying," Oliver told Hoffman, who answered, "Well, there's a point in her not bringing it up for 40 years." Oliver said that broaching the subject wasn't pleasant for him, but that it was necessary. Audience reaction was mixed, with some chastising Oliver, though one spectator yelled: "Thank you for believing women!" BuzzFeed notes post-panel reaction on the internet leaned mostly Team Oliver, though some say he shouldn't have blindsided Hoffman at this type of event. |
The Supreme Court on Monday ruled for a Colorado baker who refused to create a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, but it left undecided whether a business owner’s religious beliefs or free speech rights can justify refusing some services to gay people.
Instead, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s 7-to-2 decision focused on what he described as religious bias on the part of Colorado Civil Rights Commission members who ruled against baker Jack Phillips, who owns Masterpiece Cakeshop.
“The neutral and respectful consideration to which Phillips was entitled was compromised here,” Kennedy wrote, adding that the commission’s decision that the baker violated the state’s anti-discrimination law must be set aside.
But Kennedy acknowledged that the decision was more of a start than a conclusion to the court’s consideration of the rights of those with religious objections to same-sex marriage and the rights of gay people, who “cannot be treated as social outcasts or as inferior in dignity and worth.”
Future cases that raise those issues “must be resolved with tolerance, without undue disrespect to sincere religious beliefs, and without subjecting gay persons to indignities when they seek goods and services in an open market,” he wrote.
[The spurned couple, the baker and the long wait for the Supreme Court]
Such a case could come quickly: The court is set to consider this week whether to review a Washington state Supreme Court decision that a florist could not legally decline to provide flowers to a same-sex wedding there.
The bakery case was one of two decisions Monday — a ruling on an immigrant teenager’s abortion was the other — in which the court opted for compromise rather than division. The justices are in the final month of a term that has included contentious fights over President Trump’s power in the travel ban case and what could be a landmark decision on partisan gerrymandering, among other issues.
Kennedy’s narrow ruling drew the support of three of the court’s consistent conservatives — Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch — and two of its consistent liberals, Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan.
Justice Clarence Thomas agreed with the outcome but said he would have ruled for Phillips on free-speech grounds. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented, saying comments from the commissioners did not change the outcome of the case.
“What prejudice infected the determinations of the adjudicators in the case before and after the Commission? The Court does not say,” Ginsburg wrote.
In a conference call with reporters, Phillips thanked the court for recognizing “the injustice that the government inflicted on me.” He said that “tolerance is a two-way street” and added, “If we want to have freedom for ourselves, we have to extend it to others with whom we disagree about important issues like the meaning of marriage.”
But James Esseks of the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the couple at the center of the fight, Charlie Craig and David Mullins, pointed to Kennedy’s protective language about gay citizens and the “general rule” that religious and other objections “do not allow business owners and other actors in the economy and in society to deny . . . equal access to goods and services.”
“The bakery may have won the battle, but it has lost the war,” Esseks said in a conference call with reporters.
Even the dissenting Ginsburg began her opinion: “There is much in the Court’s opinion with which I agree.”
The case presented Kennedy with a dilemma. On the one hand, he is one of the court’s staunchest defenders of free speech and religious freedom. On the other, he has written all of the court’s groundbreaking opinions on gay rights, including that there is a constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry.
He had signaled in oral arguments that comments from members of the commission displaying “religious hostility” might be the narrow way out.
“At several points during its meeting, commissioners endorsed the view that religious beliefs cannot legitimately be carried into the public sphere or commercial domain, implying that religious beliefs and persons are less than fully welcome in Colorado’s business community,” Kennedy wrote.
He noted that one commissioner later said that religious beliefs had been “used to justify all kinds of discrimination throughout history, whether it be slavery, whether it be the holocaust.”
Such statements, Kennedy wrote, “cast doubt on the fairness and impartiality of the Commission’s adjudication of Phillips’ case.”
Phillips contended that dual guarantees in the First Amendment — free speech and the free exercise of religion — protect him against Colorado’s public accommodations law, which requires businesses to serve customers equally regardless of “disability, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, national origin, or ancestry.”
Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Kristen Waggoner, who represented Phillips, praised the ruling. “Government hostility toward people of faith has no place in our society, yet the state of Colorado was openly antagonistic toward Jack’s religious beliefs about marriage,” she said.
She and Esseks agreed that the court’s decision resolves this particular case against Phillips. But she was reluctant to opine on what might happen if Phillips again declined to create a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, saying she needed more time to study the ruling.
Across the country, florists, bakers, photographers and others have claimed that being forced to offer their wedding services to same-sex couples violates their rights. Courts have routinely turned down the business owners, as the Colorado Court of Appeals did in the Phillips case, saying state anti-discrimination laws require businesses that are open to the public to treat all potential customers equally.
There’s no dispute about what triggered the court case in 2012, when same-sex marriage was prohibited in Colorado. Craig and Mullins decided to get married in Massachusetts, where it was legal. They would return to Denver for a reception, and those helping with the plans suggested they get a cake from Masterpiece Cakeshop.
The couple arrived with Craig’s mother and a book of ideas, but Phillips cut short the meeting as soon as he learned that the cake was to celebrate the couple’s marriage.
Phillips recalled: “Our conversation was just about 20 seconds long. ‘Sorry guys, I don’t make cakes for same-sex weddings.’ ”
The couple then learned that Colorado’s public accommodations law specifically prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation, and they filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The commission ruled against Phillips, and the appeals court upheld the decision.
On Monday, Craig and Mullins issued a statement on the ruling: “Today’s decision means our fight against discrimination and unfair treatment will continue,” the couple said. “We have always believed that in America, you should not be turned away from a business open to the public because of who you are. We brought this case because no one should have to face the shame, embarrassment, and humiliation of being told ‘we don’t serve your kind here’ that we faced, and we will continue fighting until no one does.”
Within the court’s seven-member majority, there were differences that are likely to animate future cases.
Gorsuch, along with Alito, indicated they would have been willing to go further. Some may find Phillips’s religious beliefs irrational or even offensive, Gorsuch wrote, but that is of no consequence. “In this country, the place of secular officials isn’t to sit in judgment of religious beliefs, but only to protect their free exercise,” he wrote.
He added: “It is no more appropriate for the United States Supreme Court to tell Mr. Phillips that a wedding cake is just like any other — without regard to the religious significance his faith may attach to it — than it would be for the Court to suggest that for all persons sacramental bread is just bread or a kippah is just a cap.”
Kagan, joined by Breyer, said Gorsuch was wrong.
“A wedding cake does not become something different whenever a vendor like Phillips invests its sale to particular customers with ‘religious significance,’ ” Kagan wrote. “As this Court has long held, and reaffirms today, a vendor cannot escape a public accommodations law because his religion disapproves selling a product to a group of customers, whether defined by sexual orientation, race, sex, or other protected trait.”
She referenced a 1968 decision that said a barbecue restaurant owner must serve black customers even though he claimed that his religion did not embrace racial equality.
Monday’s case is Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. ||||| Outside the Supreme Court after the DOMA and Prop 8 decisions. (Charles Dharapak/Associated Press)
The Supreme Court’s work on marriage equality is far from done. But I believe this may be remembered as the day when the nation stopped regarding gay people as second-class citizens.
Justice Anthony Kennedy’s sweeping opinion, striking down the federal Defense of Marriage Act, compels the federal government to accept that there is no difference between legally performed same-sex marriages and legally performed opposite-sex marriages. That is huge — but only goes so far.
The court left the question of allowing gay marriage to the states. This means that couples who are legally married in, say, Massachusetts or New York will be considered unmarried, and unable to be married, in Alabama or South Carolina. If they move to one of those states, they may receive the federal benefits of marriage but none of the state benefits.
Presumably, for example, such a couple could file a joint federal income tax return but would have to file individual state returns. One unintended consequence of Kennedy’s court ruling may be to create lots of new work for accountants.
Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion in the California Proposition 8 case is even narrower, in that he basically decided not to decide — thus allowing gay marriage to resume in a state that is home to 11 percent of the U.S. population. Even the question of whether marriage rights, once granted, can be taken away was left unaddressed.
This leaves things basically they way they stood before — not after — the landmark 1967 Loving v. Virginia ruling that struck down laws against interracial marriage. At the time, 16 states had laws on the books making marriage between blacks and whites illegal. Married couples became “unmarried” when they crossed state lines.
But even if we’re far from the point where same-sex marriage is recognized as a fundamental right throughout the land, that’s clearly where we’re headed.
Kennedy’s majority opinion notes that the state of New York, by sanctioning gay marriage, conferred upon “this class of persons … a dignity and status of immense import.” DOMA, by contrast, has “the opposite purpose — too impose restrictions and disabilities.”
Kennedy writes: “DOMA’s avowed purpose and practical effect are to impose a disadvantage, a separate status, and so a stigma upon all who enter into same-sex marriages made lawful by the unquestioned authority of the States.”
The opinion is full of that kind of language. It speaks often of dignity, it lauds the “stability and predictability of basic personal relations” that marriage provides, it notes that there is an “evolving understanding of the meaning of equality.”
In a dissent, Roberts argued that “interests in uniformity and stability” justify Congress’ decision to pass DOMA. This question of uniformity will surely come up in future cases, when same-sex couples move across state lines and have their marital status summarily altered.
The court took pains to avoid even considering whether the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection gives same-sex couples the inalienable right to marry. But when the court does eventually take up that question, it will have as precedent a decision that, while tightly constrained in its legal reasoning, is broad and forward-looking in its language.
The decision treats gay marriage, and gay people, as normal and unthreatening. It uses words that echo the Constitution’s most cherished guarantees of liberty and equality. This will, I believe, be a day long remembered. ||||| Good News, Bad News
The court’s promotion of gay marriage is like a shotgun wedding: done with reluctance and without the loving embrace of someone fully committed to the sacred union.
In 1964, when the Supreme Court held that the Civil Rights Act’s bar on racial discrimination applied even to a small, family-owned barbecue restaurant in Birmingham, Alabama, the court rested its ruling on Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce, rather than on the Constitution’s guarantee of “equal protection.” As Justice Tom Clark announced the opinion from the bench, Justice Arthur Goldberg scribbled a note to Justice William O. Douglas criticizing the court’s reluctance to base its decision on equality: “It sounds like hamburgers are more important than human rights.”
Today’s two Supreme Court decisions on marriage equality might be similarly described. To hear the reasoning of the court, it sounds like procedure is more important than people.
Like the court’s decision in the Birmingham barbecue case, today’s decisions undoubtedly advance the cause of equality for LGBT individuals. Yet they do so not because the justices are fully committed to equal citizenship for all Americans regardless of sexual orientation. Instead the court’s rulings focused largely on process—either how the law was passed or how the law came up for review in the court. And by focusing on process and procedure, the court severely limits the scope and implications of its rulings.
The court’s emphasis on process and procedures is most glaring in Hollingsworth v. Perry, the case involving California’s ban on same-sex marriage. Über-lawyers Ted Olson and David Boies, who famously went head-to-head in Bush v. Gore, asked the justices to hold that LGBT couples had a constitutional right to marry. If the justices had agreed, bans on same-sex marriage in 38 states might have been overturned. Alternatively, the court could have limited its ruling to California, on the theory that states can’t grant marriage rights one day and take them away the next. The justices declined to endorse either approach. Rather, the court held that it didn’t have the authority to rule on the merits of Olson and Boies’s challenge to California’s ban because the initiative’s backers, who were defending the law on appeal when California’s lawmakers refused to do so, lacked authority to represent the state’s interests. Because of this procedural problem, all the appeals in the Proposition 8 challenge were nullified.
Make no mistake, Perry is a victory for marriage equality. The trial court ruling by Judge Vaughn Walker that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional still stands, as does the injunction he issued requiring state officials to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. By its terms, it prohibited state officials from “applying or enforcing” Proposition 8. That would seem to mean that state officials can’t refuse to issue marriage licenses on the basis of sexual orientation to any gay couple. In other words, same-sex marriage would be immediately lawful throughout California. Yet, consistent with existing law on injunctions, Walker’s injunction is likely to be read much more narrowly, requiring only that officials permit the two same-sex couples who challenged Proposition 8 to wed. Federal district courts generally only have authority to issue injunctions applicable to the named parties in the suit, except in special cases (like class-action lawsuits).
The court’s decision may make California Gov. Jerry Brown the ultimate arbiter of Proposition 8’s fate. Generally, the executive branch is obligated to enforce laws, even if the governor is opposed to a law’s requirements. Indeed, California officials have continued to follow Proposition 8, declining to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Yet, Brown may decide that, in light of Walker’s ruling, that the ban is no longer good law. He could point to the fact that there’s now a final ruling of a federal court that the law is unconstitutional, and there won’t be any serious political backlash in liberal California. In fact, he’s likely to be hailed as a hero. If, nonetheless, he decides to continue enforcing the ban, he would almost certainly lend his support for another ballot measure in California to overturn Proposition 8 in 2014. Marriage-equality proponents have already promised to push such a measure, which is likely to pass.
In any event, same-sex marriage is going to be permitted in California within the next 18 months, if not much sooner. This will itself be a major victory for marriage equality. California has approximately 1.1 million LGBT adults and 200,000 people already part of a same-sex couple; they would finally have the option of marriage. Today, only 18 percent of the American population resides in a jurisdiction allowing same-sex marriage. Once California turns, however, that number rises to 30 percent. Marriage equality in California will also mean that nearly 40 percent of the nation’s 650,000 same-sex couples will live in places where they can marry. Yet nothing in today’s opinion requires any other state to allow same-sex marriage. So couples in Mississippi and Alabama will have to wait for another day.
The DOMA case, United States v. Windsor, also furthers the cause of LGBT rights, but, in many ways, for the wrong reasons. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion does discuss equality and recognizes that discrimination against LGBT people is often, like DOMA, merely a reflection of a “bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group.” Yet, again, much of Kennedy’s reasoning focuses on process. One of the main problems with DOMA, he writes, was that Congress, in a blunderbuss fashion, restricted the rights of same-sex couples to more than 1,000 federal benefits and programs that opposite-sex couples enjoy. In doing so, Congress interfered with the state’s traditional authority to regulate marriage. Regulation of marriage “is an area that has long been regarded as a virtually exclusive province of the States.” DOMA, Kennedy explains, “because of its reach and extent, departs from this history and tradition.”
This language may be celebrated today, but by emphasizing respect for tradition, the court may have sent a signal to lower courts that limiting marriage to one man and one woman remains constitutionally permissible. After all, allowing marriage only between one man and one woman is a longstanding tradition. If a central part of DOMA’s problem was its deviation from longstanding practice, then a state ban on same-sex marriage would not seem to pose the same problem. Moreover, Kennedy’s ode to states’ rights is hardly a boon to marriage-equality proponents. Mississippi and Alabama’s authority to define marriage as they see fit appears to be given constitutional protection.
There are other important limitations in Kennedy’s ruling that should give LGBT-rights supporters pause. Kennedy rejects the argument of the Obama administration that all laws discriminating against LGBT individuals should be subject to heightened judicial review—the same type of review laws discriminating on the basis of race or sex receive. Heightened scrutiny would have meant that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation could be constitutional only in exceptional cases, where there was a demonstrably important reason for the disparate treatment and few other alternatives. Under that test, nearly every law discriminating against gays and lesbians would have been called into question, including marriage laws, adoption laws, and blood-donor rules. Yet the court’s refusal may be read by lower courts to mean that LGBT discrimination may still be constitutional, especially when it’s consistent with tradition rather than contrary to it.
Forsaking heightened scrutiny is on a par with Kennedy’s approach in past gay-rights cases. While Kennedy wrote some major pro-gay rights opinions for the court, those decisions have included caveats and qualifications that limited their impact. He’s consistently refused to say that LGBT classifications should receive heightened scrutiny. His opinion in the much-touted Lawrence v. Texas case, striking down same-sex sodomy bans, refused to say that gays and lesbians have a fundamental right to sexual privacy and made sure that gay-marriage bans weren’t called into question. Indeed, after surveying Lawrence, a federal appeals court said that nothing in Kennedy’s opinion required striking down a ban on gay adoption. Kennedy’s embrace of gay rights has always been hesitant and incremental. DOMA is no different. ||||| The tide might be turning in favor of gay marriage, but that doesn’t mean the Supreme Court will be swept up in it.
For all the toasting in Washington and excitement among gay rights groups about the historic oral arguments this week, there’s still a chance their set of cases could culminate in a loss.
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reset POLITICO Prop. 8 report Sights, sounds from day one
Under the worst-case scenario for gay rights groups, the court could uphold both California’s Proposition 8 and the federal law Defense of Marriage Act — extending no new rights to gay couples looking to marry or take advantage of federal benefits extended to opposite-sex couples.
But gay rights activists say this wouldn’t have the impact of Plessy v. Ferguson — the 1896 decision that left “separate but equal” the law of the land until Brown v. Board of Education six decades later.
(Also on POLITICO: Culture wars return — with a twist)
Instead, they say, they would still leave the court in a better position than when they started their legal trek because public opinion has swung in their favor, supporters have been galvanized and about 100 prominent Republicans signed a brief publicly endorsing gay marriage.
“Even if you lose the case, and I think that’s very unlikely, you would say that the case has been a success because it’s changed public opinion so dramatically,” said Richard Socarides, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton. “It’s really unbelievable what a successful communications and litigation strategy has combined to do in such a short time.”
Plus, they don’t think they’re going to lose big at all.
“There’s zero possibility,” said University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone.
One key source of confidence is Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority ruling 17 years ago in Romer v. Evans, a case throwing out a Colorado ballot measure that banned any special protections for gays and lesbians. Many analysts believe that decision and a 2003 ruling he wrote banning sodomy laws essentially guarantee Kennedy will vote to find the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional. With the four Democratic-appointed justices thought to favor at least that much of a win for gay rights, Kennedy would make a majority.
(Also on POLITICO: Poll: Court approval near record low)
Other potential GOP pickups for the pro-same sex marriage forces are Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito.
For those reading tea leaves, there are signs Roberts could be in play. While in private practice in 1995, Roberts gave pro bono help to the legal team preparing briefs and oral arguments for the Colorado case. And Roberts is using some of his personal allotment of tickets to this week’s arguments to allow a lesbian cousin and her partner to attend oral arguments, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are considered pretty certain votes against same-sex marriage. Scalia defended the Colorado measure as “a modest attempt by seemingly tolerant Coloradans to preserve traditional sexual mores against the efforts of a politically powerful minority to revise those mores through use of the laws.” Thomas joined the opinion.
(PHOTOS: 21 landmark SCOTUS rulings)
There is one potential wild card on the left: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Though she was a pioneering litigator for the American Civil Liberties Union on gender issues, she has repeatedly said she thinks the Roe v. Wade decision went too far because it forced a consensus that many Americans had not arrived at and led to a backlash.
“It’s not that the judgment was wrong, but it moved too far too fast,” she said at Columbia Law School last year. “The court made a decision that made every abortion law in the country invalid, even the most liberal. … Things might have turned out differently if the court had been more restrained.” ||||| A legal brief the Justice Department filed with the Supreme Court Friday asking the justices to strike down a key part of the Defense of Marriage Act is raising hopes among gay rights advocates that President Barack Obama is on the verge of embracing a federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage.
The brief formally urges the court to declare unconstitutional the portion of the 1996 law barring recognition of same-sex marriages by the federal government for income tax purposes, federal employee benefits, immigration and myriad other programs.
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reset Week in review: Press gripes, sequester fights
(FULL TEXT: The White House's brief)
The portion of DOMA barring federal benefits for same-sex spouses “targets the many gay and lesbian people legally married under state law for a harsh form of discrimination that bears no relation to their ability to contribute to society,” Solicitor General Donald Verrilli and other government lawyers write in the brief. “It is abundantly clear that this discrimination does not substantially advance an interest in protecting marriage, or any other important interest. The statute simply cannot be reconciled with the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. The Constitution therefore requires that Section 3 [of DOMA] be invalidated.”
The brief pulls few punches in its effort to knock out DOMA, using sweeping language about the history of discrimination against gays and finding no legitimacy in the reasons some have offered for rejecting same-sex marriages. The unsparing tone of the government’s brief led some observers to suspect that the Justice Department is laying the groundwork to endorse a federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage in another pending case that addresses that question more directly.
(Also on POLITICO: New gay marriage ad won't use Laura Bush)
The Obama administration must decide by next week whether to join with those urging the court to strike down California’s voter-approved ban on gay marriage, Proposition 8. The federal government is not required to file any brief in the Prop. 8 case, but those arguing against the measure and in favor of a constitutional right to gay marriage have until Thursday to weigh in with the high court.
“There is nothing at all tentative about the government’s embrace of gay equality in this brief. And next week I think we will see the government urging the same standard of review be used to overturn Prop. 8, and with it, all anti-gay-marriage laws,” said Richard Socarides, a gay rights advocate and White House adviser to President Bill Clinton. “It’s clear from the administration’s DOMA brief that they understand and now embrace its connection to the Prop. 8 case. The discrimination evidenced by Prop. 8 itself is cited to support the standard of review urged by the government to strike down DOMA.” | – The Supreme Court's gay marriage rulings have pretty much everyone talking and typing. Many liberals are overjoyed, but others urge caution, while conservatives look for silver linings. Here's what people are saying: "This may be remembered as the day when the nation stopped regarding gay people as second class citizens," writes Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post, but there's still much more to be done. The Prop 8 ruling "leaves things basically the way they stood before—not after—the landmark 1967 Loving v. Virginia ruling that struck down laws against interracial marriage." Adam Winkler at the Daily Beast complains that "to hear the reasoning of the court, it sounds like procedure is more important than people." Even the comparatively bold DOMA decision leans on process and states' "traditional authority," which "may have sent a signal to lower courts that limiting marriage to one man and one woman remains constitutionally permissible." Winkler also points out that the court rejected the Obama administration's arguments that laws discriminating against LGBTQ people should be subject to more rigorous judicial review, on par with race or gender. "The court’s refusal may be read by lower courts to mean that LGBT discrimination may still be constitutional, especially when it’s consistent with tradition rather than contrary to it." "This happened the right way—from the ground up, with argument, with lawsuits, with cultural change, with individual courage," writes Andrew Sullivan at The Dish. "So to those who are often tempted to write off America's ability to perfect its union still further … let me just say: I believe." June Thomas at Slate feels like she just won an Oscar. "As the decision was announced, I finally allowed myself to experience a feeling a belonging," she writes. "Perhaps the world really is changing." Meanwhile over at the conservative blog RedState, Dana Loesch looks on the bright side, arguing that this is "a loss for big government, not for marriage." After all, power was just removed from the federal government and returned to the states. "If big government is needed to define marriage then the people who make up the church" have failed to "live and evangelize their faith." For more conservative reactions, click here. |
Redmond O'Neal, the son of the late Farrah Fawcett, is headed back to jail today after authorities said he violated the terms of his probation in connection with a series of drug offenses.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Michael Tynan today sentenced O'Neal, the troubled son of actors Ryan O'Neal and Fawcett, to a 30-day, in-custody drug-treatment program.
Prosecutors said the violation was because of "a drug-related offense."
According to L.A. County sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore, O'Neal was on a 24-hour pass from a residential treatment center. "When he came back, he told the program counselors that he had used drugs," Whitmore said. "He tested positive" for unspecified drugs.
O'Neal was remanded into sheriff's custody on Dec. 29, Whitmore said. O'Neal is currently classified as a "keep-away" -- kept away from the general jail population -- at Men's Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles. His next court date is Feb. 10.
O'Neal was jailed last year after he was found in possession of heroin during a routine security check by deputies at the parking lot of the Pitchess Detention Center. ||||| Redmond O’Neal Arrested On Drug Charges
LOS ANGELES, Calif. -- Caption Redmond O’Neal appears in court on May 22, 2009 in Santa Clarita, CaliforniaRedmond O’Neal has been arrested again, Access Hollywood has confirmed.
O’Neal, the son of Farrah Fawcett and Ryan O’Neal, was taken in custody on December 29 on a felony drug charge.
He was in court for a drug related probation violation allegation.
O’Neal was not granted bail and appeared in court on Tuesday, where he gave the judge a handwritten note, which was not read aloud.
He was ordered to return to an in-custody drug treatment center at the Impact Drug and Alcohol Treatment Center in Pasadena for 30 days and is due back in court in 30 days for a progress report.
“The defense, the prosecution, and the treatment team all agreed with the court’s order,” O’Neal’s attorney Richard Pintal told Access.
As previously reported on AccessHollywood.com, O’Neal began rehab at the Impact Drug and Alcohol Treatment Center in September. He was ordered to undergo treatment for one year at Impact.
O’Neal was previously incarcerated at the Pitchess Detention Center in Castaic, Calif. for a January 2008 drug arrest and a probation violation in September 2009.
Copyright 2013 by NBC Universal, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. | – Redmond O'Neal has been busted again on drug charges. The son of Farrah Fawcett and Ryan O'Neal was taken into custody on Dec. 29 on a felony drug charge—the second violation of his probation for a 2008 drug arrest. O'Neal was ordered to go to an in-custody drug-treatment center in Pasadena for 30 days, Access Hollywood reports. O'Neal had been on a 24-hour pass from a residential treatment center, reports the LA Times. "When he came back, he told the program counselors that he had used drugs," said an LA County sheriff's spokesman. He then tested positive for unspecified drugs. |
Wessex Archaeology / AP
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(Sept. 29) -- New research indicates that Stonehenge may have been an ancient tourist destination, attracting visitors from across Europe.Studies of the skeleton of an adolescent boy from some 3,500 years ago found near the site suggest that he traveled all the way from the Mediterranean -- potentially Italy, Spain or southern France -- to the southwest of England.Another body found near the famous stone complex has been identified as coming from the German Alpine foothills some 800 years earlier."The find adds considerable weight to the idea that people traveled long distances to visit Stonehenge, which must therefore have had a big reputation as a cult center," Timothy Darvill, professor of archeology at Bournemouth University, told The Associated Press . "Long-distance travel was certainly more common at this time than we generally think."Researchers from the British Geological Survey analyzed isotopes in the travelers' teeth to pinpoint where they were raised.Drinking water in different climates contains different ratios of heavy oxygen and light oxygen. Stones in different parts of Europe also contain different ratios of isotopes of the element strontium.These two substances build up in children's teeth and remain there throughout adulthood, providing clues as to where the person grew up.One thing they share is that both seem to have borne some kind of illness. The boy was buried at the age of 14 or 15, suggesting he may have died prematurely, The Independent reported. The German seems to have suffered from a painful leg condition.It may be that Stonehenge was a center of healing, drawing people from across Europe in search of cures, The Independent said.Stonehenge has long mystified scientists. The site was first worked upon about 5,000 years ago. A thousand years later, massive stones were added to the site, according to Stonehenge.co.uk. The stones, which weigh as much as 4 tons each, were taken more than 200 miles from Wales to the remote location in southwest England.Nobody is quite sure what the site was used for. It could have been a religious site built by sun worshipers, since the axis that runs through the center of the stone circle aligns with the midsummer sunrise.Today, the site is a favorite with both tourists and pagans, who celebrate religious festivals there.Whatever drew these ancient travelers to the location, they certainly weren't budget travelers. The boy was found with a 90-piece amber necklace, while the German had copper daggers and gold hair clasps."People who can get these rare and exotic materials are people of some importance," Andrew Fitzpatrick of Wessex Archeology told BBC News ||||| LONDON _ A wealthy young teenager buried near Britain's mysterious Stonehenge monument came from the Mediterranean hundreds of miles away, scientists said Wednesday, proof of the site's importance as a travel destination in prehistoric times.
In this image provided by Wessex Archaeology on Wednesday Sept. 29, 2010 shows the remains of an early bronze age burial. Although it cannot be seen in this photograph, this person was buried wearing... (Associated Press)
The teen _ dubbed "The Boy with the Amber Necklace" because he was unearthed with a cluster of amber beads around his neck _ is one of several sets of foreign remains found around the ancient ring of imposing stones, whose exact purpose remains unknown.
The British Geological Survey's Jane Evans said that the find, radiocarbon dated to 1,550 B.C., "highlights the diversity of people who came to Stonehenge from across Europe," a statement backed by Bournemouth University's Timothy Darvill, a Stonehenge scholar uninvolved with the discovery.
"The find adds considerable weight to the idea that people traveled long distances to visit Stonehenge, which must therefore have had a big reputation as a cult center," Darvill said in an e-mail Wednesday. "Long distance travel was certainly more common at this time than we generally think."
The skeleton, thought to be that of a 14- or 15-year-old, was unearthed about two miles (3 kilometers) southeast of Stonehenge, in southern England.
Clues to the adolescent's foreign origins could be found in the necklace, which isn't a recognized British type. But he was traced to the area around the Mediterranean Sea by a technique known as isotope analysis, which in this case measured the ratio of strontium and oxygen isotopes in his tooth enamel.
Different regions have different mixes of elements in their drinking water, for example, and some of those are absorbed into a person's tooth enamel as he or she grows up. Analysis of the isotopes of oxygen and strontium carried in the enamel can give scientists a good but rather general idea of where a person was raised.
The teen, whose necklace suggests he came from a rich family, is one of several long-distance travelers found near Stonehenge. The "Amesbury Archer," so-called because of the stone arrowheads he was found with, was buried three miles (5 kilometers) from Stonehenge but is thought to have come from the Alpine foothills of central Europe. The "Boscombe Bowmen," also found nearby, are thought to have come from Wales or possibly Brittany.
It isn't clear precisely what drew these people to Stonehenge, a site which has existed in various forms for some 5,000 years. It clearly had an important ceremonial function, and the area around it is dotted with the remains of prehistoric monuments and tombs. Some say it was at the center of a sun-worshipping culture or that it served as a kind of astronomical calendar.
Others, like Darvill, also say it might have been an important healing site, drawing pilgrims from across Europe like a prehistoric version of Lourdes.
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Online:
Stonehenge:
http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/stonehenge/ | – Religious site? Healing temple? Whatever Stonehenge was used for, it was quite the tourist hot spot. Isotopic tests performed on a recently discovered skeleton—dubbed "The Boy with the Amber Necklace" because of the beads tied round his neck—found that he traveled from the north coast of the Mediterranean to get there. And scientists say his hundreds-of-miles journey gives credence to the belief that Stonehenge was a top tourist attraction in prehistoric times. Other skeletons have been traced to Brittany and the Alps, the latter of which was found buried with gold and copper items—a sign that foreign visitors were wealthy. The bejeweled skeleton belonged to a teen who died near age 14 or 15, potentially bolstering the belief that sick travelers came to Stonehenge in hopes of being healed, and were buried there if that didn't work out, reports the AP. Click here for more. |
SO FAR, INVESTIGATORS HAVE NOT SAID HOW THE CHILD DIED. NEW AT 6:00, A BIZARRE ACCIDENT IN VOLUSIA COUNTY WHERE A MAN DIED WHILE INSTALLING A DISHWASHER. POLICE THINK IT WAS HIS WEDDING RING THAT MAY HAVE HAD SOMETHING TO DO WITH IT, TOO. THIS HAPPENED AT A HOME ON CALDWELL ROAD IN SOUTH DAYTONA. ERIK von ANCKEN HAS BEEN TALKING WITH INVESTIGATORS. DO WE HAVE ANY IDEA HOW THIS ALL HAPPENED? YEAH, MATT. IT SOUNDS LIKE THE MAN WAS KNEELING IN OR AROUND A POOL OF WATER, JUST AROUND, JUST BELOW THAT DISHWASHER WHEN HE WAS HELPING OUT, TRYING TO INSTALL IT. HE HAD ASKED HIS BROTHER-IN-LAW TO TURN THE POWER BACK ON. THEY THOUGHT THEY GOT IT. APPARENTLY THEY HEARD A STRANGE SOUND AND THAT'S WHEN HE REACHED BEHIND THE DISHWASHER, IT SOUNDS LIKE, TOUCHED THE BARE COPPER WIRE AND SHOCKED TO DEATH. THE FAMILY UNDERSTANDABLY IS HAVING A VERY TOUGH TIME WITH THIS. THE FAMILY AT THIS SOUTH DAYTONA HOUSE WHERE THEIR RELATIVE DIED CLEARLY DID NOT WANT TO TALK TO US. THEY WERE HERE, CHILDREN, TOO, ACCORDING TO POLICE, WHEN JASON FERGUSON DIED, TRYING TO HELP FIX A DISHWASHER, THE WEDDING RING TOUCHING THE LIVE WIRES AND KILLING HIM, POLICE SAY. I WASN'T REAL SURE, TO BE HONEST. WE KNEW SOMETHING HAPPENED BUT WE JUST DIDN'T KNOW WHAT. WHAT DO YOU THINK NOW? FRJ NOW IT'S A LITTLE SCARY. SOUTH DAYTONA POLICE SAY THE FAMILY WAS ABOUT TO HAVE DINNER AT THE HOME WHEN THEY NOTICED FERGUSON WAS SLUMPED OVER AND NOT MOVING. PARAMEDICS TRIED TO REVIVE FERGUSON AT THE HOME AND AFTER THEY LEFT THE HOME ON THE WAY TO
PORT ORANGE, Fla. -
A 33-year-old Central Florida man installing a dishwasher was electrocuted when his wedding ring came in contact with an unknown object, police said.
South Daytona police said Jason Ferguson, of Port Orange, was at his in-laws' home on Thursday when the fatal accident occurred.
Police said the family was getting ready to eat around 7 p.m. when they noticed that Ferguson was kneeling in front of the appliance with his left arm extended behind the dishwasher.
The family said Ferguson was turning red and was not responsive, so they grabbed him and began CPR, police said.
Ferguson was taken to Halifax Health Medical Center and later died.
Police said Ferguson, who the family said routinely installed and repaired items at the home, possibly came in contact with a copper wire. ||||| A wedding ring and a new dishwasher led to the sudden death of a Volusia County man on Thursday evening.
Jason Ferguson, 33, of Port Orange, was leaning on the metal door of a dishwasher he was installing for his brother-in-law and sister-in-law at their home in South Daytona when his wedding ring touched an element in the appliance, the South Daytona Police Department said.
Ferguson's family was getting dinner ready as he assisted them with the new appliance about 7 p.m.
"It was noticed that Mr. Ferguson was on his knees leaning against the dishwasher with his left arm extended behind the dishwasher and was not moving nor had he moved in a few minutes," officials said.
Ferguson was electrocuted and taken to Halifax Medical Center where he died upon arrival, Lt. Daniel Dietrich of the South Daytona Police Department said.
[email protected] or 407-420-5735 ||||| Man electrocuted while attempting to install dishwasher Posted: Monday, November 10, 2014 3:30 PM EST Updated: Monday, November 17, 2014 3:30 PM EST
A Volusia County man was electrocuted while attempting to install a dishwasher, authorities say.Jason Ferguson, 33, was pronounced dead on arrival to Halifax Medical Center.
A spokesman with the South Daytona Police Department says Ferguson was assisting family members with the installation of the appliance when he became unresponsive. Ferguson was on his knees leaning against the dishwasher with his left arm extended behind the appliance when family members told police that he had not moved for several minutes and was turning red. They grabbed him by his clothes, laid him on his back and began CPR and called 911.
After an investigation and autopsy, it is believed that Ferguson's wedding ring may have touched an element behind the dishwasher which resulted in his electrocution. ||||| A 33-year-old South Daytona man died last week by electrocution as he was installing a dishwasher.
List: Top 10 causes of death in Florida During 2012, there were 175,849 deaths in Florida. The top two causes of death account for almost half of the deaths in the state. More
Police were called to the Caldwell Road home on Thursday after family members realized Jason Ferguson was on his knees by the dishwasher and wasn't moving.
Officers began CPR, and rescuers took over, but Ferguson was pronounced dead at the hospital.
Most watched: 4-year-old boy gets to implode 19-story Atlanta hotel
Police said Ferguson was leaning on the dishwasher's metal door and his wedding ring touched an element in the back of the dishwasher that caused his electrocution.
Related: Top causes of death in Florida | – A good deed for his in-laws has ended in tragedy for a south Florida man. Jason Ferguson, 33, was installing a new dishwasher at his brother-in-law and sister-in-law's house Thursday when he was electrocuted, the Orlando Sentinel reports. Family members, who were sitting down to eat around 7pm, found him on his knees and leaning against the dishwasher's metal door. Ferguson was "turning red" and unresponsive, but his left hand was still behind the dishwasher, WKMG reports. Ferguson's family laid him on the ground to begin CPR, then called police, reports My Fox Orlando. Police and then EMTs took over, before he was taken to the hospital, adds WESH, but he was pronounced dead upon arrival. A sobering detail: Ferguson's wedding ring apparently touched something behind or in the dishwasher, causing the electrocution, police tell the Sentinel. Ferguson's family believe it was a copper wire, WKMG adds. (Other freak accidents lately include this construction worker, and this bowling alley employee.) |
The device is expected to become available in small quantities within a few months, Musk said.
The Tesla Powerwall is a wall-mounted home battery unit that can store renewable energy. (Photo: Tesla Motors)
Silicon Valley electric-vehicle automaker Tesla Motors is expanding its presence beyond luxury cars with plans to produce a wall-mounted battery pack designed to store renewable energy in the home.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed the Tesla Powerwall unit in an event late Thursday in California that was live streamed online.
The unit, he said, would go into small-scale production in three to four months at the company's Fremont, Calif., plant. Next year it will hit production at the company's currently-under-construction battery factory in Nevada. Customers can place orders online.
The reveal of the Tesla Powerwall underscores the company's transition from electric-vehicle designer and manufacturer into advanced energy device company.
The lithium-ion, software-equipped Tesla Powerwall comes in two versions: a 7 kilowatt-hour pack for $3,000 and a 10 kilowatt-hour pack for $3,500. Those fees don't include installation. Either version will power a typical U.S. home during peak evening hours, the company said.
Lux Research analysts said the actual cost of a Powerwall system could be double the sticker price when including installation and the price of an inverter, among other costs.
The system works indoors or outdoors and has a 10-year warranty. It starts at 220 pounds and measures 52.1 inches by 33.9 by 7.1
The device is designed to allow homeowners with solar panels on their roofs to store electricity generated throughout the day for use at night or during power outages.
Musk also revealed a bigger version of the battery pack for use in energy storage for utilities, which are scrambling to meet renewable energy requirements throughout the U.S.
That system is called the Tesla Energy. Amazon and Target have signed up for pilots.
With his typical dash of showmanship, Musk revealed to a giddy crowd that, in fact, the room where the news conference was taking place had been running on battery power generated from solar panels.
"So this entire night -- everything you're experiencing -- is stored sunlight," Musk said as the crowd shrieked.
It's difficult to immediately assess whether the Tesla Powerwall is pure hype, legitimate business breakthrough or somewhere in between.
Barclays analyst Brian Johnson told investors in a note Thursday before the event that there's a "battleground of debate" among investors over the impact the device will have on Tesla's business.
The success of the system relies heavily on the company's ability to lower battery costs through innovation and manufacturing advancements at its new battery factory in Nevada. Tesla's goal is for 30% of the factory's batteries to go into stationary energy storage systems, while the rest would be devoted to electric vehicles.
Musk blasted current home battery options for consumers, saying Tesla's device would look nicer and operate more efficiently.
"The issue with existing batteries is that they suck. They're really horrible," he said.
Musk, who has long emphasized that his chief goal at Tesla is to reduce carbon emissions that cause climate change, is chairman of solar firm SolarCity, which has a partnership with the automaker on home battery unit pilots.
It was not immediately clear whether Solar City has a role in the Powerwall rollout.
But Musk made it clear that he believes solar energy stored in home batteries offers a feasible and desirable alternative to fossil fuels.
"We have this handy fusion reactor in the sky called the sun" that "produces ridiculous amounts of power," he said.
He added, with a smirk: "The obvious problem with solar is the sun does not shine at night. I think most people are aware of this."
That's why home batteries are vital, he said.
"If Tesla can produce a cost effective home energy storage system it could prove far more valuable, and profitable, than anything the company is doing with automobiles," said Karl Brauer, a Kelley Blue Book senior analyst, in a statement early Friday. "As solar panels get cheaper and easier to install the only thing thing keeping consumers tied to the energy grid is a need for electricity when the sun isn't shining."
Brauer added: "If Tesla can help consumers bridge the moments between abundant sunlight it could force electric companies to deal with same issue threatening home phone and cable companies. Imagine a wave of customers cutting ties with their local power companies because they have a self-contained energy system."
Contact Nathan Bomey: 313-223-4743 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @NathanBomey.
Read or Share this story: http://on.freep.com/1zxOOjm ||||| Tesla has unveiled a suite of new energy products, including a wall-mounted battery that will be sold for use in consumers' homes.
Tesla is calling the rechargeable lithium-ion battery the "Powerwall." As the name suggests, the unit is designed to be mounted on a wall, and connected to the local power grid.
It will be sold to installers for $3,500 for 10kWh, and $3,000 for 7kWh. Deliveries will begin in late Summer.
Home batteries power up overnight, when energy companies typically charge less for electricity. Then, they can be turned on during the day to power a home. The batteries typically cost thousands of dollars, though many utility companies offer rebates.
Related: Is the Tesla home battery worth the cost? Depends where you live.
Kimbal Musk, a Tesla board member, told CNNMoney earlier this week that the new battery would slash consumers' electric bills by 25%.
The announcement was made during an event in California. In promotional materials, Tesla referred to the battery as "the missing piece." In addition to the Powerwall, Tesla also announced an energy storage system for businesses, and a large scale system for use by utilities.
"The issue with existing batteries is that they suck," said Tesla CEO Elon Musk. "They're really horrible."
When coupled with solar energy, the batteries will help accelerate the move away from fossil fuels, he said.
"That's the future we need to have," Musk said. "It's something we must do, and we can do, and we will do."
Speculation over the new product line has been building since Jeff Evanson, Tesla's investor relations director, sent a letter to investors and analysts saying the electric car company would soon announce a "home battery" and a "very large utility scale battery."
Tesla (TSLA) has talked about releasing a home battery for about a year.
Tesla shares have jumped 20% over the past month as investors speculated about the battery's technical specifications and market potential. The company is scheduled to announce its first quarter earnings next week. ||||| MELBOURNE (Reuters) - Tesla Inc boss Elon Musk on Friday offered to save Australia’s most renewable-energy dependent state from blackouts by installing $25 million worth of battery storage within 100 days, and offering it for free if he missed the target.
FILE PHOTO: Tesla Chief Executive, Elon Musk enters the lobby of Trump Tower in Manhattan, New York, U.S., January 6, 2017. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton/File Photo
The offer follows a string of power outages in the state of South Australia, including a blackout that left industry crippled for up to two weeks and stoked fears of more outages across the national electricity market due to tight supplies.
Musk made the offer on social media, and the government said it could consider backing such a battery roll out by Tesla.
“The government stands ready through ARENA and the CEFC to work with companies with serious proposals to support the deployment of more storage,” Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg said in an email to Reuters.
ARENA is the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and the CEFC is the Clean Energy Finance Corp.
Musk made the offer in response to a comment on social media by Mike Cannon-Brookes, the co-founder of Australian software maker Atlassian Corp, who said he would be willing to line up funding and political support if Tesla could supply batteries that would solve South Australia’s problems.
100-DAY GUARANTEE
Musk responded by tweeting: “Tesla will get the system installed and working 100 days from contract signature or it is free. That serious enough for you?”
He quoted a price of $250 per kilowatt hour for 100 megawatt hour systems, which would imply a price of $25 million for the battery packs.
“You’re on mate. Give me 7 days to try and sort out politics & funding,” tweeted Cannon-Brookes.
He said he was inundated with calls on Friday after the exchange and was eager to get the plan off the ground.
“My phone hasn’t stopped buzzing. The support is flooding in, both from individuals in terms of ‘Hell yes!’ and from corporates who are asking: ‘Can we buy power? Can we contribute dollars?’,” Cannon-Brookes told Reuters.
Tesla launched its Powerwall 2 in Australia, the world’s top market for rooftop solar, this week. Battery storage is just one of several options the government is looking at to help ensure reliable power supplies as the country grows more reliant on intermittent wind and solar power.
“We have been talking with a number of large-scale battery providers about potential storage solutions, including in South Australia. To the extent Tesla is interested, we’ll also talk with them,” Clean Energy Finance Corp Chief Executive Oliver Yates said in an emailed statement.
After a record-breaking summer, Australia’s energy market operator said this week that eastern Australia desperately needed more gas for power stations within the next two years to provide back-up electricity for wind and solar and avert blackouts. | – The guy who's diligently working on a plan to transport humans to Mars has also been toiling on a project that makes use of the sun. That project, a rechargeable lithium-ion battery made by Tesla called Powerwall, is designed to be installed in homes and store solar energy to be used at night or during power outages, CNNMoney reports. And that guy who announced it last night in a live-streamed unveiling in California is Elon Musk, the ambitious Tesla CEO who hopes this energy alternative will reduce our need for fossil fuels, the Detroit Free Press reports. "The issue with existing batteries is that they suck," he said, per the newspaper. "They're really horrible." Not the Powerwall, according to Musk, which is scheduled to start shipping sometime this summer, the AP reports. The 220-pound wall-mounted battery charges "using electricity generated from solar panels, or when utility rates are low," the Powerwall site explains. But there's a cost to get there: The batteries go for $3,000 or $3,500, depending on its juice capacity, plus installation. "The value proposition now is around reliability and backup power more than it is around savings, but over time that may change," says an analyst with GTM Research. Indeed, Musk's brother Kimbal, one of Tesla's board members, told CNNMoney earlier in the week that the battery would cut electricity bills by 25%. As the AP explains, as more utilities permit power prices to fluctuate throughout the day based on market conditions, Powerwall software will let customers use their own home-generated power—and not costly grid power—when grid prices are highest. |
Fans took to Twitter to express their outrage over a recipe changes in Cadbury Creme Eggs in the U.K. (Photo: Paul Vathis, Associated Press)
New changes to Cadbury Creme Eggs are proving to be anything but sweet for fans of the chocolaty treat.
Folks in the United Kingdom are upset with recipe changes and the reduction of a pack of the candies from six eggs to five, without changing the price.
Under a new recipe, the shell of the United Kingdom version of the eggs is now made with a "standard, traditional Cadbury milk chocolate," Stephanie Minna Cass,
a spokesperson for Mondelez International told USA TODAY Network.
The company separated from Kraft Foods Group, which acquired Cadbury Chocolate in 2010.
Fans took to Twitter to express their outrage over changes they feel "cheapen" the brand.
Have you tried the NEW #CadburysCremeEggs ??!! Not very good at all! — Your Boy! Brian (@yourboyBrianRD) January 12, 2015
Why would you change it!?! Could taste the difference straight away.. Won't be buying any till they are changed back! #CadburysCremeEggs — Kishan Raja (@kishanraja26) January 12, 2015
#CadburysCremeEggs if it ain't broke, don't try to fix it! — Mark Dowse (@devonoffice) January 12, 2015
The recipe change was too much for some Twitter users, still reeling from the news of the five-pack.
Creme Eggs are now 5 in a box instead of 6 AND for the same price, not cool @CadburyUK ✋ — Kayleigh (@kayleighjr) January 11, 2015
Just read that @CadburyUK is changing the Creme egg recipe. Nooooo! I'm already mad about the 5-packs. #CadburysCremeEggs — Caroline Domenech (@the_adverb) January 12, 2015
Egg boxes have 6 eggs minimum, not 5!! Oh and bring back the dairy milk shell. Don't mess with a national treasure! #CadburysCremeEggs — Ella Cservenka (@ellaroo1) January 12, 2015
Cadbury U.K. blamed the downsizing of eggs on "economic factors" like the cost of ingredients.
@JonnoHuggard we now sell them in 5 packs due to changes in economic factors, such as - cost of ingredients that make our eggs so delicious! — Cadbury UK (@CadburyUK) January 12, 2015
Follow @MaryBBowerman on Twitter
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1IEQA0h ||||| Story highlights Fans of Cadbury Creme Eggs are upset about a recipe change
Cadbury Creme Eggs appear on shelves from January until Easter
American food giant Kraft acquired British-based Cadbury in 2010
(CNN) The makers of Cadbury Creme Eggs are walking on eggshells with fans of the beloved Easter treat after a recent tweak in the recipe.
The chocolate eggs, filled with a cloying "yolk" of yellow and white fondant, were originally made in the United Kingdom with Cadbury's signature Dairy Milk chocolate.
Now, under the new recipe, they're made with "a standard, traditional Cadbury milk chocolate," said a spokeswoman for Mondelez International, a spinoff of Kraft Foods, in a statement. Kraft acquired British candy maker Cadbury in 2010 for roughly $19 billion.
The change applies only to Cadbury eggs sold in the United Kingdom. The goo-filled eggs usually appear on shelves starting in January until April.
"We have always used a range of milk chocolate blends for different products, depending on their shape or consistency," the spokeswoman said. "The fundamentals of the Cadbury Crème Egg remain exactly the same -- delicious milk chocolate and the unique creme centre that consumers love."
However, fans aren't buying it. Some took to Twitter to vent their displeasure.
New Kraft ad campaign: Cadbury's Creme Eggs, how don't you eat yours? — David Stokes (@scottywrotem) January 12, 2015
Hey @CadburyUK! YOU MIGHT AS WELL HAVE JUST CANCELLED EASTER. I'M HIGHLY EMOTIONAL AND PROTECTIVE OF CHOCOLATE EGGS. — Matty Tyler (@TylerMattyJames) January 12, 2015
Thank God I was already sitting down when I heard about Cadbury's Cream Eggs. — Richard Sandling (@squat_betty) January 12, 2015
According to Cadbury, 500 million creme eggs are made each year, and about two-thirds of those are consumed in the UK.
This is not Cadbury's first controversy of 2015's creme-egg season: Fans expressed similar disappointment when the number of eggs in each pack was cut from six to five. ||||| A triumph of the confectioner’s art has been traduced: the classic treat’s shell is no longer made of Dairy Milk
Stop all the clocks. Cut off the telephone. Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone.
Monday 12 January 2015 will go down in confectionery history as a bad day. A hurtful day.
The day when it was revealed that Cadbury’s Creme Eggs have changed for ever.
No longer shall the egg shell be made from delicious Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate. It will instead be made from disgusting, foul, vomit-inducing “standard cocoa mix chocolate”.
“It’s no longer Dairy Milk. It is similar, but not exactly Dairy Milk,” said a spokesman for Cadbury, which was bought by the US giant Kraft in 2010 and is now owned by Mondelez, with a flippancy almost as hard to stomach as this new, Frankenstein’s monster of an egg is bound to be.
The spokesman said the new chocolate had been tested on “consumers” – industry shorthand for “idiots”, clearly – and had been “found to be the best one for Creme Egg”.
He added: “The Creme Egg had never been called Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Creme Egg. We have never played on the fact that Dairy Milk was used.”
As true as that may be, it offers little consolation for fans of the original.
The combination of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk and whatever it is that goes into the cream/creme that forms the centre of a true Cadbury Creme Egg is one of the all-time great double acts. Would you separate Laurel and Hardy so lightly? Bill from Hillary? Romeo from Juliet? Bell from spigot?
Of course not. It would be outrageous, not to mention unfair. All those individuals are or were utterly dependent on the other. Their relationships are or were watertight. Cadbury’s Dairy Milk and whatever it is that goes into the cream/creme that forms the centre of a Creme Egg deserved the same respect. The same longevity.
The Cadbury Creme Egg was a rare thing in this modern age. Its subtle blend of delicious chocolate and sweet, creamy/cremey yolk was a throwback to the days when chocolatiers took pride in their work.
Without the Dairy Milk shell – and I say this without having tried the new product, obviously – we are left with nothing less than an abomination. This new Creme Egg is a Creme Egg that is barely worthy of the name. Fabergé, hen, goose … are you watching? Are you willing to have this, this … thing sully your fine work?
There are already two differing Creme Eggs. There is the UK-manufactured flagship, a full 40g of chocolatey egg glory. Then there is its American, dear-god-hide-it-in-the-attic sibling, a wretched creature offering a mere 34g of satisfaction.
Creme Egg enthusiasts thought the UK version was safe, although we should have seen the alarm signs. It is Kraft at whose doorstep this controversy should really be laid. It was Kraft, an awful, immoral, US behemoth, that bought Cadbury, a smiley, cottage-industry, whistle-while-you-work British chocolate-maker in a hostile takeover that created public outcry.
We should have seen the alarm signs. But we were high on Dairy Milk chocolate and and whatever it is that goes into the cream/creme that forms the centre of a Cadbury Creme Egg. We had our egg and we were eating it. We were safe, we thought, as we greedily wolfed down Creme Egg after Creme Egg, laughing maniacally.
Oh how wrong we were.
Already, this egg announcement is threatening the stability of the UK government. What havoc will this monster wreak next?
Are we really going to swallow this bad egg, America? For that is what Cadbury has wrought. A bad egg. And today will for ever be known as a bad day.
• This article was amended on 13 January 2015 to clarify the ownership of Cadbury. | – It's early January, but people in the UK are apparently already munching on a lot of Cadbury Creme Eggs—and many of them aren't happy about some changes inside the foil. The Easter treats used to be made with the Dairy Milk brand of milk chocolate, but the maker admits they're now made with "a standard, traditional Cadbury milk chocolate" instead, CNN reports. Chocolate lovers have taken to social media to voice their outrage at both the recipe change and the company's decision to cut the number of eggs in each pack from six to five, which it says is the result of "changes in economic factors," reports USA Today. "The Creme Egg had never been called Cadbury's Dairy Milk Creme Egg. We have never played on the fact that Dairy Milk was used," a company spokesman tells the Guardian, which notes that while the recipe change won't affect the American version, the US Creme Egg is already a "wretched creature" of 1.2 ounces, compared to 1.4 ounces in Britain. The Cadbury recipe changes follow a blow to British national pride in 2010, when Kraft bought the chocolate maker in a $19 billion deal; Cadbury has since 2012 been handled by Mondelez. |
Story highlights PR executive no longer works for IAC
Corporate communications head was on 12-hour flight when tweet went viral
Justine Sacco's Twitter account was deleted Saturday
IAC says, "There is no excuse for the hateful statements that have been made"
The "tweet heard round the world" was followed by the sound of a slamming door Saturday.
Media company IAC has "parted ways" with company PR executive Justine Sacco over her tweet: "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!"
"The offensive comment does not reflect the views and values of IAC. We take this issue very seriously, and we have parted ways with the employee in question," an IAC spokesman said in a statement.
"There is no excuse for the hateful statements that have been made and we condemn them unequivocally," he said. "We hope, however, that time and action, and the forgiving human spirit, will not result in the wholesale condemnation of an individual who we have otherwise known to be a decent person at core."
Sacco did not immediately respond to messages left by CNN.
Justine Sacco's tweet went viral while she was en route to South Africa.
The tweet Sacco sent before she left Friday for Cape Town, South Africa, went viral and created a social media firestorm.
The incident -- Boing Boing called it " the tweet heard round the world " -- was a glaring reminder that every word uttered on the Internet can be heard by seemingly everyone on the Internet, sometimes with serious consequences.
Sacco was the head of corporate communications for IAC, the media company chaired by Barry Diller that operates websites such as The Daily Beast, About.com, CollegeHumor and Match.com. Her whole job revolved around communicating with reporters -- which made her Twitter comment about Africa all the more shocking.
Sacco was in London and about to begin a long vacation in South Africa when she wrote the message. Her Twitter account was relatively obscure when she posted it -- fewer than 500 people were following it. But the message went viral on Friday, unbeknownst to Sacco, who apparently did not have Internet access on her flight.
Websites such as Valleywag and Buzzfeed highlighted Sacco's account, and soon it had thousands of followers -- and thousands of harsh replies directed at it. Some were downright hateful. Others said they felt sorry for Sacco, regardless of how offensive her Twitter message was, because she hadn't had a chance to defend herself during the 12-hour flight.
As Twitter observers parsed through her public posts, many were disturbed by her previous messages. ("I had a sex dream about an autistic kid last night," she once wrote.)
Her account was a laundry list of banal complaints about poor customer service and other apparent indignities.
"It seems she has left a trail of casual racism across social media on her various travels," Chris Taylor, a writer for Mashable, opined
Still, Taylor wrote, "it was hard to ignore a disturbing feeling in the mob's response" to the Twitter messages "and something creepy in the trial by social media that was going on in her absence."
On Friday afternoon, with hours to go before she landed, another corporate communications representative for IAC issued a statement that tried to address the online controversy.
"This is an outrageous, offensive comment that does not reflect the views and values of IAC," the company said. "Unfortunately, the employee in question is unreachable on an international flight, but this is a very serious matter and we are taking appropriate action."
The statement led many to believe that Sacco would be reprimanded or even terminated when she landed in South Africa.
Parody accounts started to appear on Twitter and Facebook that portrayed Sacco as a mean, bitter person. On Friday evening a Twitter hashtag, #HasJustineLandedYet, became a running commentary about Sacco; some people observed that she'd have to put her crisis communications expertise to the test to save her own career.
Meanwhile, other Twitter users started scoping out Sacco's past messages and flagged other questionable comments she'd made before, like this one: "I can't be fired for things I say while intoxicated right?"
All of those messages disappeared, though, early on Saturday, when someone -- presumably Sacco -- deleted her Twitter account. IAC had no immediate comment about how or why her account was removed.
Some good does seem to have come out of the incident, at least. ||||| Justine Sacco was, until Friday, the top PR person for InterActiveCorp, the New York media conglomerate run by Barry Diller. IAC owns the Daily Beast, Vimeo, About.com, Match.com and Ask.com, among many others. On her now-deactivated Twitter account, Sacco called herself a "troublemaker on the side" known for her "loud laugh." Perhaps it was inevitable that this self-image would clash with her high-rolling position.
Because Sacco has made a world of trouble for herself, and as I wrote this, she didn't even know it. Before she got on a plane Friday, a tweet emerged from Sacco's account, a joke of such monumental stupidity that it was hard for many people to believe her account wasn't hacked:
Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white! — Justine Sacco (@JustineSacco) December 20, 2013
Point of fact, nobody knew if Justine Sacco's account was hacked, or if she left her phone when she boarded her plane in London. But that didn't stop IAC from issuing a preemptive press statement: “This is an outrageous, offensive comment that does not reflect the views and values of IAC,” the company said. “This is a very serious matter and we are taking appropriate action.”
If that were all there was to the story, it would have briefly lit up Twitter like a Christmas tree and burned itself out with Sacco's firing. But then there was the other part of the IAC statement: "Unfortunately, the employee in question is unreachable on an international flight." You can't fire someone this senior for anything without talking to them first, and Sacco was on a very long, wi-fi-free plane journey — 11 hours, 20 minutes on British Airways.
That occasioned a tremendous schadenfreude, as users waited for 20th century transport to catch up with 21st century communications.
Here's a representative sample of the conversation, via the trending hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet:
#HasJustineLandedYet is NORAD Santa Tracker for adults. — jane davis (@janedavis) December 21, 2013
If only @LOLJustineSacco had Whoopi Goldberg on flight, bc I'm pretty sure this would occur: #HasJustineLandedYet pic.twitter.com/1ZNIziJyct — John Jdol (@JohnJdol) December 21, 2013
LAST Friday: "Surprise, heffas!" - Beyonce to the world
THIS Friday: "Surprise, heffa!" - the world to Justine
#HasJustineLandedYet — Bee (@BeeSince83) December 21, 2013
Right, is there no one in Cape Town going to the airport to tweet her arrival? Come on, twitter! I'd like pictures #HasJustineLandedYet — Farhad Manjoo (@fmanjoo) December 21, 2013
Man, things are going to get so awkward for #JustineSacco once she realizes Africans have twitter, too. #hasjustinelandedyet — Laila Alawa (@lulainlife) December 21, 2013
It is kinda wild to see someone self-destruct without them even being aware of it. #hasJustineLandedYet — David Flor (@BrainClouds) December 21, 2013
Sacco is nearly impossible to defend. It seems she has left a trail of casual racism across social media on her various travels, making the hacking scenario unlikely, and explaining why her company rushed to denounce her — they knew it was most likely the genuine article. She certainly did herself no favors with this writer by sliming the British in a tweet during her pit stop in London earlier Friday.
Still, it was hard to ignore a disturbing feeling in the mob's response, and something creepy in the trial by social media that was going on in her absence. You could argue she did it to herself — all those pictures in the album "Too Much Swagger for White Girls (Miami '10)" are in the public part of her Facebook Timeline, after all.
Then you could also read the hateful comments recently placed all over her Instagram feed, including on pictures of her child. That's when you might realize this whole thing has gone too far.
There's a fine line between slamming Sacco for her blatant what-guys-I-was-just-kidding buffoonery, and taking an unconscionable delight in the misfortune of others while playing Big Brother on their lives. Quite apart from anything else, that sort of attention may play into the worst tendencies of someone who would write that. It grants her notoriety, maybe even a career in news channel punditry. She can pour out an apology to Barbara Walters.
When her plane lands in Cape Town, I hope not a soul tweets her picture. I hope they show a far older social response, and turn their back on her. And as for the rest of us, I hope we take the suggestion of several good souls on Twitter — if you are (rightfully) offended by what she said, channel your rage into donating to an AIDS charity.
Awesome. @AidforAfrica registered the domain name http://t.co/8ty73MJoCZ and has it redirect you to their donate page. #HasJustineLandedYet — Diane Alston (@dianelyssa) December 21, 2013
An earlier version of this story made reference to a screenshot of a Google search for Sacco's name that included her flight details; this turned out to be fake. We regret the error.
Image: Justine Sacco, Facebook ||||| The Tweet heard round the world
As she embarked upon a long flight to Africa, PR staffer Justine Sacco issued this tweet. At best a darkly ironic self-deprecation that could never fit into 140 characters, it resulted, within bare minutes, in an internet-wide scandal. Even as the plane is still in the air--Sacco presumably oblivious--there is a hashtag, #HasJustineLandedYet, a parody account, @LOLJustineSacco, a fake movie poster, and, God help her, a whole entire New York Times article, replete with a stunned disavowal from her corporate employers.
“This is an outrageous, offensive comment that does not reflect the views and values of IAC,” the company said in a statement. “Unfortunately, the employee in question is unreachable on an international flight, but this is a very serious matter and we are taking appropriate action.”
"Ms. Sacco," added The Times' Ashley Southall, "could not be reached for comment."
UPDATE: It looks like Sacco landed, deleted the tweet, and subsequently the entire account. I wonder if anyone managed to get a screen grab!
UPDATE 2:Here's a timely reminder from Michele Catalano about the dangers of Twitter.
We're all 140 characters away from being vilified. — Michele Catalano (@inthefade) December 21, 2013
UPDATE 3: Sacco was fired over the tweet, and apologized for it. | – A PR exec who became an instant Internet villain yesterday appears to have lost her job following fury over an AIDS-related tweet. Media firm IAC says it has "parted ways" with Justine Sacco, CNN reports. She won't be tweeting again anytime soon, either—at least not from the @JustineSacco account, which has been deleted. If you missed the fuss yesterday, Sacco tweeted the following from Heathrow Airport just before getting on a long flight to South Africa for a vacation: "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!" Sacco works as head of communications for IAC, which only seemed to amplify the outrage that immediately ensued. In fact, much of it played out while Sacco was incommunicado during the flight, notes Boing Boing, which calls it the "tweet heard round the world." Even before she landed, her employer issued a statement: "This is an outrageous, offensive comment that does not reflect the views and values of IAC." The company noted that "we hope, however, that time and action, and the forgiving human spirit, will not result in the wholesale condemnation of an individual who we have otherwise known to be a decent person at core," the New York Times reports. Reaction has ranged disbelief at the line (see the HasJustineLandedYet hashtag, of course) to disbelief over how vitriolic the "mob response" has been. On that note, the Times notes that it appears someone tracked down Sacco at the Cape Town airport and took photos. |
Former coal executive and ex-convict Don Blankenship on Monday announced plans to launch a third-party bid for a West Virginia Senate seat after losing the GOP primary to state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey.
It's unclear whether Blankenship will actually be allowed onto the ballot, since state law bans candidates who lose a major-party primary from running as a third-party candidate in a general election, a rule often referred to as the "sore loser law."
But, if he is successful, he could deal a serious blow to Morrisey's attempt to coalesce Republicans around his bid to defeat Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin Joseph (Joe) ManchinSchumer reelected as Senate Democratic Leader Mellman: The triumph of partisanship Senate GOP readies for leadership reshuffle MORE.
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In a statement announcing his decision, Blankenship blasted the GOP establishment that successfully fought to keep him from winning the primary, warning that there would be payback and accusing the White House of reneging on a promise to not get involved in the race.
“The political establishment is determined to keep me — the most anti-establishment candidate in the nation — out of the United States Senate," he said.
"The press and the establishment have colluded and lied to convince the public that I am a moron, a bigot, and a felon. They even went so far as to lie about my chances against Senator Joe Manchin in the general election.”
Blankenship finished third in the state's GOP Senate primary behind Morrisey and Rep. Evan Jenkins Evan Hollin JenkinsWest Virginia New Members 2019 Republican Carol Miller holds off Democrat in West Virginia House race Trump to fundraise for 3 Republicans running for open seats: report MORE (R-W.Va.), to the delight of Washington Republicans who worried Blankenship would destroy the party's chances of defeating Manchin in the deep-red state.
The former coal baron served one year in prison on a misdemeanor charge related to an explosion in one of his mines that killed 29 people. During the campaign, Washington Republicans strongly condemned him, and a super PAC backed by allies of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Addison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellSenators introduce Trump-backed criminal justice bill On The Money: Senior GOP senator warns Trump against shutdown | Treasury sanctions 17 Saudis over Khashoggi killing | HQ2 deal brings new scrutiny on Amazon | Senate confirms Bowman to Fed board Senior GOP senator warns Trump against partial shutdown MORE (R-Ky.) bankrolled an ad campaign meant to smear him.
Blankenship positioned himself as an anti-establishment candidate, portraying himself as “Trumpier than Trump” and waging a controversial ad campaign that included all-out attacks on McConnell and his family.
He called McConnell "Cocaine Mitch," a reference to a report that drugs were found on a shipping vessel his wife's family owned, and referred to McConnell's wife, Chinese-American Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao Elaine Lan ChaoTrump, first lady attend special Supreme Court ceremony for Kavanaugh 5 ways Democrats can turn the House win into future success Overnight Energy: Groups want Senate to probe Interior watchdog controversy | Puerto Rico eyes plan for 100 percent clean energy | Dems say Congress already rejected part of EPA car emissions plan MORE, as a "China-person."
President Trump Donald John TrumpAvenatti ‘still considering’ presidential run despite domestic violence arrest Mulvaney positioning himself to be Commerce Secretary: report Kasich: Wouldn’t want presidential run to ‘diminish my voice’ MORE, in a tweet just before the state's primary, urged West Virginia voters not to support Blankenship, a move the candidate largely blamed for his loss. Trump reportedly called Blankenship after the election to congratulate him on the campaign.
But Blankenship appeared spurned by the primary outcome —adviser Greg Thomas said days after the election that Blankenship would not support Morrisey and that "all options are on the table" to stop him from winning.
That appears to have culminated in the push for the Constitution Party's nomination, a strategy that could siphon votes away from Morrisey if he's allowed on the ballot.
Even with the Constitution Party's support, a spot on the ballot is no sure thing for Blankenship thanks to the state's "sore loser law."
But in the statement, Blankenship predicted he'd be allowed onto the ballot "absent a politically motivated decision by the courts.”
Trump won West Virginia by more than 40 points in the 2016 presidential election, giving Republicans hope they can knock Manchin out of office once and for all. Manchin has carved out space in the state despite his party affiliation, serving as the secretary of state and governor before his Senate bid.
Republicans are hopeful that Morrisey can win the seat, pointing to a recent internal poll from the campaign that had Morrisey up 2 points. But any move that could split the GOP vote could be a problem for the GOP and make it that much harder to defeat Manchin.
Updated at 9:28 a.m.
Avery Anapol contributed. ||||| FILE - In this Jan. 18, 2018, file photo, former Massey CEO and West Virginia Republican Senatorial candidate, Don Blankenship, speaks during a town hall to kick off his campaign in Logan, W.Va. Blankenship... (Associated Press)
FILE - In this Jan. 18, 2018, file photo, former Massey CEO and West Virginia Republican Senatorial candidate, Don Blankenship, speaks during a town hall to kick off his campaign in Logan, W.Va. Blankenship... (Associated Press)
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is urging West Virginia voters to reject a former federal convict and coal baron running in the Republican Senate primary, arguing that Don Blankenship would lose the general election.
Trump tweets on Monday: "To the great people of West Virginia we have, together, a really great chance to keep making a big difference. Problem is, Don Blankenship, currently running for Senate, can't win the General Election in your State...No way! Remember Alabama. Vote Rep. Jenkins or A.G. Morrisey!"
Blankenship has taken aim at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell with racially charged accusations of corruption. He responded that Trump doesn't know him and "the establishment is misinforming him because they do not want me to be in the US Senate and promote the president's agenda."
He added: "As some have said, I am Trumpier than Trump and this morning proves it."
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said on Monday on Fox and Friends said the president's tweet against Blankenship are meant to avoid internal battles among Republicans and "find the very best person" in West Virginia to challenge incumbent Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat.
The primary is Tuesday.
Trump is citing Alabama Republican Roy Moore, who lost a special Senate election after allegations of past sexual misconduct. Trump endorsed Moore in that race. | – President Trump is urging West Virginia voters to reject a former federal convict and coal baron running in the Republican Senate primary, arguing that Don Blankenship would lose the general election. Trump tweeted on Monday: "To the great people of West Virginia we have, together, a really great chance to keep making a big difference. Problem is, Don Blankenship, currently running for Senate, can't win the General Election in your State...No way! Remember Alabama. Vote Rep. Jenkins or A.G. Morrisey!" Politico on Sunday wondered if the White House would get involved after speaking to four GOPers who said 11th-hour polls suggest Blankenship could be moving ahead of Republican challengers Rep. Evan Jenkins and state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey. Blankenship responded to Trump's tweet by writing that Trump doesn't know him and "the establishment is misinforming him because they do not want me to be in the US Senate and promote the president's agenda." He added: "Tomorrow, West Virginia will send the swamp a message—no one, and I mean no one, will tell us how to vote. As some have said, I am Trumpier than Trump and this morning proves it." Per the AP, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said on Monday on Fox and Friends that the motivation behind the president's tweet is to "find the very best person" in West Virginia to challenge incumbent Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat. The primary is Tuesday. (Blankenship served a year in prison.) |
BuzzFeed News obtained internal data on rapes and sexual assaults lodged via Uber's customer service system, as the company attempted to find the leaker.
According to data provided by Uber to BuzzFeed News, the company received five claims of rape and "fewer than" 170 claims of sexual assault directly related to an Uber ride as inbound tickets to its customer service database between December 2012 and August 2015.
Uber provided these numbers as a rebuttal to screenshots obtained by BuzzFeed News. The images that were provided by a former Uber customer service representative (CSR) to BuzzFeed News, and subsequently confirmed by multiple other parties, show search queries conducted on Uber's Zendesk customer support platform from December 2012 through August 2015. Several individual tickets shown in the screenshots have also been confirmed. After Uber learned of BuzzFeed's investigation, the company began contacting customer service representatives in its system who had searched the Zendesk database for the terms rape and sexual assault, apparently in a hunt for the leaker.
In one screenshot, a search query for "sexual assault" returns 6,160 Uber customer support tickets. A search for "rape" returns 5,827 individual tickets. Other variations of the terms yield similarly high returns: A search for "assaulted" shows 3,524 tickets, while "sexually assaulted" returns 382 results.
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Uber insists the data shown in these images is not an accurate representation of assault complaints made through its platform. Though the company said it could not immediately provide internal statistics for the numbers of rape and sexual assault complaints on its platform, a 24-hour review by Uber's legal, safety, and data teams concluded that the rape ticket counts obtained by BuzzFeed News are "significantly overstated."
Uber officials told BuzzFeed News that of these thousands of tickets returned for the keyword "rape," five meet Uber's standard of an actual incident related to a trip; Uber declined to further define this standard or expose its methodology. (It's worth noting these are incidents in its customer service system, not an accounting of all incidents. The number is neither comprehensive nor inclusive). The company suggested a number of reasons a search query for the term would return 5,827 support tickets. Uber officials suggested that if an email address or rider/driver last name contains the word “rape” like “Jason Rape” or “Don Draper” it will be included when queried. The official noted that 68 riders and 12 drivers have the first or last name “Rape” and claimed that many of them generated multiple tickets during the time period in question. The source also suggested that misspellings of the word "rate" and expressions like "you raped my wallet" accounted for false positives in the search results seen in the obtained screenshots.
However the screenshots obtained by BuzzFeed News show nine complaint tickets with the subject line of "rape." The nine results in the screenshot do not appear to be the result of misspellings or driver or rider names or emails with a letter sequence of "rape." The ride-hail giant repeatedly asserted that the high number of queries from the screenshots is overstated, however Uber declined BuzzFeed News' request to grant direct access to the data, or view its data analysis procedures. When asked for any additional anonymous data on the five rape complaint tickets it claims to have received between December 2012 and August 2015, Uber declined to provide any information. Uber also rebutted screenshots that show a search query for "sexual assault" returning 6,160 customer support tickets. Uber officials told BuzzFeed News there were fewer than 170 tickets with a claim of sexual assault. These officials suggested that the thousands of tickets matching that search query may have been caused by "reports from riders who were making claims about sexual assault on other transport services, discussions about sexual assaults in the news, and reports about passengers who got into cars that were not Uber vehicles and were then sexually assaulted." The screenshots obtained by BuzzFeed News show at least nine complaint tickets with the subject line of "sexual assault" and at least nine results out of 382 with subjects for "sexually assaulted," including "uber driver sexually assaulted me," "sexually assaulted by Uber driver in SF," "Uber driver sexually assaulted my girlfriend," and "my daughter sexually assaulted by drive."
Uber officials told BuzzFeed News that, in the instance of reported rape or assault, CSRs are told to reach out to the person who reported the claim and to escalate to law enforcement as appropriate. Company officials also noted that Uber temporarily deactivates the driver partner or rider during the investigation and that Uber's technology sends riders the license plate, make, and color of the car, and the driver's photo and name. Additional screenshots provided to BuzzFeed News detail the way Uber’s Incident Response Teams are instructed to deal with customer support tickets, which range in severity from Level 1 to Level 4. Nonconsensual sexual contact (or attempts to commit same) fall under Level 3, and are supposed to prompt an investigation. According to Uber's internal documentation, if an investigation into nonconsensual sexual contact proves inconclusive, a driver receives a “Final Warning”; only if the investigation is conclusive or if the driver receives a second inconclusive strike is he or she deactivated. Screenshots from Uber’s “Support Logic and Escalations” section inside Zendesk also show that customer service reps handling nonconsensual sexual contact cases should take media and law enforcement interest into account when deciding to escalate cases to higher-ranking employees. “Determine LE/media interest and have Comms/LERT monitor if risk confirmed,” one screenshot reads.
In another customer service screenshot pertaining to confirmed driver alcohol/drug use, support logic instructions suggest that "if rider does not want to escalate with LE (law enforcement) or media, follow strike system, issue warning, and resolve without escalating."
While the volume of search returns for tickets concerning rape and sexual assault in the screenshots above differ greatly from the numbers Uber provided to BuzzFeed News to rebut them, the high volume of queries under these two keywords provides a window into a particularly vexing problem for customer support representatives already struggling to handle a myriad of rider and driver issues. Simply put: The sheer quantity of these tickets makes it difficult to tell which ones are exaggerations or attempts at false escalations and which are legitimate and urgent requests. An Uber spokesperson told BuzzFeed News, "we are deeply committed to providing a ride people can trust, and our technology allows us to focus on safety before, during, and after every trip. Even one incident of this nature is one too many."
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Charlie Warzel is a senior writer for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York. Warzel reports on and writes about the intersection of tech and culture. Contact Charlie Warzel at [email protected]. Johana Bhuiyan is a tech reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York. Bhuiyan reports on the sharing economy with a focus on ridesharing companies. Contact Johana Bhuiyan at [email protected]. Got a confidential tip? Submit it here.
News moves fast. Keep up with the BuzzFeed News daily email! Sign up Great! You're almost there! Check your inbox and confirm your subscription now! ||||| Following a BuzzFeed News investigation into Uber's internal customer service system — which led to Uber's revelation that the company received five claims of rape, and 170 claims of sexual assault directly related to an Uber ride as inbound tickets to its customer service database between December 2012 and August 2015 — Uber responded shortly after publication with the following message, which we are publishing in full.
Dear Ben, John and Mat,
We have worked with your team over the last week to answer questions about safety at Uber, but the story you have just posted fails to take into account the many facts we have provided to Buzzfeed. Given that our business depends on accountability and transparency, we are now sharing that information publicly so that our riders and drivers have the facts and can judge for themselves.
Getting people from point A to B safely and reliably is the single most important thing Uber does. It’s why we have a dedicated Trust and Safety team, overseen by Joe Sullivan (whose entire career has been focused in this field, first as a federal prosecutor and then at eBay, Facebook, and now Uber) and run by Phil Cardenas (the former head of Trust and Safety at Airbnb).
This team exists to reduce safety incidents, and its success is judged on that one metric. Because even one incident is too many. It’s why Uber has invested heavily in technology to improve safety for everyone before, during, and after each ride. Every Uber trip is GPS-tracked and passengers can share their route in real time with family or friends, as well as rate their drivers at the end of each trip (and vice versa). This is on top of a robust system of background checks.
Sadly, no means of transportation is 100 percent safe today. Accidents and incidents do happen. It’s why we are working to build an exceptional customer support team that can handle problems when they occur, including working with law enforcement.
You asked about screenshots in your possession (and since published) showing that if a customer service representative types “rape” or “sexual assault” into our database, they will see more than 5,800 results (i.e. customer support tickets) for rape and 6,160 for sexual assault over a period of three years. These results are highly misleading because:
Riders routinely misspell “rate” (as in the fare) as “rape”, or use the word “rape” in another context. For example, “you raped my wallet”;
Any email address or rider/driver last name that contains the letters R, A, P, E consecutively (for example, Don Draper) are included. After analyzing the data, we found more than 11,000 rider names and 17,500 rider emails with the letters “rape”;
The results also showed tickets from passengers who got into cars not on the Uber platform, or who were discussing unsubstantiated media reports of sexual assaults.
Our analysis for all of these results shows five tickets that allege an actual rape occurred (0.0000009% of rides in the three years from December 2012 to August 2015) and 170 tickets with a legitimate claim of sexual assault (1 in every 3.3 million trips). Bear in mind that when serious incidents occur, people often report them directly to law enforcement. Therefore, those incidents may not be reflected in the numbers above.
When serious incidents are reported to us, we always reach out to the person who filed the report and, where appropriate, engage with law enforcement. We also temporarily suspend the driver or rider (if it is a question of violence by a passenger) during the investigation.
You asked to have one of your reporters sit with Uber’s customer service team so they could review these types of tickets and validate our numbers. It is entirely fair to ask questions of Uber -- it is the purpose of a free press. But it is unfair to suggest that you cannot trust the veracity of the numbers Uber has provided without personally verifying them, which would be a serious breach of our riders’ and drivers’ privacy.
In addition, you have asked if this is the first time we have audited the data behind the screenshots in your possession. Because of the flaws highlighted above, we do manual audits of every ticket sent to Uber, not audits of key words. It’s why it took us more than two days to answer your questions in detail. It is entirely untrue to conclude that we do not audit safety on our platform. We do, regularly. As we said earlier, our Trust and Safety team is measured internally on one metric: whether it has cut safety incidents on our platform.
Finally, you asked yesterday if Uber had contacted customer service representatives who had recently queried the terms “rape” and “sexual assault” in our database. The answer is yes. We are unsurprisingly concerned that sensitive, personal and confidential data has been shared with people outside Uber. We believe that any company in a similar situation would do exactly the same.
Uber is a relatively young company and we’re the first to admit that we haven’t always gotten things right. But we are working hard to ensure passengers everywhere can get a safe, reliable ride, as well as to provide great customer service when things go wrong. It’s a shame that your article does not reflect much of the substance we have provided.
Sincerely,
Joe Sullivan, Chief Safety Officer
Jill Hazelbaker, Vice President, Communications & Public Policy
Tim Collins, Vice President, Global Support | – Between December 2012 and August 2015, Uber received five claims of rape and fewer than 170 claims of sexual assault stemming from an Uber ride, according to data the company provided to BuzzFeed. Those numbers differ greatly from those reflected in screenshots from Uber's Zendesk customer support platform that were obtained by BuzzFeed. Those images, which BuzzFeed says were provided by a former Uber customer service rep and confirmed by other parties, show 6,160 results for a search for "sexual assault" and 5,827 results for "rape." In a response to the BuzzFeed piece, Uber calls those search results "highly misleading," saying, for instance, riders may misspell "rate" or use the term "rape" out of context. Also, any word with the letters R-A-P-E in consecutive order will return a result for the search term "rape" (e.g., the name "Don Draper"). To that, BuzzFeed says the screenshots it obtained show nine complaint tickets with the subject "rape" that do not appear to be misspellings, names, or email addresses. As for "sexual assault," Uber tells BuzzFeed the high-volume query results on the obtained screenshots could be the result of riders making claims of assault on other transport services and discussions about sexual assaults in the news, among other things. In response to allegations of sexual assault, Uber tells BuzzFeed that its customer service reps are told to follow up with the person making the claim, and then report it to law enforcement if appropriate. The driver is temporarily deactivated during the investigation. If the investigation is inconclusive, the driver gets a warning and goes back to work. After two inconclusive investigations, a driver is permanently deactivated. While the data provided by Uber doesn't jibe with the screenshots, BuzzFeed notes, "The sheer quantity of these tickets makes it difficult to tell which ones are exaggerations or attempts at false escalations and which are legitimate and urgent requests." |
Story highlights In one town, 68 people remain missing after a mudslide
Residents complain that government aid has been slow
Officials say help is on the way after "historic" rains
Storms have killed at least 97 people in Mexico
As raging floodwaters swept away half of his timber shack, Saturnino Medina climbed to the roof.
He pointed Thursday to the place where river waters broke through a container wall and washed away his kitchen.
Medina and his family have almost nothing left now, after the wind and rain of Manuel hit the town of Renacimiento, located about 20 km northeast of the resort city of Acapulco.
Days after the storm made landfall as a tropical depression in the Mexican state of Guerrero, thousands of tourists are still trapped in Acapulco and thousands of families are struggling to recover.
Medina and his family were left to eat eggs and tortillas donated by neighbors and drink expired cartons of juice they found in a nearby trash dumpster. So far, he said, they haven't gotten any government aid.
"The truth is, I don't even know what to tell you," he said. "The government ignores us. They help everyone else, but they've forgotten about Renacimiento."
The town is one of many across Mexico ravaged by multiple storms that have been battering the country.
35 photos: Storms slam Mexico 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – A Red Cross rescuer zip lines across a river at the site of a collapsed bridge near the town of Tierra Colorada, Mexico, on Saturday, September 21. At one point this week, Mexico seemed to be pummeled from all sides by then-Hurricane Manuel and the remnants of Hurricane Ingrid. Hide Caption 1 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – Two women inspect what is left of their home in the village of Salsipuedes, Mexico, on Friday, September 20. Hide Caption 2 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – A van is recovered September 20, after being trapped by floodwaters in Navolato, Mexico. Hide Caption 3 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – Mexican soldiers search through mud and debris in the state of Guerrero on September 20. Guerrero was the hardest-hit state from the dual onslaught of Hurricane Manuel and sister storm Ingrid. Hide Caption 4 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – Villagers in San Jeronimo line up at a helicopter from Mexico's Attorney General's Office to get aid on September 20. Federal police have been helping move emergency supplies and bring aid to victims of massive flooding. Hide Caption 5 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – A man rescues his dog from floodwater in Navolato, Sinaloa State, Mexico, on September 20. Hide Caption 6 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – A resident of Barra de Coyuca checks the destruction in a restaurant by the beach in a tourist resort close to Acapulco, on Thursday, September 19. Hide Caption 7 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – A muddy dog lies on a mattress amid the remains of a house destroyed by storms in Acapulco, Mexico, on September 19. Hide Caption 8 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – People affected by Hurricane Ingrid and Tropical Storm Manuel wait in shelters set up by the Ministry of Defense on September 19, in Acapulco. Hide Caption 9 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – Members of the military try to move aid to Atoyac de Alvarez, which is isolated because of flooding on September 19. Hide Caption 10 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – Church tower lies toppled after a landslide in La Pintada, Guerrero state, on September 19. Hide Caption 11 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – An aerial view shows the extent of a landslide that wiped out part of La Pintada. Hide Caption 12 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – Officers with the Federal Police search for bodies at the landslide in La Pintada on September 19. Hide Caption 13 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – A man shovels mud from his home on September 19 in Chilpancingo, Guerrero. Hide Caption 14 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – A car lies submerged in mud as residents attempt to clean up. Hide Caption 15 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – People wade through a flooded street in Acapulco, Mexico, on Wednesday, September 18. Hide Caption 16 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – People unload boxes of food from a Mexican navy helicopter in Acapulco on September 18. Hide Caption 17 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – People attempt to cross a collapsed bridge in Coyuca de Benitez on September 18. Hide Caption 18 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – A man crosses a river using a makeshift zip line on September 18, after a bridge collapsed near the town of Petaquillas, Mexico. Hide Caption 19 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – A man wades through floodwaters in Acapulco on September 18. Hide Caption 20 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – A boat moves across the Papagayo River to ferry people from the end of a collapsed bridge in Acapulco on September 18. Hide Caption 21 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – The Papagayo River swells with floodwaters in Acapulco on Tuesday, September 17. Hide Caption 22 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – Stranded tourists gather around a Mexican air force plane at the air base in Pie de la Cuesta, near Acapulco, as they wait to be evacuated on September 17. An estimated 40,000 tourists were stranded in the Pacific state of Guerrero as dozens of roads were damaged and Acapulco's airport temporarily suspended services due to Hurricane Manuel. Hide Caption 23 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – Tourists wait to be evacuated at the Pie de la Cuesta air base on September 17. Hide Caption 24 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – People wait in line at the air base on September 17. Hide Caption 25 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – A tourist from Mexico City sleeps in a shelter in Acapulco on September 17. Hide Caption 26 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – Tourists wait in line at an improvised check-in counter at an airport in Acapulco on September 17. Hide Caption 27 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – People prepare to board a flight to Mexico City at an airport in Acapulco on September 17. Hide Caption 28 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – People rest in a shelter in Acapulco on September 17. Hide Caption 29 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – An aerial view shows a flooded area in Acapulco on September 17. Hide Caption 30 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – Homes and streets in Acapulco are deep in floodwater on September 17, after the heavy rain brought on by Tropical Storms Ingrid and Manuel. Hide Caption 31 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – Water stands on the flooded tarmac of the Acapulco airport on September 17. Hide Caption 32 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – Planes sit on the flooded tarmac of the Acapulco airport on September 17. Hide Caption 33 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – People stand at the entrance of the Agua de Obispo tunnel that connects Acapulco with Chilpancingo, Mexico. The tunnel was badly damaged by the flooding. Hide Caption 34 of 35 35 photos: Storms slam Mexico Hurricane Manuel hits Mexico – Residents carry goods and supplies in Acapulco on September 17. Hide Caption 35 of 35
JUST WATCHED Mexico reeling from deadly storms Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Mexico reeling from deadly storms 01:47
JUST WATCHED Mexico struggles with massive flooding Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Mexico struggles with massive flooding 02:50
Federal officials say at least 97 people were killed across Mexico by Manuel, which plowed into the country's Pacific coast, and Ingrid, which hit the Gulf coast.
Rescue efforts continued throughout the country Thursday. In one Guerrero town ravaged by a mudslide, authorities said 68 people remained unaccounted for.
An aerial survey revealed many more mudslides, Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said, and there are additional reports of disappearances that authorities have not yet confirmed.
In Renacimiento, one of the hardest-hit areas, Alma Rojano said neck-high floodwaters washed by her home.
Days after the storm hit, bulldozers and cleanup crews finally arrived in the town on Thursday.
In a press conference Thursday night, federal officials said that climate conditions had made it difficult to reach more remote parts of the country, but pledged that government aid was on the way.
"Right now we are facing a truly extraordinary condition," President Enrique Peña Nieto said, noting that the extent of the heavy rains over such a large part of the country had reached "historic" proportions.
Tourists stranded
Ana Benavides, a stranded American tourist in nearby Acapulco, tried to leave by car.
She didn't get more than a mile before blocked roads stopped her.
Then she waited for 12 hours in a line along with thousands of other stuck tourists hoping to get on a flight out. While more than 10,000 tourists had been evacuated in this way, there was no guarantee that Benavides would be one of the lucky ones to board a plane.
Some people, in their desperation, slept in the line.
Benavides kept her situation in perspective: "You know, we're a lot better off than a lot of people," she said.
Manuel left about 40,000 tourists stranded in Acapulco. As of Thursday, more than 10,000 were able to board military or commercial flights out of the storm-ravaged area.
Authorities said they hope to reopen the highway leading out of Acapulco on Friday, which would allow for thousands more to leave and quicken the flow of food and other aid to the area.
The worst of a deadly storm has passed, but tension and confusion remain as the extent of the damage continued to emerge.
The weather in Acapulco has improved. And the storm -- Manuel -- weakened Thursday from a hurricane to a tropical storm. But it was still expected to produce 5 to 10 inches of rain over the northern state of Sinaloa, with some places getting as much as 15 inches, forecasters said.
Ingrid batters Gulf coast
In addition to Manuel, those living on Mexico's Gulf Coast were recovering from the remnants of Hurricane Ingrid, and in the south, a storm system over the Yucatan Peninsula was likely to become a tropical cyclone.
On the Gulf Coast, in the state of Veracruz, Ingrid and its remnants claimed 11 lives. About 32,000 people had to be evacuated from their homes.
Residents there sent photos to CNN showing streets that looked like rivers, with the tops of cars sticking out of the floodwaters.
Another major concern in the Gulf Coast was that the new storm system brewing in the south could bring more rain to the already saturated area.
More than 1 million residents across Mexico have been affected in some way by the storms, Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong told reporters.
18 stranded in New Mexico 'ghost town' amid flooding
In violence-ravaged state, another devastating blow
In Guerrero state, the storms were yet another devastating blow to a part of the country already suffering from some of the country's fiercest drug-related violence.
When government cleanup crews arrived in Renacimiento on Thursday, a security detail accompanied them.
Two pickup trucks circled the area, packed with heavily armed police officers wearing bullet-proof jackets.
A woman ran screaming out of her storm-battered home -- not because of the damage -- but because she learned her son had been kidnapped.
Nearby, Paulina Bravo and Teodoro Medina were cleaning up storm damage. Their house was still intact, but floodwaters destroyed their stove, refrigerator and beds.
"Now, my husband and I take turns sleeping in this hammock," Bravo said.
Two bags of bread, she said, are the only government aid she's received so far.
Bravo and her husband shoveled mud out of their home, determined to clean up after the storm, whether anyone from the government helps them or not.
In Spanish, the town's name -- Renacimiento -- means rebirth. ||||| Five days after Hurricane Michael roared into the Florida Panhandle, decimating the seaside community of Mexico Beach, rescuers appear to have some good news -- just three people remain missing in the city that was torn apart by the Category 4 storm.
Hurricane Michael's death toll has climbed to 18 and officials feared the number of people killed by the storm would increase as crews sifted through the wreckage of once-bustling oceanside cities, including Mexico Beach and Panama City Beach, the Associated Press reported.
Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images, FILE
David Goldman/AP
In Mexico Beach, three of those who didn't evacuate were missing still unaccounted for on Monday, city manager Tanya Castro told ABC News.
She said search and rescue teams were making their final sweep of the area and they’re optimistic about finding the other three.
Mexico Beach Mayor Al Cathey had said 289 people, including 10 children, decided to stay put despite evacuation orders, and rode out the storm, which made landfall there on Wednesday. Michael devastated homes and businesses in Mexico Beach, which has a population of nearly 1,200.
DigitalGlobe, a Maxar company via AP, FILE
The powerful storm sounded like a freight train when it barreled into nearby Panama City, said resident Jackie Lane, who was overcome with emotion recalling her experience to ABC News on Monday.
Lane, her husband and her son rode out the storm on the second story of an inn down the street from her home. She and her son raced into the bathtub, she said, as her husband sat on the floor and put his feet up against the bathroom door to hold it.
"It was already splitting," she said of the door, her voice shaking, "and the roof came, the ceiling came off."
"For about three hours it just sucked us in and sucked us out, sucked us in and sucked us out," she said. "I thought I was gonna lose my husband cause the door was cracking. And the stove and refrigerator that was in there, we could hear them just banging together and clanging around. We seen the stove fly across us. We seen all the debris, trees, pieces of everything."
The entire second story of that inn is now gone.
"We lost everything," Lane said. "We're lucky to have our lives."
AP
Of the 18 people killed as the hurricane swept through the Florida Panhandle, Virginia, Georgia and North Carolina, only one confirmed death was reported in Mexico Beach. When Michael made landfall there, winds topped out around 155 mph.
Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images, FILE
Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images
Michael knocked out power across the South, and Monday over 280,000 remained powerless across four states, including 150,000 in Florida.
AP
President Donald Trump toured some of the hurricane-hit Sunshine State Monday with Florida Gov. Rick Scott.
Trump called it "total devastation" as he toured a badly damaged neighborhood in Lynn Haven.
"To see this personally, is very, very tough," he said.
David Goldman/AP
The storm not only destroyed homes and businesses in the city, it destroyed the Mexico Beach Police Department.
"We don't have a building -- from my understanding, the water surge moved it off its foundation," Police Chief Anthony Kelly told ABC News on Friday. "The officers, I finally made accountability of them all today, two days after the fact. ... They're not just my officers, the people that I work with, they're my family."
Emily Mitchell returned on Saturday afternoon to what was left of the house her family owned in Mexico Beach. The roof was ripped off and walls were blown in. She called it a "total loss." ||||| A single rope was seemingly all that was left between a woman and certain death today in Brazil, as she stood on the roof of a home being quickly swallowed by rushing water and earth amid the country's worst mudslides in a generation.With the ground disappearing beneath her, the woman took a leap of faith, grabbing a rope rescuers threw to her from a neighboring building before jumping straight into the torrent of mud as she was lifted to safety.Video of the rescue shows the woman clinging to her dog, then finally being forced to let the animal go, as she braves the brown rapids threatening to sweep her away.Record rainfall has brought powerful walls of mud and water to the mountainous region outside Rio de Janiero, killing at least 400 people and leaving thousands more homeless. In some hard-hit areas, the devastation was so complete that residents said it was of biblical proportions."There's no chance of even making this human. We've just never seen anything like it here," Jose Ricardo Ferreira de Aguiar, a judge in Teresopolis, told The Guardian . He said a church simply vanished beneath the mud.Jorge Aldeia, another Teresopolis resident, said he wasn't sure how to move forward. "I'm alive -- fortunately or unfortunately, I don't know," Aldeia said. "The church has gone. The baker's has gone. It is a disgrace."Hundreds more people were reported missing and officials say the death toll is expected to rise sharply. "I believe the number of dead is much more than was announced so far," Rio State Environment Secretary Carlos Minc told Globo TV in Brazil today, according to Reuters . "Many people died while they were sleeping."Rescuers could be seen using shovels and frantically searching for survivors in the mud, but for many people it was simply too late -- morgues in the region were so overwhelmed that witnesses said the smell of decaying bodies filled the air. "This was like a tsunami," Vanda Cortasio, 46, a resident of the town of Petropolis, told The New York Times Vania Ramos said she and her her daughter rushed to dig through the mud for their neighbors with their bare hands. "I don't even have the words to describe what I've seen," she told The Associated Press . "A lot of our friends are dead or missing. There are people we may never find." | – At least 97 people have been confirmed dead in the wake of the tropical storm double-whammy that hit Mexico this week, Mexican authorities announced today—and that's not counting the many still missing. In the small town of La Pintada, for instance, 68 of the town's 800 residents are missing after a massive landslide Monday, the AP reports. "Half the homes in town were smothered and buried," one woman says. Several entire families were wiped out in the disaster. Tropical Storm Manuel is believed to have caused almost $400 million in damage, Voice of America reports. Thousands of tourists have been evacuated from Acapulco. CNN meanwhile visited the hard-hit town of Renacimiento, and found that cleanup crews had only just begun to arrive yesterday. "The government ignores us," complained one resident who watched flood waters wash away his kitchen. "They help everyone else, but they've forgotten about Renacimiento." |
FILE- This undated file photo shows Kitty Genovese, whose screams could not save her the night she was stalked and killed in 1964 in the Queens neighborhood of New York. A man convicted of the stabbing... (Associated Press)
FILE- This undated file photo shows Kitty Genovese, whose screams could not save her the night she was stalked and killed in 1964 in the Queens neighborhood of New York. A man convicted of the stabbing death of Genovese in a crime that came to symbolize urban decay and indifference has died in a New... (Associated Press)
FILE- This undated file photo shows Kitty Genovese, whose screams could not save her the night she was stalked and killed in 1964 in the Queens neighborhood of New York. A man convicted of the stabbing death of Genovese in a crime that came to symbolize urban decay and indifference has died in a New... (Associated Press) FILE- This undated file photo shows Kitty Genovese, whose screams could not save her the night she was stalked and killed in 1964 in the Queens neighborhood of New York. A man convicted of the stabbing... (Associated Press)
NEW YORK (AP) — A man convicted of the 1964 stabbing death of Kitty Genovese in a crime that came to symbolize urban decay and indifference has died in prison at age 81.
Winston Moseley died on March 28 at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, state prisons spokesman Thomas Mailey said. An autopsy will try to determine the cause of Moseley's death.
Genovese was a 28-year-old bar manager. Her killing caused an outcry after reports that neighbors saw the attack and heard her screams but did not try to help her. Details of the accounts were challenged, but the crime spurred the adoption of the 911 system and Good Samaritan laws.
Moseley spent more than 50 years in prison and was one of the state's longest-serving inmates. He was denied parole 18 times, the last time in 2015. His prison mates included David Sweat and Richard Matt, who cut their way out of the maximum-security facility last year. A massive three-week manhunt ended with Matt killed and Sweat captured.
In 1968, Moseley was involved in a prison breakout, during which he held hostages in Buffalo and raped a woman before being recaptured. He joined the Attica uprising in 1971 and earned a college degree from Niagara University in 1977.
"I know that I did some terrible things, and I've tried very hard to atone for those things in prison," he said in a November 2013 parole interview. "I think almost 50 years of paying for those crimes is enough."
___
This story has been corrected to show the name of the facility is the Clinton Correctional Facility, not the Clinton Correction Facility. ||||| Lena Dunham Reveals 'Weirdest Coincidence' as Girls Episode Dedicated to Slain Kitty Genovese Airs Days After Her Killer Died
This is one of the weirdest coincidences the universe has yet so serve up in my short time here on earth. Last night's @girlshbo is about the Kitty Genovese murder. Today we learn her killer has died #spookytiming #RIPkitty A photo posted by Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) on Apr 4, 2016 at 3:54pm PDT
Sunday's episode of Girls was titled "Hello Kitty" but creator and star Lena Dunham did not predict this coincidence would ever happen.Season five's seventh episode was named after Kitty Genovese, the woman who was stalked, raped and killed by in New York in 1964 by Winston Moseley . Days before that particular Girls installment went to air, Moseley died in prison on March 28. He was 81."This is one of the weirdest coincidences the universe has yet so serve up in my short time on earth. Last night's @girlshbo is about the Kitty Genovese murder. Today we learn her killer has died #spookytiming #RIPkitty," Dunham, 29 wrote on Instagram Monday.The actress preluded the episode on Sunday telling Girls fans and followers, "Tonight's episode of @girlshbo involves an exploration of the Kitty Genovese murder of 1964- one of New York City's most notorious crimes which led psychologists to coin the term 'bystander effect.'"Adding, "We honor Kitty, a tough gay girl making her way in the city, a woman ahead of her time #RIPKitty."Moseley died at the maximum security Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, N.Y., according to the New York Times . He entered prison on July 7, 1964, and was one of the state's longest-serving inmates with 52 years.In November, Moseley was denied parole for the 18th time. The stabbing of Genovese, then 28, became infamous after initial reports stated that dozens of people witnessed the stabbing and heard Genovese's cries over a lengthy time period but did nothing to help.Moseley, a married father of two, confessed to killing Genovese, who was a stranger to him, as well as two other women. He said he killed Genovese because he "wanted to kill a woman."He had completed educational programs, worked as a porter, and been involved in a Quaker program while in prison, a Department of Corrections told PEOPLE.Moseley was next eligible for parole in 2017. ||||| A deviant drifter with a terrifying rap sheet that includes two sex attacks on elderly women was charged Thursday with the rape of a 73-year-old bird watcher in Central Park.
Three rookie cops caught Appalachian ex-con David Albert Mitchell, 42, strolling down an upper West Side street, and the victim later picked him out of a lineup.
The West Virginia native — who has been locked up most of his adult life — did not confess and asked for a lawyer.
But he was nabbed with the memory card from the victim’s camera, which he snatched after dragging her into the brush to beat and rape her Wednesday morning, police said.
CBS TV
“He’s clearly a violent, dangerous individual,” NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said.
The disheveled suspect — covered in tattoos of warriors, dragons and the Grim Reaper — angrily spat at reporters as he was taken to Central Booking.
Hours later, he remained silent as he was arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court and ordered held without bail.
Mitchell’s disturbing criminal history began when he was just 18 and charged with molesting and beating to death 87-year-old Annie Parks during a burglary in his hometown of Jenkinjones near the border of Kentucky and Virginia.
A jury acquitted him, and months later he was accused of raping a woman in her 70s during another break-in, the Charleston Gazette reported.
“He asked me to get him the best possible plea deal,” said Sid Bell, who was his lawyer at the time and is now a prosecutor.
Marc A. Hermann for New York Daily News
Mitchell pleaded guilty to first-degree robbery, was sentenced to 10 years and did about eight in state prison.
After his release, the ex-con was arrested at least twice more before being convicted of kidnapping in 2003 and sent back to prison for eight more years.
He was busted several times in the past two years for probation violations and petty crimes but didn’t serve any hard time before he left for New York.
James Keivom/New York Daily News
Mitchell’s brushes with the law “were always sexually driven,” his sister-in-law and ex-girlfriend Saretta Mitchell told The Associated Press. She said she was the victim in the 2003 case and was nearly sexually assaulted by the drunken predator when he dragged her from her home.
Investigators believe he arrived here three or four months ago and was sleeping in Central Park. And he soon found trouble again, sources said.
He threatened Ayrton Ferreria dos Santos, a performance artist known as the “Mayor of Strawberry Fields,” with a knife on Aug. 20, police said.
“He pulled a 6-inch shank on me,” dos Santos said. “It all happened over a joint.”
Michael Schwartz for New York Daily News
A week ago, Mitchell was masturbating in a section of the park called The Ramble when the elderly bird watcher inadvertently photographed him — triggering a scary encounter, Browne said.
“What are you doing?” the man demanded when he saw her camera. “Give me that.”
The woman, a professional photographer, ran off without reporting the incident. Then, on Wednesday morning, while she was trying out a new camera lens in the park, the same man pounced and began pummeling her, police said.
“Do you remember me?” he asked. Then he dragged her into the brush and brutalized her.
“This was a revenge attack,” the shaken and bandaged victim told Channel 7 Thursday night.
She said she would not let the attack deter her from her beloved hobby, vowing, “Nobody is going to take that pleasure away from me.” Detectives discovered the earlier photo of Mitchell on the woman’s hard drive and gathered surveillance photos of the attacker leaving the park.
The NYPD beefed up patrols near the park. Officers Enmanuel Rodriguez, Steven Ourelio and Sicelin Ortiz spotted Mitchell Wednesday evening at W. 77th St. and Amsterdam Ave.
“We had very alert rookie officers who recognized him,” Browne said.
After the victim identified him, the career criminal was charged with rape, a predatory sex act, a criminal sex act, robbery and felony assault. He was also charged with menacing in the knife incident last month.
New York Daily News
It was the first rape in the park this year, and Mayor Bloomberg said New Yorkers should not be fearful. “I feel so sorry for the woman,” he said. “It’s a terrible thing, but I think the overall history of safety in the park says it’s one of the safest places you can be.”But some parkgoers were still nervous. “I am appalled. I spend so much time in the park — that is really, really scary,” said Andy Young, 33, an actress who lives in midtown.Derrick Edwards, 29, a tour guide from Brooklyn, said he had no qualms about using the park. “This ain’t the ’70s. It’s so rare that it’s not a concern.”With Edgar Sandoval, Rich Schapiro, Tina Moore, and Jennifer H. [email protected] | – Winston Moseley has died in prison, 52 years after he was sentenced to death for a New York City murder that shocked the nation. In 1964, Moseley raped and murdered 28-year-old bar manager Kitty Genovese while neighbors ignored her cries, the New York Times reports. He had spotted his victim while driving around late at night and followed her to her building in Queens. Accounts that 38 people witnessed the murder and not a single person called police turned out to be exaggerated, but the killing prompted national soul-searching and many studies on the "bystander effect." It also led to Good Samaritan laws and hastened the adoption of the unified 911 system for reporting emergencies, the AP reports. In the Genovese murder, Moseley stalked his victim before stabbing her at least a dozen times. He left the scene after hearing a neighbor's shout but returned to resume the attack. After his arrest, he confessed to two more murders and eight rapes. He was sentenced to the electric chair in 1964, but the sentence was cut to life imprisonment in 1967. The following year, Moseley raped a woman and took five hostages during a prison breakout. In later years, he earned a college degree and said he wanted to make amends for his crimes, but he was still denied parole 18 times, most recently in 2015. People reports that Sunday's episode of Girls was based on the Genovese murder, which creator Lena Dunham calls the "weirdest coincidence." |
What's in a ring? Palace confirms that Prince William will not be wearing a wedding band when he marries Kate Middleton
Prince William has decided not to wear a wedding ring following his marriage to Kate Middleton, palace officials have revealed.
According to senior royal sources, the Prince discussed the issue with his fiancée but has chosen not to. 'It is simply down to personal preference,' an aide said.
Kate, 29, will wear a band fashioned from a lump of Welsh gold already owned by the Royal Family which will be given to her in the traditional way during the April 29 Westminster Abbey royal wedding ceremony, the Mail can reveal.
Breaking with tradition: Prince William will not be wearing a wedding ring after his marriage to Kate Middleton on April 29
The use of Welsh gold in royal wedding bands is a long-standing tradition.
Most male royals do wear a wedding ring of some kind, with the exception of the Duke of Edinburgh.
Like many members of the upper classes, Prince Charles wears a gold wedding ring under a signet ring on the little finger of his left hand given to him by the Duchess of Cornwall.
His signet ring bears the fleur-de-lys crest of the Prince of Wales and is believed to have been a gift from his parents.
He also wore a ring given to him by his first wife, Diana, Princess of Wales, until the day after his engagement to Camilla.
William's decision not to sport a wedding band is likely to cause some surprise, however, as it is so commonplace nowadays.
Symbol: Prince Charles wears a wedding ring under a signet ring on the little finger of his left hand given to him by the Duchess of Cornwall, who he married in 2005
But a St James's Palace aide insisted that it was a decision that Kate was happy with.
'It was something the couple discussed but Prince William isn't one for jewellery - he doesn't even wear a signet ring - and decided he didn't want to. It really is just down to personal preference,' they said.
'Catherine will wear a ring fashioned from a lump of Welsh gold owned by the Royal Family that has been smelted down. The couple have both had a hand in the design. This is the ring Prince Harry will carry and hand over in the traditional way.'
Another source added: 'It is quite common for men in that strata of society not to wear a traditional wedding band. If they do, they tend to wear it with their family signet ring but William doesn't have one of those.'
Most male royals, including Prince Edward (left), do wear a wedding ring of some kind, with the exception of the Duke of Edinburgh (right)
Prior to the Second World War is was unheard of for men to wear wedding rings. It then became customary for soldiers serving overseas to wear a wedding band to remind them of home and their commitment to their wives and families.
The popularity of wedding rings for men has since soared, but there is still divided opinion on whether wearing one is obligatory or not.
Although wearing a wedding ring for men in the past was not crucial, most modern brides would not hear of her new husband’s fourth finger going unadorned.
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David Miller, director of Debretts, a leading authority on etiquette, said: 'Wearing a wedding ring used to be uncommon for men but now it is quite accepted practice. That said, it really is a matter of personal choice and members of the Royal Family often chose to wear it with a signet ring on the little finger of their left hand.
'Although this is a very modern royal wedding in so many ways, I think there will be a few surprises of this kind to come.'
According to some customs, the wedding ring forms the last in a series of gifts, which also may include the engagement ring, traditionally given as a betrothal present. This tradition was already in use in Ancient Rome and is possibly much older.
After marriage, the ring is worn on the hand it had been placed on during the ceremony. By wearing rings on the fourth finger, a married couple symbolically declares their eternal love for each other. ||||| Pippa Middleton is officially a married woman — and she’s added another ring on her left hand.
After exchanging her “I Dos” with new husband James Matthews in a private ceremony at St. Mark’s Church in Englefield, England, on Saturday, the 33-year-old new bride proudly showed off her antique Asscher cut engagement ring from English jeweler Robinson Pelham, along with a new addition — her wedding band.
While Princess Kate‘s younger sister has a show-stopping engagement ring, it seems she went for an understated gold band that works perfectly with her dramatic diamond ring.
REX/Shutterstock
The ring is similar to sister Kate’s wedding ring, which is a simple Welsh gold band. British royal brides have been wearing Welsh gold bands as wedding rings for nearly 100 years.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Middleton, who arrived at the church with her father, Michael Middleton, was a beautiful bride in a custom silk cotton lace gown by Giles Deacon.
RELATED: See Pippa Middleton’s Wedding Dress from All Angles!
Her young nephew and niece, Prince George and Princess Charlotte, also joined the wedding party, acting as a page boy and bridesmaid, respectively. Naturally, they stole the show — even if they had to be shushed by mom Kate, who ushered them into the church along with the other children.
Samir Hussein/WireImage
Kirsty Wigglesworth/Pool/AP
After getting the children settled, Kate greeted her sister and father at the entrance of the church and helped smooth out her sister’s dress.
Guests leaving the party after the wedding told reporters that the ceremony was lovely.
“It was amazing,” one guest told PEOPLE. “They were so cute. I cried. My makeup was running.” They added that George and Charlotte were “very” well-behaved.
RELATED: Every Stunning Photo from Pippa and James’ Wedding
Wedding guests included Princess Eugenie, Prince William and Prince Harry — who later brought his girlfriend Meghan Markle to the post-church evening reception at the Middleton family’s home.
Matthews, 41, proposed to Middleton in July 2016 in the picturesque Lake District of northwest England.
Matthews manages a hedge fund and is chief executive of Eden Rock Capital Management Group, which he established more than 10 years ago. ||||| Kate Middleton today spoke of the "daunting prospect" of joining the royal family as she and Prince William announced they would get married next year.
Wearing the blue sapphire and diamond engagement ring that the prince's father gave to Princess Diana in 1981, Middleton said "hopefully, I will take it in my stride", while adding that her future husband was "a great teacher".
Prince William said the ring "was very special to me" as was his bride-to-be. Giving it to her was "my way of making sure my mother didn't miss out on today" and the excitement that the couple were going spend their lives together.
The long-expected news that the second in line to the throne was to marry his long-term girlfriend was announced by Clarence House earlier in the day .
The prince asked Middleton to marry him during a private holiday in Kenya last month and has, the royal press office stressed, asked her father's permission.
Middleton said, during a brief press conference and photocall at St James's Palace, London, that the prince had been "a true romantic", was "a loving boyfriend" and "very supportive of me in good times and also through the bad times".
Prince William said of their engagement: "The timing is right now, we are both very, very happy. We both have a very good sense of humour and we take the mickey out of each other a lot."
He added that Middleton had "plenty of habits that make me laugh that I tease her about".
The formal statement said William's father, Prince Charles, was "delighted".
Speaking at his Poundbury model village in Dorset, Charles said that he was "thrilled, obviously", and joked: "They have been practising long enough ... it makes me feel very old."
William's stepmother, the Duchess of Cornwall, on her way to an official engagement at the Apollo Theatre in London, told a wellwisher: "It's brilliant, isn't it? It's absolutely wonderful."
Middleton's parents, Michael and Carole, were "thrilled". Her father Michael, reading a statement outside their home near the Berkshire village of Bucklebury, said they had got to know the prince very well: "We all think he is wonderful and we are extremely fond of him. They make a lovely couple, they are great fun to be with, and we've had a lot of laughs together. We wish them every happiness for the future."
Earl Spencer, the prince's uncle and brother of Princess Diana, said: "It's wonderful news. Very exciting. My family are all thrilled for them both."
The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh were also "absolutely delighted", Buckingham Palace said. During a reception this afternoon at Windsor Castle for leaders of British overseas territories including Bermuda, Montserrat and the Falklands Islands, the Queen told a guest who congratulated her: "It is brilliant news. It has taken them a very long time."
Political leaders and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, echoed the sentiment.
Full details of the wedding plans have yet to be announced. The statement said only that the wedding would take place in London next spring or summer.
St Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey are possible venues, although both have painful resonances – St Paul's was where Charles's ill-fated wedding to Princess Diana took place in 1981, while the abbey hosted Diana's funeral in 1997.
William and Kate have known each other for eight years, and met as students at St Andrews University. They subsequently shared student accommodation for two years and, apart from a brief separation in 2007, have been together ever since.
Middleton will be the first commoner to marry an expected future king for 350 years, since Anne Hyde married the future King James II in 1660.
Middleton is eldest of three children in a family whose fortune is based on a mail-order children's party accessories business.
The prime minister, David Cameron, said the whole country would join him and his wife, Samantha, in wishing the couple "great joy".
Later, he said that he had spoken to the prince to pass on his congratulations and predicted "a great day of national celebration".
The prime minister told a press conference at Downing Street that it felt "great to have a bit of unadulterated good news", and said a cheer had gone up when he told ministerial colleagues at today's Cabinet meeting.
The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, said via the social network Twitter: "Delighted for Prince William and Kate Middleton on their engagement. The whole country will be wishing them every happiness."
Scotland's first minister, Alex Salmond, congratulated the couple and said: "Of course, this was a match made in St Andrews, and everyone in Scotland will join with me in wishing the prince and Ms Middleton every happiness as they look forward to their wedding day and a long and fulfilling married life together."
The Welsh first minister, Carwyn Jones, said: "I'm very pleased to hear that they plan to begin their married life in north Wales."
Graham Smith, spokesman for Republic, a group campaigning for an end to the monarchy, said: "We mustn't see the government wasting limited resources paying for a major set-piece event ... if people are being told to tighten their belts, if the government is making thousands unemployed, if welfare payments are being slashed, it would be sickening for the government to allow a single penny more to be spent on the royals at this time." | – Perhaps when you heard that Prince William won’t sport a wedding ring after he finally ties the knot with Kate Middleton, you thought it was some sort of royal tradition. Nope, turns out the prince just doesn’t like jewelry, the Daily Mail reports. “It is simply down to personal preference,” says an aide. “It was something the couple discussed but Prince William isn't one for jewelry—he doesn't even wear a signet ring—and decided he didn't want to.” And Kate’s fine with that, the aide says. Another source adds, “It is quite common for men in that strata of society not to wear a traditional wedding band. If they do, they tend to wear it with their family signet ring but William doesn't have one of those.” Most male royals do wear some type of wedding band, including Wills’ dad. The only other exception noted by the Daily Mail is the Duke of Edinburgh. For more royal wedding gossip, click to find out where the couple is “registered”—or check out rumors involving Queen Elizabeth and Snoop Dogg. |
Larapinta Trail: American hiker dies after taking wrong turn in 42C heat
Updated
A 33-year-old American tourist has died after taking a wrong turn while hiking the popular Larapinta Trail, west of Alice Springs in Central Australia.
Key points: Man 'ran off' from companion on descent
Body found three hours later, 750m from carpark
Authorities warn against embarking on 16km Mount Sonder trek in the heat
Route has steep, rocky incline with exposed landscape
The man, from California, set out to climb Mount Sonder about 8:30am on Wednesday and was found dead about 750 metres from a carpark near Redbank Gorge at 5:00pm.
Police said the man and a companion had climbed Mount Sonder, which is the fourth-highest peak in the Northern Territory, and were on the descent when they separated.
Duty Superintendent Rob Burgoyne told ABC Darwin: "It's about 1,300 metres tall and the actual walk that they undertook was about 16 kilometres there and back — so quite a hike."
The 40-year-old man he was walking with told police the 33-year-old ran off on their way back and appeared to have taken a wrong turn.
"They both descended the mountain, unfortunately it appears the deceased took a wrong turn at that stage," Duty Superintendent Burgoyne said.
"His partner made it back to the Redbank Gorge carpark and raised the alarm, but unfortunately the 33-year-old didn't arrive and his body was eventually located about 400 metres down the track where he'd turned the wrong way.
"It was about three hours from when he was last seen and when his body was found."
Police said investigations were ongoing but it was not believed there were any suspicious circumstances surrounding the death.
Temperatures reached 42C
The Bureau of Meteorology confirmed Alice Springs reached a top of 42 degrees Celsius on Wednesday, which Duty Superintendent Burgoyne said would have made trekking conditions difficult.
"We do know he had water with him, but he did do a very foolish thing in that he apparently ran away from his companion after the descent," he said.
"It wouldn't be a terribly advisable thing to do in 40-degree heat, to actually sprint away."
Authorities warn against embarking on the long trek in the heat because it comes with a high risk of becoming dangerously dehydrated, Chris Day from Parks and Wildlife said.
"It's almost physically impossible to put back the fluids that you're going to lose as quickly as you're losing them, and unfortunately people become dehydrated very rapidly before even realising that it's even happening," Mr Day said.
"Unfortunately it is too late, quite often, once people realise they're in trouble."
Mount Sonder, the final section of the 223-kilometre Larapinta Trail which the men were on, is a steep, rocky incline with an exposed landscape.
"Its a very exposed mountain walk," Mr Day said.
"There's no big shady trees and it's very rocky, so when you've got a hot day like we had (on Tuesday) we've got a lot of radiated heat coming back off the rocks.
"Obviously on days when temperatures are forecast to be in the 40s, we strongly advise against doing any longer walks."
Incident follows death of German tourists
The death comes 11 months after two elderly German tourists perished at Trephina Gorge, east of Alice Springs.
Mr Day said it appeared foreign tourists were not taking heed of warnings about the risks involved in the Larapinta trek, however acclimatising to the Territory's hot climate remained one of the main safety challenges.
"Quite often they would've not been in Australian conditions for very long and most possibly come from the northern hemisphere — effectively winter conditions — much cooler than what they're encountering here," Mr Day said.
Parks and Wildlife recommend trekkers allow six hours to do the walk. It also advised they leave at first light, take appropriate clothing, adequate water supplies and know their fitness level.
This is the second death in Central Australia within 10 days, with a man from Adelaide killed by lightning at King's Canyon on New Year's Day.
The US embassy said it was "aware of reports of the death of a US citizen in the Northern Territory".
"We are closely monitoring local authorities' investigation into the cause of death," an embassy spokesperson said.
The spokesperson said the embassy was ready to provide "all appropriate consular assistance", but would not add any further details about the tourist due to privacy considerations.
A report will be prepared for the coroner.
Topics: accidents, disasters-and-accidents, alice-springs-0870, nt
First posted ||||| FILE PHOTO: Two tourists watch the setting sun from atop a rocky outcrop in the West MacDonnell Ranges along the Larapinta Trail about 110 kilometres (66 miles) west of the central Australian town of Alice Springs April 18, 2004. REUTERS/Tim Wimborne/File Photo
SYDNEY (Reuters) - An American tourist has died in the Australian outback while hiking though sweltering conditions on the Larapinta Trail, renowned for its ancient Aboriginal sacred sites, police said on Thursday.
The 33-year-old Californian had been walking the popular Larapinta Trail some 160 km (100 miles) west of Alice Springs in central Australia with another man, when they became separated on Wednesday, police said.
“His partner made it back to the Redbank Gorge carpark and raised the alarm,” Northern Territory Duty Superintendent Rob Burgoyne told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.
“Unfortunately the 33-year-old didn’t arrive and his body was eventually located about 400 meters down the track where he’d turned the wrong way.”
Police do not believe the death to be suspicious, although heat and exposure were likely contributing factors, police superintendent for the southern desert, Jody Nobbs, said a press conference in Alice Springs in the Northern Territory.
A snake bite, or a fall, were other possible causes under investigation, he added.
Temperatures in the area reached 42 degrees Celsius (108 degrees Fahrenheit) on Wednesday. The Larapinta Trail website lists over exertion as one of the greatest risks to hikers due to the potential for dehydration.
The men had hiked 16 km (10 miles) before they were separated on a path that afforded little shade and were carrying limited supplies of water, according to police.
“We live in a beautiful but harsh environment,” Nobbs said. ||||| Image copyright MICHAEL BARRITT/WA TOURISM AND CULTURE Image caption The man died at Mount Sonder on Australia's popular Larapinta Trail
A US tourist has died while hiking in hot weather on a popular trail in the Australian outback.
The man, 33, was found dead on the last leg of the Larapinta Trail on Wednesday, police in the Northern Territory said.
He had set out early with a companion to scale Mount Sonder - a gruelling section of the trail - but the pair became separated, authorities said.
His body was discovered hours later, about 750m (2,500ft) from a car park.
The man, from California, had taken a wrong turn on descent, a police officer told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.
"[Mount Sonder] is about 1,300 metres tall and the actual walk that they undertook was about 16 kilometres there and back," Supt Rob Burgoyne said.
The 223km Larapinta Trail is a popular trek through rugged bush west of the city of Alice Springs, where temperatures reached 42C on Wednesday.
Police said the US consulate had been notified and a report would be prepared for a coroner. | – A US tourist has died while hiking in what police call "a beautiful but harsh environment" in Central Australia. The 33-year-old California man and a 40-year-old companion were descending Mount Sonder on a 10-mile hike Wednesday when they became separated. A Northern Territory police superintendent tells ABC Australia the American did "a very foolish thing" and "ran away from his companion." The 40-year-old returned to a parking lot, but the American did not. Three hours after he was last seen, the Californian—who police say had taken a wrong turn—was found dead a quarter to a half a mile from the car park, report Reuters and the BBC. It's not yet clear how he died—a fall or snake bite are possibilities—but authorities say heat and exposure were likely contributing factors. It was about 108 degrees in the area as the men were hiking a section of the Larapinta Trail described by a Parks and Wildlife Service rep as a "very exposed mountain walk." Though police say the California man did have some water, the rep tells ABC Australia "it's almost physically impossible to put back the fluids that you're going to lose as quickly as you're losing them." That means "people become dehydrated very rapidly before ... realizing that it's even happening," which is why long walks in such heat are discouraged. He points out visitors from the Northern Hemisphere are used to temperatures "much cooler than what they're encountering here." The US Embassy says it's "aware of reports of the death of a US citizen in the Northern Territory" but has provided no additional information. (California can be deadly for hikers, too.) |
President’s claim that Germany owes the US ‘vast sums of money’ shows a lack of understanding, says ex-Nato representative
'That's not how it works': Trump's grasp of Nato questioned
On the heels of a visibly awkward visit from the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, Donald Trump said on Saturday that Germany owed “vast sums of money” to Nato and the US, even though the alliance does not stipulate payments to America.
Angela Merkel and Trump can't hide fundamental differences in first visit Read more
His remarks prompted a former US permanent representative to Nato to reply “that’s not how Nato works”, and to add that increased European spending on defense was not a “favor (or payment) to the US”.
Trump, who was at his Mar-a-Lago estate for the weekend and spending the morning at Trump International Golf Course, sent two tweets early in the day. The first denounced “the FAKE NEWS” for what he said was mistaken coverage of a “GREAT” meeting with Merkel.
Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) Despite what you have heard from the FAKE NEWS, I had a GREAT meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Nevertheless, Germany owes.....
Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) ...vast sums of money to NATO & the United States must be paid more for the powerful, and very expensive, defense it provides to Germany!
Trump’s public appearances with Merkel betrayed an awkwardness between the two leaders, including during two widely remarked upon appearances in the White House. In one, the leaders failed to stage a handshake for cameras in the Oval Office, and in another Merkel looked baffled by comments made by Trump during a joint press conference. Before the visit Trump had repeatedly called Merkel’s policies “insane” and a “disaster” for Germany.
What is it with Trump and handshakes? This is getting awkward | Moustafa Bayoumi Read more
Trump’s second tweet accused Germany directly of not paying enough to the security alliance.
In a joint press conference on Friday, Trump expressed “strong support” for Nato but reiterated his belief that member nations do not contribute a “fair share”.
“Many nations owe vast sums of money from past years and it is very unfair to the United States,” he said. “These nations must pay what they owe.”
He added: “During our meeting, I thanked Chancellor Merkel for the German government’s commitment to increase defense spending and work toward contributing at least 2% of GDP.”
Trump’s tweets on Saturday suggested a misunderstanding of the way Nato is funded. According to Nato’s official guidelines, member nations are expected to spend at least 2% of their country’s gross domestic product (GDP) on defense. However, only a handful of the 28 members actually meet that target.
At a 2014 summit in Wales, members pledged to increase their military spending to 2% of GDP by 2024, a goal some have said is unachievable and unrealistic for several member states.
Ultimately, members’ contributions are based on each nation’s capability. Therefore, Nato member nations do not “owe” or have to compensate any other country.
On Saturday Ivo Daalder, who was permanent representative to Nato from 2009 to 2013, respond to Trump in a series of tweets.
“Sorry, Mr President, that’s not how Nato works,” he wrote. “The US decides for itself how much it contributes to defending Nato. This is not a financial transaction, where Nato countries pay the US to defend them. It is part of our treaty commitment.
“All Nato countries, including Germany, have committed to spend 2% of GDP on defense by 2024. So far five of 28 Nato countries do. Those who currently don’t spend 2% of their GDP on defense are now increasing their defense budgets. That’s a good thing.
“But no funds will be paid to the US. They are meant to increase Nato’s overall defense capabilities, given the growing Russian threat. Europe must spend more on defense, but not as favor (or payment) to the US. But because their security requires it.”
'Paris in Georgia': political salons spring up across US in push against Trump Read more
Daalder added that the “large military commitment” of the US to Nato was “not a favor to Europe” but was “vital for our own security”.
“We fought two world wars in Europe, and one cold war,” he wrote. “Keeping Europe whole, free, and at peace, is vital US interest.”
Trump has long criticized Nato. In a joint interview days before taking office in January, with the Times of London and the German publication Bild, Trump declared the alliance “obsolete”.
“I said a long time ago that Nato had problems,” he said. “No1 it was obsolete, because it was designed many, many years ago. No2 the countries weren’t paying what they’re supposed to be paying.”
In an interview with the New York Times editorial board, Trump implied that US defense of a Nato ally would depend on whether the country was contributing proportionally to the alliance’s defense spending.
Asked whether the US would provide military defense to Baltic countries if Russia were to attack, Trump said: “If they fulfill their obligations to us, the answer is yes.”
Pressed on what course of action he would take if the answer were no, Trump said: “Well, I’m not saying if not,” he said. “I’m saying, right now there are many countries that have not fulfilled their obligations to us.” ||||| Trump Stands By Unproven Wiretap Claim At Joint News Conference With Merkel
Enlarge this image toggle caption Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Updated at 4:50 p.m. ET
At a wide-ranging and occasionally tense news conference after their first in-person meeting Friday, President Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel discussed trade and border policy — and had one notable exchange when Trump was asked about his unproven claims that former President Obama tapped the phones at Trump Tower last year.
Trump declined the opportunity to retract the claim, telling the media that "we said nothing" when he tweeted, "How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process," and that he was merely quoting a "very talented legal mind" he had seen on Fox News.
"You should be talking to Fox," Trump said.
After the conference, Fox's Shepard Smith responded: "Fox News cannot confirm Judge Napolitano's commentary," apparently referring to the report Trump cited.
But first, when addressing the question about wiretapping from a German reporter, Trump told Merkel: "At least we have something in common, perhaps" — making an implied reference to the 2013 revelations that the National Security Administration had spied on European leaders, including Merkel.
Merkel did not reply.
The moment punctuated remarks that focused predominantly on trade and training the countries' workers for manufacturing in the 21st century. In his statement at the start, Trump praised Germany's apprenticeship program that trains people to join the industrial workforce.
He also took a moment to thank Merkel for Germany's continued support of the war effort in Afghanistan and for its role as a "counter-ISIS coalition member."
Still, while Trump said he reiterated to Merkel his strong support for NATO, he was also careful to emphasize that NATO allies need to "pay their fair share for the cost of defense." It's a point he has repeated often, maintaining a skeptical view of the defensive alliance — a position that has made Germany and other European countries wary.
"Many nations owe vast sums of money from past years, and it is very unfair to the United States," Trump continued. "These nations must pay what they owe."
Toward that end, both leaders said that Germany is committed to increasing its defense spending to 2 percent of its GDP — a goal already established for NATO members by the treaty's terms.
Merkel, for her part, focused on business from the outset as a centerpiece of her visit. Indeed she embarked on her trans-Atlantic trip with some notable companions: top executives at BMW, Siemens and the industrial parts manufacturer Schaeffler.
Her high-placed company sent as good a message as any about the direction Merkel expected these introductory talks to take.
"She wants to make the point that the companies have created thousands of jobs in the United States," Tanit Koch, the editor of the German newspaper Bild, tells NPR's Rachel Martin.
Citing Merkel's interview with another German paper, Saarbruecker Zeitung, the BBC says the chancellor planned to remind Trump that BMW's plant in South Carolina exported "more cars than GM and Ford together" from America.
"I'll make that clear," Merkel added.
And unavoidably with business comes the question of trade. At the news conference, Merkel praised international trade agreements, saying they work best when they work as a win-win for the parties involved.
"The English word she puts a lot of emphasis on right now is the word 'reciprocity,' " Koch says.
Yet the German publication Deutsche Welle points out that "the bar of what to expect from their first meeting [is] rather low, especially given the prior verbal tiffs between them and their different domestic audiences."
And those "prior verbal tiffs" are not insignificant.
Both as a candidate and as president-elect, Trump had some harsh words for the German leader, saying she was "ruining Germany" and had "made a catastrophic mistake" in welcoming more than 1 million migrants and refugees in recent years.
It's always better to talk with each other than about each other.
The stark difference between their immigration policies surfaced again occasionally in the course of their news conference — with Trump pointedly asserting that "immigration is a privilege, not a right."
In turn, Merkel maintained that while efforts must be made to stop illegal trafficking, such efforts have "to be done by looking at the refugees as well, giving them opportunities to shape their own lives. ... Help countries who right now are not [able] to do so."
On the campaign trail, Trump stressed this difference in beliefs in harsh terms, once saying, "The German people are going to end up overthrowing this woman. I don't know what the hell she's thinking."
And shortly after Trump's election, Merkel offered a rebuttal of her own in a tepid note of congratulations, taking the opportunity to state:
"Germany and America are bound by their values: democracy, freedom, the respect for the law and the dignity of human beings, independent of their origin, skin colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political position. On the basis of these values I offer the future president of the United States, Donald Trump, close co-operation."
The tensions have made for a tenuous balance for both leaders — perhaps more so for the German chancellor, who faces a tough national election of her own in September.
"What we know from the polls — as much as we can trust them nowadays — is that you have 80 to 90 percent of Germans saying they pretty much abhor what [Trump is] doing," Koch tells NPR.
But Merkel can't fully separate herself from the U.S. president. Quite the opposite, in fact: Hopes remain that the meeting, if nothing else, might help reset the relationship between the two leaders.
Or as Merkel told Saarbruecker Zeitung: "It's always better to talk with each other than about each other."
They are likely to have at least one more opportunity to talk with each other after this visit. Trump has accepted Merkel's invitation to the G-20 Summit, which will be held in Germany this summer. | – President Trump's at-times awkward meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel was summed up as one that "could have been a lot worse" by German daily Bild, reports the New York Times, but Trump's comments on NATO are gathering some steam. During a joint news conference Friday, Trump thanked Merkel for working to move Germany toward paying 2% of its GDP to NATO (Germany currently pays 1.2%; only five of 28 member countries meet the 2% target). But on Saturday, he was more forceful on Twitter: "Despite what you have heard from the FAKE NEWS, I had a GREAT meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel," he tweeted. "Nevertheless, Germany owes vast sums of money to NATO & the United States must be paid more for the powerful, and very expensive, defense it provides to Germany!" Which immediately prompted many to point out that the White House shouldn't hold its breath waiting for a check that decidedly won't be in the mail. Former permanent rep to NATO Ivo Daalder responded, "Sorry, Mr President, that’s not how Nato works. The US decides for itself how much it contributes to defending Nato. This is not a financial transaction, where Nato countries pay the US to defend them. It is part of our treaty commitment." Explains the Guardian in quoting Daalder, "ultimately, members’ contributions are based on each nation’s capability. Therefore, Nato member nations do not 'owe' or have to compensate any other country." |
If someone offered you an apple cinnamon mayonnaise burger from a Japanese Burger King, you might politely decline. After all, at this point in your life, do you really need to go around sampling odd food combinations? (The answer is no, you're old and stolid and have already reached your personal threshold when it comes to new twists on otherwise commonplace food.) Of course, if you turned down your chance to feel apple slices sliding down your mayonnaise-coated throat like little Olympic bobsledders, you'd be making a grave mistake. Perhaps the gravest of your life.
Burger King Japan has been offering two hamburgers topped with apple slices in lieu of tomatoes and coated with cinnamon mayonnaise. The burger is called the BK Ringo ("ringo" means "apple" in Japanese) or the NY Whopper (a bigger, Whopperized version), and it made a previous appearance in Japanese Burger Kings back in 2012. According to Rocket News blogger Casey Baseel, the apple effect is, surprisingly, pretty good:
The BK Ringo comes with a unique cinnamon infused mayonnaise, and a pretty generous portion at that. The cinnamon smells great, and the scent mixes with the meat and produces an almost Middle Eastern effect. It doesn't impart as much sweetness as you'd expect, though. There's a short burst of cinnamon flavor that comes just before you wrap your mouth around the sandwich, but once you bite in, the initial flavors on the tongue is mayonnaise, followed by the juicy meat and slight char.
Apple burgers might not be that crazy, according to the Consumerist, because, let's face it — fast food tomatoes are usually sad, tasteless little testaments of humanity's defiance of the seasons. The tomato's unquestioned dominion on the burger must be stopped, if only so it can make a comeback in, say, 25 years when everyone's sick of gross fast food apples and a bid by a Wendy's in Germany to put flambéed bananas on burgers fails spectacularly. ||||| A Burger King sign in the United States. Japan's Burger Kings have started offering burgers with grilled apple slices. (Photo: Gene J. Puskar, AP)
Burger King in Japan has introduced two new burgers with grilled apple slices instead of tomatoes.
The burgers are the BK Ringo (ringo means apple) with cinnamon mayonnaise and the NY Whopper with bacon.
MORE: Burger King beefs up Big King, tops Big Mac
Blogger Casey Baseel wrote in Rocker News 24 that the BK Ringo tastes like a "firm apple pie."
Baseel wrote, "There's a short burst of cinnamon flavor that comes just before you wrap your mouth around the sandwich, but once you bite in, the initial flavors on the tongue is mayonnaise, followed by the juicy meat and slight char."
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Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1aRp30I ||||| Even as someone who can always appreciate a tasty hamburger, there’s a quandary I face whenever I go out to satisfy my beef-based sandwich needs. Your standard burger gives you plenty of protein from the meat, some nice carbs from the bread, and even a scattering of veggies between the buns, but it’s hard to get your fruit fix at a burger emporium.
Or, more accurately, it was, until Burger King Japan started offering two hamburgers with slices of grilled apple. We traveled to one of Burger King’s branches in Yokohama to try both on the day of their release, but they weren’t the only discoveries waiting for us. So come along with us as we present the ABCs (apples, booze, and couches) that make Burger King different in Japan.
I’ve got a confession to make: I hate tomatoes. Not tomato sauce or ketchup; I’ve got no problems with those. I can even appreciate some tomato broth soups. But an actual slice of tomato in my food? I’ve never been happy to see one and probably never will.
So when word came that Burger King had two new sandwiches with grilled apple in place of tomato, my dinner plans were set. This actually isn’t the first time Burger King has combined fruit in Japan, as apple burgers were also available for two limited periods during 2012, but the two current versions, the BK Ringo and NY Whopper, are both brand new.
Figuring if I was going to have a double helping of fast food for dinner I should at least get some exercise in, I walked the 20 minutes to the Burger King branch closest to my apartment. Displayed at the entrance was a poster for the two new sandwiches, which seem to be playing off a New York/Big Apple image by featuring the Statue of Liberty.
I placed my order and took a seat, which is when I noticed that Burger King is a lot swankier than I remember it being in the U.S. You’d never mistake it for a Michelin-ranked restaurant, but the interior was tastefully appointed, and even had some plush couches.
▼ Signs indicate that the couches are only for groups of three or more, but they look comfy enough that my wife suggested inviting the stranger reading a book by herself to come and sit with us.
But I came to eat, not pick up pointers for sprucing up my living room. Despite the upmarket look, the staff was as quick as you’d expect from a major fast food chain, and before long I had my two apple-toting burgers before me.
I started with the smaller of the two, the BK Ringo (ringo being the Japanese word for apple, and not a Beatles reference). Aside from the grilled apple you’ve got some shredded lettuce, but that’s all, with no harsh pickles or onion to battle the fruit flavors.
The BK Ringo comes with a unique cinnamon infused mayonnaise, and a pretty generous portion at that. The cinnamon smells great, and the scent mixes with the meat and produces an almost Middle Eastern effect. It doesn’t impart as much sweetness as you’d expect, though. There’s a short burst of cinnamon flavor that comes just before you wrap your mouth around the sandwich, but once you bite in, the initial flavors on the tongue is mayonnaise, followed by the juicy meat and slight char.
The apple comes out a bit later as you chew, and the fruit’s texture is somewhat like a firm apple pie. It’s mild, but with a definite sweetness that makes the decision not to put ketchup on the burger definitely the right one. After that, the cinnamon notes come out for a tiny little encore, with the sesame from the bun finishing off the flavor profile.
Next up was the bigger burger, the NY Whopper, which differs from the BK Ringo not only in size, but by having two slices of apple instead of one, plus a few small bits of bacon.
The NY Whopper also ditches its little brother’s cinnamon mayo for Hollandaise sauce, something gourmet enough I had to go online to remind myself of what exactly it is (egg yolk, butter, and seasonings including lemon juice).
After the amount of mayonnaise on the BK Ringo, the NY Whopper was a lot drier. A little Hollandaise sauce goes a long way though, and while the BK Ringo has a subtle sweetness, the NY Whopper replaces that with a touch of sourness.
It’s not clear how much of this comes from the citrus in the sauce itself, and how much of it is drawn out from the natural acidity in the apple, but it’s definitely there, and gives the sandwich a more upscale feel that justifies its higher price. And while the bacon was hard to find during our visual inspection (color-wise it sort of blends in with the red apples, whose skin is left on), but it lent a surprisingly smoky finish to the NY Whopper.
Of course, you can’t put away two hamburgers without working up a thirst. Japanese fast food chains sometimes have unique beverage offerings, such as oolong tea or grapefruit juice. Burger King does them one better by offering beer and cocktails.
The mixed drink list is limited (highballs made with cola or ginger ale or your only options), but they are the real deal, with plenty of alcohol and a stronger kick than you’d expect from a fast food joint. But really, would you expect anything less from the chain that invites customers to “Have it your way?”
▼ My way is mixed with whiskey.
Photos: RocketNews24 | – USA Today picks up on an odd food story out of Japan, where the burgers at Burger King tend to taste like apple pie. The reason? The new BK Ringo and the NY Whopper ditch tomatoes for slices of grilled apple. It also helps that the mayo is infused with cinnamon, notes food blogger Casey Baseel at Rocket News 24. And he's a fan of the combination, which "produces an almost Middle Eastern effect," he writes in what may be the most earnest fast-food review ever. "There's a short burst of cinnamon flavor that comes just before you wrap your mouth around the sandwich, but once you bite in, the initial [flavor] on the tongue is mayonnaise, followed by the juicy meat and slight char." No word on whether the chain plans to bring the concoction to the US, but Doug Barry at Jezebel notes that fast-food tomatoes are generally "sad, tasteless little testaments of humanity's defiance of the seasons," so why not? Of course, more people might be more interested in Baseel's observation that BKs in Japan also offer beer and cocktails. |
It's become clear over the past few years that US Border Patrol has massive problems with corruption and excessive use of force. Current Customs and Border Protection commissioner Gil Kerlikowske, the head of the agency that includes Border Patrol, is trying to turn Border Patrol around, and there's some evidence he's succeeding.
In September, for example, an internal investigation led to a Border Patrol agent actually being charged for assaulting a 14-year-old boy in immigration detention — a big step forward for a force that has barely disciplined misbehaving agents for the past several years.
The biggest threat to Border Patrol's turnaround right now is Congress. The new Republican Congress in 2015 will likely want to strengthen Border Patrol by hiring more agents for the US/Mexico border. As it turns out, that's the worst thing it could do.
A recent feature in Politico Magazine by Garrett Graff shows what happened the last time Border Patrol underwent a rapid expansion, growing by two-thirds over the second term of the Bush Administration. The hiring surge was a major reason Border Patrol has had such massive misconduct problems: One agent was arrested nearly every day from 2005 to 2012, and the agency's been accused of turning a blind eye to hundreds of complaints about excessive force.
A bigger Border Patrol is a more corrupt Border Patrol
According to Graff, Michael Chertoff, who became Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security in 2005, came in with the goal of doubling the size of Border Patrol in two years. Eventually, he settled for the "compromise" goal of doubling Border Patrol in four years. That didn't quite happen either, but it was close: The number of agents on the US/Mexico border grew by over two-thirds from 2005 to 2009, and it's continued to grow slightly since then.
Congress had to authorize the funding increases leading to all these hiring surges, but it was happy to do so. The first Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, told Graff that "people just wanted to give me unlimited amounts of money."
Interestingly, Customs and Border Protection officials didn't welcome the funding increases for their agency — because they understood the dangers of growing that fast. The head of CBP who oversaw the hiring surge told Graff:
"I was very concerned when I was asked to grow the Border Patrol over that period of time...Normally, you'd want a chance to make a careful plan. You want to choose very carefully people who are put into a tough environment like that we had on the southwest border."
But they had to spend the money as Congress had authorized it. Congress had given Border Patrol money to recruit and hire thousands more agents. To find enough agents to hire, Border Patrol had to resort to sponsoring a NASCAR car; they put together commercials featuring agents on motorcycles and conducting SWAT-style raids. But Congress hadn't given money for closer oversight of agents; internal affairs officials later said they hadn't conducted many integrity checks on current agents from 2006-2010 because they were so focused on meeting the hiring goals Congress had mandated.
Crucially, hiring quotas made it harder to screen out problematic applicants. There's a reason that law enforcement officials whose departments don't use excessive force put a lot of emphasis on choosing new hires carefully — and on being able to fire recruits who aren't able to, for example, make good decisions under stress. A hiring surge makes it impossible to do either of those things. To the contrary, the kind of motorcycle-driving image Border Patrol needed to recruit more officers is exactly the image that warier law enforcement agencies try not to send.
The hiring surge also turned Border Patrol from a bunch of solitary agents out on their own, to a bunch of teams of agents working together. That was a significant change to the force's culture. But it didn't lead to a change in the rules around use of force — which had been written for an era when a Border Patrol agent was on his own. What might be a reasonable amount of force for a single lone agent might be excessive for a squad of them.
One result? A sharp rise in the use of excessive force. In 2013 — after Congress started asking questions — a DHS report identified 1,187 "possible" excessive force incidents between 2007 and 2012, including 136 involving a fired weapon. Furthermore, a companion report written by the Police Executive Research Forum found that agents often shot at fleeing cars out of mere "frustration."
Will Congress start force-feeding Border Patrol again?
Gil Kerlikowske took over Customs and Border Protection in early 2014, and one of his major goals was to fix "transparency and accountability."
For a decade, CBP's internal affairs department hadn't had real authority to investigate criminal misconduct among Border Patrol agents. In September Kerlikowske announced that CBP would finally have the authority to investigate Border Patrol abuses.
The changes haven't stopped excessive force overnight. But it really does look like agents are being held responsible. It was the work of the CBP internal investigators that led to agent Aldo Francisco Arteaga being charged with assault in September for punching a 14-year-old boy.
When law enforcement experts talk about changing the culture of a force, they tend to focus on hiring; there's only so much an organization can do to change its members' behavior once they're in, but it has much more control over who it lets in to begin with. So if Border Patrol's going to fix its problems, it needs to make sure new hires start getting properly vetted and trained.
Border Patrol is trying to hire a new wave of 1,600 agents in the next year — not to beef up its strength on the border, but just to fill in normal hiring needs and replace agents who've left. This is going to be an important test of whether the agency can turn its culture around. But at the same time, its parent agency is hiring 2,000 new people to work at ports of entry — the biggest expansion of port workers it's ever seen — so resources and attention are going to be strained.
And it could get worse: Congress is going to need to pass a temporary government-funding bill in December 2014, and a proper budget in 2015. There are plenty of members of Congress who are likely to use either of those opportunities to rapidly expand Border Patrol again. This was one of congressional Republicans' top ideas for responding to the Central American migrant crisis last summer.
Ironically, more Border Patrol agents wouldn't have fixed the migrant crisis. But another hiring surge could easily undo the progress that Border Patrol has made with its own crisis of agent misconduct.
It would be nice if any member of Congress who thinks that ramping up Border Patrol again is a good idea, or even a useless but harmless symbolic gesture, read the Politico Magazine piece and thought long and hard about whether a symbolic response to a high-profile crisis is worth the risk of exacerbating a slow-burning one. ||||| Gil Kerlikowske was hoping to make it through at least his first week on the job without being awakened in the middle of the night. President Barack Obama’s new head of Customs and Border Protection, Kerlikowske could have used a week of quiet as he began to figure out the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, with its 46,000 gun-carrying Customs officers and Border Patrol agents and massive $12.4 billion annual budget. He didn’t get it. On his sixth night after taking office in March, a Border Patrol agent’s single gunshot 1,500 miles away from Washington interrupted Kerlikowske’s sleep. The gunshot itself wasn’t all that surprising; Border Patrol agents regularly open fire on suspected smugglers, border crossers and people harassing them from across the Mexican line. So often, in fact, that the agency doesn’t even bother to release details on most shooting incidents. But this wasn’t a regular shooting incident.
Early the day before, while Kerlikowske, an affable career cop who had spent five years as Obama’s drug czar, was going about his meetings in CBP’s headquarters at Washington’s cavernous Ronald Reagan Building, three Honduran women had surrendered to a green-uniformed U.S. Border Patrol agent in the Rio Grande Valley.
That, too, was a common occurrence. “RGV,” as it’s known in the Border Patrol, has been the epicenter of this year’s “border crisis,” the latest in a long series that stretches back decades—crises that inevitably lead to calls for more money, more agents, more fences. In this year’s iteration, tens of thousands of people fleeing the Central American countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras have journeyed through Mexico to turn themselves in at the U.S. border seeking asylum. Many of the refugees have been unaccompanied minors (“UACs” to the bureaucracy), a fact that strained the U.S. government response and unleashed critical 24-hour cable media coverage. RGV had been particularly flooded, and so the detention of the three Honduran women—a mother, her 14-year-old daughter and a second teen—around midday on March 12 shouldn’t have been anything other than routine.
Except that they surrendered to Esteban Manzanares.
Manzanares, a stocky 32-year-old agent who kept his head shaved short, was already under suspicion for misconduct—colleagues suspected he had let two border violators go free—but there was a huge backlog of misconduct cases at the inspector general’s field office in McAllen, Texas, and Manzanares was but one small unconfirmed red flag amid many along the southern border, so even under suspicion, he remained on duty with the Border Patrol.
Rather than detain the three Honduran women and bring them to the McAllen holding center, a 300-bed unit that some nights this spring hosted more than 1,000 people, Manzanares locked the women in the back of his Ford patrol truck—and drove them around the scrubland surrounding McAllen for an hour or two. It was a perfectly lovely South Texas day—sunny, low 70s, a bit cool for that time of year.
At 3:15 p.m., Manzanares texted his ex-wife, saying he wanted to be a good dad to their two children: “I want to help in any way I can but I am very limited.”
Then he stopped his truck in a wooded area. He raped both the mother and the daughter. He slit the mother’s wrists and tried to break the daughter’s neck, leaving them for dead in the brush.
He drove off with the third woman bound in his green-and-white heavy-duty Border Patrol truck with a red-and-blue light bar on top, a Department of Homeland Security logo on the door and a U.S. flag on the hood. Somewhere out in the borderlands, the agent left his third prisoner hidden, bound with duct tape.
Manzanares wrapped up his scheduled shift a little after 4 p.m. and returned his truck to the motor pool at the McAllen Border Patrol station, a huge new 68,000-square-foot facility constructed for $22.4 million as part of the agency’s influx of new agents and money over the past decade. Only at 5:45 p.m., his paperwork for the day completed, did he finally pull out of the Border Patrol station. His apartment was just three miles straight down the highway, past South Texas College and then a right turn at the Exxon station, but he wasn’t going straight home.
It was just around that time that other Border Patrol agents made a horrifying discovery, spotting one of the women Manzanares had left for dead wandering past a security camera—one link in the huge post-9/11 network of electronic eyes and sensors that now monitors the border region. Agents responded to the scene and after a brief search located both the injured mother and daughter, took them to the hospital and began looking for their attacker; the women described him as wearing green, so the agents suspected they were looking for one of their own.
Esteban Manzanares, a Border Patrol agent based in McAllen, Texas, was already under suspicion for misconduct when, in March, he kidnapped three Honduran women he had detained at the border. After raping them and attempting to kill two of them, Manzanares shot himself. | Left: Todd Heisler/New York Times/Redux; right: Facebook
They were, and he was not far away: After leaving work, Manzanares had retrieved the third victim and brought her back to his apartment in a housing complex, the last set of buildings before the Rio Grande that demarcates the two countries. The complex was home to a number of his Border Patrol colleagues—including his next-door neighbor and one across the hall. They all joked about how safe it was. Border Patrol agents seemed to be everywhere in McAllen these days, as the agency since 9/11 had become one of the region’s largest employers, a boon for one of the poorest metropolitan areas in the country. There were now some 3,200 agents in RGV—driving along the border, patrolling by boat, flying overhead in helicopters, working interior checkpoints, watching cameras, staffing the Border Patrol’s new overhead surveillance blimp, the latest high-tech toy cast off by the Pentagon and repurposed to protect the border.
Back inside his apartment, Manzanares stripped his teenage prisoner naked, bound her to a chair, stuffed a sock in her mouth and raped her.
By 7 p.m., the Border Patrol, having questioned the first two victims, had realized there was a third victim, notifying the FBI that a kidnapping had occurred and that the girl was probably being held by a Border Patrol agent. The magnitude and horror of the crime were unusual, but the potential perpetrator wasn’t. The FBI in McAllen had gotten used to investigating assaults and misconduct among Border Patrol agents; it had become the field office’s top criminal priority.
It took only hours to narrow down a suspect: When investigators examined the truck Manzanares used on his shift, they found blood and duct tape.
By 12:39 a.m., FBI agents knocked on his red door, Apartment 1513, and shouted, “FBI—federal agents.” At first, there was no response. Then, the agents heard a single gunshot as Manzanares took his own life. When a SWAT team broke down the door, they found the teen inside, still naked and bound, but alive.
Now it was definitely time to tell the new commissioner.
Kerlikowske had already known that the Border Patrol was troubled, of course: It had taken 1,870 days into the Obama administration before he even became the first Senate-confirmed commissioner of the Obama era, and he was well aware he didn’t have much time to right an agency that was beset by corruption problems and excessive force complaints, the unfortunate legacies of a massive hiring surge that had doubled the force’s size in just a few years after 9/11. That lying and obfuscation had often accompanied the scandals was no real surprise either.
“We had a history of not addressing things as directly as we should,” Kerlikowske told me when we met this fall in his office at the Reagan Building.
Open In New Window OPTICS: Inside the Border Patrol's post-9/11 surge. | Photos by David Taylor
Kerlikowske wanted to use the Manzanares attack as an opportunity to show that on his watch, the agency would be different—more forthright and transparent. But it wouldn’t be easy: He wrote a first draft of a statement he wanted to send out immediately, but CBP officials blocked their own new commissioner. They were nervous about admitting fault so quickly. CBP’s longstanding policy had been to hold off for days, weeks, months and even years before addressing publicly any misconduct incident.
The CBP leadership was so concerned about Kerlikowske’s statement that he finally had to turn to the new secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, and the new DHS general counsel, for their approval.
Two days later, CBP released Kerlikowske’s statement, the first since his swearing-in as commissioner. “I consider these actions, if true, to be reprehensible and I know they are not representative of the agents of the U.S. Border Patrol,” it said. “I am deeply sorry that this incident occurred and am committed to doing everything in my power to prevent incidents like this from occurring again.”
Anywhere else it would hardly have seemed like a controversial thing to say under the circumstances—but this wasn’t anywhere else. And Kerlikowske had to start somewhere.
***
The United States today spends more money each year on border and immigration enforcement than the combined budgets of the FBI, ATF, DEA, Secret Service and U.S. Marshals—plus the entire NYPD annual budget. Altogether, the country has invested more than $100 billion in border and immigration control since 9/11.
It has paid for quite a force: Customs and Border Protection not only employs some 60,000 total personnel—everything from desert agents on horseback to insect inspectors at airports—but also operates a fleet of some 250 planes, helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles like the Predator drones the military sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, making CBP both the largest law enforcement air force in the world and equivalent roughly to the size of Brazil’s entire combat air force.
The Border Patrol wing of this vast apparatus has experienced particularly dramatic growth: By the time the Bush administration left Washington, the fiercely independent agency—part police force, part occupying army, part frontier cavalry—had gone from being a comparatively tiny, undermanned backwater of the Justice Department to a 21,000-person arm of the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country.
But the Border Patrol has also become one of the nation’s deadliest law enforcement agencies over that same period, involved in more fatal shootings—at least 46—since 2004 than perhaps any other such agency. (As this summer’s events in Ferguson, Missouri, showed, definitive statistics on fatal law enforcement shootings are notoriously difficult to collect.) An internal report last year that the agency tried to keep secret accused its agents of shooting their weapons not out of fear for their lives but instead out of “frustration.”
As one senior DHS official told me, “The agency has created a culture that says, ‘If you throw a rock at me, you’re going to get shot.’”
Corruption and excessive force have also skyrocketed along with the massive hiring surge. In fact, between 2005 and 2012, nearly one CBP officer was arrested for misconduct every single day—part of a pattern that Ronald Hosko, former assistant director of the FBI’s criminal investigation division, calls “shocking.” During Obama’s first term, the sheer number of allegations was so glaring that, according to two CBP officials, DHS under Secretary Janet Napolitano ordered Customs and Border Protection to change its definition of corruption to downplay to Congress the breadth of the problem.
Yet the agency’s response has been paralyzed by bureaucratic turf battles and the broken Senate confirmation process, which left CBP without a Senate-confirmed leader for five years. Now, just as he rebuilt police departments in Buffalo and Seattle, Gil Kerlikowske’s new job is to bring order and discipline to a force so long lacking leadership, and to weed out what he calls “bad apples” like Manzanares who should have never been hired in the first place—a problem, CBP officials admitted during an internal meeting this past spring, that might take a generation to fix.
This article, tracing the rapid growth of the Border Patrol since 9/11 and the host of problems that spawned, is based on more than 50 interviews—including nearly all of the seven men who have headed CBP in the past decade and all three former DHS secretaries—as well as officials at the White House, Justice Department and Congress. I also reviewed thousands of pages of documents, including inspector general investigations, CBP performance reports and budgets. What emerges is the largely overlooked story behind the story of the perennial border crises, in which the best intentions and worst impulses of the Bush administration met the laissez-faire management and political cynicism of the Obama administration. The result? A massive agency—freshly militarized by billions of dollars of weapons and technology and thousands of poorly vetted gun-carrying personnel hired in the panicky years after 9/11—was left adrift as violence and corruption in its ranks rose dramatically.
CBP officials in Washington refer to the Border Patrol, somewhat endearingly, somewhat ruefully, as the Green Monster, a name derived from the patrol’s proud historic tradition of dark green uniforms.
This is the story of how the Green Monster came alive.
***
Then and Now | The U.S. Border Patrol has ballooned since its founding in 1924. At left, agents in Texas round up a group of immigrants in 1948. At right, agents in 2006. | Left: Harry Pennington/Keystone Features/Getty Images; right: Charles Ommanney/Getty Images
CHAPTER I: THE POOR STEPCHILD
The irony of New York’s Statue of Liberty is that the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed on its base at its dedication in 1886, “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free,” marked almost precisely the moment the nation’s borders began to close to new immigrants—especially the tired, the poor and the huddled masses.
That same decade, Congress passed the first comprehensive immigration act, expanding earlier limits on Chinese and other Asian immigrants to include bans on “lunatics, idiots, convicts, those liable to become public charges, and those suffering from contagious diseases.” In 1891, the United States began to deport those who entered the country illegally. By the 1920s, Congress created the first force to patrol the country’s 7,500 miles of unguarded borders with Canada and Mexico. When the Border Patrol got up and running in 1924, its first agents were transfers from the Mounted Guard of Chinese Inspectors, who had enforced the Chinese exclusion acts in the U.S. West. Much of their early patrolling was done on horseback in the rough terrain of the Arizona deserts and Texas scrub, making them the closest thing to cowboys in the U.S. government.
The Border Patrol: A Brief History 1882: Congress passes the Chinese Exclusion Act to keep out Chinese laborers thought to be taking American jobs. The law begins decades of legislation regulating immigration to the United States. 1891: The first Office of Immigration is established, as part of the Treasury Department. The agency, which formalizes the immigration process, is actually meant to encourage more Western European immigration to the United States. 1904: The first informal border patrols begin to police the Mexican border. In 1915, Congress formally creates the Mounted Guards to prevent immigrants from crossing the border illegally. 1924: The Border Patrol is founded, housed within the Labor Department. Its 450 inspectors are initially charged with guarding the Canadian and Mexican borders, and later the Gulf of Mexico and Florida. 1933: President Franklin D. Roosevelt consolidates the Bureau of Immigration and Bureau of Naturalization into the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). The agency shifts its focus to law enforcement and is moved, in 1940, to the Justice Department. Top to bottom: Image PDP03732 Royal BC Museum, BC Archives; U.S. CBP; CBP; Wikipedia Commons; Keystone Features/Getty Images (Continues on next page)
In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt combined the Border Patrol and the Bureau of Citizenship into what came to be known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and on the eve of World War II, it became part of the Justice Department, where it would remain for six decades—always understaffed, increasingly neglected and largely forgotten in the government bureaucracy.
For its first quarter-century, most of the agency’s staff and resources were expended securing the longer northern border with Canada, and it was only in 1954, long before political correctness hit the government, that Operation Wetback marked the Border Patrol’s first large-scale deportations of illegal Mexican immigrants. Periodic INS crackdowns and raids over the coming decades followed, but the country never really took illegal immigration seriously until the 1990s, when Mexican border enforcement became a political lightning rod.
Only twice before 2001, in fact, did the Border Patrol make concerted efforts to “secure” the border—and both were localized initiatives rather than national strategies. As late as the beginning of the Clinton administration, the Border Patrol had just 4,000 agents, though steady growth spurred in part by popular border crackdowns in El Paso and San Diego brought it to 9,000 agents by 2001.
It was clear that still wasn’t anywhere close to enough. In 2000, the peak year of illegal immigration, the Border Patrol apprehended 1.6 million people crossing the border. “And a large part of what was coming through wasn’t even getting apprehended,” recalls David Aguilar, who later became chief of the Bush-era Border Patrol and prior to that led its Tucson sector. “There was a lack of intestinal fortitude to address the border. We were being overrun.”
Near the top of the Border Patrol’s list of complaints was the policy known internally as “CARP,” the Catch-And-Release Policy. By the end of the Clinton administration, 80 percent of people who were caught and released with a notice to appear at a deportation hearing never showed up in court. But despite millions of border crossings, the Border Patrol had the financing in 2001 for just 60 detainees a day across the entire country. “They could turn themselves in and have a high confidence that they wouldn’t be returned to their home countries,” recalls Michael Chertoff, who would go on to become President George W. Bush’s second secretary of Homeland Security.
Mostly agents just asked border violators for their names and then did a cursory background check before returning them to Mexico or releasing them into the United States. Sometimes they ran fingerprints, sometimes they didn’t. In June 1999, agents captured one of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives, a rapist and serial killer named Ángel Maturino Reséndiz, aka “The Railway Killer,” and unknowingly released him back into Mexico, whereupon Reséndiz promptly sneaked back into the United States and murdered four more people before being apprehended by Texas Rangers.
As the 9/11 Commission dryly noted in its report on the terrorist attacks, “In the decade before September 11, 2001, border security—encompassing travel, entry, and immigration—was not seen as a national security matter.”
That changed quickly after the 9/11 attacks.
Tom Ridge, the Pennsylvania governor soon installed as Bush’s homeland security czar, singled out airport and border security as top priorities.
He had good reason to seek improvement.
“Within the INS structure, they were the poor stepchild. That was how most of INS viewed them at every level,” recalls Robert Bonner, who was Bush’s commissioner of Customs and in 2003 became the first head of CBP. “They weren’t appreciated and weren’t viewed with respect, and that created this defensiveness and insularity within the Border Patrol.”
Besides, CBP simply didn’t have anywhere close to the manpower, system or resources needed to police the border adequately—never mind secure the detainees it did catch. Richard Falkenrath, Ridge’s policy adviser in the White House, recommended in December 2001 that the United States create a single unified border agency—but that proposal collapsed when nearly every Cabinet secretary involved vetoed it. As White House chief of staff Andy Card later told Bush, “Tom tried to sell his plan to them and the response was classic Washington: ‘Don’t take anything away from us, just give us more money.’”
But the death warrant for INS came soon enough, when word got out that the slow-moving bureaucracy had approved long-delayed visas for two of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi. No one evidently involved in the process noticed who the now-dead men were. Reading news of the visa approval over breakfast one day, Bush sputtered with rage. “I could barely get my coffee down,” he said.
It was stunningly bad mismanagement. INS was done.
The government’s entire homeland security apparatus, Bush decided, needed to be shaken up. “Maybe we should stop getting pecked to death like this,” Bush reportedly told Card, months after initially resisting such a major government reorganization. “Maybe it’s time to think big.”
INS was so marginalized that the following month, when Bush announced his support for breaking the agency apart, no one from the White House even bothered to tell the INS commissioner, James Ziglar, in advance.
INS was such a broken bureaucracy that it would be the single agency in the entire U.S. government to receive the ultimate “death penalty” after 9/11 in the wide-ranging bureaucratic reorganization that led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. INS was completely disbanded, its responsibilities removed from the Justice Department and its duties reassigned among three new DHS agencies: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) and Customs and Border Protection. CBP—and the newly created DHS—would be a reality in less than a year.
“Unfortunately, the United States has not been in complete control of its border for decades,” Bush would later say. “We have a responsibility to secure our borders. We take this responsibility seriously.”
***
CHAPTER II: BUILDING A FENCE
Creating CBP fell to Robert Bonner, a federal judge and former head of the Drug Enforcement Administration who had been confirmed as Bush’s pick to be commissioner of Customs just a week after 9/11. And Bonner knew that if he were going to succeed as CBP commissioner, he had to make an important decision quickly.
Weeks before the new agency officially launched, on March 1, 2003, he invited the Border Patrol’s 20 sector chiefs to Washington to discuss the transition. They all arrived in D.C. in full dress green uniforms, shoes polished, brass buttons gleaming. As Bonner walked into the room, everyone stood and snapped to attention.
The new commissioner began his remarks simply: “The Border Patrol will remain green.”
The Border Patrol: A Brief History (Cont.) 1954: The Border Patrol has roughly 1,000 agents, as public concern over illegal immigration leads to Operation Wetback, the agency’s first mass Mexican deportations, in which more than 1 million illegal immigrants are removed. 1983: Illegal immigration begins to rise dramatically along the U.S.-Mexico border, topping more than a million apprehensions annually from 1983 to 1987. 1993: Operation Hold the Line launches in El Paso, Texas. The manpower-intensive project is the first serious attempt to “secure” the border. It proves wildly popular, and is followed by the similar Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego a year later. 2001: The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks spur border security fears, especially as illegal immigration along the U.S. border spikes, peaking at 1.6 million migrants stopped in 2000. 2003: INS is dissolved in the creation of the new Department of Homeland Security, giving way to three new agencies: Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. 2005: The Border Patrol’s hiring surge begins, boosting the agent ranks from 9,200 to about 18,000 by the time President George W. Bush leaves office. 2006: Bush signs the Secure Fence Act, providing for hundreds of miles of border fencing. “Unfortunately, the United States has not been in complete control of its border for decades,” he says. 2009: President Barack Obama’s first nominee for CBP commissioner, Alan Bersin, never receives a Senate confirmation hearing after he fails to fill out tax forms for household employees, and instead is given a recess appointment in March 2010. 2011: Border Patrol apprehends just 328,000 illegal immigrants along the Mexican border, the lowest level in 40 years, which the Obama administration touts as a sign that the new security is deterring illegal crossings. 2014: In March, Gil Kerlikowske becomes the Obama administration’s first Senate-confirmed CBP commissioner, nearly 62 months into the administration. Top to bottom: California Farm Placement Service; Carlos Osorio/AP; KVIA-TV; David McNew/Getty Images; DHS; Tom Tingle/The Arizona Republic/AP; David Maung/AP; Alex Brandon/AP; Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images; Craig Rittle/AP
The room erupted in applause and cheers. “They’re proud of the green—they were very proud of that uniform,” Bonner recalls today. “They were concerned about losing that identity.”
CBP was meant to be, as officials said at the time, the “one face at the border,” combining three different border functions—Customs inspectors, Department of Agriculture inspectors and Border Patrol agents—into a single unified agency. But the Border Patrol wasn’t happy about becoming part of CBP. Its leaders felt it could stand on its own, like the Coast Guard or the Secret Service, and report directly to the DHS secretary. They didn’t appreciate being lumped in with what was known as “legacy Customs,” the Customs inspectors who made up what would now be called the Office of Field Operations.
Bonner’s decision to let the Border Patrol keep its green uniforms—others received a new blue CBP uniform—set an early tone that the Border Patrol could stand apart, but he defends it. “They would have walked through fire for me from that point forward,” he recalls. “I wasn’t going to destroy the organization. That was still a wise and sound decision.”
Even as he allowed the Border Patrol to keep the uniform, much of the rest of it needed to be remade. “The structure itself was dysfunctional,” Bonner told me. “There was simply no command structure. No one was accountable or responsible for the entire Border Patrol.”
The Border Patrol had long been divided into 20 sectors across the country, each reporting to a regional INS commissioner and leading to what Bonner says were 20 individual “fiefdoms” across the country. When Bonner took over, the Border Patrol had just 17 staff in its national headquarters. The chief of the Border Patrol was effectively a ceremonial position, and there wasn’t anyone to look at the big picture. “No one had ever asked the question: What resources did you need to control the border?” Bonner recalls. “You can’t determine your resource needs without a strategy.”
Bonner, working with Ridge and his 2005 successor, Chertoff, embarked on the nation’s first-ever serious border security discussion, mapping out sector by sector what was needed to secure the borderlands. He broke down the regional fiefdoms, uniting everyone into a structure reporting to a newly empowered chief of the Border Patrol. But the task was almost beyond imagining: The agency’s own studies concluded the Border Patrol did not have “operational control” over 97 percent of the border.
As Ridge told me, “There was clearly a need for more bodies—what the magic number was, I don’t know.”
As DHS secretary, he had initially laughed off the idea of dramatically growing the Border Patrol, labeling such dreams “fool’s gold.”
“It’s nice to say you’re going to have 10,000 more Border Patrol agents in five years, but what other part of Homeland Security do you want to take the money from?” he had told one interviewer. Then, he realized Congress didn’t view it as an either/or; members would appropriate money for everything. As Ridge remembers it, “People just wanted to give me unlimited amounts of money.”
The Border Patrol would get all those 10,000 agents—and a lot more.
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CHAPTER III: FIELDING AN ARMY
Freshly trained new agents began to flood Border Patrol stations in the Southwest so quickly during the second term of the Bush administration that some stations began to hold their daily musters in the parking lot—the only place large enough to gather everyone.
When Chertoff took over as secretary in 2005, his original goal had been to grow even more quickly—doubling the border force in just two years. Eventually a “compromise” pace of doubling in four years was settled on, but even that seemed disconcertingly rapid, boosting the agency’s budget by billions of dollars a year.
“From an integrity issue, you can’t grow a law enforcement agency that quickly,” Bonner says. There was plenty of evidence to prove the point: Police departments in Miami, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., had all been beset by systemic misconduct scandals after they had tried to grow their force rapidly in the 1980s and ’90s.
The plan was audacious: By the time the next president took office, the Border Patrol would grow from 9,200 agents in 2001 to some 18,000 agents, before capping off in the first Obama term at 21,000 agents. “We felt it was within the limits of what we could do,” Chertoff says now, “but it was the upper limit.”
“It wasn’t just the administration [driving the growth]. If President Bush asked for 100 agents, Congress would add 200,” recalls Richard Skinner, who was the first Senate-confirmed DHS inspector general. “You have to remember how scared everyone was. The mentality was we need more boots on the ground.”
The new Border Patrol growth plan was approved in 2005, as Bonner prepared to hand over the reins of CBP to a new commissioner, W. Ralph Basham, a former Secret Service agent who had led the federal government’s police academy in Georgia, then helped start the Transportation Security Agency and later became director of the Secret Service in 2003.
Basham knew that recruiting, training and deploying that many agents so quickly would be a “herculean” effort. “I was very concerned when I was asked to grow the Border Patrol over that period of time,” Basham says. “Normally, you’d want a chance to make a careful plan. You want to choose very carefully people who are put into a tough environment like that we had on the southwest border.”
But Congress and the Bush administration prized speed and quantity over quality. “Their view was, ‘We’re going to field a small army and make up for decades of neglect by previous administrations.’ Almost any body in the field was better than no body,” explains one DHS official.
“Would I as chief of the Border Patrol have liked to have more time to grow?” David Aguilar asks. “Absolutely. Any chief of police would tell you that you’d prefer to grow more slowly. We didn’t have that time.”
Problems were to be expected in such a hiring surge—and they were almost implicitly part of the plan. “They were severely understaffed and underfunded for too long,” says Jay Ahern, who rose to be Basham’s deputy commissioner and then was acting commissioner for the first year of the Obama administration. “When you have big numbers coming on board, you know you’re going to make some bad hires. That doesn’t mean for a second in my view that it was a mistake.”
The surge meant the agency had to search far and wide for qualified candidates, going so far as to spend $8.4 million sponsoring Kenny Wallace’s NASCAR car and painting his Chevrolet in the familiar green and white Border Patrol colors. The agency raised its recruiting age limit from 37 to 40, and, according to two people involved in the hiring process, regularly sent new agents through the academy and even out into the field before completing full background checks.
“At some point, it became more important to have people in seats than it was to have qualified people in the seats,” says James Wong, a now-retired senior CBP internal affairs official who helped oversee the background-check process. “Was I concerned about the quality of the people we were bringing on? Yes.”
“There was no doubt that that [growth] was a major concern,” says Skinner, then the DHS inspector general. “The growth was more than CBP was prepared to manage.”
Agents in the field pejoratively referred to the new hires as “No Trainee Left Behind,” and below chief Aguilar, who enthusiastically embraced the surge, some Border Patrol leaders were deeply concerned about what they were seeing in the field—agents who weren’t properly prepared or vetted for their new role. “The Border Patrol was never big on the huge hiring,” argues one former training officer. “We weren’t prepared. That’s never worked out for anyone.”
“The mentality was that we can do this extreme hiring and at the same time build out our management and training systems—which they didn’t do,” says Skinner, the DHS inspector general.
After decades of underfunding and being short-staffed, now the opposite problem took hold. “I had 50,000 employees, an $11 billion budget, but they still couldn’t throw enough money [at me],” Basham recalls. But many agents felt that the hiring surge took the agency far past what it could manage. “Money was just coming in—grow, grow, grow,” recalls a senior CBP official. “We didn’t want it all.”
By the middle of the hiring surge, some southwest sectors reported to the GAO that average agent field experience was down to 18 months—and falling. And whereas the agency aimed for an agent-to-supervisor ratio of 5 to 1, some stations reported ratios as high as 11 to 1. By the end of the Bush administration, more than half of the Border Patrol had been in the field for less than two years.
As Skinner says, “The supervisory capacity was exhausted. People were being promoted prematurely as supervisors or trainers with inadequate inexperience. I don’t think [the hiring] was done in a very strategic manner.”
But still, Chertoff argues today, what choice did they have? “Sure, every time you hire someone, you have a cause for potential concerns. But there’s an old law enforcement maxim: big cases, big problems; small cases, small problems; no cases, no problems,” he says. “We didn’t take a ‘no problems’ approach, which was doing nothing.”
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CHAPTER IV: ‘WHAT HAPPENS IN THE FIELD STAYS IN THE FIELD’
The corners cut during the hiring surge were becoming clear by the final months of the Bush administration. There was the Miami CBP officer who used his law enforcement status to bypass airport security and personally smuggle cocaine and heroin into Miami. There was the green-uniformed agent in Yuma, Arizona, who was caught smuggling 700 pounds of marijuana across the border in his green-and-white Border Patrol truck; the brand-new 26-year-old Border Patrol agent who joined a drug-smuggling operation to distribute more than 1,000 kilograms of marijuana in Del Rio, Texas; the 32-year-old Border Patrol agent whose wife would tip him off on which buses filled with illegal immigrants to let through his checkpoint on I-35 in Laredo, Texas. Some cases were more obvious than others, like the new Border Patrol agent who took an unusual interest in maps of the agency’s sensors along the border and was arrested just seven months into the job after he had sold smugglers those maps for $5,500.
In November 2007, CBP official Thomas Winkowski wrote an agencywide memo citing numerous incidents, or, as he called them, “disturbing events,” and saying that the leadership was concerned about the “increase in the number of employee arrests.” The memo, never made public but obtained by the Miami Herald, reminded officers and agents, “It is our responsibility to uphold the laws, not break the law.”
Although the allegations concerned just a fraction of the force, the work CBP did made it especially susceptible to corruption, and made that corruption uniquely damaging. “There’s a huge vulnerability there with employees who control the flow of goods and people on the border,” explains James Wong, the CBP internal affairs investigator. “You’ve got undocumented immigrants, contraband or even worse—a weapon of mass destruction.”
Which is why, acknowledges Basham, who oversaw the hiring surge as CBP commissioner, the border region is considered the “highest threat environment for government corruption.”
In fact, CBP was uncovering dozens of cases of criminal organizations like Mexican cartels and street gangs such as MS-13 infiltrating its ranks with new hires. “We made some mistakes,” Basham says today. “We found out later that we did, in fact, hire cartel members.”
Left: CBP agent Marcos Manzano Jr. was convicted of harboring illegal immigrants, including his drug-dealing father, after federal officials discovered a secret room beneath Manzano's house in San Diego. | John Gibbins/The San Diego Union-Tribune/Associated Press. Right: In 2010, CBP agents shot and killed a 15-year-old Mexican boy along the Rio Grande, alleging he had thrown rocks. | La Region Tamaulipas
What concerned Skinner, the DHS inspector general, was the possibility that he was hearing only about the most egregious misconduct. “We were getting more and more complaints, but our biggest concern was that there was a culture as to not report allegations to us,” Skinner says. “Out in the field, there was a culture to keep things to themselves. You’re familiar with ‘What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas?’ They had a ‘What happens in the field stays in the field.’”
Agents traditionally worked lonely patrols, with help far away and a strong tradition of frontier-style justice. The agency motto, “Honor first,” is a statement of both machismo and integrity, and its responsibilities require a mind-set far different from most law enforcement agencies. “Their mentality is everyone they encounter is a bad guy, which is totally different from other law enforcement,” Basham says.
“It’s a unique challenge—you encounter anything and everything a law enforcement [agency] can and would encounter,” says Aguilar, the former Border Patrol chief who joined the agency at age 22 after growing up in South Texas. “What most people don’t appreciate is that an agent has no idea what he or she is encountering before they’re in it.”
The Border Patrol: A Brief History (Cont.) 2005: The Border Patrol’s hiring surge begins, boosting the agent ranks from 9,200 to about 18,000 by the time President George W. Bush leaves office. 2006: Bush signs the Secure Fence Act, providing for hundreds of miles of border fencing. “Unfortunately, the United States has not been in complete control of its border for decades,” he says. 2009: President Barack Obama’s first nominee for CBP commissioner, Alan Bersin, never receives a Senate confirmation hearing after he fails to fill out tax forms for household employees, and instead is given a recess appointment in March 2010. 2011: Border Patrol apprehends just 328,000 illegal immigrants along the Mexican border, the lowest level in 40 years, which the Obama administration touts as a sign that the new security is deterring illegal crossings. 2014: In March, Gil Kerlikowske becomes the Obama administration’s first Senate-confirmed CBP commissioner, nearly 62 months into the administration. Top to bottom: Tom Tingle/The Arizona Republic/AP; David Maung/AP; Alex Brandon/AP; Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images; Craig Rittle/AP
Merging into CBP’s culture and management structure wasn’t something the agents in green did easily—or willingly. Even today, the Border Patrol’s distinct independence continues to show in ways big—the different uniforms—and small: Alone among CBP’s senior leadership, the head of the Border Patrol is known as a “chief,” whereas the heads of its other 13 units are known as assistant commissioners. As one DHS official says, “It’s an agency within an agency—there’s a whole war within the war.”
The insular culture certainly wasn’t prepared for the massive influx of new agents during the Bush years, and as those agents matured in the field, both corruption and excessive force complaints spiked.
Both parts of CBP also struggled with general misconduct arrests. There were 2,170 reported incidents of arrests for acts of misconduct, such as domestic violence or driving under the influence, from 2005 through 2012—that’s nearly one CBP officer or agent arrested for misconduct every single day for seven years.
As the Obama administration arrived in Washington in January 2009, the need for stronger leadership and management at CBP couldn’t have been clearer.
But things at CBP were actually about to get much, much worse.
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CHAPTER V: THE FBI SOUNDS THE ALARM
President Obama’s pick for DHS secretary, Janet Napolitano, seemed on paper the perfect person to oversee the border. The feisty Arizona governor had been a tenacious federal prosecutor and a strong-willed border-state leader, and she immediately brought onto her staff a “border czar,” a former U.S. attorney from San Diego, Alan Bersin, who by the fall would be the administration’s pick to head CBP.
But border security was always a back-burner issue for Obama and his team until this year’s crisis of Central American kids at the border. For much of his first term, in fact, CBP was back to stressing its role as facilitator of interstate commerce—not blocker of illegal migration. “We emphasized and worked to improve the flow through the border of legal travel and trade,” Napolitano said when we spoke.
As far as it went, the administration’s border security plan settled into two major initiatives: Continue the investments in the Bush-era border security strategy while building out DHS’ capability to deport illegal immigrants already inside the country. Under Obama, in fact, DHS deported more illegal immigrants than ever before—as many as 400,000 a year.
“The presence of so many illegal immigrants make a mockery of all those who are trying to immigrate legally,” the president said in one 2011 speech. Just days earlier, Napolitano had bragged in a congressional hearing that the administration had fielded “the most comprehensive and dedicated effort to strengthen border security that our country has ever deployed.” The statement was technically true, but it masked systemic problems inside CBP that went unaddressed year after year.
One of the biggest challenges was a long-running dispute over who actually could investigate misconduct. It was an issue that DHS didn’t like to talk about publicly, but the bureaucratic turf war effectively paralyzed CBP’s ability to address rising misconduct concerns. To outsiders, DHS insisted everything was just fine. On Aug. 1, 2012, the acting DHS inspector general, Charles Edwards, told Rep. Darrell Issa’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, “There is absolutely no turf battles [sic] between OIG, CBP or ICE or the Bureau.”
Except that wasn’t true at all.
Edwards’ predecessor, Richard Skinner, who retired in 2011, had been fighting with CBP and the FBI for years over internal affairs investigations. “By the time I left, our relationship with CBP was dismal,” he told me.
“There was more than tension and friction,” Bersin, Napolitano’s hand-picked choice for CBP commissioner, testified at one point. “There was outright confrontation.”
Even as Edwards promised Congress that everything was hunky-dory, that same summer, Ronald Hosko took over as assistant director of the FBI’s criminal division. As head of all the criminal investigations across the nation in 2012, Hosko had a lot on his plate—street gangs like MS-13, narcotics smuggling, financial fraudsters, kidnappings, organized crime.
But he could see from the windows on the seventh floor of the Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue what he considered just about the nation’s biggest criminal threat: It was another government agency, just down the road, in the Ronald Reagan Building.
In the summer and fall of 2012, Hosko attended a series of meetings at CBP headquarters that left him stunned. CBP officials, just coming off the huge hiring surge that had doubled the size of the Border Patrol and increased Customs officers by thousands, had grave concerns about the people that they had hired.
Hosko heard senior CBP officials say at the meetings that they believed roughly 10 percent of the agency’s workforce had integrity problems, but he was even more stunned when they batted around a range of numbers, going as high at one point as 20 percent, of those who might deserve to be removed from the force.
“That’s a shocking number and chilling. If I have the senior leaders of an organization like CBP—with 40,000 uniforms and guns—saying 20 percent, that’s shocking,” Hosko told me. “Let’s say that’s a gross exaggeration. Let’s cut that in half. Let’s say it’s just 5 percent. That’s still thousands of people.” (Asked about Hosko’s numbers, CBP officials denied that the force had such systemic problems but refused to confirm whether the meetings he cited had taken place.)
The roots of the meetings that so upset Hosko lay in the tiny, but important, difference between being an “agent” and being a “special agent.” The title of “special agent” in the federal government is restricted to those who hold the job classification of GS-1811, which grants them both arrest and investigative powers.
In many ways, the difference between the two is CBP’s original sin—a seemingly minor technical distinction, made in the harried heat of the DHS creation a decade ago—that would allow hundreds of cases of corruption in CBP’s Office of Field Operations and use-of-force abuses in the Border Patrol to fester for years.
The problem was that no one at CBP received what’s known as “1811 authority.”
When DHS was set up, ICE was given exclusive “1811 authority” to conduct investigations in the border region; CBP was only given so-called “1801 authority,” a lesser classification that allowed Border Patrol agents and Customs officers to make arrests and enforce federal law—but not investigate. They could be cops but not detectives.
That didn’t particularly matter in the daily performance of CBP’s duties—the borders were patrolled, the ports of entry watched—except that CBP was legally prohibited from policing its own workforce.
During his tenure, CBP Commissioner Basham had tried to start up a robust internal affairs department, led by James Tomsheck, a former Secret Service official Basham had recruited from his days leading that agency. But the members of Tomsheck’s internal affairs unit were “1801s.” Lacking that “1811 authority,” CBP officials had to rely on DHS to investigate their own agency’s problems—assuming DHS had time, manpower or money to do so.
The 1811 vs. 1801 authority is a technicality about which every commissioner since CBP’s creation has complained, all to no avail. “Bonner, Basham, me—we were 100 percent in lockstep on this one,” says Jay Ahern, who took over as acting commissioner when Basham left in 2009 and served through most of the Obama administration’s first year. “It was unconscionable that we didn’t have a robust, fully functioning internal affairs effort that could report directly to the commissioner. It’s a problem to this day. It’s still a bad, bad operational decision.”
By the end of the first year of the Obama administration, DHS ordered Tomsheck’s internal affairs office to cease investigating corruption allegations within CBP. Tomsheck turned to the FBI for investigative help, but later, as the turf battle deepened, Edwards and the DHS inspector general’s office cut off all DHS cooperation with the FBI’s long-running Border Corruption Task Forces. As Hosko recalls, “They said, ‘You can’t share bilaterally with the FBI.’ That has a significant chilling effect on any relationship that’s not beneficial to either agency or to citizens of the U.S.”
Hosko took the issue to the FBI leadership, as well as to senior leaders at the Justice Department, who in turn repeatedly raised corruption warnings and the lack of cooperation with Secretary Napolitano’s office at DHS over the course of 2012 and 2013, to no avail. Those high-level warnings to DHS, including at least one delivered directly to DHS Deputy Secretary Jane Holl Lute, were confirmed by three different Justice and FBI officials in addition to Hosko.
“It was one of the highest-priority challenges that happened when I was assistant director,” Hosko says. “We were unable to move DHS forward at all.”
It’s not at all clear what happened to the FBI’s repeated warnings inside DHS. Napolitano says that her team became aware of corruption challenges at CBP when she came into office but that she doesn’t recall any specific warnings in subsequent years: “Certainly, as we were taking the reins, that was an issue of concern. It’s always an issue of concern with large law enforcement agencies that have grown quickly.”
Unable to make headway with DHS directly, Hosko and FBI leaders took the matter into their own hands.
“We told not only the entire leadership of the FBI and DOJ, but we engaged extensively with our SACs to say we don’t have enough intelligence on border corruption,” Hosko says, referring to the heads of the FBI’s 56 national field offices.
Special instructions, confirmed by other FBI officials, went out to the FBI’s field offices in the fall of 2012 to pay extra attention to DHS-related border corruption.
“I was surprised by not just inertia, but forced inertia,” Hosko told me. “CBP knew they had these holes and nothing was getting done.”
But Napolitano’s staff, for their part, felt this was as much a story about turf as it was about government corruption. “Just because DHS didn’t use to exist, this all used to be [the FBI’s]. Now they’re preventing DHS from maturing into its own and using its own growing capabilities and levers,” a former DHS official told me. The fight, he says, sums up “a lot of the goofiness of this town.”
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CHAPTER VI: SMOKING GUNS
In the early days of the Border Patrol’s post-9/11 expansion, violence at the border was seen as a good thing. Agents getting attacked meant that the agents were making progress securing the border. Or at least that’s how the bureaucratic logic of it went.
As former chief Aguilar says, “It was boots on the ground, birds in the air and boats on the water. We took back parts of the border that had been owned by the cartels, where they’d operated with impunity.”
The Revolving Door | Since its creation in 2003, Customs and Border Protection has cycled through seven confirmed and acting commissioners, five of them in the Obama era. From top left: Robert Bonner, W. Ralph Basham, Jay Ahern, Alan Bersin, David Aguilar, Tom Winkowski and Gil Kerlikowske. | Matt York/AP; Jacquelyn Martin/AP; Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP; Eric Gay/AP; Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images; Dennis Poroy/AP; Alex Wong/Getty Images
As new infrastructure went in, including more than 600 miles of border fencing, new technology came online, and as thousands of new agents arrived on the scene, they came into much more regular contact with smugglers—contact that led to more violence.
In 2004, there were 374 assaults on agents; by the following year, that number roughly doubled, and by 2007, there were a thousand assaults on agents annually, a rate that held steady for the next three years.
Back in 2006, Secretary Chertoff bragged about how, as the Border Patrol grew, “We’re starting to really hurt” the bad guys and organized criminal groups that once operated with near-impunity along the border. Chertoff’s strategy—and the strategy communicated to agents out in the field—was clear: Fight back. This was the U.S. border, and the U.S. would win. “If they think they’re going to back us down or chase us away, the answer to that is no,” Chertoff said in 2006. “Our Border Patrol is properly trained. They have rules of engagement. They are entitled to defend themselves. They will defend themselves.”
More recently, though, the border violence has led to a new set of troubling questions: hundreds of “excessive force” complaints against the Border Patrol that the agency has done almost nothing to address. Between 2007 and 2012, according to DHS, approximately 1,700 allegations of excessive force have been leveled against CBP, although exact numbers are hard to come by because the agency’s record-keeping is so poor.
And, in more than 130 shooting incidents, dozens of people have been killed. Often, the only set of facts that witnesses and the Border Patrol can agree upon at the end of an incident is that a person is dead. Many of the Border Patrol’s most controversial shootings actually straddle the border; at least six of the people killed in recent years by the Border Patrol have been in Mexico at the time.
In 2012, in an incident caught on a home video camera, Mexican citizen Guillermo Arévalo Pedraza was in a public park in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, with his wife and daughters when, according to the Border Patrol, someone in the park began throwing rocks at a passing patrol boat in the Rio Grande. Agents in the boat opened fire with heavy weapons, killing Arévalo, who does not appear to have been involved in rock-throwing.
However, Arévalo’s death is not even the best-known incident in Mexico: In another video from June 2010, watched more than 1.6 million times on YouTube, Border Patrol agent Jesus Mesa Jr. fires across the concrete bed of the Rio Grande between El Paso and Juárez, killing a 15-year-old boy. The agent said later that he was surrounded by rock-throwers, but the video contradicts that story.
That all of these instances involved rock-throwing isn’t coincidental: So-called “rockings” are often cited as the cause of Border Patrol shootings, and they’re one of the most controversial aspects of the Border Patrol’s use of force. According to a March CBP memo, agents on the southern border have been “rocked” more than 1,713 times since 2010, though even that statistic is vague.
While being a Border Patrol agent is undoubtedly dangerous and even deadly, “rockings,” however chronic, aren’t the main reason. Nearly two dozen CBP officers died in the line of duty between 2006 and 2014; most of those deaths came during training accidents or in motor vehicle accidents. At least four agents were killed during hostile encounters at the border; most famously, Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was killed in a 2010 gunfight on the Arizona border with suspected drug traffickers who used weapons linked to the ATF’s Fast and Furious program.
No agent has been killed in a “rocking” incident, though the Border Patrol has shot and killed at least eight people in response to rock-throwing. As Wong, the CBP internal affairs investigator, says, “I know rocks can be dangerous—bottles, rocks, anything thrown can hurt you when it hits you—but there were a number of people shot in the back. That caused a concern.”
As use-of-force questions began to surface in 2010 and 2011, Congress pressured the agency to review its procedures, resulting in the Border Patrol asking the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington law enforcement think tank, to study its policies. PERF’s secret internal report—made public a year later by the Los Angeles Times—examined 67 recent instances of the Border Patrol’s use of deadly force. Its conclusion was unambiguous: “Too many cases do not appear to meet the test of objective reasonableness with regard to the use of deadly force.” It determined that agents were actively stepping into the path of oncoming vehicles, “creating justification for the use of deadly force.” PERF said the Border Patrol’s use-of-force policies were far outside the mainstream of U.S. law enforcement. “It is clear that agents are unnecessarily putting themselves in positions that expose them to higher risk,” the report stated.
CBP fought releasing the report, which was issued in 2013, for a year, refusing even to provide Congress with more than a summary. Border Patrol Chief Michael Fisher said at the time that the agency would not change its rules of engagement as the PERF report recommended. Although policies were not changed, Napolitano acknowledges now that the report was worrisome: “I thought we needed to review the policies and ensure that there was ongoing training with the agents in the field,” she told me. “I wasn’t confident that everything that needed to be done was being done.”
As another DHS official who has worked closely with the Border Patrol says, “They developed a system where ‘If you throw rocks at us, we will shoot at you.’” In 2012, the most recent year for which statistics are available, agents opened fire in 22 out of 185 recorded “rockings.”
Finally, after the PERF report was leaked earlier this year, the new secretary of DHS, Jeh Johnson, and Fisher said the agency would change its policies to encourage agents to retreat or take cover, rather than returning fire, and that it would prohibit agents from moving into the path of a fleeing vehicle.
More broadly, though, many of the fatal shootings by the Border Patrol come with questions attached. The agency seems not to investigate shooting incidents consistently—even those that appear to violate CBP’s use-of-force guidelines. The PERF report found a “lack of diligence” in follow-up. Tomsheck, who served for eight years as CBP’s head of internal affairs, says he believes at least seven of the shootings are “suspect.” Another DHS official says, “There were definitely some bad shoots.”
An Arizona Republic investigation last year that examined some 1,600 CBP use-of-force engagements found that in at least nine of the 24 deadly killings since 2010, witnesses or other evidence contradicted the agents’ account of the incident. It also uncovered at least four people who died in encounters with the Border Patrol that the agency’s records didn’t include.
But there don’t appear to be any consequences for agents who violate the use-of-force policy. Since the hiring surge started, the Border Patrol has never publicly disclosed disciplining an agent involved in a shooting.
In recent years, only a single agent has faced a criminal trial for a shooting incident. But that case, in 2008, was dismissed after a mistrial, and the agent kept his job with the Border Patrol. The U.S. government paid $850,000 to settle a wrongful death lawsuit brought by the dead man’s family—one of multiple lawsuits against the government over border patrol shootings in which it has refused to admit wrongdoing.
“Not a single Border Patrol agent for the last eight years has been disciplined for excessive use of force. With a workforce that large, that’s amazing,” Wong says. “You go pull the stats on any medium-size municipal police force, pull the stats on the NYPD. At any given time, they’ll have all sorts of excessive force investigations.”
***
It took the Obama administration more than five years to install a Senate confirmed commissioner at CBP. | Charles Dharapak/AP
CHAPTER VII: OBAMA’S NOT-SO-BENIGN NEGLECT
President Obama has repeatedly celebrated CBP’s success at securing the border. “During my first term, we took steps to try and patch up some of the worst cracks in the system,” he said during a speech last year in Las Vegas. “We strengthened security at the borders so that we could finally stem the tide of illegal immigrants. We put more boots on the ground on the southern border than at any time in our history.”
On the White House website, the administration claims that “President Obama has doubled the number of Border Patrol agents since 2004,” which isn’t remotely true—nearly all of the agency’s growth came during the Bush years, though Obama has added a few thousand agents since 2009. Mostly the Obama administration has left CBP running on autopilot.
In fact, the Obama administration would go more than five years before a Senate-confirmed CBP commissioner was finally installed, a period during which four different men passed through the revolving door of the director’s suite. Aguilar served twice as “acting commissioner,” once for so long that he had to give up the title and return to being “deputy commissioner,” even though his duties remained the same; Congress has a limit on how long someone can be “acting.”
Aguilar was supposed to run the agency for a bit as it waited for a permanent leader.
It would have to wait a long time.
Obama’s first nominee for commissioner was Bersin—a Rhodes scholar buddy of Bill Clinton who had become a powerful border politics figure as the U.S. attorney in San Diego during the Clinton administration. Bersin had been named Napolitano’s “border czar” at DHS when she took over, and was nominated for the vacant CBP commissioner post in September 2009.
The Militarized Border | The $100 billion poured into U.S. border enforcement since 9/11 has spawned a newly militarized Border Patrol, equipped with ground-scanning technology, surveillance blimps, patrol boats and Predator drones. | Kirsten Luce
Bersin, though, got hung up quickly in the confirmation process, tagged with what DHS officials called “the Geithner penalty,” the extra-strict vetting that the Senate Finance Committee gave every nominee after discovering tax problems by Treasury Secretary nominee Timothy Geithner. Bersin had missing or incomplete paperwork for all 10 of the people who had served as nannies or household help for his family between 1993 and 2010. It was an unforgivable mistake for Sen. Max Baucus, then chair of the Finance Committee: “As the person responsible for securing our nation’s borders, your failure to follow the law in this matter is unacceptable,” Baucus scolded Bersin.
Bersin’s nomination never even got a hearing; instead, Obama gave him a recess appointment six months later, which meant that Bersin was forced out at the end of the following calendar year. At the conclusion of his recess appointment, Bersin returned to DHS in the same position he had held before, assistant DHS secretary for international affairs and “border czar.” (Bersin, still at DHS, did not respond to interview requests.)
“The administration and Napolitano were all collectively supportive of Bersin,” says a DHS official involved in that confirmation process. “There’s something broken about our system—everyone can make a mistake.”
But Baucus disagreed—vehemently—and exercised his authority to ensure that Bersin was forced out when his appointment expired. After Bersin returned to DHS headquarters on Nebraska Avenue, the CBP commissioner post sat vacant for 26 months, with Aguilar again serving as the “acting” until he retired in early 2013.
DHS officials say that the post simply wasn’t a top priority for the White House to fill, in part because the administration didn’t want to tangle again with the Senate Finance Committee, where, between the sour economy, Obamacare and numerous budget battles, the White House felt it had fought all the fights it could. (It’s an odd legacy of the old Customs Service that the CBP commissioner is confirmed by the Finance Committee and not the Homeland Security Committee.)
But mostly it reflected a sense from the top that Aguilar was doing fine with an agency whose spiraling problems had not commanded top-level administration attention. “CBP’s leadership at the time was quite mature—it had leaders who had been there for decades,” says the DHS official. “The agency was being well run at the time.”
Still, argues former DHS Secretary Chertoff, “When you’re making strategic decisions, you’re constrained by your ability to implement big change. There’s an impermanence, and it’s demoralizing for the workforce.”
Indeed, CBP’s problems were becoming so bad they couldn’t entirely be ignored. In Obama’s first year, CBP and DHS leadership even ordered the agency to change its definition of “corruption” to downplay the number of total incidents. Instead, according to internal affairs official Wong, the agency began to differentiate between “mission-compromising corruption”—bribery, narcotics-smuggling or human-smuggling allegations—and “non-mission-compromising corruption,” a “lesser” category of cases that included things like employees’ sexually assaulting detainees or workplace theft. Only the “mission-compromising” problems, the agency now decreed, would be reported to Congress. (Even rape and attempted murder like that of Manzanares, in other words, wouldn’t have to be disclosed.) The distinction helped them wipe nearly a third of the corruption cases out of statistics.
Skinner, the original DHS inspector general, says that before he retired in early 2011, he raised the issue of troubling CBP corruption trends in department budget meetings, as well as directly with the deputy secretary multiple times, and even once used a meeting with Napolitano to raise the issue with her. “I expressed my frustration with her, [but there’s] nothing that I can point to that improved,” Skinner says.
Partly DHS’ reluctance to spend more on internal investigations was a practical concern: The free-flowing homeland security money that had tripled the border security budget under the Bush administration ran into the new budget realities of the Obama administration. There was just less to go around. Napolitano says she was constrained in directing any additional resources toward internal investigations. “I never had a director or commissioner ever come into my office not asking for more resources. We just weren’t going to get them. From a budget standpoint, it was an extraordinarily difficult time.”
But partly CBP’s problems just seemed to get lost in the DHS bureaucracy, despite hollering from the FBI, from the Justice Department, from CBP’s internal affairs and the DHS inspector general.
“It just never became a priority,” Skinner says.
No doubt that’s at least in part because the agency itself was not a priority: It was only after Obama had been reelected in 2012 and Aguilar approached retirement that the administration even began to look for a permanent, confirmable head for the agency.
In January 2013, Obama counselor Pete Rouse approached Gil Kerlikowske, then serving as the White House drug czar, to ask if he had any recommendations for CBP commissioner. Kerlikowske raised his hand. “I’d had plenty of White House time and policy time,” he says. “I was anxious to get back to operations.”
Yet it still took 14 months until Kerlikowske, who was officially nominated in August 2013 and confirmed in March 2014, took the job. During most of that time, after Aguilar’s retirement, Deputy CBP Commissioner Thomas Winkowski took over CBP as yet another interim leader.
Kerlikowske sailed through the Senate confirmation process, and he was installed in the director’s suite just days before Agent Manzanares’ rampage in McAllen, Texas. During Kerlikowske’s confirmation hearing, not a single senator even asked about corruption—at the time, and to this day, the FBI’s single biggest criminal priority along the border.
***
As a former police chief, Kerlikowske knew exactly what he was stepping into, problem-wise, at CBP. “Law enforcement always regrets hiring quickly,” he says, sitting at the conference table in the spacious wood-paneled commissioner’s suite. The horror stories are legendary in police circles: the infamous Miami police hiring surge in 1980; the notorious Washington Metropolitan Police class of 1989, when Mayor Marion Barry, under pressure from Congress, tried to increase the police force by nearly half in a single year. Both agencies faced widespread corruption problems in the years after.
The New Green? | CBP Commissioner Gil Kerlikowske has promised "a continuous review of our responsibility to only use force when it is necessary to protect people." | Gabe Hernandez/The Monitor/AP
“You try to put all the checks and balances in place,” the 64-year-old Kerlikowske says today. “Unfortunately, that didn’t happen during the last expansion [at CBP].”
Kerlikowske is a police department turnaround artist; he’s previously stepped into roles in cities like Seattle and Buffalo that were struggling with morale problems and use-of-force complaints.
In Seattle, taking over following the 1999 World Trade Organization riots, he pushed officers to use nonlethal weaponry like Tasers, and in 2003, the city recorded its first year in 15 without an officer-involved fatal shooting. Kerlikowske is an advocate of body-mounted cameras for officers and has started a small field test to see if the cameras can work in the environments where the Border Patrol operates. “The Border Patrol is under constant scrutiny and criticism,” he says. “I’d really like to see it past that and have it be more open and responsive to complaints.”
He has also forcefully confronted corruption in previous agencies. In Seattle, when one police officer was arrested for robbing drug dealers, Kerlikowske held up the officer’s badge at a press conference: “He has forever tarnished this badge,” Kerlikowske told reporters. “It will never again be worn, and, in fact, it will be destroyed.”
Now, in what he says was an attempt to start with a fresh slate and try to make headway on the intractable turf battles, he replaced Tomsheck, CBP’s longtime internal affairs head, with a new agent on loan from the FBI. That agent has been tasked with reviewing each of the 67 shootings studied in the controversial PERF report—and has been given some of the long-sought authorities to investigate wrongdoing within CBP.
Kerlikowske has even more work cut out for himself: The new federal budget that started October 1 contains $225 million to hire 2,000 additional CBP officers, the largest single increase Congress has ever passed.
The new hiring surge comes as Kerlikowske is still trying to reckon with the last one. On May 30, he finally released the Border Patrol’s use-of-force handbook and promised it was “the beginning of a continuous review of our responsibility to only use force when it is necessary to protect people.”
Just hours later, Border Patrol agents in Arizona chasing a suspected narcotics smuggler killed Jose Luis Arambula, a U.S. citizen, while he was fleeing on foot after crashing his vehicle.
He was shot fatally in the back of the head.
He was unarmed. ||||| U.S. Customs officials are looking for a few good border patrol agents, but critics say the hiring blitz that begins today won't help if policies in Washington continue to handcuff the agency's efforts.
As American soldiers help combat the Ebola virus in Africa, border patrol agents stateside are struggling to maintain enough manpower to stop the influx of undocumented immigrants from Mexico, Central America and elsewhere. Beginning Wednesday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials are seeking to hire roughly 1,600 border patrol agents through 2015 to account for “attrition and normal hiring needs,” CBP officials told FoxNews.com.
“Your mind is sharp,” a pitch on CBP.gov reads. “Your body is tough. Your soul is driven. You're built for the border.”
Qualified candidates can earn between $39,012 to $63,894 for preventing terrorists and their weapons from entering the country, as well as to apprehend those found in violation of immigration laws some critics say aren’t being properly enforced.
Applicants must be under age 37 (barring certain exemptions) and be fluent in Spanish, or be able to learn the language during an additional 40-day training period. Other requirements include a valid state driver’s license, a fitness test and medical review, a thorough background check and a drug test. Candidates may also be subject to a polygraph examination.
"A third step would be to actually allow us to enforce the laws we were hired to do and there doesn’t seem to be the political will to do that." - Shawn Moran, vice president, National Border Patrol Counsel
New hires would then be asked to complete a 58-day paid basic academy training at the Border Patrol Academy in Artesia, N.M.
“Training includes such topics as immigration and nationality laws, physical training and marksmanship,” the listing continues. “Border Patrol agents must be willing to work overtime and shift work under arduous conditions, be proficient in the use of and carry firearms.”
While interest to join the other 20,863 current border patrol agents is expected to be high, the hires won’t likely translate to a safer, more secure border, particularly in the Southwest, according to immigration experts and the National Border Patrol Counsel.
“I don’t think you’re going to see a significant impact,” NBPC vice president Shawn Moran told FoxNews.com. “If this is just an attrition class, with a few hundred or even a few thousand new agents, we’ll just get back to the 21,370 [agents] we’re authorized for. I don’t expect to see Earth-shattering changes in terms of our effectiveness.”
Moran, whose agency represents roughly 17,000 Border Patrol agents, said he expects to see fierce competition among those candidates regardless of how effective they’ll inevitably be in the fight against illegal immigration. Having between 300 and 400 qualified candidates per vacant job was not unheard of during the 1990s, he said.
“Our position has been that we need better training and we need full manpower,” Moran said. “So this is a step in that direction, but they will still be subject to the same budgetary cuts. A third step would be to actually allow us to enforce the laws we were hired to do and there doesn’t seem to be the political will to do that.”
Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute, a Washington-based think tank, said he predicts no shortage of applicants — but the quality of those job seekers may be an issue.
“[CBP] has increased its size six-fold since 1989 and has doubled since 2004, so they’re pretty good at expanding rapidly and finding applicants to take these jobs,” Nowrasteh told FoxNews.com. “They might have to adjust their standards for hiring and there’s some evidence in recent years that there’s more complaints about border agents and more reviews of potential corruption, so a cost of rapidly expanding could be a lower-quality Border Patrol.”
Nowrasteh said he expects to see little impact along the border with the new hires once in place.
“The flow of illegal immigrants into the United States is more determined by our economic growth rates and job market opportunities for immigrants than it is by security or the number of Border Patrol agents,” he said. “We’re already beyond the point where additional agents will have an impact — they can only do so much to regulate and control this border without allowing more legal immigration.”
The Obama administration, Nowrasteh said, has clearly focused more on border security rather than internal enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws in recent years.
“From 2009 to 2012, the president massively increased interior immigration enforcement,” he said. “But since 2012, interior immigration enforcement decreased and more emphasis has been placed on border enforcement. And this is just a continuation of that strategy.”
Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, also questioned whether the hires represent the “best bang for our buck” in terms of overall federal law enforcement precedence.
“The Border Patrol’s sister agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has a shortfall of officers and interior enforcement has declined much more than border enforcement has,” Vaughan said. “It seems, I would argue, the priority should be bolstering interior enforcement because that would help American communities that are struggling with the fiscal and criminal problems resulting from illegal immigration.”
A report released Wednesday by the Center for Immigration Studies revealed that interior enforcement activity in the United States is suffering from declining arrests and deportations, and with tens of thousands of criminal illegals being released back to American communities.
Total deportations credited to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the majority of which were illegal immigrants arrested by the Border Patrol and CBP officers at the ports of entry, declined 15 percent from 2013 to 2014, according to a review of ICE records by the group.
The report also found that the number of aliens who have received a final order of removal, but remain in the United States, has risen to nearly 900,000. Nearly 160,000 of these are convicted criminals who were released by ICE and are currently at large. ||||| Page 1 of 1
MISSION — A Border Patrol agent is suspected of assaulting three females who are unauthorized immigrants, kidnapping one of them, then killing himself, authorities said.
The agent was found dead in his apartment in Mission early Thursday, according to a statement from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Several sources identified the agent as Esteban Manzanares.
The string of events started Wednesday when CBP found an injured woman who told officials that she and two teen-age girls with her had been assaulted by the same man, later determined to be a Border Patrol agent.
Officials found one of the girls, who had been stabbed, nearby and began a search for the second one.
Before dawn Thursday, authorities went to the agent's apartment where they found him dead and the second girl, who had been assaulted.
The victims are believed to be Honduran, including a mother, her 14-year-old daughter and another girl, according to a law enforcement official who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak.
Two of the victims were allegedly raped and left for dead near the tiny border community of Abram, the official said.
The third victim was kidnapped and held captive in the agent's apartment while he finished his shift, the official said. Upon returning to his home, the agent allegedly raped the girl before taking his own life, according to the law enforcement official.
The Border Patrol agent is thought to have transferred from Falfurrias to McAllen about two years ago, the law enforcement official said.
The McAllen branch of the FBI's San Antonio office is heading up the investigation, with assistance from Homeland Security Investigations, Hidalgo County Sheriff's Department and the Mission Police Department.
“CBP takes this incident extremely seriously and we are fully cooperating with the investigation,” the agency said in a statement. “CBP holds its employees to the highest ethical standards. We stand ready to take any additional action necessary, pending the investigation.”
This is the third time in recent months that a border agent was suspected of criminal activity.
A U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer who worked at the international bridge in Hidalgo was charged with attempted murder in February after police said he shot his girlfriend's brother. Randal Wayne Sutterfield had been on leave from his job.
In January, Adam S. Garibay, a Border Patrol agent since 2007, was accused of assaulting his wife in Nueces County, then gunning down his wife's lover in Medina County. He is charged with murder.
[email protected] | – The US Border Patrol has ballooned into a massive agency where employee misconduct is reportedly rampant, but figuring out who to blame—or how to fix it—is no easy job, Politico reports via Vox. Driven by security fears after 9/11, federal officials threw billions of dollars at Border Patrol and expanded its workforce from about 9,200 to 46,000 agents, some of whom, officials admit, were hired a little too quickly. "From an integrity issue, you can’t grow a law enforcement agency that quickly," says Robert Bonner, the first head of the newly minted Customs and Border Protection in 2003. Before President Obama took office, CBP had agents (some reportedly cartel members) accused of smuggling drugs or letting in illegals, while 2,170 employees were arrested on various charges between 2005 and 2012—nearly one per day. Under Obama, a bureaucratic turf war developed as the Department of Homeland Security (which oversees CBP) apparently rebuffed FBI attempts to prosecute border agents. Homeland Security didn't empower CBP with its own fully functioning internal affairs office, so allegations ranging from DUIs to officer shootings went ignored. "Not a single Border Patrol agent for the last eight years has been disciplined for excessive use of force," says a retired CBP official. "With a workforce that large, that's amazing." So Gil Kerlikowske, CBP's first Senate-confirmed leader in five years, has a lot on his plate—including an extra $225 million to hire 2,000 more officers. "They’re pretty good at expanding rapidly and finding applicants to take these jobs," an analyst tells Fox News, but "a cost of rapidly expanding could be a lower-quality Border Patrol." |
Michael Lohan’s ex-fiancée has sought a restraining order against him after the alleged brutal showdown at their Southampton home on Monday, RadarOnline.com has confirmed exclusively.
Kate Major, former magazine reporter and one-time Jon Gosselin gal pal, filed for an order of protection against Lindsay Lohan’s father after she told police he shoved her and kicked her in the face during an argument.
Lindsay Lohan — See The New Mug Shot
The order, which was granted, prevents Lohan from contacting his one-time lover or going anywhere near her.
He has not yet been served the papers relating to the order because he is in Los Angeles, attempting to visit his estranged daughter, who has said she does not want to see him.
PHOTOS: Lindsay Lohan’s Family Photo Album
Major confirmed to RadarOnline.com that she filed a temporary restraining order at a New York courthouse on Wednesday morning.
But she did not want to elaborate on more details.
PHOTOS: Lindsay Lohan Arrives At Lynwood Correctional Facility
Major has claimed she has photographic evidence and hospital records supporting her version of events after the alleged brawl, although Lohan has insisted the confrontation was never physical.
Facing yet more legal woes, Lohan turned on Major and threatened retribution against his ex-fiancée the only was he knows how — with audio tapes.
The Lohan patriarch said he planned to release recordings detailing Major’s “legal and personal issues”.
PHOTOS: Lindsay Lohan Arriving At Court On Tuesday
“Because of Kate’s behavior and false claims, I am going to release a statement and only the first of many pictures of Kate (obliterated) as well as the first of multiple recordings,” Lohan told RadarOnline.com.
As their romance hits the skids, sources close to Major told RadarOnline.com the couple’s wedding, expected to take place in the fall in New York, is officially over.
“Kate voluntarily returned the engagement ring to Michael before he left for L.A. and there are absolutely no plans for a wedding,” said one friend.
Earlier on Wednesday, Lohan declared to RadarOnline.com: “Why wouldn’t it still be on?”
PHOTOS: Celebs Who Have Served Time In The Slammer
In the wake of the bitter split, the pair are trading a flurry of accusations.
Lohan declared Major, in a a fit of jealous rage, accused him of checking into a Los Angeles hotel with mystery woman — a claim Lohan has denied.
On the other hand, Major’s camp is suggesting Lohan, a sobriety campaigner and the chief critic of Lindsay’s battles with booze and drugs, has fallen of the wagon.
“He tried to hide the drinking,” said one of Major’s pals.
Lohan also suggested Major had drained their bank account of all of his funds. She, too, has rejected that allegation. ||||| Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
Michael Lohan may be accused of physically abusing his fiancée Kate Major but he thinks their wedding is still on. Meanwhile, Kate has gone to the police and a friend told RadarOnline.com that the former magazine reporter is scared to death of Lohan.
PHOTOS: Lindsay Lohan’s Family Photo Album
The unlikely Lohan-Major romance imploded Wednesday in the only way possible– a controversial, headline-making storm of controversy.
Lohan is accused of physically abusing Major, who is said to have photos of her injuries. But Michael told RadarOnline.com: “There can’t be any photos because nothing like that happened.”
PHOTOS: Lindsay Lohan Arrives At Lynwood Correctional Facility
Major exclusively released the following statement to RadarOnline.com, “The reason I am NOT speaking is because the truth will come out. Michael has always threatened to try to ruin me in the press. It’s sad he can’t keep his mouth shut and stop making up lies. Consider the source. I just need privacy at this time.”
PHOTOS: Celebs Who Have Served Time In The Slammer
Lohan, however, remains defiant. “Look, I really hope that this isn’t going to turn into another Erin [Lohan’s former fiancé] situation because I don’t want to have to talk about the things that Kate does,” Michael told RadarOnline.com. “I just found out she drained one of our bank accounts without telling me.”
And when asked if the wedding, scheduled for the end of this year in New York is still on, Michael responded: “I see no reason why the wedding wouldn’t still be on.”
EXCLUSIVE VIDEO & PHOTOS: Lindsay Emerges From Hiding – To Shop
Kate’s pals, however, say she’s terrified of Michael. They claim she was treated at a hospital after he pushed her over a chair and kicked her in the face. They also say he’s threatened her previously.
Lohan, who flew to LA on Tuesday, one day after the alleged incident, admits that he and Major argued over two of the cast members joining his upcoming reality show Celebrity House but that when he left to come to LA, “Kate was in the house and fine.”
Lindsay Lohan — See The New Mug Shot
He says things heated up Wednesday night when Lohan says Kate heard a report that he checked into his LA hotel with another woman. “She called me (and was) crazy,” Lohan told RadarOnline.com. “She said I was photographed checking into the hotel with this woman and it’s just not true. The hotel verified I was in my room alone all night.”
PHOTOS: Lindsay Lohan Arriving At Court On Tuesday
But Major’s friends say that Michael has threatened her before and her injuries are real. “I’ve seen her injuries and they’re real,” one pal told RadarOnline.com. “I’ve been in their presence when they fight and he’s threatened Kate’s life on more than one occasion.”
The friends also say Lohan and Major did not fight over who was joining the proposed reality show despite Michael’s assertion the argument was over Rachel Uchitel.
PHOTOS: See Lindsay’s Previous Two Mugshots
“Rachel Uchitel has absolutely nothing to do with it! The show isn’t even going to happen because they can’t find anyone to finance it,” Kate’s pal told RadarOnline.com. ||||| Michael Lohan is denying he kicked fiancé Kate Major in the face, RadarOnline.com is reporting.
The Southampton Police Department has confirmed a police report was filed this week on behalf of Kate against her high-profile fiancé.
Lindsay Lohan -- See The New Mug Shot
But the Lohan patriarch, who is Los Angeles attempting to visit his jailed daughter Lindsay, has admitted that he and Kate, a former magazine reporter, had a disagreement — and we can reveal the cause of the bust-up was two of Tiger Woods’ mistresses.
Rachel Uchitel and Joslyn James have reportedly signed on to star in Lohan’s upcoming reality television program Celebrity House.
PHOTOS: Lindsay Lohan Arrives At Lynwood Correctional Facility
He was also photographed with Uchitel at a recent event in New York’s playground of the rich and famous, The Hamptons.
“We had a disagreement because of some of the people coming into the house for our upcoming television show,” Michael told RadarOnline.com.
PHOTOS: Lindsay Lohan’s Family Photo Album
Kate has reportedly told police Michael shoved her over a chair, injuring her shoulder, forcing her to seek treatment at a hospital.
She wouldn’t comment when contacted, but supposedly has pictures of her injuries.
PHOTOS: Celebs Who Have Served Time In The Slammer
“I’m not commenting on anything right now,” Major told RadarOnline.com.
Responded Michael, “I just don’t know what she is talking about... I tried to speak with Kate this morning because I found out Kate drained one of our bank accounts and now she won’t call me back.”
PHOTOS: Lindsay Lohan Arriving At Court On Tuesday
Michael also claimed Kate “went crazy” after accusing him of checking into Los Angeles’ Mondrian Hotel with a mystery woman.
“Kate thought I checked into a hotel with another woman,” Michael said.
EXCLUSIVE VIDEO & PHOTOS: Lindsay Emerges From Hiding - To Shop
“But the hotel has verified to her that I was in the hotel room all alone.”
As for the couple’s wedding, planned for fall in New York, Michael insisted to RadarOnline.com: “Why wouldn’t it still be on?” ||||| By Radar Staff
Michael Lohan was back in a Florida court on Wednesday morning facing charges of domestic battery, RadarOnline.com has learned.
Lindsay’s dad appeared exhausted and serious as he stood handcuffed in front of the judge in Tampa, Florida, who told him not to even “dream” about his ex-girlfriend, Kate Major.
PHOTOS: Michael Lohan Gets Booked And Stands Before The Judge
As RadarOnline.com previously reported, Lohan was arrested for battery domestic violence and was taken into custody in the early hours of Tuesday morning after getting into an argument with former fiance, Kate.
PHOTOS: Sexy Stars Who Have Been Arrested
He had been held in jail ever since and was granted a $5,000 bond on Wednesday after over 24 hours in custody.
Judge Walter Heinrich Jr. told the 51-year-old to stay away from Kate, 28, at all costs. “You even dream of her and you’re going to jail,” he said.
The judge ordered that Lohan be detained until 6pm ET until the authorities could determine whether a warrant had been issued out of Sarasota County involving a temporary restraining order sought by Major, reported TampaBayOnline.com.
PHOTOS: Celebs Who Have Done Jail Time
When the police responded to Major’s 9-1-1 call on Tuesday, they said they arrived to a tense scene between Lindsay’s father and the journalist who famously dated reality star Jon Gosselin two years ago.
“As we approached the door, we could hear a female yelling ‘Stop’ and ‘Leave me alone,’” police said, adding Lohan was “wearing only shorts, and was out of breath/sweating” when he answered the door.
“He immediately got defensive, saying, ‘Everything is OK and nothing happened here,’” police said. “The victim started yelling in the background for us to help her because he was lying. We separated the two at this time.”
PHOTOS: Celebrity Death Threats
Major told officers Lohan repeatedly pushed her, squeezed her arms and “told her he would slit both his wrist and her wrist.”
After Lohan threatened to throw Major off the 4th floor balcony, Major told officers, he “threw the remote control at her, but missed.”
Lohan told police Major told him she drank a bottle of wine and took some of her medication. He said he had to go pick her up because she was too intoxicated.
PHOTOS: Celebs Who Have Battled Drinking Problems
Lohan told police he and Major “got back to their apartment and had sex.
“Major did not want Michael to ejaculate inside her; Lohan stated he did ejaculate in her and his girlfriend got very angry,” police wrote. “The two argued and Major told him she might be pregnant from previous sexual encounters with him. They argued some more.”
PHOTOS: Celebrity Cheaters
According to TampaBayOnline.com, Lohan’s attorney said he will fight the charges.
“We’ll defend all the allegations and we’re going to be denying everything,” said Sarasota defense attorney Michael Perry. “But we’re going to pursue this and defend him to the best of our ability here and get this thing resolved.”
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Kate Major’s 911 On Michael Lohan: ‘I’m Afraid He’s Going To Hit Me’ ||||| The sad Lindsay Lohan story just keeps getting sadder: according to her Twitter feed, Father of the Year Michael Lohan stormed Lindsay’s Los Angeles apartment with sheriffs this morning trying to either stage an intervention or “rescue” her 16-year-old sister, Ali Lohan. Resourcefully, Lindsay chronicled the whole drama live as it was happening:
“my lawyer isn’t answering I NEED A RESTRAINING ORDER! MY SISTER AND FRIEND TOO!!!!! HE’S NUTS!!!” my BUILDING didn’t STOP him, isn’t it supposed to be safe? THAT’S WHY I MOVED HERE! it coulda been FAKE cops! dressed up… let’s not forget, that my father KIDNAPPED me from a COURT ROOM when i was 4 years old and is CRAZY.”
Oof.
And since no one in the Lohan family is known for their discretion, both Dina and Michael Lohan found the time to explain to the tabs what was going on. Dina proclaimed to US Weekly that her ex was “dangerous,” while Michael blabbed on video to TMZ.com and to Hollyscoop.com:
“I went to the police department concerned about Ali’s welfare. I wanted to check on Ali. I want to make sure she’s ok. She’s 16 and she doesn’t belong there! She’s a minor. I just want to make sure she’s ok.”
Michael Lohan also told Hollyscoop that Lindsay took her sister, Ali, to Coachella this weekend and drove home “at 115 miles per hour.” He claimed he is trying to get a conservatorship over Lindsay, like the one Britney Spears’ father Jamie had.
A spokesperson for the L.A. County Sheriff’s office confirmed to US, “We were there. We found no evidence of abuse.”
You know what? Lindsay probably does need help. But maybe it’s time Michael gets a clue that his daughter is not willing to listen to him, given his own history with drug abuse and prison time. Not that Dina Lohan looks like she’ll ever step up to the parenting plate, either, but Michael — and his tabloid writer fiancée, Jon Gosselin cast-off Kate Major! — just gives me the heebie-jeebies. Couching his behavior in “I’m just checking on Ali!” excuses is a sleazy move.
Ugh, this whole thing makes me feel gross. Time for a bath. [US Weekly, Hollyscoop.com] ||||| Lindsay Lohan had her brother, not her lawyer, contact Los Angeles prosecutors to discuss a potential THIRD rehab venue, RadarOnline.com has learned.
On the eve of her sixth stint in treatment, RadarOnline.com can reveal Michael Junior made the last-ditch approach to the City Attorneys for L.A. to have them sign off on The Lukens Institute for the court-ordered 90-day treatment.
“Lindsay is desperately trying to get out of going to rehab in Southern California,” a source close to the Mean Girls star said.
“Lindsay wants to be in the Florida center, but she isn’t sure if she’s going to be able to make that happen. She’s in a panic about her situation.”
PHOTOS: Lindsay Lohan’s Mugshot Hall Of Fame
As of late Wednesday, there were three options on the table for Lindsay: California-based Morningside Recovery, Seafield Center in New York’s Westhampton Beach and Lukens, a luxury center based in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.
The unorthodox approach to prosecutors directly from a member of the Lohan family begs the question as to why the actress’ lawyer, Mark Heller, did not initiate the contact.
Heller is expected in a Los Angeles court on Thursday to notify the judge of Lohan’s venue choice.
As RadarOnline.com previously reported, LiLo’s dad, Michael, has been lobbying for Lukens, which bills itself as providing “sophisticated treatment for sophisticated clients in a setting that meets the highest standards of luxury.”
PHOTOS: Lindsay Lohan Through The Years
In an interview on Wednesday, Michael revealed his daughter had lost interest in Seafield because they won’t let her smoke.
“It is come to my attention that Lindsay does not want to go to Seafield in New York because it’s not private enough, they don’t allow smoking and the accommodations are not suitable to her needs,” he said.
“She told me people want her to go to Morningside in Newport Beach, California. But that’s very place that leaked she was going there about a year ago and did the same this time.”
According to Michael, Morningside isn’t going to help his daughter.
PHOTOS: 25 Stars Who’ve Been Brutally Busted In Big Lies
He said the venue, located in a wealthy enclave by the sea, had promised to allow his daughter to smoke cigarettes “even though they have a no smoking policy.”
“This is the last straw and I’m going to do everything I possibly can to put them everyone out of the business of using people,” the Lohan patriarch said.
Lohan is slated to start her rehab on Thursday after a court ordered Lohan to spend the time in rehab as part of her sentence for lying to Santa Monica police about who was driving a Porsche on Pacific Coast Highway that collided with a truck. | – The Delusional Quote of the Day comes to us from a source “very close” to Lindsay Lohan, who tells PopEater LiLo will be spending her time in jail writing music…and the resulting album “will definitely get nominated for a Grammy.” For more on her inevitable musical comeback, click here. More from the world o' Lohans: Some inmates are “pissy” about Lindsay’s “special treatment,” one recently released woman tells the New York Daily News. There are rumors, denied by the prison, of her own TV and dresser, special food, a private phone, and her own guard. “Tears were shed” when mom Dina and sister Ali recently visited her, a source tells Radar. Also on the list of people permitted to visit Lindsay: Samantha Ronson. Not on the list: Her dad. Speaking of that wacky Michael Lohan, his fiancée—Jon Gosselin ex Kate Major—accuses him of pushing her to the ground and kicking her in the face, TMZ reports. She has since filed a restraining order, Radar adds. Michael Lohan of course denies the whole thing, going so far as to tell Radar, “I see no reason why the wedding wouldn’t still be on.” He also, bizarrely, blames the whole fight on two of Tiger Woods’ mistresses. |
This post has been corrected. See the note below for details.
A vast building in McAllen, Texas, was once home to a Wal-Mart -- but no longer. When the discount superstore moved to a larger location, it left behind a vast empty building. The community took advantage of the space and converted the warehouse-like building into a public library.
The size of more than two football fields, the McAllen Public Library is the largest single-story library in the country, the website PSFK writes. Its conversion from vast warehouse space to functioning library has recently made it the winner of the 2012 Library Interior Design Competition by the International Interior Design Assn.
Adriana Ramirez, who teaches creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh, grew up in McAllen. "The old library on Main Street was not beautiful," she told Jacket Copy. "It was packed with books and seemed too small for the people it serviced. Of course, that was part of the charm -- always waiting your turn for the computer and spending a good amount of time finding a corner where you could read uninterrupted. The new library solves all that."
McAllen is near the southernmost tip of Texas, on the Mexico border. "In a city like McAllen, with cartel violence across the river (less than 10 miles away from the library), I think it's amazing that the city is devoting resources to a) not only saving a large and conspicuous piece of property from decline and vandalism, but b) diverting those resources into youth and the public trust," Ramirez writes. "It's easy to fall into drugs, drinking, and violence when you live on the border. It's not really easy to find a place to hang out when you're 14 that's not the mall, the movies, or Mexico. And a giant library -- a cool-looking open space devoted to entertaining the imagination? Well, I think that's the best counter-move against violence imaginable. And you don't even have to wait for a computer now."
The new McAllen Public Library opened in December 2011; after it had been open for just a month, new user registration increased by 23%. ||||| McALLEN, Texas (AP) — Glass cases being smashed during an attempted robbery at a jewelry store in a popular Texas mall on Saturday were misconstrued as gunfire and sent people running for the exits, according to the authorities and witnesses.
All known suspects in the attempted robbery at the La Plaza Mall in McAllen were taken into custody, the city's police chief, Victor Rodriguez, said in a statement that the city government posted on Twitter.
Madeline Madden, a 17-year-old from McAllen, told The Monitor of McAllen that she was inside Glitz and Glamour, a boutique just across from the mall, when she saw people rush out of the mall and into the parking lot.
She said one frightened couple ran into the boutique seeking safety.
"The man and his wife came in with their kids and asked if they were going to lock the door, and they told us what happened ... that there had been a shooting," Madden said. "They were trying to get away. The wife was crying and the man looked really nervous. They had a newborn and a toddler with them, and the toddler was crying. Someone else came and had cuts all over them from falling. We had to lock the doors and wouldn't let anyone else into the store."
Several law enforcement agencies rushed to the scene, including officers from the McAllen Police Department, Hidalgo County sheriff's office and Texas Department of Public Safety.
Dispatchers with McAllen police and the Hidalgo County sheriff's office declined to answer questions when reached by phone.
The mall is one of the primary shopping centers in the Rio Grande Valley. McAllen is near the border with Mexico and about 50 miles (80 kilometers) west of the Gulf Coast. | – When McAllen, Texas, found itself with an abandoned Walmart on its hands, it didn't just bring in another store: It used the building to create a new library. And that library just so happens to be the largest single-story library in the country—and the winner of the International Interior Design Association's 2012 Library Interior Design Competition. PSFK has a number of pictures of the exceptional space, which includes a striking entrance, cheerful orange highlights, hip ceiling elements, and a special lounge for teens. The McAllen Public Library now clocks in at 124,500 square feet, or about 2½ football fields, and has seen new-user registration increase 23% in the first month after opening. "In a city like McAllen, with cartel violence across the river"—the town is on the Mexico border—"I think it's amazing that the city is devoting resources to a) not only saving a large and conspicuous piece of property from decline and vandalism, but b) diverting those resources into youth and the public trust," a McAllen native tells the Los Angeles Times. "It's easy to fall into drugs, drinking, and violence when you live on the border. It's not really easy to find a place to hang out when you're 14 that's not the mall, the movies, or Mexico." |
(KUTV) — Shaun French, sought by police in connection with the death of a Utah teen, has been taken into custody by law enforcement officials in Colorado.
At a press conference Wednesday, Brandon Shearer with the Salt Lake City Police Department said he French, 24, is the suspect in the killing of Baleigh Bagshaw. Previously he was only said to be a person of interest in the case but was wanted for unlawful sexual activities with the girl he is now accused of killing.
Shearer said from Tuesday to Wednesday more information and tips led police to change his status to a suspect in the investigation of the homicide. Formal charges have not yet been filed for the homicide and French remains in police custody in Colorado on charges for three felony counts of unlawful sexual contact with a minor.
A warrant was issued Tuesday for French, not for the killing of 15-year-old Bagshaw, but for illegal sexual relations with the underage girl. French was also listed as a person of interest in her brutal killing Monday. Police said he lived in the home with the girl at some point but was not living there at the time of the homicide. Shearer was not sure how long he lived in the home or how long he was abusing the girl.
Court documents released later Wednesday claimed French moved into the Rose Park home with Bagshaw's older brother in February, 2017, when she was 14 and he was 23. Her brother said he witnessed the pair engaged in sexual activity.
Shearer also gave further insight into the discovery of the girl's death. He said Bagshaw was on the phone with her mother who heard screaming and immediately called a neighbor. The neighbor checked on the house and called police who took the call at approximately 3:08 p.m. Monday. They arrived to discover that she had been killed.
Because French had a warrant for unlawful sexual contact with a minor when he was found, police can bring him to Utah more quickly, but Shearer said it still is a matter of a legal process in the court system. He said detectives would head to Colorado to interview their newly named suspect.
It is not yet known how French was found, only that he was taken into custody Wednesday.
Before he was found, police said it was believed he could be headed to Wyoming, Colorado or Ohio by way of Interstate 80.
Salt Lake police issued the warrant Tuesday and held a press conference and were looking for French's camouflage-painted vehicle.
Bagshaw was found dead in a home at 1650 West 500 North in Rose Park, Utah.
"It was a very violent and brutal attack that occurred in the home," Shearer said Tuesday at a press conference.
He said the job of the forensic investigative team was long and difficult because of the violence involved in the girl's death. He specified that investigators were examining blood splatters in the home.
Wednesday, Shearer thanked the public and the media for aiding in the investigation and the capture of French.
If he is extradited to Utah, French's bail is expected to be set for the amount of $500,007. ||||| SALT LAKE CITY — Co-workers say Baleigh Bagshaw always had a smile on her face.
"She was really sweet," said Gwendolyn Robinson. "She worked very hard. She was a good girl."
If the 15-year-old was going to be late for work, she would always call, her co-workers at Leatherby's Family Creamery said. Even on Monday, her mother called to inform the store that Baleigh wouldn't be coming in because of a family "emergency," said Diana Ngyeun, who co-owns the store with her sister, Robinson.
It wasn't until Tuesday that employees learned Baleigh had been attacked and killed inside her house after she came home from school.
"I found out the news this morning and I'm devastated," Robinson said while fighting tears. "I expect her to be walking into work still. It's not computing. … She's always walking through that door and I'll be expecting her tonight. And she's not going to show up."
Baleigh arrived home, 1624 W. 500 North, from West High School just after 3 p.m. Monday and, responsible as always, called her mother to check in.
She was speaking with her mom when a man began assaulting her.
"While she was on the phone with her mother, she was brutally attacked while inside of her home. Her mother heard the attack going on and then the phone went dead. At that time, the mother called a neighbor to go check on Baleigh," Salt Lake Police Sgt. Brandon Shearer said.
"I can't even guess what the mother would be going through right now. Our hearts and thoughts are with her."
Shearer called it a "very violent attack," but police have not yet said how she died or if any weapons were involved. It was unknown Tuesday if the person who attacked Baleigh was already inside the house when she arrived at home or if he came in after.
Police did not release any information about what Baleigh may have told her mother while on the phone or whether her mother heard anything that could identify the attacker. When asked if Baleigh identified the man while on the phone, Shearer said, "Not that I'm aware of."
Police continued a nationwide search Tuesday for Shaun French, 24, whom they are calling a person of interest. Shearer said French should be considered "armed and dangerous."
Police confirmed Tuesday that French used to live in the same house as Baleigh and her family. Shearer declined to say how long or how recently French had lived there, but noted he was not living there at the time of Baleigh's death.
An arrest warrant was issued Tuesday afternoon for French, charging him with three counts of unlawful sexual activity with a minor. The charges were filed in court but were sealed.
According to police, French and Baleigh had a consensual, though illegal relationship. Shearer did not know how long the relationship lasted.
Detectives believe French may be driving a 1991 Daihatsu Rocky SUV with Wyoming plate 19 13974. The camouflage-green paint job makes the car stand out, police said. They believe French may be traveling on I-80 to either Evanston, Wyoming; the Denver area; or Cleveland, Ohio. Shearer said French has family or contacts in each of those places.
Investigators finished collecting evidence from inside the house in the Fairpark neighborhood on Tuesday. Bags and boxes of evidence sat on the driveway Tuesday morning waiting to be taken to the Utah State Crime Lab. Shearer said evidence in this case was "widely spread throughout the home and the area."
French does not have any signficant criminal history in Utah. According to his Facebook page, he worked at Intermountain Plantings Inc. and went to high school in Fort Walton Beach, Florida.
Baleigh had worked at Leatherby's for a little over a year, according to her co-workers, who on Tuesday recalled her "bubbly" personality. She worked hard, Nguyen said, and then was known to enjoy a hot fudge brownie.
"She's amazing. We love her a lot," she said.
Baleigh wanted to follow in her older sister's footsteps and serve in the U.S. military, said Scott Arnold, her LDS bishop. He recalled the teen as an excellent student who was a joy to be around at youth activities.
"She was just a fun person and just had a great smile and a great attitude and not a mean bone on her," Arnold said.
Arnold added, "I know my family and all of our immediate neighbors around — not just members of our LDS ward, but the neighborhood in general — is saddened to lose somebody like her."
Talia Zamir, also a 15-year-old freshman at West High, became emotional as she described finding out about the death of a girl she'd gotten to know during school productions of "Grease" and "The Crucible."
The news came in a late-night text Monday from a longtime friend of Bagshaw's but Talia said what's most shocking is not knowing why her friend was killed.
Talia said she worries about occasionally being home alone as Baleigh was. "It's so scary that something like that can happen."
Talia said Baleigh, considered part of West High's theater family as a member of the crew that moved props and built sets, deserves to be remembered as more than a victim.
"She was incredibly smart and talented and she always got along with people around her. She was really friendly and nice," Talia said. "And that's what makes everything so heartbreaking, honestly."
Two other 15-year-old freshmen who knew Bagshaw from elementary school, Abby Chodos and Chloe Davie, said they spent much of the day with grief counselors.
"We really haven't had long to process it yet because we both found out this morning," Abby said.
"This whole thing has been horrible," Chloe chimed in. "My mom read the story in the news and she wanted to pick me up right away. But I wanted to be with my friends. I'm taking the bus home because I wanted to ride with Abby."
While leaving school Tuesday, Mikala Jackson, a 15-year-old fellow West High student who was in PE class with Baleigh, remembered her as being "really beautiful in everything."
"She had a lot of people that loved her that always wanted to hang out with her and stuff," she said. "She was only 15. And she can't live that (life) now because somebody wanted to be selfish."
Tributes filled social media as word of Baleigh's death spread.
"I remember you were the shy new girl at Northwest, and when I approached you, you were so sweet. My prayers go out to you and your family," one girl wrote. "Your smile was contagious and even if you didn't know me, you were so nice to me. I hope they catch whoever did this, justice will be served. Rest easy love."
Some mentioned that Baleigh was part of the dog show community, including the Great Basin Non-Sporting Group.
"It is with the heaviest heart that I inform our dog show community and friends of the tragic loss of Baleigh Bagshaw," one woman posted. "I know that all of us will have Shawna and her family and close friends in our thoughts and prayers through this most difficult time."
A GoFundMe campaign to raise funds for funeral expenses was established in Baleigh's name Tuesday. It had raised more than $6,000 in about nine hours.
Contributing: Alex Cabrero, Lisa Riley Roche, Ashley Imlay, Ladd Egan
Correction: An earlier version incorrectly spelled Diana Nguyen's last name as Ngyeun. ||||| Please enable Javascript to watch this video
SALT LAKE CITY — Salt Lake City Police released new information Tuesday morning about the murder of 15-year-old girl whose body was found Monday.
A representative for SLCPD said Baileigh Bagshaw, a student at West High School, died in a "very violent attack."
A tweet from SLCPD said Baileigh was on the phone with her mother when she was attacked.
The search is still on for a man police identified as a person of interest Monday night in the homicide.
Shaun French, 24, may be driving a 1991 Daihatsu Rocky, that is camouflage in color with Wyoming listing 19-13974.
The Salt Lake City Police Department said French may be headed to Wyoming or Denver, Colorado.
Police also released photos of French, who appeared to be a white male with facial hair and glasses.
Police asked anyone with information to call 801-799-3000. ||||| Police in Santa Cruz, Calif., found a body they believe to be missing 8-year-old girl Madyson Middleton. A 15-year-old boy is under arrest. AP
This undated photo provided by the Santa Cruz Police Department shows Madyson "Maddy" Middleton from Santa Cruz, Calif. (Photo: Courtesy Santa Cruz Police Department via AP)
An 8-year-old Northern California girl was lured into the apartment of a 15-year-old neighbor before she was killed and her body dumped in a recycling bin at their complex, Santa Cruz police said Tuesday.
The unidentified teen knew Madyson Middleton and was near the bin when a detective found her body during a second search Monday evening, Police Chief Kevin Vogel said during an emotional news conference. The boy had reportedly helped look for her.
Her body was found just before 8 p.m. PT Monday at the Tannery Arts Center, a housing development for local artists where both lived. Known as Maddy, she was last seen by a security camera at 5:05 p.m. Sunday riding her scooter in the complex.
"It's my belief she was killed before we ever got the phone call" an hour later that she was missing, Vogel said at a news conference. He did not indicate how she died or whether she was sexually assaulted. Autopsy results were pending.
Vogel said the body had been concealed "in a way that was not obvious or readily apparent. If you just opened the top of the bin, you would not have seen the body."
The boy was arrested early Tuesday. Neighbors reported that his mother screamed in agony when her son was taken into custody.
The district attorney said the teen could be charged as an adult.
Vogel said it appears Maddy, who lived in the complex with her mother, 42-year-old Laura Jordan, was "lured to the apartment willingly" and murdered there. He described them as acquaintances.
"I think she had a reasonable amount of trust in him," he said. "I don’t think she was taken against her will.”
A Tannery resident described the suspect as "the nicest kid you can imagine," the Santa Cruz Sentinel reported.
“Everyone has got to be in shock over this,” the unidentified artist said.
Mayor Don Lane called Tuesday "a day to honor Madyson and to offer our support.”
“Our hearts and our thoughts and our prayers go out to those close to Madyson who have been devastated by the loss of this very precious life,” he said at the news conference outside police headquarters.
Following Maddy's disappearance, police conducted door-to-door searches of the complex and nearby communities. Authorities searched in nearby woodlands, parks and along the San Lorenzo River. Helicopters, bicycle patrols, dogs and even boats aided the search. Middleton's father, Michael, spent much of Monday searching the streets with friends.
Jordan told the Sentinel on Monday that her daughter was waiting for a friend to finish a board game so they could play together, and rode her scooter under her friend's window. At 5:07 p.m., surveillance video shows Maddy riding near a cluster of metal mailboxes at the Tannery. It was the last time she was seen alive.
"I thought she was in the courtyard," Jordan said. "I thought she was in the bathroom, checked the art bar, then I started to going to every friend's house. Maybe she got bored waiting for her play date, maybe she found another friend. But we had no luck."
Contributing: John Bacon
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1MT7wne | – Baleigh Bagshaw, 15, had just gotten home from school on Monday and called her mom to check in. Then, the unthinkable: "While she was on the phone with her mother, she was brutally attacked while inside of her home. Her mother heard the attack going on and then the phone went dead," a Salt Lake City police sergeant tells Deseret News. Bagshaw's mother heard screaming and called a neighbor, who went to the house and called police. Police found the teen dead at the house, Fox 13 reports. After a manhunt, suspect Shaun French was taken into custody Wednesday in Colorado, KUTV reports. Police say he was "lying in wait" for the teen. French, 24, once lived in the same house as Bagshaw and her family, but did not live there when Bagshaw was murdered. Police say he and the teen had a consensual but illegal relationship, but it's not clear how long the relationship lasted or when French lived in the house. An arrest warrant charging him with three counts of unlawful sexual activity with a minor was issued Tuesday; he has not yet been charged in Bagshaw's death. Police have not said how Bagshaw was killed or if weapons were involved, simply saying she died in a "very violent attack." Says the police sergeant, "I can't even guess what the mother would be going through right now. Our hearts and thoughts are with her." A GoFundMe campaign has been set up for the family. |
A South Miami man shot his wife and then went to police to confess to the murder. (Source: CBS4)
SOUTH MIAMI (CBSMiami) – A grisly murder scene in South Miami has ended up on Facebook after the alleged killer posted a picture to the social networking site.
Derek Medina, 31, of South Miami posted a picture of his dead wife Thursday morning on a Facebook page attributed to him. Police found the woman’s body in the townhouse at 5555 SW 67 Avenue.
There was a 10-year-old girl at the home, authorities said, but she was not hurt.
CBS4 has confirmed the identity of Medina with South Miami Police Sgt. Rene Landa.
The picture, which CBS4 and CBSMiami.com have chosen not to show, shows a woman identified in the post as Jennifer Alfonso, bent over backwards at the knees with her head in the corner of what appears to be a kitchen.
The woman’s left arm is covered in blood and blood appears on her face as well.
Alfonso was married to Medina.
The Facebook page also had an alleged confession from Medina on the site that read as follows:
“I’m going to prison or death sentence for killing my wife love you guys miss you guys take care Facebook people you will see me in the news” my wife was punching me and I am not going to stand anymore with the abuse so I did what I did I hope you understand me.”
The statement on Medina’s Facebook page came roughly at the same time as the photo of the body was published. Medina’s page was active on the site for several hours before Facebook officials took it down.
“The content was reported to us. We took action on the profile – removing the content and disabling the profile, and we reached out to law enforcement. We take action on all content that violates our terms, which are clearly laid out on our site,” read a statement from Facebook released to CBS4 News. “As this is an ongoing law enforcement investigation, I would refer you to the authorities in Florida for any additional details.”
According to the arrest affidavit, Medina told police that he and his wife began arguing at around 10 in the morning in their upstairs bedroom. Medina reportedly told police that he retrieved a firearm from his closet and pointed it at Alfonso, who then told him she was leaving him before exiting the room and going downstairs. According to the affidavit, Medina put the firearm away and followed his wife downstairs, where he then confronted her in the kitchen. Medina told police that Alfonso was armed with a kitchen knife, so he returned upstairs and once again armed himself with a gun. When he returned downstairs, Medina said he disarmed Alfonso and put the knife away in a drawer. Medina told police that Alfonso began punching him repeatedly, so he opened fire, striking her several times.
After the shooting, Medina told police that he changed his clothes and left the house and drove his his family’s home to confess what he had done. After he left his family, he drove to the South Miami Police station and reportedly told a desk operator that he had just murdered his wife.
Police say Medina told them he knew Alfonso was dead, and that he made no attempt to call 911.
Medina had just changed his profile picture on the social networking site to a picture of himself, a woman, and a young girl some 15 hours before the final post allegedly of Alfonso’s body.
Friends tell us the couple met at Denny’s where Alfonso worked as a waitress. They had been divorced and remarried, and had a rocky relationship.
“I hope they have no pity for a coward, I hope that god can forgive you because I can’t,” said Daysi Fernandez, Alfonso’s best friend and co-worker. “What sick person goes and writes a status about it and says that’s something that they have to do. She never gave up she didn’t even give up on that marriage when she should have a long time ago.”
Neighbors describe Medina as sketchy.
“Walking around with a concealed gun so he tried to be the neighborhood watch guy,” said a neighbor Yoshi Dade. ” Always there day and night, it was kind of weird to me.”
“It has to be mental illness, it can’t be someone with sanity,” said Paula Trivino, a neighbor who heard screaming coming from the home before the shooting.
According to marriage records, Medina and Alfonso had been married since April 2012. ||||| South Miami’s Derek Medina admitted to detectives that he shot his wife “six to eight times” and indeed was the one who posted a confession and a photo of her dead body on Facebook, according to a newly released police search warrant.
The warrant, filed in Miami-Dade Circuit Court, reveals new details about the confession of Medina, whose post on the social-media website has drawn worldwide attention to the killing of Jennifer Alfonso, 26.
The document also outlines the evidence seized by Miami-Dade police from the couple’s townhome, including two Samsung cellphones, three Dell computers and an iPad.
The warrant, signed by a Miami-Dade judge, asks for permission to look for evidence including electronics, and suggests that the Facebook confession and photo will indeed be key evidence for prosecutors as they prepare for a likely grand-jury indictment.
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Medina, 31, is charged with first-degree murder. His arraignment is set for Aug. 29.
On Aug. 8, Medina stunned South Florida when he posted a photo of Alfonso’s bloody body, bent backwards, lying on the tile kitchen floor. Her 10-year-old daughter from a previous relationship was upstairs at the time and was not physically harmed.
Medina admitted posting the admission and photo on his page — which was public — before ever calling police, the warrant said. He later walked into the South Miami police station and surrendered.
“I’m going to prison or death sentence for killing my wife. Love you guys. Miss you guys. Take care. Facebook people you’ll see me in the news,” he wrote, claiming he was tired of Alfonso’s physical abuse.
Medina and Alfonso’s Facebook pages have since been removed at the request of police.
But a self-defense claim, legal experts say, will be tough.
In his confession, Medina admits that during their argument he grabbed his Bersa Thunder .380-caliber pistol from his upstairs bedroom and pointed it at Alfonso. When she threatened to leave him, he followed her downstairs.
She grabbed a knife, but he disarmed her and put the utensil back in the kitchen drawer, according to the warrant penned by Miami-Dade Detective Terry Goldston.
“Mr. Medina then shot the victim six or eight times because she began to punch him,” the warrant said.
Miami defense lawyer Andrew Rier, who is not involved in the case, said that even if Alfonso was indeed punching or kicking him, it will be tough to prove to a jury that the physically bigger man feared for his life or imminent “great bodily harm” after disarming her.
“He was armed. She wasn’t armed, so why did he have to kill her?” Rier said.
The sheer number of bullets fired — publicly unknown until the release of the search warrant — also hampers a self-defense claim, former Miami-Dade prosecutor Matthew Baldwin said.
“For a self-defense claim to be viable and sustainable, the defendant must establish that his actions were proportionate and reasonable under the circumstances,” Baldwin said. “The fact that he shot her so many times in response to her allegedly punching him is a clear indication that he was not acting in self-defense.”
Any self-defense claim also is hurt by a Youtube video he posted days before the shooting in which he is kicking a boxing punching bag — showing he was capable of using less-than-lethal force to protect himself, experts say.
His lawyers on Friday nevertheless appeared in court asking a judge to ensure that detectives preserved all photos taken of Medina, presumably ones that might show any bruises or cuts inflicted during the episode. His lawyers were also allowed to take their own photos of him.
Medina also told police that the episode was captured on an interior surveillance video system. Police seized the video, although it is unclear how much of the confrontation was actually captured.
From the warrant, it is clear that Miami-Dade detectives were intent on investigating the self-defense claim.
They swabbed Alfonso’s hands for gunshot residue, noted blood on her hands and swabbed her knuckles for DNA. Results of any tests won’t be known for some time.
Detectives also seized a Taser stun gun, two other pistols, ammunition, a holster, as well as a large Chicago Cutlery knife from the top kitchen drawer. Crime-scene technicians also noted eight bullet casings on the kitchen floor near where Alfonso’s body was found.
Investigators also took from the townhome copies of Medina’s self-published books, a journal and other documents. | – Unreal: A South Miami man reportedly posted a photo of his dead wife on Facebook—just after taking her life, CBS Miami reports. Derek Medina, 31, posted the photo of wife Jennifer Alfonso bent over backward in the kitchen of a townhouse with blood on her arm and face. "I’m going to prison or death sentence for killing my wife love you guys miss you guys take care Facebook people you will see me in the news," reads a separate post on Medina's page. "My wife was punching me and I am not going to stand anymore with the abuse so I did what I did I hope you understand me," the post adds. About 15 hours before, Medina had changed his profile photo to show himself, a young girl, and a woman. A 10-year-old girl was at home during Alfonso's death but wasn't injured. Afterward, Medina went to police and confessed to shooting his wife, saying it all started with a domestic dispute. See more pics, including a blurred version of the death photo, at the Daily News. (Incredibly, Medina has written a self-help book on marriage.) |
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You don’t need to stand in line at the crack of dawn or risk being trampled to death to score the best Black Friday deals; they’re all available online, and we’re collecting the best ones right here.
In a rush? Here are our 40 favorite deals that you can still buy.
We’ll be updating this post throughout the day as Black Friday discounts go live, so bookmark this page, follow us on Twitter and Facebook, join our Kinja Deals Community group, and sign up for our Kinja Deals messenger bot for the latest updates!
This post will get pretty long as more deals are added, so keep an eye out for these navigation links throughout the post to jump to your favorite category.
Commerce Content is independent of Editorial and Advertising, and if you buy something through our posts, we may get a small share of the sale. Click here for more.
With 5% back on all Amazon purchases, you should probably have one of Amazon’s credit cards anyway. Now though, they’re boosting that to an astounding 20% on a wide array of items from throughout the store. You can find all of the eligible products, and also apply for the card, here. If you’re instantly approved, you’ll be able to use the card and score the cash back deals immediately.
An SSD is the best upgrade you can give your older computer, and Samsung’s 850 EVO line is the most popular one there is. A worldwide NAND shortage has reversed the previously inexorable downward price trend on these things over the past year or so, but today on Amazon, the 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB models are all down to the best prices of the year.
The Fire 7, Fire HD 8, and Fire HD 10 aren’t ever going to be confused with iPad Pros, and that’s fine. They have good-enough screens, can play videos from all of the major online video services, and can handle basic gaming and web browsing with ease. Anecdotally, I’ve found that they’re also extremely popular devices for kids. So if you’ve had an inkling that you might want to buy one, Today’s the day to do it.
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The Fire 7 is down to a ridiculously low $30, but it’s probably worth spending $20 more for the HD 8, which has a better screen, twice the storage, and 50% better battery life. If you’re going to primarily use the device as a portable TV screen, the 1080p HD 10 is a great bargain at $100.
Amazon’s breakthrough Echo smart speaker has spawned an entire family of products, and a whole bunch of them are down to all-time low prices for Black Friday, including a $20 discount on the brand new flagship Echo, a $30 discount on the smart home-ready Echo Plus, and a whopping $50 discount on the touchscreen Echo Show.
Amazon’s first-party gadgets are always hot commodities come the holidays, and all of their Black Friday deals (that we know of) are available now.
Home Theater
The full-size (and 4K-compatible) Fire TV isn’t discounted, but the compact and very capable Fire TV Stick is impulse-priced at $25.
Kindles
The two entry level Kindles are both $30 off, with additional savings available on Kids and Essentials bundles. Our advice - get the Paperwhite. The extra $40 is well worth a screen that’s twice as sharp, and includes a backlight. If you don’t mind buying a refurb, you can also get the Kindle Voyage, complete with an ambient light sensor and pressure-sensitive page-turning bezels, for $120.
Cloud Cam
Amazon only came out with the Cloud Cam about a month ago, but that won’t stop them from offering a $20 discount.
Amazon’s entire selection of Dash buttons is 50% off, bringing them all down to $2.50. The first time you use them though, you’ll still get a $5 account credit, so you actually stand to (sort of) make money here.
Have someone on your holiday list that’s difficult to shop for? I guarantee they’ll get use out of a good USB battery pack, because who doesn’t need extra battery power from time to time? Anker’s PowerCores are our readers’ favorites, and several models are on sale for Black Friday.
I’m partial to the PowerCore Fusion, because it has fold-out AC prongs, so you can plug it straight into the wall and use it as a regular wall charger.
If your giftee already has a big battery pack, it’s worth owning a pocket-sized model as well.
The PowerCore II 20000 features Anker’s newest technology, which ensures your phone will get the fastest possible charging speed.
And the classic PowerCore 10000 strikes a great balance between size (it can fit in a jacket pocket or small purse with ease) and capacity: About 2-3 full phone charges.
After teasing us with some appetizers earlier in the week, Anker just opened up the floodgates on their Black Friday deals, including several that our exclusive to our readers.
Your Favorite Anker Products Readers have purchased more than 10 million products through links on our network since 2012, and… Read more Read
There are too many deals to include them all here, but head over to this post for a complete roundup.
Whether you’re building a new gaming PC, buying one pre-made, or upgrading your existing rig, Amazon’s Black Friday PC gaming deal has something for you.
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You can find all of the deals by heading to Amazon, but we also highlighted some of our favorites here.
Today only, the Google Home Mini is down to $29 from its usual $49, and if you buy it from Bed Bath & Beyond, you’ll get a bonus $10 BB&B gift card thrown in top.
Whether you need a new Wi-Fi router, more ethernet ports, a modem to call your own, or some smart switches to start automating your home, Amazon’s TP-Link Black Friday sale has you covered.
There are two pages of deals here spanning nearly all of TP-Link’s product line. A few of our favorite deals are below, but be sure to head over to Amazon to see the full selection. Just remember that these deals are only available today, so lock in your orders before Amazon pulls the plug.
Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 tablets are a lot like Surface Pros on the inside, except they come with they keyboard cover (sporting the iconic ThinkPad key design, of course), work with some unique add-on modules, and are a lot cheaper, at least with today’s deal. Prices range from $500 to $950 depending on the specs you choose, but they’re all solid values if you like the idea of a convertible Windows hybrid computer.
Anker has long been our readers’ go-to manufacturer for inexpensive mobile phone accessories, but now they’re stretching their tentacles into higher-end markets, and you can save $150 on one of their most ambitious products to date, today only with promo code P1NEBULA.
Your Favorite Anker Products Readers have purchased more than 10 million products through links on our network since 2012, and… Read more Read
Marketed under their Nebula home theater brand, the Mars Portable Cinema is a projector that you can take anywhere. Packing a 19,500mAh battery, the Mars can project a 150" image at 720p for up to three hours away from a power outlet; more than enough for an outdoor movie night, or even a watch party for a big game. Its built-in JBL speakers should also be sufficiently loud and clear, but you can of course plug in any sound system you want with a 3.5mm cable.
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The Mars even runs Android (a weird version of it, admittedly) with support for a few popular streaming apps. But of course, any streaming stick like the Fire TV Stick can plug right into its HDMI port, and utilize the Mars’ USB port for power. And if you have an iPhone or iPad, you can even skip all of that and stream your content directly to the projector over AirPlay, no Apple TV required.
Today’s deal is $150 less than usual, $50 less than Prime Day, and a match for the best deal ever.
If you’re going to turn outdoor movie nights into a regular occurrence, you’ll also want to invest in a good screen. There are tons of outdoor-friendly options on Amazon, but Camp Chef’s seem to be the most popular.
You can never have enough hard drive space, especially when it’s this cheap. This Black Friday only, Amazon’s discounting a wide array of Seagate internal and external hard drives to great low prices.
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You’ll want to head over to Amazon to see them all, but I suspect that the most popular items will be a 2TB portable drive for $60 (there are several colors available), or the 2TB FireCuda, which can speed up your PS4's loading times with a small amount of built-in flash storage.
23andMe’s Health + Ancestry DNA test kit would make for a unique holiday gift, and it’s half off its usual price today for Black Friday. You just provide them with some saliva, and they send you back over 75 reports about your ancestry, your genetic health risks, and a lot more. It’s a bit more to take in than the ancestry-only tests out there, but knowledge is power.
It should go without saying that digital photo frames make great gifts for parents and grandparents. But even I, a tech-savvy millennial, am pretty enamored with the Nixplay Iris. It usually sells for $200, but the Peach Copper model is down to $150 today.
For $122, you can also opt for the larger Nixplay Seed in a few different colors, though it’s not nearly as nice looking as the Iris.
Tile is the ultimate device for anyone who can’t stop losing their things, and you can get four Tiles (in two different designs) for $60 today, an all-time low. Plus, if you add this $10 gift card to your cart as well, you’ll get it for free!
You’ll get two Tile Slims, which are designed to slide into a wallet or stick to objects, and two Tile Mates, which you can attach to keychains or keep in bags. Once you have your Tiles in place, the Tile app on your phone can ping them over Bluetooth and cause them to beep until you find what you’re looking for. And if your lost item is outside of your phone’s Bluetooth range, it’ll show up on a map automatically any time another Tile user comes into range.
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Buying these Tiles a la carte would set you back about $100, so if you can think of four things you want to track, this is a fantastic bargain.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year...to buy Sonos stuff. A bunch of the high-end audio gear is on sale for Black Friday, including the first ever discount on the Alexa-equipped Sonos One, $50 off the still-great PLAY:1 and PLAY:3, and $100 savings on the PLAYBAR and PLAYBASE.
4K monitors might be the new hotness, but if you just want to collect 1080p displays to build out a multi-monitor setup, two great discounts from ASUS are included in Amazon’s Black Friday deals today. Get a 23.6" screen for $95, or 27" for $145.
Sony’s WH1000XM2s put the noise-canceling headphone world on notice when they were released earlier this year, and now, you can get them at a discount for the first time ever. They’re still an investment at $298, but if you spend any significant amount of time in planes, trains, or just a noisy office, they’ll probably be the best thing you buy this year.
Last year’s model is also down to $228, though its battery only lasts 20 hours compared to 30 on the new one, and its noise-cancelling engine and sound quality aren’t quite as good.
If these are out of your price range, Sony’s extra bass noise canceling cans are also on sale for $123. They won’s sound nearly as good, and don’t have all the advanced features of the 1000XM2s, but that’s still a great deal.
Don’t need noise cancelation at all? Sony’s standard wireless over-ears and on-ears are on sale for Black Friday too.
Want noise cancellation in a pocket-sized package? Sony’s brand new noise-canceling true wireless headphones are on sale, down to $178 from their usual $200. They don’t have great battery life, so you can’t use them continuously all day at work, but their included charging case makes it easy to top them off. And hey, they’re freaking noise-cancelling truly wireless earbuds. That’s amazing!
If price has been the barrier to entry keeping you from better audio, here’s the first opportunity since Prime Day to grab Status Audio’s CB-1s for their lowest price ever, $55, beating the previous best deals by $8.
Status is a direct-to-consumer headphone company, building great cans in proven form factors without the markup that comes with popular brands. In fact, there’s no branding here whatsoever.
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The CB-1s are extremely comfortable out of the box, more so (for me) than the ATH-M50X, MDR7506, SR60e, or V-MODA Crossfade Wireless, just to name a few off the top of my head (ha!).
The CB-1s have a (relatively) flat frequency response that’s great for listening to a variety of music or audio/video editing, with a wide sound stage in a closed back design. I get good isolation/seal with the updated pads. The inclusion of two detachable cables- coiled and straight, is also generous and welcome. Even better that they smartly attach with a twist lock.
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We know from five years of Kinja Deals that great over-ear, closed back headphones for under $60 is no joke. Depending on what you’ve shelled out for in the past, they might even blow away your much more expensive pairs.
Yesterday’s big SanDisk sale is expired, but a few items remain at or near their all-time low prices for Black Friday, including some microSD cards that’ll work with your new action cam or Nintendo Switch.
It’s the best time of year to buy a Fitbit, as most of the lineup is on sale for Black Friday. Fitbit Alta HR for $100 is probably the one you want to buy, unless you’re interested in a full-featured smart watch, in which case the Fitbit Ionic comes with a $50 Amazon gift card today. For the rest of the deals, head below.
Fitbit Ionic | $300 | Amazon | Plus $50 gift card
We see deals on leaf-style HDTV antennas pretty frequently, but if you won’t settle for anything less than the brand that started the trend, you can score a huge deal on the Mohu Leaf 30 and amplified Leaf 50 today.
The the Leaf 30 is rated for the 30 miles, and the Leaf 50 for 50 miles, but keep in mind that those figures are only under ideal circumstances, and your actual range will likely be lower. But still, it’s just about the most powerful omnidirectional antenna you can get that doesn’t require outdoor or attic installation, and these are the best prices we’ve seen. Just be sure to use promo code MOHUBLACK at checkout to maximize your savings.
DJI’s Spark is the most exciting new drone of the year. It’s roughly the size and weight of those cheap toy drones you see out there, but with significantly better flight time and performance, an automatic follow-me mode, and most crucially of all, a gimbal-stabilized 1080p camera that shoots some seriously great footage.
It was already a bargain at its $500 launch price, but its Black Friday deal just took flight, bringing it down to $397, so go earn your wings.
Ultimate Ears’ water-resistant Bluetooth speakers are some of the best looking and best sounding options out there, and two different models are on sale for all-time low prices for Black Friday.
It’s not quite as cool looking as Ultimate Ears’ offerings, but the JBL Charge 3 is our readers’ favorite waterproof speaker, and it’s also on sale for $90.
The budget-friendly Anker SoundCore 2 also remains on sale for $32, complete with its 24 hour battery life, and surprisingly great bass.
The Greenco G Pen Elite was already one of the best vaporizers for the money at its usual $150, but for Black Friday, you can get it for an all-time low $85 with promo code KINJA-BFCM.
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Of, for just $66 with the same code, you can also opt for the smaller G Pen Pro, which should perform similarly, but with a smaller chamber capacity and less precise temperature adjustment. Either way, these deals aren’t available for long, so get in before they go up in a puff of smoke.
From Gizmodo’s review:
“Pleasant” has come to define much of my time with the Grenco G Pen Elite. It charges quickly via USB and has battery life that last for days of regular use. It also feels great in my tiny hands and fits easily in a coat pocket or a purse. The thing that takes it from “perfectly pleasant” to near outstanding is the price. It’s just $170. That’s damn cheap compared to it’s competitors. The Firefly 2 costs $329.95 and the Crafty retails for $339. Sure those products heat via convection instead of roasting a ceramic chamber, they’re much easier to pull on, and the clouds they produce are enough to fishbowl someone sitting with you, but for nearly half the price the Grenco G Pen Elite is a fantastic deal.
The Roku Streaming Stick+ packs more features than you’d ever think was possible in such a small dongle. You get 4K, HDR, advanced Wi-Fi, a voice remote, basically anything else you could want in a larger streaming box. It’s only about a month old, but you can already get it for $48 for Black Friday, a ~$20 discount.
What started with the reader-favorite and budget-friendly Yi action cam has since grown into an entire lineup of cameras, and they’re all on sale right now for Black Friday, from the original on up to the 4K+, which features 4K/60 capture for an all-time low $210. Personally, I think most people should go for the Yi Lite at $73, which features a built-in screen, and 1080/60 capture, or 4K up to 20 frames per second.
LG’s OLED TVs seem to have cornered the high-end market this year, and four different models are down to their lowest prices ever on Amazon right now, in anticipation of Black Friday. Choose from 55" or 65", and between the B7A and C7 line. The picture quality between the two will be identical (i.e. completely stunning), but the C7 has a higher quality industrial design and onboard Dolby Atmos audio processing.
If you’re still listening to your TV through its built-in speakers, it’s time to drop what you’re doing and grab a sound bar on sale.
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For just $75, you can get an AmazonBasics sound bar with a built-in subwoofer. The bass won’t be as deep as it would be from a discrete woofer, but it’s better than nothing.
If you’d prefer a little more bass, for $158, you can step up to a 2.1 channel model from Samsung with a wireless subwoofer, or go for a 3.1 channel system for $218. Both of those prices are all-time lows.
The cool thing about those Samsung systems is that you can turn them into wireless 4.1 and 5.1 surround sound systems (respectively) with this expansion set, which is actually also on sale right now for $68.
Brother is our readers’ favorite printer brand and it’s easy to see why: they basically never jam, the toner is relatively cheap, and it prints fast (up to 32 pages per minute). The one trade off is that they don’t print in color, which when I think back to the last couple of things I’ve printed, it’s been a bunch of boring forms, so I don’t think it would be too hard of a pill to swallow.
Plus, this refurbished EHLL2360DW includes the ability to print from your mobile device. At $55, what are you waiting for?
If you really need to be able to print in color, the 3170CDW is also on sale for $160, its lowest price of the year.
VPNs are in the news these days, and with good reason. So if you’re curious to sign up and start protecting your browsing history and personal data (or, you know, getting around websites’ geoblocks), NordVPN charges less per month than a typical trip to Starbucks.
NordVPN has long been one of the most popular and reliable VPN providers out there, and if you sign up for a one-year membership, promo code VIP70 will drop your annual price from $69 to $48. If you’re sure you want to commit, use this link to get a special two year plan for $79 with code 2YSpecial2017, or this link to get three years for $99 with code 3ydeal. Lifehacker has recommended Nord in some previous guides, but if you have any firsthand experience with the service, sound off in the comments!
Commerce Content is independent of Editorial and Advertising, and if you buy something through our posts, we may get a small share of the sale. Click here for more.
Nest’s iconic thermostats don’t go on sale often, and sizable discounts their other products are even rarer still, so Black Friday really is the best time of year to join the ecosystem, or expand your collection. Save $50 on the third generation Nest Learning Thermostat, $20 on the Protetct smoke detector (both the battery and wired versions), $50 on the outdoor Nest Cam, or $60 on the indoor one.
Weighted blankets can work wonders for your anxiety, or at the very least keep you warm and cozy all winter long, and you can save 10% on both kid and adult-sized blankets today with promo code INYARD10. These burst onto the scene recently, and we haven’t really seen any deals before this one, so you should take advantage if you want to give one as a gift this holiday season.
It might look like something Rey would wear while scouring for spare parts on Jakku, but this neck wrap is actually a travel pillow, and a top-selling one at that.
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The Trtl pillow uses a hidden ribs to support your neck as you doze off in your tiny coach airline seat. Just wrap Trtl around your neck, placing the ribs on whichever side you want to lay your head (including directly under your chin) pop on some noise-cancelling headphones, and try your darnedest to get some shut-eye.
In case it wasn’t obvious, the big advantage of this design is size; Trtl weighs less than 1/3 of a pound, can attach to your luggage, and is far less bulky than a memory foam pillow. Amazon’s got it marked down to $21 today for Black Friday, a rare discount from its usual $30, so if you have any holiday travel on the horizon, I wouldn’t sleep on this discount.
The Breville Smart Oven is our readers’ favorite toaster oven, and the 650XL model is one of my personal favorite possessions. If I would normally cook something in the oven, I’ll try everything in my power to make it fit into the Breville instead, which usually isn’t hard, because it can fit a lot.
It’s worth every penny at its usual $180, so you’d be making a terrible mistake to miss it at $110.
If you live in a city with Amazon’s same-day Prime Now delivery service, but haven’t gotten around to using it yet, they’re running a fantastic promotion for new members to celebrate Black Friday
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For a limited time, you can save $10 on your first Prime Now order with promo code BFCMGET10, and receive an additional $10 credit to use within a month. Prime Now requires you to spend $35 per order, so that means you can basically save 50% on snacks, ice cream, household essentials, and more brought right to your front door. Or, if you’ve used Prime Now before, you’ll get 25% off select items.
If you don’t own a pressure cooker, today’s a great day to fix that. The newest, pint sized 3Qt Instant Pot Mini wants a permanent home on your kitchen counter, and it just got its biggest ever discount down to just $49, the first time it’s ever been under $50.
If you’re cooking for a larger family, the extra large 8Qt model is incredibly down to $82. For context, the previous all-time low price was $112, so this is a massive discount, and one that we likely won’t see again for some time.
This is also our readers’ favorite slow cooker, and one of their favorite rice cookers too. To put a fine point on it: It’s one of the most versatile kitchen gadgets you can own. Even if you already have one, I don’t need to tell you that these make great gifts.
It’s like AmazonBasics is having a garage sale. This giant Gold Box is full of a bunch of random AmazonBasics and Pinzon brand products, like bedding, pet supplies, cables, telescopes, and more. I’ve highlighted a couple of stand-out products below but you’re going to have just go check out and start scrolling for yourself. Thankfully, they you can navigate between categories at the top.
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Some highlights: Your favorite velvet hangers, 6-pack of dimmable light bulbs, a whole bunch of flannel and microfiber sheets, resistance bands, these steering wheels for Nintendo Switch, these microfiber car wash mitts, and more.
One of the easiest home upgrades you can make is replacing that crappy shower head that came with your house or apartment. This Delta two-in-one was ranked as your absolute favorite, and today it is at its lowest price ever at $88. I bought this exact shower head six months ago and it has been worth every penny. You (probably) shower everyday, might as well make it as enjoyable as possible.
If your tires are about due for a replacement, Discount Tire Direct is offering up to $100 in Visa gift card rebates (in addition to any manufacturer rebates) when you order four new tires, plus an additional $100 if you order wheels as well, plus an extra $60 on each if you use a Discount Tire credit card. Just enter your make and model, click the options to see tires on promotion, and you’ll see the rebate amount (either $25, $75, or $100) on the right hand side.
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Hands down, Nespresso is the easiest way to make decent espresso at home. Their space-saving Inissia model with included milk frother is down to $66 and the Nepresso VertuoPlus is down to $80 for Black Friday. Those deals ought to perk you right up, because these two are some of the best we’ve ever seen.
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If you’re trying to decide between the two, the VertuoPlus is a little more powerful and larger, holding about double the amount of water, and can make three different sized drinks (espresso, coffee, and 14-ounce alto). The Inissia only weighs 5 pounds with a much smaller footprint and has two available coffee sizes.
Anova dominates the sales charts, but in many ways (raw heating power, looks, size, software quality), the Joule sous-vide circulator is actually the superior product, and Amazon’s running an unprecedented $30 discount on it for Black Friday
The Joule White is actually a new model of the Joule, swapping the original’s stainless steel top and base with white plastic to match the rest of the unit. Otherwise, it’s exactly the same as the Joule White/Stainless, and usually retails for $20 less at $179. Today’s Black Friday sale though is a great chance to save a bit more.
The steel version is also $30 off, but at $169, there’s really no reason to buy it over the white model, unless the white sells out.
The Anova circulator is on sale for $119, and it might be the right choice for you. I’d encourage you to read the Lifehacker showdown post to help decide.
If you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about or why you might want to buy this, Lifehacker has a great sous-vide explainer here. Spoiler alert: It’s incredibly simple, and the results are fantastic.
If you’ve consumed so much coffee in your life that you’re now desensitized to the caffeine (hi), Insomnia Coffee might be the solution best option other than getting more sleep.
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Insomnia claims to be the world’s strongest coffee blend, boasting 702mg of caffeine per 12 ounce cup. For comparison, a 12 ounce Red Bull has about 115mg, so...yeah, Insomnia probably isn’t super healthy. But hey, I’m not here to judge. You can get a pound of ground for $15, or whole bean for $14 right now on Amazon, the best prices we’ve ever seen.
WeMo products have long been the simplest way to get started with home automation, and both the light switch and mini smart plug are on sale for all-time low prices today. These are dead simple to use, and allow you to control any light fixture or power outlet with your phone, IFTTT recipes, or even Alexa.
It’s never been easier to outsource vacuuming to a robot, and with today’s Amazon Gold Box, it’s basically never been cheaper, either.
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While they lack the brand recognition of Roombas, and we can’t personally vouch for them like we can for the Eufy RoboVac 11, these ECOVACS vacuums have solid reviews, and are insanely affordable.
The $140 Slim model is just over 2" tall, so it can fit under most furniture that you probably only move to clean under a couple of times per year. It also has Wi-Fi control, which is insane at that price.
For $10 more, you can get the M79, which is slightly bigger, slightly more powerful, and includes an extra cleaning mode.
For just $170, the DEEBOT M80 adds an optional wet mopping system for your hard floors, in addition to pulling standard vacuum duties.
This sale also comes with a special surprise: A window cleaning robot! Its utility will obviously vary depending on how your windows are set up in your house (generally speaking, these become more useful as your window panes get bigger, obviously), but it could be a worthwhile splurge.
Dremels make great gifts, because they can be many different things to many different people, and a whole bunch are on sale for Black Friday today. That includes everything from the Dremel pet nail grooming kit to a 30-piece variable speed starter kit to a damn butane torch, and everything in between. Be sure to head over to Amazon to see the complete list before these deals are ground away.
simplehuman makes our readers’ favorite trash cans, the only paper towel holders that don’t suck, next level shower caddies, and are just generally great at making beautiful and functional pieces for your home. The caveat is that they’re normally pretty expensive and very rarely do any kind of sale. But, today is one of those rare days! So check out the deals below the image above, or on this post. Most items are around 20% off their usual prices, and we likely won’t see a sale like this for a long time.
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Make your holiday cocktails with better tools. A whole bunch of boozy OXO gear is on sale for Black Friday, including the innovative Press & Pour shaker.
Worx Landroid Robotic Lawnmower | $649 | Amazon
Robotic vacuums have finally started to catch on in the mainstream, but mowing the lawn might actually be the more odious chore, especially when it’s hot out. Luckily, the Roomba for your yard exists, and it’s on sale right now for $649, an all-time low by about $100.
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The Worx Landroid runs seven days per week to keep your lawn perfectly manicured at all times, and like a robotic vacuum, it can park itself back on its charging base whenever its battery runs low, or if it starts to rain. The biggest catch is that you’ll have to peg down or bury a guide wire along the perimeter of your lawn, which prevents Landroid from escaping into the wilderness of Ms. Jenkins’ backyard herb garden.
$649's still a lot of money, but it’s a small price to pay to reclaim your Saturday afternoons.
If your spring cleaning doesn’t involve revamping your home goods, what are you even doing? Add some awesome infographics to your walls with 25% off sitewide at Pop Chart Lab. Get everything from the Connected Characters of Seinfeld to every single bird in North America. Enter the code BFWEEKEND at checkout to see your discount.
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And if you need an attractive and easy way to hang your new posters, the 25% also works on poster rails and map corners.
Everyone has fond memories of smelling the Yankee Candle store from halfway down the shopping mall’s hallways. It’s a rite of passage to attempt to walk by without getting a headache. But their candles really are great, and with this sale from Amazon, you can have those scents in your home for even less. Choose holiday or classic candle smells, including the bestselling Cedar & Balsam scent for just $12.
See all the candles included in the sale in this post.
In case you didn’t notice, we really like Chase’s Ultimate Rewards program. Back in 2015, Chase offered an incredible 10% back on Amazon purchases over the holidays- a promotion we’ve been longing for ever since that’s finally returned, with Best Buy and Walmart as the partner retailers this time.
Of course, you’ll need a Chase card to take advantage of this offer, but it doesn’t need to be a premium one. The high-end Chase Sapphire Reserve and the no-fee Freedom and Freedom Unlimited are all eligible. These are all must-own cards anyway, so if you don’t already have one, this deal is a great pot sweetener to stack with both your Black Friday/Cyber Monday savings and your sign-up bonuses.
Walmart’s half of the promotion runs through Dec. 14, with a max applicable spend of $325, while Best Buy’s goes all the way to Christmas Eve with a ceiling of $400. You can use Chase Pay to check out online to take advantage of the Walmart offer, but with Best Buy you’ll have to... go to a store.
You don’t need a yard, or even any gardening skills to grow your own food at home; you just need one of these countertop gardens. These fully-integrated, soil-free indoor gardens can grow herbs, vegetables, and salad greens up to five times faster than regular soil, and they’re all on sale for Black Friday.
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First up, Click and Grow makes beautifully-design gardens that create the perfect environment that your plants need to thrive. With sensors that tell the Click and Grow when to turn the LED lights on, you simply fill the container with water once a month and the Click and Grow (and the plants themselves) does the rest of the work. They have two options on sale today, a 3-plant size garden for 40%, or $60, and a 9-plant size garden at 30% off or $140.
Amazon also has a countertop garden on sale, the AeroGarden Harvest. Very similar to the Click and Grows, you simply pop in the seed pods, some water, occasionally add nutrients, and it does the rest. This AeroGarden has accommodations for six plants so its a good middle ground between the two Click and Grows. It normally sells for $140 and is down to only $100 today.
The Click and Grow sale only lasts through the weekend and the AeroGarden can change in price at all time, so harvest these deals now. They make great gifts.
It’s FINALLY that time of year where it’s socially acceptable to have a Christmas tree up in your house. If you’re in the market for a new artificial one, Amazon is discounting a bunch of trees made by National Tree. These are top-of-the-line trees that look convincingly real and come in a variety of tree species. Most of these are at or very near their all-time low prices so get yourself one of these and go ahead and blast that Christmas music.
Alexa, ask Garmin to get me directions to a good deal.
The Garmin Speak lets you bring Alexa along for the ride in your car, and works as a unique, unobtrusive GPS device to boot. If you’ve been waiting on a deal to pick one up, it’s down to $100 for Black Friday, or $50 less than usual.
Black Friday’s here to brighten your day with an array of Philips Hue smart lighting deals.
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In my opinion, the Hue White starter kit for $60 is a better way to get started than the more popular color bulbs. Most people won’t turn their living room various shades of blue, but everyone can benefit from regular light bulbs that you can control with your phone or your voice. This kit gets you four bulbs and a Bridge, which can support up to 50 Hue products.
If you really do want the classic Hue colorful bulbs, they’re on sale for $32 each, which is about as cheap as they ever get.
Hue can also accent your molding, or go under your kitchen cabinets with the Hue LightStrip Plus, which has never been this cheap before.
Keurigs and drip coffee makers are convenient, sure, but the coffee they produce can’t hold a candle to what you’ll get from these discounted gadgets.
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First up, the legendary Aerobie Aeropress is down to $24, an extremely rare discount from its usual $30. Even at full price, it’s easily the cheapest and easiest way to make terrific coffee, and it would make a great gift for any coffee lover. It also has one of history’s all-time great product videos.
Buying Guide: Gear for Better Coffee Good coffee tastes amazing, can be a great comfort, and is fun and easy to make well with the right … Read more Read
While you’re at it, we highly recommend picking up a reusable stainless steel filter to go with your new toy. It’s only $9, and it’ll pay for itself over time.
If, like me, you prefer the smoothness and concentration of cold brew, OXO’s Cold Brew maker is also $10 off today, down to $40. Just add coffee, add water, and walk away. You can read Shane’s review of it on Gear, and also see a video of how it works.
Cooking eggs isn’t exactly rocket science, but I’d say the ability to make soft, medium, and hard boiled eggs, plus omelettes and poached eggs at the touch of a button is worth $16. The Dash is Amazon’s top-selling egg cooker, and carries a stellar 4.5 star review average from nearly 4,500 customers, so get it while it’s on sale.
Bestsellers: Dash Egg Cooker An item has to sell 10,000 units to join our Bestseller club. The Dash Egg cooker can cook six eggs … Read more Read
If you cook rice regularly, you can save $40 off the normal price of this highly-rated Zojirushi rice cooker. You may be thinking that $201 is still a big chunk of change for a rice cooker, but it’s not when you learn about how this machine uses fuzzy logic to cook your rice precisely and perfectly every time.
“Fuzzy logic” is a way of describing situations that cannot be described in absolutes: yes or no, true or false, white rice or brown. Fuzzy logic is used in automated technology that must sense and adjust for various factors, like mixing cement (depends on humidity) and changing traffic lights (depends on traffic). In rice cookers, fuzzy logic can take into account the type of grain, its age and hardness and its desired consistency. Frequent rice cooks who work with a variety of grains and have room on the countertop will not be disappointed by the performance of these machines.
This is a larger model that can cook up to 1 liter of rice at a time, has a killer 4.4-star rating, and has extended keep warm features to keep your rice perfect for hours.
Irwin’s GrooveLock pliers are exceptionally popular, and at $16 less than its usual $80, this 8-piece set would make a great gift.
Grabbing breakfast or lunch with coworkers can be a great way to break up the day, but more often than not you’ll just wallow in your own indecision before ordering a bad $17 sandwich.
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Break the cycle with Soylent, a nutritionally complete meal replacement shake that now comes in six flavors (Coffiest is good!). Clip the coupon to save 35% off the 12-pack of your choice.
The original flavor also comes in powdered form now, which is also available with the aforementioned coupon.
So you want to try a standing desk, but you’re not ready to commit to it for eight hours a day...what do you do? You buy this Lorell monitor riser for as little as $136, an all-time low.
This riser arrives fully assembled, and just sits on top of your existing desk. Put your monitor(s) on the top shelf, your keyboard and mouse on the bottom, and use its integrated spring system to raise the entire setup from a sitting to standing position within seconds. You can also opt for the larger deluxe model for $227, which is also an all-time low. I own a very similar product from Varidesk (which was much more expensive, by the way), and I absolutely love it.
When compared to traditional blenders, stick blenders are 1,000x easier to clean. You can skip the blender work bowl and just place this stick blender in whatever container you were already using to make your sauce, smoothie, or whatever else needs to be pureed. That means less dishes, and more time to do whatever else you need to do.
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This Cuisinart Smart Stick Blender is just $25 today, which is the lowest price its been since July.
Spend $50 on the stuff everyone needs, like laundry detergent, paper towels, and body wash, and Amazon will give you a $10 gift card. Free money.
Remember to add the gift card to your cart before you check out.
While not nearly as ubiquitous as Nest’s Learning Thermostats, Ecobee’s smart thermostats one-up the competition by pairing with wireless remote sensors that you can place elsewhere in your house, giving the thermostat a more accurate picture of your home’s overall temperature.
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The new Ecobee4 is especially notable in that it doesn’t just work with Google Assistant and Alexa...it actually is a fully-featured Alexa device, just like an Echo Dot that lives on your wall. It’s rarely been discounted from its usual $250 since it launched earlier this year, but today on Amazon, you can get it (plus a remote sensor) for an all-time low $199.
Eight Sleep Black Friday Sale
There are seemingly dozens of internet mattress companies these days, but Eight Sleep sets itself apart by piling on smart features, and you can try out most of their mattresses for $100 off, plus a $100 bonus Amazon gift card.
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The mattresses themselves are basically what you’ve come to expect from internet mattresses these days: They’re blocks built from multiple layers of different types of foam. With Eight Sleep though, you do get to pick from three different tiers, including one with innersprings that should be more breathable. Whichever mattress you choose, you’ll probably like it just fine, and if you don’t like it, Eight Sleep offers the industry standard 100 night trial period, so you can return it for any reason.
Eight Sleep’s real magic comes from its unique mattress cover, which has smart features built in that you’ll actually want to use. It can track your restfulness, heart rate, and other sleep stats independently for each side of the bed, wake you up with a smart alarm when you’re not deep in a REM cycle, and even integrate with other smart home appliances. So you could conceivably change your thermostat temperature automatically when you get into bed, and start brewing coffee whenever you’re about to wake up.
The best feature though, without question, is dual zone temperature control. Yes, the mattress pad doubles as a smartphone-connected electric blanket to warm each side of the bed independently, which may not seem appealing right now, but you’ll thank the stars for it come winter.
Spend your money where you spend your time: in bed. We’ve been sleeping through the gauntlet of Internet mattresses, and not only is Leesa’s three-layer mattress our reigning champ, but the free pillow you get as part of this deal is our new favorite pillow.
The discounted mattress and pillow bundle starts at $665 for a full with code BFCM2017. The pillow is normally $75. Note the split date range this is valid for: 11.18-11.24 and 11.27. 100-night trial as always.
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This deal is even bigger if you’re in the market for Leesa’s hybrid (foam + springs) Sapira mattress: $250 off with the same code.
Dyson dominates the list of our readers’ favorite vacuums, and two of their most popular uprights are on sale on Amazon.
First up, the Ball Multi Floor 2 features a smart cleaning head that automatically raises and lowers itself based on the kind of floor you’re on, ensuring that the vacuum always maintains tight suction for optimum cleaning. $250 is by far the best price Amazon’s ever offered on it.
If you have pets, you should probably spend $50 more to get the Animal version.
The Dyson Cinetic features the same cleaning head, but doesn’t require any filter maintenance, instead relying on oscillating tips inside the motor to separate dust, making it perfect for homes with pets. $450 is actually $50 less than we’ve seen it in Black Friday ads, so you can buy with confidence.
If you’re looking for a lightweight cord-free option, they have Dyson V6 Animal for $249, which is $120 off its usual price.
Black Friday’s $275 deal on the Roomba 690 is an all-time low, and a great deal considering it has Wi-Fi to enable app and Alexa control from anywhere. That means once you leave the house, you can use your phone to start your Roomba, and come home to clean floors.
The high-end Roomba 980 and 960 has also dropped to its Black Friday price of $800 and $600, respectively. Needless to say, those aren’t cheap, but they both include a suite of sensors that can map your house, and even show you on an app which rooms it’s cleaned, and which it still needs to get to. The main difference is that the 980 has more powerful suction, but honestly, the 960 will be good enough for most people.
Commerce Content is independent of Editorial and Advertising, and if you buy something through our posts, we may get a small share of the sale. Click here for more.
Zappos is basically a one-stop shoe destination already, but right now, they’re having an actual sale, something they haven’t done in years. It’s ending on Saturday, so you’d better hurry and grab discounted shoes and apparel from Columbia, Sam Edelman, Frye, SOREL, Asics, Nike, The North Face, Hunter and more for men and women. And, if you’re part of their rewards program, get free expedited shipping on the over 70,000 items on sale.
You need jeans. Everyone needs jeans. Right now, get some from premium brands like Levi’s, NYDJ, J Brand, 7 For All Mankind, and more for a lot less during Amazon’s one-day sale. The best part is that these pricey premium brands are mostly marked down to under $100.
I’m firmly in the camp of never having too many bags, especially when they all serve different purposes. If you’ve been putting off replacing the one you’ve been using for far too long, Amazon’s handbag Gold Box has more than a handful of options from both Rebecca Minkoff and Kate Spade, all from Shopbop’s Amazon storefront.
Part of their massive Black Friday deal list, Amazon is taking up to 30% off a ton of best-selling beauty and grooming products. Pick up your favorite liquid eyeliner, Stila Stay All Day, for under $16. Or Crest 3D Whitestrips on sale, plus an extra $5 off coupon. And if you need a really great hair tool, try out the Beachwaver.
In my opinion, a classic wristwatch still looks better than any smartwatch, any day. Today only for Black Friday, pick up the a new timepiece from brands like Casio, Daniel Wellington, Timex (including the popular Weekender), and more for men, women, and kids. But time’s a-tickin’ on this deal and these prices only last until the end of the day.
Sunglass Warehouse has some of the best pricing out there, but they’ve amped it up this week. Their Black Friday Sale is basically a free-for-all. Use the code FRIDAY40 and take 40% off everything on the site, including sale styles. I mean, you can grab pairs for as low as $2, so you really have no excuse not to get a backup.
Anthropologie will always be a good destination to start looking for something unique. Right now, they’re taking 30% off everything in the store, including sale items and their insane home section. No code is needed to get the discount, just add all your stuff to your cart and checkout.
Sephora isn’t known for their discounts and deals like other retailers, but for Black Friday, they launched over 20 exclusive deals and sets, all for under $15. It’s not just single items either, it’s kits and sets that are perfect for de-stressing for the holidays, or the answer to your stocking stuffer inquiries. My recommendation is picking up the Bite Beauty Mini Multistick Duo or the Becca Wake Up Call set.
For as ridiculously cheap as e.l.f. Cosmetics is, they have some outstanding products. Right now, they’re even cheaper because the code CELEBRATE gets you half off orders of $30+ (excluding new and sale items), plus there’s automatically free shipping on orders of $25 or more. I highly recommend the Hydrating Bubble Mask and the Liquid Highlighter, and even though it’s not part of the sale, the Beauty Shield Magnetic Mask Kit is too cool to pass up.
For me, the most common answer to “Where did you get that?” is H&M. The stores are mad houses and the clearance sections are disorganized, but digging through them is so worth it. Right now, they’re having three sales in one. First, they have a massive, up to 70% off section, starting at $3. Second, they’re taking an extra 20% off, plus free shipping, with the code 1662. And third, they have an entire Black Friday Collection, which means limited edition items and prices.
In a twist of fate, Nordstrom Rack is having a clearance sale for Black Friday that’s even better than Clear the Rack. Starting today and going through Monday, you can get an additional 30% off Nordstrom Rack’s entire sale section, which is chock full of designer clothing in all styles.
You probably already got your Bean boots from last year and are ready for whatever 2017 throws at you (weather-wise, at least). But if you need to replace them, or if you somehow haven’t gotten a pair, they’re 25% off right now with the code FRIDAY25. Or, if you don’t need new boots, you can grab 20% off everything else with the code THANKS20, plus get a $10 gift card when you spend $50+.
LifeStraws are great backpack staples for hiking, or nice gifts for the outdoorsmen in your life. And right now, they’re just $14, which is about as cheap as you’re likely to see them.
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If you aren’t familiar, these allow you to sip directly from basically any source of fresh water you find in nature, and the filters will catch 99.9999% of bacteria, and 99.9% of parasites. That could come in handy during camping trips, or as you cling to life in a future post-nuclear hellscape.
If you need anything for the outdoors, Backcountry has it on sale. With up to 40% off a ton of stuff, plus use the code ARC30 on any one single Arc’teryx item (which is great seeing as they’re always way too expensive) and get 30% off. Outerwear, boots, bags, and more are discounted, so maybe it’s time to think about going for a winter camping trip
Every person should have a good pair of sneakers and workout clothes in their closet that can actually function during athletic activities. If you haven’t gotten around to getting an actual pair of athletic shoes or need to layer up for your runs, Amazon is marking down New Balance gear today only, with everything coming in under $50.
Uniqlo’s affordability is sometimes thwarted by the shipping costs, so when there’s free shipping, you know it’s a big deal. But with Black Friday sales upon us, they’re marking down outwear, denim, HEATTECH, socks, sweaters, basically everything for the fall, and there’s free shipping. Is there such thing as a Thanksgiving miracle?
Nordstrom may not have all the deals that Nordstrom Rack does, but an extra 25% off isn’t something to scoff at. This early Black Friday discount spans every category, from men’s shoes, to beauty deals, to home goods. No code is needed to get the discount, but you’ll need to take some time to dig through because there are hundreds of deals.
The Philips Norelco OneBlade is the shaver of choice for every guy on our staff, and Amazon’s offering an unprecedented 50% discount on it for Black Friday.
If you aren’t familiar with this thing yet, Shane shared his thoughts about it on Lifehacker Gear:
I’m pretty blown away by the Philips OneBlade. I was expecting a deconstructed electric razor or a souped up Gillette Power-style situation, but the OneBlade is more like the next evolution of beard trimmers. The OneBlade can be used to get a close shave, edge, or trim down to your preferred length. It’s also washable and rechargeable, and the replaceable blades that last an estimated four months are already available on Subscribe and Save. The OneBlade can be used in the shower or over the sink, with or without shaving cream or oil. To be clear, this is not going to give you a straight razor-close shave, but it’s going to get you 99.5% of the way there in no time and with no irritation.
The OneBlade usually sells for $35, and occasionally sees modest discounts to $25-$35, but $17 blows away every previous promotion. I paid full price for it back in March of this year (I’m still on my original blade, for the record), and have zero regrets.
You voted Indochino your favorite custom clothing company by a wide margin, and this week you can dress yourself in a bunch of different suits for all-time low prices of $289-$329 with promo code KINJA17.
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You do not have to go through the measurement and customization process to lock in this discount. You can checkout now and submit later, which makes it very easy to gift a suit.
Having a suit that fits perfectly is great, but the little details Indochino lets you customize, from your jacket lapels to pocket flaps to accent stiching around your buttons, are where things get fun.
How It Works
Measure and customize from home...
Follow the directions on Indochino’s site to submit your measurements and customize your suit. Once the suit arrives, if anything doesn’t fit quite right, Indochino will provide directions for your local tailor, along with a $75 credit to cover their work. If for whatever reason your tailor cannot resolve the issues, Indochino will remake your suit. Shipping and return shipping are free.
If you live near a showroom...
Purchase your suit online with our discount and take your receipt/account info into an Indochino showroom. They’ll do your measurements, walk you through your customization options, and have your suit delivered to the showroom. Return once it arrives for any final alterations if they’re needed.
Those who already have a closet full of suits may want to opt for something more interesting like the Slate Blue Plaid Suit, while the rest of us should go for something versatile.
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Let us know what you’ll be wearing to your next event (or day at the office) in the comments.
Amazon’s ability to carry a multitudes of fashion brands and styles (and even launch their own lines) is impressive. Their ability to mark things down these things in an orderly fashion is...not. Black Friday Deals Week has made its way to the apparel and accessories section of Amazon, with brands like Fossil, Adidas, Levi’s, Calvin Klein, Ted Baker, PUMA, and more included. The prices are a bit all over the place, so just keep an eye out.
Yeah, this is a mess, sorry.
GAP launched their 50% off deal Wednesday, and now Banana Republic and Old Navy followed suit. Right now, pick up 50% off everything full-price at BR or head over to Old Navy and grab 50% off your entire order. Plus, GAP’s sale is still happening and you can take advantage of all three sales at once, with one checkout. What a time to be alive.
Sperry is ready to outfit your feet in fall styles with a couple deals for you to choose from. Right now, they’re taking 50% off a ton (seriously, over 300) of styles, no code needed. That includes the boat shoes we all know and sometimes love, snow and rain boots, and even some coats and sweaters for the upcoming weather.
ThinkGeek is helping the nerds in your life get ready for the holidays. Score up to 75% off of a ton of products and apparel during their Black Friday Sale. There are seriously hundreds of items to choose from, which means every corner of geekdom is covered by this sale.
If you don’t know about REI Garage and you’re a gearhead, you’re missing out on a ton of savings. REI Garage is full of last-seasons styles and close-our gear, and right now, it’s all up to 50% off. Think boots, bags, outerwear, layers, sleeping bags, and more that are discounted to prices your wallet will appreciate it.
“No-iron shirts” have been around for so long that it seems almost ridiculous to buy anything else. Twillory takes that notion one step further by taking that no-iron notion and adding a bespoke feel.
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Their holiday deals are live now, and it’s the best pricing they’ve ever offered:
Two shirts for $89 with code SAVE2 (~$45 per shirt)
(~$45 per shirt) Four shirts for $169 with code SAVE4 (~$42 per shirt)
(~$42 per shirt) Five shirts for $199 with code SAVE5 (~$40 per shirt)
Those codes should work with all the shirts they sell, so mix, match, and get creative. Shane reviewed these shirts over on Gear, so head over there to learn about what makes them so great.
It’s about time you do some cleaning out of your drawers. Get rid of those laundry-day-only undies in favor of something you’ll actually like wearing. Aerie is giving you 10 undies for only $35, no code needed, which is kind of insane seeing as they usually sell them for $12+.
BioLite CampStove 2 Bundle | $150 | Amazon | Promo code BLKEARLY
It’s impossible to describe the BioLite CampStove 2 without sounding like a lunatic, but here goes nothing...
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So you find some sticks just laying on the ground, toss them into the stove and press a button to light them on fire. Then, you plug your phone into the USB port on the side of the stove, which is connected to a battery that is recharged by the flames. It’s completely bonkers, and yet it works.
Of course, this also works as a regular old camp stove, and at full power it can boil a liter of water in under five minutes. It’s also super light, and is about the size of a large water bottle, so it won’t take up too much space in your camping bag.
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Our readers can get early access to the CampStove 2's Black Friday deal today with promo code BLKEARLY, which brings the bundle down to $150. In addition to the stove, you get a USB-powered LED light, the KettlePot (which doubles as a carrying case for the stove), and the grill attachment.
Gone are the days where you started sweating just getting dressed in the moring (hopefully). It’s time to prepare for the temperature to drop. Columbia is giving you up to 35% off select styles, no code needed, during their Early Bird Special. Choose from over 100 styles for men, women, and kids. Pick up layering pieces, t-shirts, and outerwear that’s perfect for the fluctuating temperatures, for a lot less than normal.
Whether you’re hopping onto a bandwagon or you need a gift for the sport-obsessed person in your life, Fanatics has something you’ll like. And right now, they’re launching a bunch of daily deals leading up to Black Friday. Today, it’s 25% off sitewide with promo code BLACKFRI, no minimum purchase required.
Update: Black Friday is here early for the shoe brand, so now you can get 50% off a ton of styles (plus the 30% still applies to everything else).
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If reliability is something you crave in a pair of shoes (if it isn’t, you may need to reconsider), I bet you have Cole Haan in your closet. And if you’re looking for a new pair but don’t want to spend the normal asking price, Cole Haan is taking 30% off their entire site, no code needed. Finally get a pair of ZERØGRAND’s (or the newer 2.ZERØGRAND’s) or waterproof boots that you’ll probably need in less than a month.
Philips Sonicare DiamondClean 9300 [White] $133 | Amazon | After $30 coupon
The Philips Sonicare DiamondClean attempts to fix the biggest problem with every other electric toothbrush: The person operating it.
I know people are skeptical about Bluetooth-connected apps for devices that have existed without them for decades, but the Sonicare app is actually really cool. From Shane’s Gear review:
It’s good then the app is amazing, and changes the toothbrushing game if you actually use it. The Connected app tracks where you’re brushing (and not brushing), how long you brush for, where you’re using too much force, and more. The app will also keep track of when you need to replace brush heads, and your dentist can even use the app to view your brushing data and make notes of where you need to make changes.
In terms of the brush itself, you get basically every feature under the sun—this is the top-of-the-line in the Sonicare family, after all—including that awesome wireless charging cup.
Commerce Content is independent of Editorial and Advertising, and if you buy something through our posts, we may get a small share of the sale. Click here for more.
Need the perfect gift for the pretentious music lover in your life? How about BOGO 50% off vinyl records? This seems to apply sitewide on Amazon for any vinyl shipped and sold by Amazon.com directly, so just find two albums, stick them in your cart, and enjoy the discount.
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Need some inspiration? Our readers voted on their must-own albums a few months ago, and let me tell you, people had opinions.
Need something to play them with? Amazon’s also running a Black Friday sale on select record players.
h/t Josh Reynolds
These Harry Potter movie box sets drank some polyjuice potion and temporarily turned into discounted versions of themselves. You can snag all eight movies for $24, or just $30 for the Blu-ray discs.
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To separate the true Potterheads from the muggles, they’re also selling this Hogwarts special edition box set with 45 hours of special features, Blu-ray discs of all eight movies, and a bonus documentary, Creating the World of Harry Potter. It’s typically priced at $160, but is at $86 today so grab it before it disappears.
It’s time for your Kindle library to get in on the Thanksgiving gluttony with this Gold Box from Amazon today. They have over 100 titles to pick from, all under $5, with the selection ranging from books about Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, to psychological thrillers, and tear-jerking love stories.
For the first time since Prime Day, Amazon’s offering a sitewide discount on all physical books they sell; save $5 on any order of $20 or more with code GIFTBOOK17.
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Just like previous, similar deals, this deal excludes Kindle titles and audiobooks, but if there are any commemorative coffee table-type books or collector’s editions that you’ve been eyeing, this is a great opportunity. Just choose carefully; you can only use the code once per Amazon account.
You can buy multiple books to meet the $20 threshold, but here are a few $20+ suggestions to get you started. Again, this works on any physical book Amazon sells (shipped and sold by Amazon directly), so you shouldn’t have any trouble finding a use for it. Let us know in the comments what you got!
Fandango gift cards make great gifts, because no matter what theater the recipient goes to, they can almost definitely use it to buy tickets. For a limited time, you can save 20% on any $100+ gift card order from Fandango with code DEAL2017. That applies to $100 gift cards, or any combination of smaller gift cards that add up to $100. We won’t tell anyone if you’re just gifting them to yourself.
If you just bought (or are about to buy) a new 4K or OLED TV and want to watch something that shows off that ultra HD or superior display, look no further. This Planet Earth II 4K Blu-ray is down to its lowest price ever of $30.
Amazon is discounting DC Rebirth and Essential collections up to 65% off today through Black Friday. There are 1,600 graphic novels included in the sale, like Wonder Woman, V for Vendetta, Justice League and many more, so what are you waiting for?
You don’t need to be a Lannister today to afford Game of Thrones seasons 1 - 6 on Blu-ray. This normally sells for $140 and has never been below $90 so grab this before it turns it goes cold.
At $8 per month for Prime members, Amazon Music Unlimited was already more affordable than Spotify Premium or Apple Music, but Amazon’s sweetening the pot for new members by offering three months for just $1, for a limited time.
This is one of the best deals they’ve ever offered on the service, so if you haven’t signed up for Music Unlimited before, what’s $.33 per month to try it out?
Commerce Content is independent of Editorial and Advertising, and if you buy something through our posts, we may get a small share of the sale. Click here for more.
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus only just came out (and it’s really good unless you think Nazis are very fine people), but you can already get it for $25.
Need to get caught up? The Wolfenstein 2-pack (which includes Wolfenstein: The New Order and the standalone add-on The Old Blood) is just $15 for PS4 and Xbox One.
If you still haven’t picked up a copy of Final Fantasy XV (and you definitely should), Amazon’s marked PS4 digital copies down to $20 today, and physical Xbox One discs to $19, the best prices we’ve seen so far.
Whether you’re re-upping your own subscription or giving them out as gifts, both PlayStation Plus and Xbox Live Gold are on sale for Black Friday.
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The PlayStation Plus deal has been available for a few days, and is pretty straightforward: A year for $40. Buy it.
The Xbox Live deal isn’t quite as good, but paying $50 now sure beats paying $60 once your membership unexpectedly expires.
If you’re looking to grab an Xbox One S this holiday season, Microsoft has a ton of selection, and great incentives. Pretty much every console bundle is discounted by $50, with prices starting at a paltry $189, plus you get to pick an extra game of your choice, albeit from a fairly uninspiring selection.
Whether you already own a game console, or you’re buying a new one today, it never hurts to grab some extra controllers for under $40. The Xbox One S gamepad is on sale for $40 in both black and white, while the DualShock 4 is $38 in a whole array of colors.
Adorn your desk with your favorite light-up pixelated video game characters, now just $10 each.
What Do You Meme? is a game created by people behind Fuckjerry. It sounds very similar to Cards Against Humanity where a rotating judge picks the funniest caption that corresponds to a blank meme card. As far as we know, this game has only ever sold for $30 but is down to just $21 today.
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I’ve only played the original version of Exploding Kittens and it was very entertaining, so I can only imagine the NSFW version would be even better. It was created by the same people who write The Oatmeal comics and was the most-backed Kickstarter project of all time. Discounts on this game are very rare, but today is one of them, so pick this up for only $16.
There’s never a bad time to buy Nerf guns, but Black Friday just happens to be a particularly good time to buy them. You’ll find all the deals on this post, so go gear up.
While you may mess up an entire plot point of an epic franchise, you can pick up this droid littleBits set and make your own R2 unit the way you want. These sets are basically like if LEGO and K’nex had a baby and added a battery.
Update: Back in stock!
LEGO’s brand new Women of NASA set just launched, and we suspect it’ll be hard to find this holiday season. So if you want one for yourself, or to give as a gift, blast off to Amazon and get your order in.
Black Friday’s PlayStation VR bundles promised to be the best deals yet on the excellent virtual reality system, and two of them are live now.
$250 gets you the headset and the PS4 camera , or you can add $50 to add a copy of Gran Turismo Sport, or $100 to add a pair of Move controllers and Skyrim .
Though you’ll still need an expensive-ass computer to run it, Black Friday has brought out the best pricing ever on Oculus Rift. Get the headset and the Touch VR controllers for an all-time low $349, about $50 less than the usual going rate (which was itself a steep discount from its initial price).
Buying digital usually isn’t the way to get the best video game prices on Black Friday, but these PS4 download deals are as good or better than the physical disc deals we expect to see this weekend, and they’re available right now.
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Update: Crash Bandicoot physical copies will actually be $25 at certain retailers, sorry about that.
If you were hoping for a discount on the Nintendo Switch for Black Friday, I think you’re probably going to be disappointed. But you can still get the official Joy-Con charging dock for $19, or the AA battery pack for $15, which are both all-time lows. Hey, it’s better than nothing.
Many of you won’t bat an eye in spending $50+ on a good gaming mouse, but don’t neglect the mouse pad! This extra long model from Corsair is available for $12 today, an all-time low.
The smaller version of this same mouse pad is also available for $8.
$99 is a really good price for the Blue Yeti USB microphone, one of the most popular computer mics out there. And today, that price also includes a copy of Ghost Recon Wildlands, so you’ll have something to occupy yourself when you aren’t recording America’s next hit podcast.
If you have any Razer gaming gear on your holiday shopping list, a bunch of their Black Friday sales are already live. For all of the deals, head over to this post.
The PS4 Gold headset won our Kinja Co-Op for favorite gaming headset, and it’s down to $65 on Amazon right now, the best price they’ve listed in nearly a year.
For about the same price, you can also opt for the HyperX Cloud II, which isn’t wireless, but it will work with basically any gaming system, and simulates 7.1 surround sound.
The Humble Monthly subscription plan delivers you a selection of new games (to keep!) every month, gives you 10% off everything in the Humble Store, and donates 5% of each month’s proceeds to charity. If you prefer to play your games on PC, it might just be the best deal in gaming.
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For a limited time, if you prepay for a full year at $11 per month, they’ll throw in a $20 Humble Store gift card that you can spend on pretty much any game that you’d find on Steam. Can’t argue with that.
I didn’t know it was possible to improve upon the handheld white board, but Boogie Board might have done it. This $16 gadget includes a stylus to draw on its LCD display, and will keep its image indefinitely without any power until you hit the erase button, and of course, the “pen” will never dry out.
If you were not one of the fortunate few to get their hands on a Cozmo during the holidays last year, this is your second chance to be a gift-giving god. You’ll even save $30 doing it with Amazon’s early Black Friday Pricing.
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After nearly a year of regular play through frequent updates and new features, and there’s not stop in sight for my kids. As grueling as it was last year to stalk online and brick-and-mortar stores just to have the opportunity to pay $180 for this fist-sized forklift robot with a personality, he’s been worth every penny, every moment of effort, and then some. At $150, buying this smart robot toy for your kids is a no-brainer.
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Toys ||||| We are closing in on the “most wonderful time of the year”! And by that I mean Black Friday sale craziness is only a couple weeks away.
On Thursday, Walmart — the biggest player in the holiday sales game — announced its list of online and in-store Black Friday deals. Like last season, the retail giant is offering plenty of tech gadgets in its mix of sale items. Also familiar to its last Black Friday sale event: many of the items on said list of tech gadgets.
There’s an iPad, an Xbox One bundle, Beats headphones, a number of inexpensive laptops, and lots and lots of Blu-ray and DVD movies. The usual stuff. (You can cut to the chase and see the full listing.)
In fact, the biggest change to Walmart’s Black Friday sale this year is that the whole event has been simplified. First, the company is axing its typical rollout of various, staggered sales events from Thanksgiving Thursday through the weekend. Instead, Walmart’s entire Black Friday sale will begin online at 12:01 a.m. PST on Thanksgiving morning and in stores at 6 p.m. local time Thanksgiving evening. Second, the worldwide retailer has made “more than 95 percent” of this year’s Black Friday sale items available online, so there should be less reason to leave your turkey dinner early to fight through those crowds at the stores.
One of the reasons to put pants on and shop IRL at Walmart’s Black Friday event: As it’s done in years past, the store will again guarantee availability for select sale items (all electronics department stuff) to customers who come in-store to claim them during the first hour of the sale, between 6 and 7 p.m.
This year’s items guaranteed to be available:
iPad Air 2 in gold 16GB — $399 ($100 savings)
($100 savings) Xbox One 500GB bundled with Gears of War game — $299 ($50 savings, includes $30 Walmart gift card)
game — ($50 savings, includes $30 Walmart gift card) Beats Studio headphones — $169 ($131 savings)
($131 savings) HP 15-inch touch-screen laptop 500GB — $249 (special price)
(special price) LG 55-inch Smart 4K UHD TV — $698 ($300 savings)
Some other noteworthy techie treats in the sale:
PlayStation 4 bundled with Uncharted game — $299 ($50 savings)
game — ($50 savings) Roku 32-inch Smart HDTV — $125 (special buy)
(special buy) Samsung 60-inch 4K Ultra HDTV — $900 ($800 savings, online only)
($800 savings, online only) Dell Black 15.6-inch Intel i3 laptop — $279 ($120 savings, online only)
($120 savings, online only) Fitbit Flex wristband — $59 ($40 savings)
($40 savings) Fitbit Charge HR heart rate and activity wristband — $119 ($30 savings)
($30 savings) NBA2K16, Madden ’16 and FIFA ’16 for Xbox One — $27 each ($33 savings)
See the rest of the sale.
So that’s Walmart’s big holiday sale information drop; you may do with it what you wish. Shop online, shop in-store, or don’t shop at all. Happy holidays!
Update: Some product details and prices have been corrected.
Don’t miss these other awesome Yahoo Tech stories:
Email me at [email protected]. Follow me on Twitter at danielwbean.
For all the hottest tech news and gadget reviews, follow Yahoo Tech on Facebook! ||||| It's hard to believe that we're halfway through November already, but it's true. Not only is it time to start thinking about your guest list for Thanksgiving dinner, but also your Black Friday shopping list. Get a head start on your planning by checking out these Black Friday ads that are already posted online for your browsing pleasure.
Amazon
Motorola phones will be on sale for just a penny. Some of the available models include Droid Razr 4G, BlackBerry Torch 4G, HTC Inspire 4G, HTC Rhyme, Samsung Focus Flash 4G, and more. This sale is available now through 11:59 p.m. Monday, Nov. 28.
Verizon and Sprint customers are eligible for some extras. If they activate a mobile hotspot data plan on their hotspot-capable smartphone, they will also receive a $100 Amazon gift card.
Apple
Apple's sales will take effect on Friday, Nov. 25 at physical locations and online.
Get $101 off MacBook Airs, Pros, and iMacs. The 11-inch MacBook Air will be on sale for just $898!
Save up to $41 on iPods, including iPod Touch and Nano
iPads (first and second generation models) will be discounted up to $61.
Accessories for Macs, iPods, and iPads will be discounted as well.
Best Buy
Stores will be opening at 12 a.m. on Black Friday. Get a closer look at the Best Buy Black Friday ad here.
An insane deal, the Sharp 42-Inch LCD 1080p TV is only $200. Better get in line early for that one.
Capture precious moments with the Canon Power Shot ELPH 300HS Digital Camera for $150.
Alternatively, you can grab the Kodak PlayFull 1080p HD Camcorder for just $70.
Insane prices on DVDs — just $1 and up.
Or, grab Blu-rays starting at $5 and up.
GameStop
Stores will be opening at 12 a.m. on Black Friday.
Trade in your old DSi XL and get a 3DS bundle (that includes the system and a game) for $100.
The black Wii bundle, which includes Super Mario Bros. Wii and the official Super Mario Galaxy soundtrack, will be selling out at $150.
and the official soundtrack, will be selling out at $150. There's also a Xbox Kinect Bundle, which includes 250GB Xbox 360, Kinect, wireless controller, three-month Xbox Live membership, and two games for $300.
Kmart
If you're looking for a camcorder to capture family moments, snatch up the Sony Compact Camcorder with 60x Optical Zoom, which is on sale for $170.
Listen to your tunes on the cheap with Maxell Color Earbuds that are going for $2.50 a pair.
I love the Samsung PL120 DualView digital camera for self-portraits and videos, and on Black Friday, you can get one for yourself for just $99.
Looking for an affordable tablet that will let you surf the Internet on the fly? The Archos 8GB 101 Internet Tablet will be priced at just $219 on Black Friday.
Office Depot
The 17-inch HP g7 laptop is going for $350, but if you buy any HP laptop you can also get the HP Touchpad for $149.
HP laptop you can also get the HP Touchpad for $149. The "tech bundle" from Office Depot offers a laptop sleeve, wireless mouse, and 500GB hard drive for $80.
8GB SanDisk SD cards are only $9 each.
All M-Edge Kindle accessories and cases are buy one get one free.
All tablets are on sale during the Black Friday sale. The BlackBerry Playbook is only $200, while the Lenovo IdeaPad is $300.
The Canon Power Shot A22 14.1MP digital camera is $90 and comes with a free 4GB SD card.
Sam's Club
Stores will be open starting at 5 a.m. on Black Friday and will include a complimentary egg sandwich breakfast for members!
It could be better, but for the price of this Samsung 51-Inch Class 720p 600Hz Plasma HDTV ($498), it's a nice upgrade for someone with a smaller screen.
If you don't already have one, the Sony PS3 160GB Bundle is going for $239.
Or, get a Nintendo Wii Limited Edition Blue Console for only $99.
Need a laptop? The HP Pavilion 17.3-Inch Notebook is $499.
And though model numbers haven't been released, select 4G Android Smartphones are going for just $1.
Target
Stores open at midnight on Black Friday.
Get your game on with the PS3 gaming bundle, that comes with a 160GB PS3 Slim, two games (including Little Big Planet 2 and a 30 day PlayStation Plus membership for $199.
and a 30 day PlayStation Plus membership for $199. The Acer 10.1-inch netbook is $72 off and priced at $157 on Black Friday.
Get a Westinghouse 47-inch 1080p LCD HDTV for $298. That's $250 off the regular price of $550!
Select video games start at $5 a piece and DVDs starting at just $2.
Other gaming bundles include the Kinect sensor bundle (Kinect, two games and two game downloads) for $99, and a 3DS bundle (red 3DS and a copy of Super Mario 3D Land) for $180.
Walmart
Walmart's Black Friday ad is available to view online. Electronics will be going on sale starting at 12 a.m. on Black Friday, while toys and other departments will be open for shopping at 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day. ||||| It’s that time of year. With Thanksgiving comes Black Friday: the annual holiday for shoppers hoping to score massive deals on products from retailers around the country.
Every year, stores like Best Buy, Target and Walmart offer stunning deals on high-priced items like televisions and phones, as well as markdowns on other products that could make good gifts for the holidays.
Black Friday is also a major test for retailers — many of which have struggled in the deteriorating brick-and-mortar landscape. The kinds of deals these retailers offer could give them a leg-up on the competition — and it appears Best Buy, Walmart, Target and Toys ‘R’ Us are here to play.
According to the National Retail Federation, About 164 million Americans plan to shop or have considered shopping during the Thanksgiving weekend — which over the years has extended beyond Black Friday and into Cyber Monday.
Still, most of the shopping will be done on Friday, Nov. 24. To get a sense of the biggest deals available, here are some of the most stunning mark-downs offered.
Best Buy
If you’re looking for a deal on a new TV, Best Buy is your best bet.
The consumer technology store is selling the Sharp 50″ LED 4K Ultra HD 2160p Smart Roku TV for $179.99. That’s a staggering $320 off.
Additionally, Best Buy is selling the Toshiba 55″ LED 4K Ultra HD 2160p Chomecast TV for $279.99 — a mark-down by $220.
Both of these products will only be available in stores.
Walmart
With the purchase of select iPhones or Samsung phones under a Verizon or AT&T plan in stores only, you can get a $300 Walmart gift card.
Toys ‘R’ Us
For parents with kids, Toys ‘R’ Us is selling the popular Barbie Pink Passport 3-Story Townhouse for $59.99. That’s 50% off its original price of $119.99.
Target
One of Target’s best offerings is on its Xbox One S 500GB. For just $189.99, shoppers can snag it for $90 off — and get a $25 Target gift card along with their purchase. ||||| Play Facebook
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Black Friday deals are everywhere — in stores, online and even in-app. Consumers have never had so many options, which makes the whole event a bit overwhelming.
To help simplify the shopping holiday, NBC News compiled a list of five of the best Black Friday deals to help you hit the ground running:
Macy's
The department store chain is offering more than 400 door-buster deals, with a focus on home goods and apparel.
Ready, Shoppers? Here's Your Black Friday, Weekend Plan of Attack
"Our Black Friday assortment is focused on gift-giving ideas that we believe will be unique and interesting for our customers, and where we can also offer great quality at an incredible value on the brands and products they love," Macy's said in an email statement.
Customers stream into Macy's flagship store in New York City's Herald Square on Thanksgiving. Kena Betancur / Getty Images
Macy's said it surveyed 5,000 shoppers across the country and found that 40 percent intend to buy clothing as gifts this season, so apparel is well-represented on its list of deals.
Some of the best include 50 percent off boots and booties for women; 50 percent off Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein suit separates for men; and $15.99 puffer coats for kids.
For the already well-dressed cook, there's a J.A. Henckels Fine Edge Pro cutlery set for $79.99, discounted from the regular price of $289.99.
Microsoft
Windows users and gamers, rejoice! Microsoft has engineered a Black Friday blowout that features some of its best selling items both online and in-store.
TODAY's List of What to Get and Where to Find It
"As a thank you to Windows 10 fans — now on more than 110 million devices -- we're offering 1,000 10-cent deals over the course of 10 days at the Windows Store, Microsoft said in an email. More than 1,000 movies, games, music and apps will be available for a dime.
The software and cloud computing giant said it would have other "great deals" at Microsoft Stores and microsoftstore.com, including Xbox One gaming stations starting at $299 and PCs at less than $150.
DICK'S Sporting Goods
Outdoor types and athletes can get their fix at DICK'S on Black Friday. The retailer is selling a variety of products and apparel from The North Face, Nike, Adidas, and other fitness brands for 25 percent off.
DICK's Sporting Goods is selling discounted FitBit watches on Black Friday. DICK'S Sporting Goods
Even better, the retailer is slashing the prices of wearables and headphones. A Fitbit Surge Super Watch, normally $249.95, is going for $199.98, and a variety of Beats headphones are marked down 50 percent.
Exercise enthusiasts may also want to jump on some equipment deals, including 50 percent off the Sole F63 Treadmill and the E25 Elliptical.
"Similar to last year, DICK'S is offering extended store hours, great deals and promotions, plus a variety of ways to shop, making it the perfect place to find "Gifts that Matter" for the athletes and outdoor enthusiasts on your holiday shopping list," said Ben Shank, community marketing manager.
PetSmart and PetCo
Pets are part of the family, and they aren't being left out this BlackFriday. PetSmart is putting more than 8,000 pet products on sale.
Winter apparel for our four-legged companions will be marked down by up to 60 percent. Toys are marked down by as much as 50 percent, and even pets like hamsters and guinea pigs will be half-off.
A dog sniffs out some Black Friday deals at a Dallas PetSmart store on Nov. 29, 2013. Richard W. Rodriguez / AP Images for PetSmart
PetSmart is also offering 50 percent off a grooming package and shoppers who don't want to leave their pup at home on Black Friday can save 50 percent off a day of Doggie Day Camp.
PetCo is also offering a Black Friday special: a Dr. Seuss spa package at its grooming stations that feature a wash, a scented spritz, and "fashion pawlish," along with Dr. Seuss-themed accessory. Half the fun could come in participating in the event's social media hashtag, #DrSeussPets.
eBay
Cyber Monday isn't enough for this e-commerce giant. EBay also is unveiling a ton of Black Friday steals.
The deals cover a variety of categories and include $700 off a Canon EOS 6D Digital SLR DSLR camera, nearly $200 off a T-Tech by Tumi men's softshell jacket and more than 80 percent off a set of seven freshwater pearl earring studs.
eBay will be offering deals for both Cyber Monday and Black Friday. eBay
As random as these deals may sound, they were chosen using eBay Holiday Heat Map, a barometer for what customers are shopping for across the nation.
"Leveraging our eBay heatmap, we've been keeping a pulse on what our shoppers are most interested in buying and we're tailoring our deals to meet those needs," said Hal Lawton, senior vice president of eBay North America.
New deals will appear every hour all day long. ||||| Black Friday Deals Are Already on Amazon
Amazon has revolutionized our shopping experience and become a huge player in the annual Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, but now it wants a day all its own: Amazon ‘ Day’. At midnight begins Amazon Prime Day 2016 and some of the biggest deals have already leaked. But how good are they?
The exciting news is Amazon Prime Day 2016 is trying to outdo all the other shopping holidays with some real bargains that undercut previous Black Friday offers. It is also worth noting that Amazon will keep adding to the deals below, often with ‘Lightning Deals’ (which last only a few hours or even minutes at a time) as the day goes on. But for now this is the definitive break down…
Note: my thanks to BestBlackFriday.com which has worked with me to collate these deals and create order from the inevitable annual chaos
Star Buys
As always, some of the best Amazon offers are on its own range of products and this is true again with a number of deals making my top picks and outshining previous Black Friday deals:
Save $30 on Amazon Fire TV – regularly $100 (previously $25 off on Black Friday)
Amazon Fire tablet starting at just $33.33 (previously $34.99 on Black Friday)
Save $30 on Kindle Paperwhite (only $20 off on Black Friday)
Save $50 on Amazon Echo
32-Inch 720p Roku Smart TV for $119.99 (beats the best Black Friday price last year by $5)
Samsung UN55KU6600 Premium Curved 55-Inch 4K Ultra HD Smart TV (2016 model) for $649.99 – Amazon Exclusive
Samsung UN55KU6300 55-Inch 4K Ultra HD Smart TV (2016 model) for $549.99 – regularly $819
Solid Deals
On top of the above Prime Day 2016 deals, you’ll find some solid Amazon discounts on a lot of home cinema equipment:
2.1 Channel Sound Stand for $89.99
VIZIO 5.1 Channel Sound Bar for $199.99
RIF6 Cube 2-Inch Mobile Projector for $189.99
Save $15 on Fire TV Stick (same discount as Black Friday)
BOGO deal – Order a Fire HD 10 tablet and get a second Fire HD 10 tablet for $129 which saves 43% (useful for family purchases)
Treat With Caution
In typical Amazon style, you will also find a lot of promotions on Prime Day 2016 which which sound great on paper, but are too vague to endorse until the specific models are revealed:
43-Inch 4K Ultra HD Smart LED TV for $299.99
40-Inch 1080p LED TV for $139.99
32-Inch 720p LED TV for $99.99
Samsung Curved 3D Blu-ray Player for $49.99
As mentioned above, Amazon will continue to add to these deals as the day goes on and be sure to keep an eye out for Lightning Deals. Also expect rivals like to attempt to counter Amazon with a few hot anti-Prime day deals of their own.
Happy shopping!
___
Follow Gordon on Twitter, Facebook and Google+
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iPhone 6S Vs Galaxy S7: What’s The Difference? | – Black Friday is here, and 2017's version looks like it might be the strongest one in recent years, reports Business Insider. Generally speaking, crowds are looking larger, perhaps thanks to metrics such as low unemployment and a rising stock market. "The turnout is clearly better than the last couple of years," says an analyst at Customer Growth Partners. Still, the frenzied madness of the day itself appears to be on the wane, as stores spread out sales to "Super Saturday" and, of course, online. During Thanksgiving week, 35% of holiday shoppers planned to get most of their shopping done on Black Friday, down from 59% in 2015, reports USA Today, citing a survey from PwC. Best online deals: Kinja is among the sites rounding up the best online deals for Black Friday, including Amazon tablets: the Fire 7 is $30, the Fire HD 8 is $50, and the Fire HD 10 is $100. Brick-and-mortar deals: Fortune has a guide to some of the best deals at the likes of Best Buy, Target, and Walmart. Target, for instance, is selling the Xbox One S 500GB for $189.99, a discount of $90. Thrillist looks specifically at Walmart. TVs: The New York Times thinks the best deals awaiting customers might be on high-end TV sets that typically run $2,000 or more. Discounts of 15% to 30% can save big money, and the Times has a guide on what to look for here. |
Customs & Border Protection recently “discovered” additional daily flight logs that show the agency has flown its drones on behalf of local, state and federal law enforcement agencies on 200 more occasions more than previously released records indicated.
Last July we reported, based on daily flight log records CBP made available to us in response to our Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, that CBP logged an eight-fold increase in the drone surveillance it conducts for other agencies. These agencies included a diverse group of local, state, and federal law enforcement—ranging from the FBI, ICE, the US Marshals, and the Coast Guard to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Investigation, the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation, the North Dakota Army National Guard, and the Texas Department of Public Safety.
CBP stated that these flight logs and a list of agencies it later prepared based on those logs represented all the missions the agency flew on behalf of non-CBP agencies. Yet after EFF and CBP briefed the remaining issues in the case in our Cross Motions for Summary Judgment and on the eve of the pivotal court hearing on those motions in December 2013, CBP announced it “discovered that it did not release all entries from the daily reports for 2010-2012” responsive to EFF’s FOIA request.
Not only do these new flight logs and the accompanying new list of agencies show a striking increase in the overall number of flights (700 versus 500), they also reveal a sharp increase in the number of flights for certain federal agencies like ICE (53 more flights than previously revealed) and the Drug Enforcement Agency (20 more flights). And they also reveal CBP flew 32 additional times on behalf of state and local agencies—including previously undisclosed law enforcement like the Arizona Department of Public Safety and the Minnesota Drug Task Force. Unfortunately, CBP continues to withhold the names of many of these state and local agencies, arguing that revealing them would somehow impede ongoing investigations. However, as we pointed out in our summary judgment brief, disclosing that CBP was working with, for example, the Pima County, Ariz. Sheriff’s Department would not be specific enough to affect any particular criminal operation. It would hardly be surprising that CBP was working with Pima County because it shares a border with Mexico. It is also—at 9,200 square miles—one of the larger counties in Arizona and has one of the highest crime rates of any county in the country—a rate of 4,983 crimes per 100,000 people. Given the large geographic size of and crime rate in this county and others like it, it is hard to imagine that releasing information about which county sheriff’s department CBP is working with would enable suspected criminals in the area to link CBP’s drone surveillance to their particular criminal activity.
The newly-released records reveal other surprising facts, including that CBP was using its sophisticated VADER surveillance system much more frequently than previously thought and was using it for other agencies. This sensor, also known as Vehicle and Dismount Exploitation Radar, was initially developed for use in the Afghanistan War and can detect the presence of people from as high as 25,000 feet. CBP has used this sensor in its surveillance operations since 2011 and used it at least 30 times for other agencies in 2012. The records CBP previously released to EFF contained no specific mention of VADER technology. As noted by the Center for Investigative Reporting, the system has several limitations—not the least of which is that “it can’t tell the difference between a U.S. citizen and noncitizen.”
The records also indicate that CBP’s drones appear plagued with problems; many of the logs indicate missions were terminated or cancelled due to undisclosed issues affecting both the aircraft (General Atomics was often called in to address issues with the Predators) and the surveillance equipment on board (Raytheon, which supplies the RADAR equipment for CBP’s drones was also called in). The VADER system had its own undisclosed problems.
CBP noted in a recent Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) that it generally flies its drones in support of its primary mission—“border security.” Yet these records indicate just how blurred that mission has become. This is problematic because, as CBP also notes, drones like Predators enable “the monitoring of large areas of land more efficiently and with fewer personnel than other aviation assets.”
As the use of Predators moves from maintaining security at the nation’s borders to general law enforcement elsewhere within the country, more and more people in the United States will be subject to drone surveillance. CBP states in its PIA that it stores data unassociated with a particular investigation for no more than 30 days, but much, if not most of this data will be associated with an investigation and may therefore be stored indefinitely—even if it includes footage of property, vehicles and people unassociated with the investigation.
CBP also states in the PIA that we shouldn’t be concerned about the privacy implications of its drones because their sensors cannot yet identify individual people. However, these sensors are becoming more sophisticated every day, and it won’t be long before surveillance capabilities like "facial recognition or soft biometric recognition, which can recognize and track individuals based on attributes such as height, age, gender, and skin color" are added to CBP’s arsenal. We need to address these issues before that happens.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein was concerned enough about drone surveillance to amend last term’s Senate Immigration Bill to restrict CBP’s flights in California to within three miles of the border. We should be similarly concerned about CBP’s flights throughout the country—especially when CBP still refuses to reveal exactly which state and local agencies it’s working with. We’ll be arguing just that point in the hearing on our Cross Motion for Summary Judgment in the case this coming Wednesday.
Documents:
In order to be comprehensive, we present the documents CBP previously provided alongside the supplemental disclosures referred to in this report. The updates are marked "NEW."
Agency Lists
2010 Flight Logs
2011 Flight Logs
2012 Flight Logs ||||| A Predator drone operated by the U.S. Office of Air and Marine taxis toward the tarmac for a surveillance flight near the Mexican border on March 7, 2013 from Fort Huachuca in Sierra Vista, Ariz. (John Moore/Getty Images)
Federal, state and local law enforcement agencies are increasingly borrowing border-patrol drones for domestic surveillance operations, newly released records show, a harbinger of what is expected to become the commonplace use of unmanned aircraft by police.
Customs and Border Protection, which has the largest U.S. drone fleet of its kind outside the Defense Department, flew nearly 700 such surveillance missions on behalf of other agencies from 2010 to 2012, according to flight logs released recently in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil-liberties group.
The records show that the border-patrol drones are being commissioned by other agencies more often than previously known. Most of the missions are performed for the Coast Guard, the Drug Enforcement Administration and immigration authorities. But they also aid in disaster relief and in the search for marijuana crops, methamphetamine labs and missing persons, among other missions not directly related to border protection.
Because they have sophisticated cameras and can remain in flight for many hours at a time, drones create novel privacy challenges. Civil libertarians have argued that these aircraft could lead to persistent visual surveillance of Americans on private property. Government lawyers have argued, however, that there is no meaningful legal distinction between the use of unmanned and piloted aircraft for surveillance.
Hundreds of missions
The issue has become a hot topic in Congress; the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on the subject Wednesday.
For now, drone flights in the United States are tightly restricted for safety reasons. Other than the military, Customs and Border Protection is one of the few agencies permitted by the Federal Aviation Administration to fly unmanned aircraft on a daily basis within the country’s borders.
As a result, Customs and Border Protection is facing heavy demand to fly its unarmed drones to benefit other law enforcement agencies that lack their own.
In 2010, for example, Customs and Border Protection conducted 76 drone missions for other agencies. The next year, that number quadrupled, and it remained at nearly the same level in 2012.
Although the border agency has acknowledged that it flies drones for other law-enforcement departments, it has revealed little about the number and precise nature of the missions.
All told, Customs and Border Protection flew 687 drone missions for other agencies from 2010 to 2012, according to the records provided to the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Last summer, the border agency released a batch of records indicating that it had flown fewer than 500 missions during that period. Officials offered no explanation for why the earlier release of documents was incomplete.
Congress has directed the FAA to gradually open the national airspace to public and commercial drone traffic in the coming years. In the meantime, however, there is a huge, unfed appetite among police agencies for drones and their powerful surveillance tools, which include infrared cameras and specialized radar.
Customs and Border Protection has a fleet of 10 unarmed Predator B drones. They are virtually identical to an Air Force drone known as the Reaper. Both are manufactured by General Atomics, a major drone producer based in Southern California.
The FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies have their own drones, but they are more rudimentary than those operated by Customs and Border Protection. The Defense Department is prohibited from using its drones in the United States for law enforcement
David V. Aguilar, who was the acting chief of Customs and Border Protection until he retired last year, said calls for surveillance help from other agencies began to jump as word got out about the drones’ capabilities.
“As the other entities found out we were able to fly, and where we were able to fly, the requests started to come up,” said Aguilar, who is a partner at Global Security & Intelligence Strategies, a Washington-based consulting firm.
He said the requests were granted only if there was a pressing law enforcement purpose or a public safety emergency. “There was a sensitivity attached to this,” he said.
Customs and Border Protection flies its drones within a 25-mile-wide corridor along the nation’s northern and southern borders, as well as over the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico.
Jenny Burke, a spokeswoman for the agency, said 95 percent of its drone flights “are devoted to CBP’s border security mission.” She said that the drones are sometimes deployed in support of federal disaster-response efforts and that they can be used to provide aerial mapping of flood zones and storm-stricken areas.
Sophisticated sensors
The logs, which were heavily redacted before being released, detail hundreds of missions and attempted missions. In every case, the name of the government agency borrowing the drones was blacked out, but CBP officials separately provided overall totals of how often various agencies used its drones.
The sensors mounted on the drones, records show, often were equipped with radar technology capable of detecting movement on the ground. The drone logs record many uses of a surveillance system called VADER, for Vehicle and Dismount Exploitation Radar, to spot individual people and vehicles, though its reliability varied.
When one agency used a drone to check out reports of “a launching device” that shot bundles of contraband between homes on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, the drone detected “no suspicious activity” during its flight in May 2012.
Yet in other cases, the drones watched drugs move across the border in backpacks, speedboats, pickup trucks and river rafts. In June 2012, a drone equipped with VADER spotted a truck south of the border installing a temporary ramp over a fence. A silver Chevrolet Suburban SUV soon drove over the ramp, clearing the fence, in full view of the drone. Agents alerted to the activity recovered 2,317 pounds of marijuana.
Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, expressed frustration that CBP officials would not release the names of sheriff departments for which the agency flew drones. She also expressed concern about policies allowing for indefinite retention of video feeds and other data collected during flights related to investigations.
“We don’t know what’s happening with that data, and that creates a bigger privacy risk,” Lynch said. | – Domestic law enforcement agencies have flown a lot more drone missions than they let on, according to newly uncovered data. Customs and Border Patrol lent out drones from its fleet for almost 700 surveillance missions from 2010 to 2012, the agency has revealed, in response to Freedom of Information Act requests from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Originally, CBP had that number at around 500, but with a major court hearing pending, the agency said it "discovered that it did not release all entries" from its reports. The missions were flown on behalf of the DEA, Coast Guard, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and local law enforcement. CBP refused to identify specific local agencies, nor would it say much about the nature of the missions, or why its earlier figure was so far off. The former acting head of the agency tells the Washington Post that as one of the few agencies with access to the robots, they were swamped with requests. But he says they were granted only in pressing situations. "There was a sensitivity attached to this." |
May 8 (Bloomberg) -- Patti Hart, the Yahoo director responsible for the vetting process in the hiring of Chief Executive Officer Scott Thompson, will not stand for re-election to the board at the company's next annual meeting. Bloomberg's Cory Johnson reports on Bloomberg Television's "Money Moves." (Source: Bloomberg)
Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) board members met yesterday to review the academic record of Chief Executive Officer Scott Thompson, a person briefed on the plans said, as investor Third Point LLC stepped up pressure for his ouster.
The company formed a committee of three recently appointed board members to explore discrepancies in Thompson’s resume, said the person, who asked to remain anonymous because the meetings are private. An outside law firm is working with the committee, this person said.
Third Point, which is trying to win seats on Yahoo’s board and has said the company is mismanaged, last week highlighted errors in Thompson’s resume and demanded that he be fired. The fallout marks a setback for Thompson, who had just embarked on efforts to revive growth and help the company do a better job coping with challenges in online advertising and social media from Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. Yahoo’s board fired former CEO Carol Bartz in September amid falling sales.
The biography for Thompson, who joined Yahoo from EBay Inc. (EBAY) in January, listed a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Stonehill College, a credential that wasn’t offered until four years after he graduated, Third Point CEO Daniel Loeb said.
Yahoo’s board said last week that it would review the matter and “make an appropriate disclosure to shareholders.” The company had earlier called the discrepancy an “inadvertent error” and said it “in no way alters that fact that Mr. Thompson is a highly qualified executive with a successful track record leading large consumer technology companies.”
Thompson’s Apology
Thompson, in a memo to staff yesterday, apologized for the fallout from the disclosures and said he takes “full responsibility.” He said he’s cooperating with the review.
“I want you to know how deeply I regret how this issue has affected the company and all of you,” Thompson said. “We have all been working very hard to move the company forward, and this has had the opposite effect.”
Dana Lengkeek, spokeswoman for Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo, declined to comment.
Yahoo shares slid 1.5 percent to $15.11 as of 10:57 a.m. in New York. They had lost 4.8 percent this year before today.
New York-based Third Point demanded yesterday that it be able to inspect records related to Thompson’s hiring, as well as the appointment of director Patti Hart, whose credentials it also questions.
“Yahoo shareholders and employees will be best served if the board accepts responsibility quickly for this latest debacle,” Third Point said in a letter. “If the directors are truly interested in ‘working in a constructive manner with Third Point,’ they should provide answers promptly.”
Thompson has cut 2,000 jobs and overhauled management. The company’s shares had their biggest rally in almost four months on April 18 after Yahoo reported first-quarter sales that topped estimates, fueling optimism that turnaround efforts may take hold. A day earlier, Yahoo reported its first revenue gain in more than three years.
The appointment of the special committee and work with a legal firm was reported yesterday by the Wall Street Journal.
To contact the reporter on this story: Brian Womack in San Francisco at [email protected]
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at [email protected]. ||||| Exclusive: Yahoo Director in Charge of Botched CEO Vetting to Step Down From Board
CSLie has claimed its first victim, although the mystery is still unsolved.
Patti Hart — the Yahoo director in charge of the search that resulted in the hiring of Scott Thompson as its CEO, making her directly responsible for a clearly botched vetting of his academic record — will not stand for re-election to the board at the next annual meeting, according to sources close to the situation.
Hart — who is CEO of International Game Technology, which makes electronic gaming equipment and systems products — is resigning. Apparently, said sources, her own board asked her to remove herself from the Yahoo mess to better focus on the company she actually runs.
But she is perhaps just a few steps ahead of being pushed, given her key role in the hiring of Thompson, who was president of eBay’s PayPal payments unit when he cold-emailed Yahoo director and Intuit CEO Brad Smith seeking the job.
A Yahoo spokesman declined to comment.
[UPDATE: Yahoo confirmed the inevitable departure later in the day and said the Yahoo board would have nine members going forward. Hart also released a statement, confirming the move.]
Hart, who came to the Yahoo board in 2010, has been head of its corporate governance and nominating committee.
The departure makes her the first casualty — but definitely not the last — of the controversy over how a fake college degree managed to get in Yahoo’s regulatory filings via Thompson’s inaccurate bio.
The issues around how Thompson was hired — including how background checks on him failed to discover that he never got a CS degree from the Boston area’s Stonehill College, as his longtime bio on eBay had claimed — are part of a new investigation by the board.
That will be officially announced later today, along with the hiring of an outside law firm to conduct the probe, which will be headed by independent director Fred Amoroso.
[UPDATE: Yahoo officially said it was forming a special committee to look at Thompson’s bio snafu and the circumstances around his hiring. Along with Amoroso, the other members are John Hayes and Thomas McInerney, independent directors who joined the board in April.
“The special committee and the entire Board appreciate the urgency of the situation and the special committee will therefore conduct the review in an independent, thorough and expeditious manner,” a statement from Yahoo said.
Interestingly, the statement did not include a show of support for Thompson, which often happens in such circumstances.]
They will have a lot to investigate. Such as this mystery: Thompson’s correct bio appeared in filings eBay made with the Securities and Exchange Commission, while Yahoo’s similar documents were inaccurate about his educational credentials.
Also under scrutiny: How the falsehood was added to Thompson’s public resume, and who put it there; why Thompson never noticed the error, there since at least 2004; why he declined to correct it when asked directly about it; and who at Yahoo might have known about the problem before the hiring.
It’s a basic case of who, what, where, when and how. And, most of all, why anyone would make such a dumb mistake.
Hart would seem to have all the answers to that, along with a forensic firm that worked on the vetting. Key Yahoo staffers were also involved, said sources, although its headhunting firm on the CEO search, Heidrick & Struggles, was not used in relation to Thompson.
Presumably, there is a paper trail of some sort, which was the subject of a legal demand by activist shareholder Daniel Loeb of Third Point yesterday. He uncovered the bio error last week, in the middle of pressing a proxy fight to garner board seats.
Loeb’s allegations also nailed Hart in much-less-egregious padding of her own college record, making it appear as if she had economics and marketing degrees. She has one in business administration, with “specialties” (Yahoo’s ridonkulous word, not mine) in economics and marketing.
While Hart’s leaving might assuage some, providing a convenient scapegoat to the bizarre situation, this is by no means over for Yahoo or Thompson.
Another increasingly potent issue is the ever-declining morale at the Silicon Valley Internet giant over the company’s odd response — it initially called the bio problem an “inadvertent error,” without further explanation — and also Thompson’s lack of transparency on the issue.
He released an email to employees last night, apologizing for the “distraction” of the resume issue, but not for the error itself.
That, and other of Thompson’s actions — he has been described to me, by many close to the situation, as defiant over the issue, and as blaming Loeb for conducting a personal vendetta — did not sit well with many, both inside and outside Yahoo.
A Yahoo spokeswoman told me earlier this week that there is much support for Thompson internally and externally, but declined to provide specifics.
But message boards I read were mostly negative about him, as are a plethora of direct emails to me on the situation. One clever commenter on this site bemoaned that Thompson might get off “Scott-free.”
Ouch! Nonetheless, the atmosphere at Yahoo is indeed unsettled.
“Sentiment from employees is unanimous that he must go,” said a Yahoo employee, who has no personal agenda that I can grok, in a common refrain. “He clearly knew and lied for years; and his handling since exposed has been unacceptable.”
Unacceptable or not, though, Hart is the only one going for now. But stay tuned.
Until then, here’s an appearance I made today on WSJ.com to talk about Hart’s departure: ||||| Article Excerpt
Yahoo Inc.'s board is moving forward with an investigation into how its chief executive's academic credentials were misstated in company regulatory filings.
The board, which met on Sunday and Monday, has created a special three-person committee to investigate the matter and is hiring an outside law firm to help oversee it, said people familiar with the situation. The committee's trio are all newcomers to the board.
The board is struggling with the question of how CEO Scott Thompson didn't notice the mistaken information in his publicly-available biography for so long, said the people familiar with the matter.
Yahoo's filing in ... | – Yahoo’s board is investigating the mess surrounding CEO Scott Thompson’s inflated résumé, and is hiring a law firm to oversee the matter, the Wall Street Journal reports. After shareholder Third Point LLC discovered Thompson has only an accounting degree, rather than a degree in computer science and accounting as his bio stated, the investor set yesterday as the deadline for Thompson’s ouster. When that deadline passed with Thompson's head still intact, Third Point demanded Yahoo allow it access to documents related to Thompson’s recruitment and vetting, the BBC reports. The committee investigating the matter will attempt to determine whether anyone at Yahoo knew about the errors in Thompson’s bio. While the same incorrect information was also available on his PayPal bio, regulatory filings by eBay and other companies where Thompson sat on the board did not include the misinformation and referenced only his accounting degree. Third Point also alleges that director Patti Hart (who was instrumental in getting Thompson hired) misrepresented her degree, and it called for her to resign from the board. She said today that she wouldn't stand for re-election at Yahoo's next annual meeting, notes the AllThingsD blog. Thompson, meanwhile, apologized to employees in a memo yesterday, taking “full responsibility” but not revealing how the error occurred, Bloomberg reports. |
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/ Updated By Alex Johnson and Tom Winter
The late Penn State University football coach Joe Paterno knew about sexual abuse allegations against former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky as early as 1976, according to an assertion in a Philadelphia court order made public Thursday.
The claim emerged in a dispute over who should pay Penn State's share of about $60 million in settlements with 26 men who say Sandusky abused them when they were children — the university or its insurance company.
Previously, the abuse was widely thought to have occurred from 1994 through 2008, when Sandusky ran a youth charity called Second Mile.
But in the new order, dated Wednesday, Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas Judge Gary S. Glazer wrote in passing that the insurance company, Pennsylvania Manufacturers' Association Insurance, had claimed that "in 1976, a child allegedly reported to PSU's Head Coach Joseph Paterno that he (the child) was sexually molested by Sandusky."
According to the order, the insurance company further claims that in 1987 and 1988, other assistant coaches witnessed "inappropriate" or "sexual" conduct between Sandusky and children, and that in 1988, a similar allegation was referred to Penn State's athletic director.
The order was first reported by the Patriot-News of Harrisburg.
The Paterno family told NBC News that it wants "a full public review of the facts."
"Because of a single sentence in a court record of an insurance case, Joe Paterno's reputation has once again been smeared with an unsubstantiated, forty year old allegation," the family said in a written statement. "Over the past four and a half years, numerous allegations that were taken as fact when they were initially communicated have been proven false. It is in this context that the latest claim should be viewed."
A spokesperson for Penn State told NBC News that it was aware of the allegations, "but the legal case and confidentiality commitments that govern our settlement agreements preclude us from discussing these matters at all."
Former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky in Centre County Court in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, on Monday. Gene J. Puskar / AP
Glazer was careful to note that the claims are allegations, not proven facts, and that "since this is obviously not a criminal matter, this court is not governed by the higher standards of proof required in criminal prosecutions."
On the larger question, the judge ruled that both sides could still be on the hook for paying judgments in various cases depending on when they occurred.
NBC News has previously reported that Penn State could still face legal action by at least six other alleged victims not included in the settlement agreement. And it has also reported that some allegations against Sandusky date to the early 1990s and perhaps even the late 1980s, raising questions about what Penn State knew and when it knew it.
Sandusky was sentenced to 30 to 60 years in prison in October 2012 for abusing 10 boys he met through Second Mile. He filed a petition this week for a new trial.
Paterno, a revered figure who many proclaimed represented integrity in college football, was fired amid allegations that he didn't properly report concerns about Sandusky to authorities. He died in January 2012 at age 85 and was never charged with any crimes.
At the time the criminal charges were filed against Sandusky in 2011, Paterno told reporters, "In hindsight, I wish I had done more."
University President Graham Spanier, Athletic Director Tim Curley and Senior Vice President Gary Schultz were all forced out of their jobs. They still face charges that they failed to report one of the allegations. ||||| This post was updated at 9:18 p.m. Thursday to add some new information.
A new bombshell dropped in the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal Thursday.
It came in the form of a single line in a court order on a related insurance coverage case involving Penn State, and its full ramifications can't immediately be gauged.
But that line was eye-popping in itself.
The line in question states that one of Penn State's insurers has claimed "in 1976, a child allegedly reported to PSU's Head Coach Joseph Paterno that he (the child) was sexually molested by Sandusky."
The order also cites separate references in 1987 and 1988 in which unnamed assistant coaches witnessed inappropriate contact between Sandusky and unidentified children, and a 1988 case that was supposedly referred to Penn State's athletic director at the time.
All, the opinion states, are described in victims' depositions taken as part of the still-pending insurance case, but that, according a PennLive review of the case file, are apparently under seal.
"There is no evidence that reports of these incidents ever went further up the chain of command at PSU," Judge Gary Glazer wrote, in determining that because Penn State's executive officers - its president and trustees - weren't aware of the allegations, he would not bar claims from that time frame from insurance coverage.
The insurance case involves big money for Penn State, which hopes to be reimbursed for most of the $60 million-plus it has paid in recent years to settle nearly 30 civil claims pertaining to abuse by Sandusky.
Other sections of Glazer's pre-trial order Thursday held that the university cannot claim coverage for Sandusky settlements for abuses started between 1992 and 1999 because of specific provisions in policies written in those years excluding claims of sexual abuse.
But it is the Paterno allegation that is eye-popping, because of the unending national conversation and curiosity over how much the late and legendary Penn State coach may have known about Sandusky's actions during their lengthy careers together.
Sandusky, who was convicted in 2012 of the serial sexual abuse of 10 different boys he came to know through his Second Mile youth charity between 1994 and 2008, was a key part of Paterno's coaching staff from 1969 through 1999.
Parts of Penn State nation still are deeply divided over questions like whether Paterno was wrongly fired in the wake of Sandusky's November 2011 arrest, and whether the coach's Beaver Stadium statue - taken down in the summer of 2012 - should be reinstalled there or somewhere else on the campus.
Paterno's family, and by extension its legions of loyalists, have argued vehemently that Joe Paterno and the larger Penn State community were deceived by the Sandusky, whom they have argued - with a consultant's help - was a master deceiver and manipulator.
And they also disputed the claim in the current case Thursday evening in the strongest possible terms.
"Over the past four-and-a-half years Joe Paterno's conduct has been scrutinized by an endless list of investigators and attorneys," the Paterno family's attorney, Wick Sollers, said in a statement.
"Through all of this review there has never been any evidence of inappropriate conduct by Coach Paterno. To the contrary, the evidence clearly shows he shared information with his superiors as appropriate.
"An allegation now about an alleged event 40 years ago, as represented by a single line in a court document regarding an insurance issue, with no corroborating evidence, does not change the facts. Joe Paterno did not, at any time, cover up conduct by Jerry Sandusky."
PennLive reached out to Steven Engelmyer, the lead attorney for Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association Insurance Co., which is arguing in the current case in Philadelphia's Court of Common Pleas that it has no duty to reimburse Penn State for more than $60 million in Sandusky-related civil settlements that the university has paid to date.
Engelmyer declined comment when reached Thursday.
Others, most notably Penn State's independent Sandusky investigator Louis Freeh, have alleged that, at least from 1998 on, Paterno, then-Penn State President Graham Spanier and two of Spanier's top managers were aware of complaints against and about Sandusky.
In a pending criminal case, Spanier, former athletic director Tim Curley and former vice president for business and finance Gary Schultz are accused of failing to report a specific allegation of abuse by Sandusky in 2001 that a then-graduate assistant had reported directly to Joe Paterno.
Paterno, who died in January 2012, was never charged with any crimes.
As Sollers pointed out in his statement, however, it was Paterno who actually referred the graduate assistant in the 2001 case, Mike McQueary, to Curley and Schultz.
But Freeh's report also cited emails from that time frame that raised the suggestion Paterno may have been part of a later decision not to take the McQueary report to police or child welfare authorities.
A source who had worked on the state's Sandusky probe but who asked not to be identified told PennLive Thursday night he knew of no cases, aside from the 2001 case, in which there was a direct report to Joe Paterno about Sandusky.
Many of the people who presented civil claims to Penn State only started to come forward after the completion of Sandusky's criminal trial in June 2012. Freeh's report was issued the following month.
The allegation contained in Glazer's ruling drew immediate puzzlement and uncertainty from some of Paterno's most loyal supporters at Penn State Thursday, and a muted reaction from the university itself.
Trustee Anthony Lubrano, a Paterno loyalist who has worked tirelessly with alumni allies to try to "correct the record" in the Sandusky case, said he was "not even peripherally aware" of the 1976 claim about Paterno.
But, he added, "I am highly doubtful about the veracity of the allegation."
Penn State spokesman Lawrence Lokman said university officials who have worked on the legal cases radiating from the Sandusky scandal were aware of the allegations, broadly, contained in the insurance case.
"Many, many people, potential victims and victims have come forward to the university as part of that (settlement) process," Lokman said. "We do not talk about their specific circumstances."
Lokman also would not say whether the 1976 incident raised in the PMA case was one of the 30 or so that have resulted in monetary settlements.
As to Glazer's ruling in the insurance reimbursement case, Lokman noted it is not the last word in the case.
"We are analyzing the decision," Lokman said. "It does not mean the university will not recoup amounts spent in responding to the Sandusky victims. It is a complicated process that is not complete."
UPDATE: The court document referenced:
Court documents: Joe Paterno heard about sex abuse in 1970s ||||| Get all of Michael McCann’s columns as soon as they’re published. Download the new Sports Illustrated app (iOS or Android) and personalize your experience by following your favorite teams and SI writers.
Did Joe Paterno learn in 1976 that Jerry Sandusky molested children?
An order by Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas Judge Gary Glazer on Thursday contained this damning accusation against Paterno, who coached Penn State from 1966 to 2011. In 2012, a jury found Sandusky, a longtime defensive coordinator for Paterno, guilty on 45 charges of sexually abusing children.
Judge Glazer is presiding over a lawsuit between Penn State and the Pennsylvania Manufacturers’ Association Insurance Co. (“PMA”) over whether the school or its insurer, PMA, should pay for settlement agreements between Penn State and Sandusky’s victims that total approximately $59.7 million. The key legal issue for purposes of whether Penn State has a right to collect on its insurance policy with PMA is whether Penn State expected or intended the bodily injuries that Sandusky inflicted upon his many victims. In order to assess that issue under the terms of the Penn State-PMA contract, Judge Glazer must consider whether any Penn State officers, trustees or shareholders—a category of Penn State officials that does not include Paterno—knew of Sandusky’s conduct.
In exploring that topic, Judge Glazer referenced several victims’ depositions, which are sworn testimonies, made out of court, that are recorded and/or transcribed. According to Judge Glazer, those depositions reveal that in 1976, “a child allegedly reported to PSU’s Head Coach Joseph Paterno that he (the child) was sexually molested by Sandusky” and that in 1987 and 1988 an assistant coach witnessed Sandusky committing sexual acts or having inappropriate contact with a child. Judge Glazer reasoned that while Paterno and the unnamed assistant coaches might have known about Sandusky’s acts, available evidence did not indicate that any Penn State officers, trustees or shareholders had such knowledge. As a consequence, Judge Glazer determined that Penn State is eligible to seek certain types of coverage payments from PMA (Judge Glazer also found that Penn State is not eligible for other types of coverage payments).
The topic of insurance coverage and who pays the $59.7 million in settlements is an important topic in its own right. Penn State has insisted that the $59.7 will not be paid through tuition, taxpayer or donation dollars. Instead, Penn State maintains, this sizable figure will be funded through Penn State’s insurance polices, including the university’s policies with PMA.
• SI VAULT: Where is Penn State three years after Sandusky scandal?
Despite the importance of Thursday’s ruling as it relates to the funding of victim settlements, Judge Glazer’s order is primarily newsworthy because it contains a previously unknown accusation against Paterno. If this accusation were true, it would contradict Paterno’s assertions that he was unaware of Sandusky’s crimes. Paterno died in 2012 at age 85 and his family has steadfastly maintained his innocence. Wick Sollers, an attorney for the Paterno family, issued a statement tonight to Penn Live that categorically rejects the accusation.
For at least four reasons, it will likely never be known if the allegation against Paterno is true, false or somewhere in between.
First, it’s unlikely that corroborating or disproving information about the allegation will surface. According to Penn Live, the record containing the deposition transcript is sealed. Also, the victim who made the allegation against Paterno has apparently reached a confidential settlement with Penn State. Odds are this victim will not make his identity known or ever talk about his claim about Paterno. In addition, Paterno’s death obviously makes it impossible for Paterno to rebut the allegation.
Second, it’s unknown how much time elapsed between the victim’s alleged conversation with Paterno in 1976 and the date the victim’s deposition was taken. This is an important point given that memories tend to erode over time and become less reliable. Along those lines, it’s unknown if the victim created any records of his alleged conversation with Paterno, such as personal journal entries or diaries, that would help to corroborate if it occurred and in the manner in which he testified.
Third, it’s unknown how old the victim was when he allegedly spoke with Paterno and what exact words he says he told Paterno. Was the victim sufficiently clear in talking to Paterno that Paterno knew or should have known that Sandusky was molesting the victim? This is where knowing what words were allegedly used becomes important.
• SI VAULT: As Penn State returns to normalcy, will it remember its past?
Fourth, it’s unclear what circumstances would have led to a child directly telling Paterno about sexual abuse or other inappropriate conduct. It might strike a reader as somewhat unusual that a child would have an opportunity to speak directly with a Division I head football coach and about such a sensitive topic. Although such a scenario is by no means unimaginable, it would be interesting to know if others were present while the victim allegedly spoke with Paterno. It would likewise be revealing if the victim’s claim was ever communicated to guardians, teachers or law enforcement or if any police investigation took place.
To be sure, this allegation against Paterno is deeply troubling, especially given that it arose during sworn testimony. At the same time, it is an allegation and has not been proven in court. Judge Glazer’s examination of the allegation was as part of a legal analysis related to insurance coverage and whether any Penn State officers, trustees and shareholders knew about Sandusky’s crimes. Judge Glazer observing that Paterno “apparently neglected to inform” an appropriate supervisor in 1976 certainly raises disturbing questions about Paterno, but it doesn’t prove or refute the underlying assertion against Paterno. In all likelihood, neither proof nor refutation of the assertion will ever be found.
Michael McCann is a legal analyst and writer for Sports Illustrated. He is also a Massachusetts attorney and the founding director of the Sports and Entertainment Law Institute at the University of New Hampshire School of Law. He also created and teaches the Deflategate undergraduate course at UNH, serves as the distinguished visiting Hall of Fame Professor of Law at Mississippi College School of Law and is on the faculty of the Oregon Law Summer Sports Institute. | – One line in a court order has revealed what PennLive calls a "bombshell" in the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse scandal. Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas Judge Gary S. Glazer wrote than an insurer—involved in a dispute over whether it should cover the $60 million in settlements Penn State has paid to 26 men who said they were abused by Sandusky, per NBC News—claims that "in 1976, a child allegedly reported to PSU's Head Coach Joseph Paterno that he [the child] was sexually molested by Sandusky." The detail comes from a deposition, ostensibly with that victim, taken as part of the insurance case. If the allegation about Paterno is true, it would mean he knew about Sandusky's crimes 22 years earlier than stated in special investigator reports, which alleged that Paterno knew in 1998. Before his death, Paterno said he became aware of allegations in 2001. "An allegation now about an alleged event 40 years ago, as represented by a single line in a court document regarding an insurance issue, with no corroborating evidence, does not change the facts. Joe Paterno did not, at any time, cover up conduct by Jerry Sandusky," the Paterno family's lawyer says. Sports Illustrated outlines four reasons why "it will likely never be known if the allegation against Paterno is true, false or somewhere in between." |
Published on Dec 2, 2015
Donald Trump joined “Fox and Friends” this morning to explain how he would stand up to ISIS as president.
One of the biggest problems right now? “We’re fighting a very politically correct war,” said the GOP presidential frontrunner.
“When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families,” he continued. “They care about their lives, don’t kid yourself.”
Trump joined the growing criticisms of President Obama for appearing to send the wrong message to Americans on ISIS, which he called “our number one threat.”
“All he’s worried about is climate change. He thinks climate change is something that’s going to go kill us,” said the real estate mogul. “And it’s not going to kill us at all.”
Had Trump been president, he wouldn’t have gone to this week’s Paris climate change conference at all, he told Brian Kilmeade.
“I would have maybe sent a vice president,” he said. “But that might be too high a position.” ||||| Cain: Trump Is GOP Front-Runner Because He's a Leader and a Fighter
Cruz: Obama, Hillary Won't Even Try to Defeat ISIS
Donald Trump joined “Fox and Friends” this morning to explain how he would stand up to ISIS as president.
One of the biggest problems right now? “We’re fighting a very politically correct war,” said the GOP presidential frontrunner.
“When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families,” he continued. “They care about their lives, don’t kid yourself.”
Trump joined the growing criticisms of President Obama for appearing to send the wrong message to Americans on ISIS, which he called “our number one threat.”
“All he’s worried about is climate change. He thinks climate change is something that’s going to go kill us,” said the real estate mogul. “And it’s not going to kill us at all.”
Had Trump been president, he wouldn’t have gone to this week’s Paris climate change conference at all, he told Brian Kilmeade.
“I would have maybe sent a vice president,” he said. “But that might be too high a position.”
Watch the interview above.
Christie: Obama Lives in His Own 'Fantasy World'
Krauthammer Blasts Obama's ISIS Strategy: 'This Is a Joke'
Sen. Coats: Obama Admin Now Acknowledging ISIS Strategy Has Failed ||||| Donald Trump’s plan to defeat the Islamic State involves destroying them — and their families.
“I would knock the hell out of ISIS, I would hit them so hard,” Trump said on “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday. “When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don’t kid yourself. When they say they don’t care about their lives, you have to take out their families.”
Trump’s comments came a day after the Lebanese government released Saja al-Dulaimi, the former wife of ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as part of a prisoner swap with an al-Qaida affiliate. But there was “no immediate indication that Dulaimi’s release was for the benefit of ISIS,” CNN reported. (She has been divorced from Baghdadi for more than six years and told Al Jazeera she hopes to resettle in Turkey.)
Meanwhile, the Republican frontrunner is attacking President Obama on ISIS, releasing a new campaign video critical of the administration’s response to the ongoing terror threat.
The video, released via Trump’s Instagram account on Tuesday, uses footage of a smiling Obama posing for selfies during a BuzzFeed photo shoot in February juxtaposed with images of ISIS training camps, the recent terror attacks in Paris and the downing of a Russian airliner.
“It is time for serious leadership,” reads an overlay before Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” appears.
According to a new Quinnipiac national poll released Wednesday, Trump is seen as best equipped among GOP candidates to handle terrorism, with 29 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters holding that view. Ben Carson, at 19 percent, is viewed as the second-best candidate when it comes to dealing with global terror, the poll found.
“I say ISIS is our No. 1 threat,” Trump said on “Fox & Friends” Wednesday. “And we have a president that doesn’t know what he is doing. And all he’s worried about is climate change.” ||||| Al Gore Al GoreTrump’s isolationism on full display at international climate talks Overnight Energy: Trump officials defend fossil fuels, nuclear at UN climate summit | Dems commit to Paris goals | Ex-EPA lawyers slam 'sue and settle' policy Al Gore: A new president in 2020 could keep US in Paris agreement MORE on Sunday hit President Trump for a tweet criticizing London's mayor following a terrorist attack over the weekend.
“I actually happened to see the statement form the mayor of London, and that’s not what I heard him say,” the former vice president told CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“I don’t think that a major terrorist attack like this is the time to be divisive and criticize a mayor who's trying to organize a city’s response to this attack.”
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Gore said terrorism must be defeated by “the force of our values.”
Trump on Saturday offered the United Kingdom “full support” in the aftermath of the London attacks. But the president took to Twitter early Sunday to hit Mayor Sadiq Khan.
“At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is ‘no reason to be alarmed!’” Trump said.
Khan in his statement condemned the “cowardly” attacks.
“There is no justification whatsoever for such barbaric acts,” Khan said, adding that "there's no reason to be alarmed" over an increased police presence. | – Donald Trump said earlier this year that he doesn't want to tip his hand on how he would defeat ISIS, but he offered a bit of a glimpse into his anti-terrorism strategy on Wednesday. "I would knock the hell out of ISIS, I would hit them … so hard," the GOP front-runner declared on Fox & Friends, per Yahoo Politics. "When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don't kid yourself. When they say they don't care about their lives, you have to take out their families." He also took aim at what he calls a "very politically correct war" we're fighting, per NBC News. And when asked about civilian casualties, Trump added "one of the reasons we're so ineffective [is the terrorists are] … using [civilians] as shields. It's a horrible thing," the Hill notes. Trump, who just jumped even more to the front of the GOP pack, next laid into President Obama for what Trump believes are misplaced priorities in fighting the militant group, per Fox News Insider. "All he’s worried about is climate change," Trump continued, referring to the Paris environmental summit Obama is attending. "He thinks climate change is something that's going to go kill us. And it's not going to kill us at all." In fact, Trump added, he wouldn't have even gone to the conference if he were president. "I would have maybe sent a vice president," he noted. "But that might be too high a position." (He didn't charge Fox millions for these insights, did he?) |
An Oregon man's public criticism of the mathematical formula used by red light cameras got him in trouble — not with the police but with the state engineering board.
So he's suing, claiming a violation of free speech.
After his wife got a ticket based on a red light camera in Beaverton, Oregon, Mats Järlström, a Swedish-born electronics engineer, studied the calculations used to determine the length of the yellow light cycle. He concluded it was too short, because it failed to account for the longer time a driver needed to turn a corner, rather than go straight through the intersection.
Convinced the cameras were using an out-of-date formula, he took his message to practically anyone who would listen — local TV stations, a conference of traffic engineers, and even the state board of engineer examiners.
Mats Järlström in Beaverton, Oregon was fined $500 by speaking about engineering issues without a license, according to the board of engineer examiners, when he studied the calculations used to determine the length of the yellow light cycle after his wife received a ticket based on a red light camera. Institute for Justice
That's what got him in trouble.
The board fined him $500 and said he was violating a state law by speaking about engineering issues without a license.
"By providing the public with his traffic engineering calculations," the board said, "Järlström engaged in the practice of engineering." And since he didn't have a license issued by the state, he was violating the law, it said.
Now he’s suing in federal court, accusing the state of violating his First Amendment right to speak about a public issue.
"Criticizing the government's engineering isn't a crime. It's a constitutional right," said Samuel Gedge of the Institute for Justice, a conservative public interest law firm representing Järlström. "You don't need to be a licensed engineer to talk about traffic lights."
Mats Järlström in Beaverton, Oregon was fined $500 by speaking about engineering issues without a license, according to the board of engineer examiners, when he studied the calculations used to determine the length of the yellow light cycle after his wife received a ticket based on a red light camera. Institute for Justice
As many states do, Oregon prohibits a person from practicing engineering without a license. But the state's board of engineering examiners equates publicly talking about engineering issues with practicing engineering.
"I was fined simply for speaking out and was told that I can't truthfully call myself an engineer. People should be free to debate any topic, including technical topics like math and traffic lights," Järlström said.
A spokesman for the state engineering board had no comment on the lawsuit, and the state has not yet responded in court.
Järlström paid the $500 fine. But he isn't suing to get his money back.
Another Institute for Justice lawyer on his legal team, Wesley Hottot, said the state is essentially requiring a permission slip to debate government policy. "This board and licensing boards across the country think the First Amendment doesn't apply to them. They couldn't be more wrong." ||||| In September 2014, Mats Järlström, an electronics engineer living in Beaverton, Oregon, sent an email to the state's engineering board. The email claimed that yellow traffic lights don't last long enough, which "puts the public at risk."
"I would like to present these facts for your review and comments," he wrote.
This email resulted not with a meeting, but with a threat. The Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying responded with this dystopian message:
"ORS 672.020(1) prohibits the practice of engineering in Oregon without registration … at a minimum, your use of the title 'electronics engineer' and the statement 'I'm an engineer' … create violations."
In January of this year, Järlström was officially fined $500 by the state for the crime of "practicing engineering without being registered."
*
An excerpt from one of the letters sent to Järlström by the Oregon engineering board.
It started in 2013, when Järlström's wife was caught running a red light by a camera near their home. Järlström spent a year looking into the timing of yellow lights and red light camera statistics, and learned that cameras were catching people who were running yellow lights.
The original paper that determined yellow light timing, written in 1959, is too simplistic for the modern world, he said. And yet the original calculations in them are still used all around the world.
A screengrab from the final fine order sent to Järlström.
"They only looked at a vehicle traveling safely directly through an intersection, however the equation they developed is not used for turning lanes," Järlström told me. "When you make a turn you slow down but that's not accounted for in their solution, so people are getting caught in red light cameras for making safe turns."
Järlström, understandably, wanted to get feedback on his findings. And so he reached out to the engineering board, his local sheriff, and 60 Minutes. He was even invited to give a talk about his research in front of the Institute of Transportation Engineers in Anaheim, California. He also spoke to Alexei Maradudin, the last surviving author of that 1959 paper: "He wants me to continue with this, it's amazing that I have his support," Järlström said.
The engineering board cited each time Järlström used the word "engineer" or "engineering" in emails he sent to them.
To be clear, Järlström is doing this work in his free time, for free, and does not have any control over the red lights in Oregon or anywhere else. In 2014, he sued the City of Beaverton over the length of its yellow light lengths, but that case was quickly thrown out because a judge said he lacked standing to challenge it because "for purposes of standing, Plaintiff must allege that the short yellow-light intervals create a credible threat of imminent injury to him."
"I'm not practicing engineering, I'm just using basic mathematics and physics, Newtonian laws of motion, to make calculations and talk about what I found," Järlström said.
Some of Järlström's calculations.
And yet, the engineering board in Oregon says he should not be free to publish or present his ideas. Tuesday, Järlström and the Institute for Justice sued the engineering board in federal court for Violating his First Amendment rights.
"Mats has a clear First Amendment right to talk about anything from taxes to traffic rights," Sam Gedge, an attorney for the Institute for Justice, told me. "It's an instance of a licensing board trying to suppress speech."
Järlström, for his part, said he never expected anything like this to happen when he moved to the United States from Sweden 20 years ago.
"When I got the first letter, it was this feeling of being violated and shocked that someone can be treated like this in the USA for sharing their ideas," he said. "I've done this freely, self-funded, as a civil service. I want to show these ideas to the public and I'm getting surpassed. It's been a civil rights violation since day one."
Below is Järlström's correspondence with the Oregon engineering board and the official fine notice it sent him.
mats4 by Jason Koebler on Scribd
mats3 by Jason Koebler on Scribd
mats2 by Jason Koebler on Scribd
mats1 by Jason Koebler on Scribd ||||| A Beaverton man who has a bachelor of science degree in engineering and has repeatedly challenged Oregon's timing of yellow traffic lights as too short was investigated by a state board for "unlicensed practice of engineering'' and fined $500.
Now, Mats Järlström has joined with the national Institute for Justice to file a federal civil rights lawsuit against members of the Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying.
He contends state law and the board's actions that disallow anyone from using the word "engineer" if they're not an Oregon-licensed professional engineer amount to an "unconstitutional ban on mathematical debate.''
"It's important in my mind we can share ideas freely in Oregon to promote innovation,'' the 56-year-old said. "I feel violated at this point in time.''
Eric Engelson, a spokesman with thestate board, declined comment Tuesday.
For the state board to initiate an investigation against Järlström is a direct attack on his free speech, his lawyers argue. Järlström identified himself as an engineer in emails he sent to city officials and the Washington County sheriff challenging the timing of Oregon's yellow traffic lights.
The state law that defines "engineer'' violates the First Amendment, their suit contends.
They also say Järlström isn't alone in getting snared by the state engineering board's aggressive enforcement of its interpretation of the word.
"The government does not have the power to take speech that is objectively true, declare it false and then punish speakers who -- wittingly or unwittingly – deviate from the government's idiosyncratic definition,'' wrote attorney William Ohle in the suit.
"Järlström thus brings this federal civil rights lawsuit," Ohle wrote, "to vindicate his and others' constitutional right to speak out on any topic – however complex it may be – and to describe themselves truthfully using the word 'engineer.' ''
This isn't Järlström's first foray into federal court.
In 2014, a judge tossed out Järlström's civil rights lawsuit against Beaverton that claimed the city's yellow lights were too short at intersections where the city had installed cameras to catch motorists running red lights.
His interest in the matter stemmed from a red-light-running ticket that his wife received in the mail in 2013. Since then, Järlström has conducted his own studies, presented his findings to local media and "60 Minutes" and even to the annual meeting last summer of the Institute of Transportation Engineers. He's currently working on an article to submit to an academic journal.
Järlström is a Swedish-born electronics engineer. After serving as an airplane-camera mechanic in the Swedish Air Force, he worked for Luxor Electronics and immigrated to the United States in 1992, settling in Oregon. Currently, he's self-employed, testing audio products and repairing and calibrating test instruments.
"The First Amendment guarantees to every American their right to debate anything and everything,'' said attorney Samuel Gedge, of the Institute for Justice. "And nobody needs a government permission slip to talk.''
According to the suit, the state board has initiated similar "outrageous'' investigations against others for using the word "engineer,'' including Portland City Commissioner Dan Saltzman:
-- In 2014, the board received a complaint that the Voters' Pamphlet described Salatzman's background as "environmental engineer.'' Saltzman earned a bachelor of science degree in environmental and civil engineering from Cornell University, a master of science degree from MIT School of Civil Engineering and membership in the American Society of Civil Engineers. He isn't, however, an Oregon-licensed professional engineer. The board investigated, and nearly a year later, voted to warn Saltzman against using the word "engineer" in incorrect ways, according to board meeting minutes.
-- In 2010, an activist told the city council in La Pine that a new power plant would be too loud for nearby neighbors. The board fined the activist $1,000 for "illegal, unlicensed practice of engineering,'' according to board minutes.
-- More recently, the board initiated an investigation into the subject of a Portland Monthly article -- a woman immigrant and entrepreneur featured in an online story titled "The incredible story of an engineer behind Portland's newest bridge.'' The board opened an investigation because the woman wasn't a professionally licensed Oregon engineer. The board questioned the writer, who said the woman profiled didn't use the word "engineer" but her editors included it in the headline. The board ultimately found the allegation unfounded.
-- A board investigation was launched into Republican gubernatorial candidate Allen Alley based on a complaint that he misused the word "engineer'' in one of his political ads. In the ad, he said he'd take a different approach, noting, "I'm an engineer and a problem solver.'' He earned a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering from Purdue University and worked as an engineer for Ford and Boeing and holds a string of engineering-related awards. But because he's not an Oregon-registered professional engineer, the board launched an investigation that's ongoing 10 months later.
Järlström's suit doesn't seek monetary damages, but an order prohibiting the state board from continuing to censure nonlicensed engineers from speaking out, Gedge said. The attorneys will be seeking a preliminary injunction against the state board.
"We're just trying to protect Mats' rights going forward,'' he said.
"Criticizing the government's engineering isn't a crime; it's a constitutional right,'' Gedge said. "Under the First Amendment, you don't need to be a licensed lawyer to write an article critical of a Supreme Court decision. You don't need to be a licensed landscape architect to create a gardening blog, and you don't need to be a licensed engineer to talk about traffic lights.''
The Institute for Justice is a national public interest law firm that advocates for First Amendment rights. It has filed similar types of lawsuits against occupation-licensing boards.
In Kentucky, for example, it filed a suit in federal court after the Kentucky Board of Examiners of Psychology tried to censor the parenting advice of nationally syndicated columnist John Rosemond for "unlicensed practice of psychology.'' A federal judge in 2015 found the state board had "unconstitutionally applied'' state regulations to Rosemond's advice column and barred the board from pursuing such enforcement.
-- Maxine Bernstein
[email protected]
503-221-8212
@maxoregonian ||||| Last fall, I accepted Mats Järlström’s invitation to spend a morning watching the traffic signals change at Southwest Allen Boulevard and Lombard Avenue.
Keep a close eye on the yellows, he said.
That, of course, is the location of one of Beaverton’s four busiest and unforgiving cops -- automated red-light cameras that have generated about 25,000 tickets since 2001. But because of that city’s imperfect yellow-light timing, many of those mailed citations, including the one for $260 issued to Järlström’s wife last April, were unjustified, he insists.
“Basically, they sent a ticket to the wife of the wrong guy,” Järlström told me as we watched the camera flash its way through the morning commute.
Maybe. But given Oregon’s often-misunderstood “restrictive” rules about how drivers should treat yellow lights, I’m worried that he may be spinning his wheels.
A Volvo-driving native of Sweden, Järlström is as sharp as a needle. He’s an engineer with expertise in calibration and electronics. His livelihood is built on precision. So, when his frame-by-frame video analysis of hundreds of yellow-light cycles at Allen and Lombard showed variations in timing, it makes sense that he would be outraged.
Typical of a yellow light on a flat 30 mph street in the Portland area, the one at the red-light camera on Allen is set to last 3.5 seconds, the city of Beaverton says. However, Järlström found some yellows last only 3.35 seconds.
A fraction of a second difference. We're talking 150 milliseconds. Big whoop, right? Actually, at 30 mph, a car can travel about seven feet in that eye-blink of time.
Judging from the citation video that Järlström shared with me, seven feet could have made the difference between his wife being forced to write a $260 check to the city or keeping that money to put gas into her white Volkswagen.
In recent months, Järlström has shown up at 13 Beaverton City Council meetings and made a load of appearances on local radio and TV news, demanding that the city increase the timing of its yellow lights -- even if it would knock the signals out of sync with those in surrounding jurisdictions.
“Not all Beaverton drivers are being treated equally under the law,” he said.
I admire his drive. But I think this is where I should thank Järlström for his work on the behalf of Portland area commuters and wish him good luck on what is looking like a quixotic campaign.
Beaverton’s yellow lights aren’t the problem. The reality, rather, is that too many Oregon drivers don’t seem to have a full grasp of how they’re supposed to treat yellows.
You see, the vast majority of U.S. states, including Washington, have what are called “permissive” rules, allowing drivers to enter an intersection during an entire yellow interval. (A violation occurs only if a driver enters after the onset of red.) Not Oregon. It’s one of only 12 states with a “restrictive” yellow-light rule, which essentially translates into “a solid circular yellow means stop and red means stay stopped.”
Vehicles are only allowed to continue if it’s not possible to do so safely. It doesn’t appear from the video that Järlström's wife was anywhere near that so-called “dilemma zone.” Indeed, last year, a judge watched the video and told her bluntly, “It looks you ran a red light.”
Ticket upheld.
Frankly, a traffic cop at the scene would have likely been less forgiving than the camera.
Now, I can’t say that I’m a big fan of the Portland area’s red-light cameras; they look and act too much like a harbinger of a soul-less, revenue-generating Robocop future. But they appear to be improving safety -- locally, at least. Since 2005, Portland’s 11 cameras have been credited with a 39 percent reduction in crashes, especially deadly T-bones, in some of its most-treacherous intersections.
The ugly truth is red-light runners kill more than 900 people a year in the U.S. A week after two Portland pedestrians were killed in two crashes over a period of 24 hours, I don't think we should be making our streets any less safer, even if we're talking about just 150 milliseconds.
Certainly, Redflex, the Australian company contracted to operate Beaverton’s redlight cameras, isn’t exactly a pillar of ethics. It has been shaken by several scandals in recent months, including accusations of widespread bribing of government officials and encouraging cities to place cameras in locations to maximize revenue rather than safety.
But there’s no evidence that Beaverton is cheating drivers out of their money. In fact, every one of the nation’s more than 1.2 million traffic signals is built for endurance, not to be costly high-precision instruments. There are going to be tolerances – allowing slightly longer and slightly shorter yellows.
Even at 3.35 seconds, Beaverton’s yellow-light intervals would easily meet the Institute of Transportation Engineers' widely followed recommendation of 3.2 seconds for a busy 30 mph street.
Meanwhile, in the keep-going-on-yellow state of Florida, the department of transportation was recently caught quietly shortening yellow-light intervals by a half second, resulting in millions of dollars in additional red-light camera fines.
Now that’s scandalous.
If Beaverton is unwilling to increase yellow-light intervals, Järlström wants the city to give drivers a half-second grace period between when the signal turns red and electro-magnetic camera triggers under the crosswalk turn on.
That puzzles Beaverton Public Works director Peter Arellano. No one is challenging the calibration of the red-light cameras.
“I don’t see why we should knowingly allow people to run red lights when that’s the behavior we’re trying to stop,” Arellano said.
-- Joseph Rose | – After electronics engineer Mats Järlström publicly challenged the mathematical formula used by the traffic cameras in his town of Beaverton, Ore., he was slapped with a $500 ticket for practicing engineering without a license. Now he’s suing the Oregon State Board of Examiners for squashing his First Amendment right to discuss public safety issues, reports NBC News. The story began in 2013 when Järlström’s wife received a $260 ticket for running a red light, Oregon Live reported in 2014. He studied the light cycles at various intersections caught by traffic cameras and claimed that the formulas were outdated; he believes the yellow light cycle is too short for turning lanes. He attended more than a dozen city council meetings, did interviews with local television stations, and even wrote to the state’s board of engineer examiners. That’s where his trouble started, reports Motherboard, because he included the words, “I am an engineer” in his email. State law says that engineers must be licensed by the state to practice engineering, which includes speaking on the topic. The automated traffic cameras in Beaverton resulted in 25,000 tickets between 2001 and 2014, many of which the 56-year-old Järlström believes are unwarranted. But for Järlström, who paid the board's $500 fine (his wife's original $260 fine was also paid), the matter is now more personal. "It's important in my mind we can share ideas freely in Oregon to promote innovation,'' he says, per Oregon Live. "I feel violated at this point in time.'' And his work is far from done: He's also working on an article on the subject he hopes to publish in an academic journal. |
By Michael Kanell
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Home Depot has confirmed that its payment systems were breached by data thieves, potentially victimizing many customers throughout the United States and Canada.
However, the company promised Monday that no one will have to pay for “fraudulent” charges.
Officials of the Atlanta-based giant would not estimate how many customer accounts might have been subject to the data attack. And while the investigation reaches back as far as April, the company did not say how long cyber-criminals had access to Home Depot systems.
A cyber-security expert reported earlier Monday that the Home Depot data breach had been carried out with the same “malware” used previous by cyber-thieves to pilfer consumer data from Target.
At least some of Home Depot’s store registers were infected with a variation of something called BlackPOS or Kaptoxa, software designed to steal data from credit and debit cards when they are swiped through register systems running Microsoft Windows, according to Brian Krebs, who writes about data security.
That similarity of software “adds another indicator that those responsible for the as-yet unconfirmed breach at Home Depot also were involved in the December 2013 attack on Target that exposed 40 million customer debit and credit card accounts,” Krebs wrote on his web site.
BlackPOS was found on the Target systems at Target last year.
Krebs wrote Monday that the new information came from sources close to the investigation of the Home Depot data breach. ||||| The apparent credit and debit card breach uncovered last week at Home Depot was aided in part by a new variant of the malicious software program that stole card account data from cash registers at Target last December, according to sources close to the investigation.
On Tuesday, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that Home Depot was working with law enforcement to investigate “unusual activity” after multiple banks said they’d traced a pattern of card fraud back to debit and credit cards that had all been used at Home Depot locations since May of this year.
A source close to the investigation told this author that an analysis revealed at least some of Home Depot’s store registers had been infected with a new variant of “BlackPOS” (a.k.a. “Kaptoxa”), a malware strain designed to siphon data from cards when they are swiped at infected point-of-sale systems running Microsoft Windows.
The information on the malware adds another indicator that those responsible for the as-yet unconfirmed breach at Home Depot also were involved in the December 2013 attack on Target that exposed 40 million customer debit and credit card accounts. BlackPOS also was found on point-of-sale systems at Target last year. What’s more, cards apparently stolen from Home Depot shoppers first turned up for sale on Rescator[dot]cc, the same underground cybercrime shop that sold millions of cards stolen in the Target attack.
Clues buried within this newer version of BlackPOS support the theory put forth by multiple banks that the Home Depot breach may involve compromised store transactions going back at least several months. In addition, the cybercrime shop Rescator over the past few days pushed out nine more large batches of stolen cards onto his shop, all under the same “American Sanctions” label assigned to the first two batches of cards that originally tipped off banks to a pattern of card fraud that traced back to Home Depot. Likewise, the cards lifted from Target were sold in several dozen batches released over a period of three months on Rescator’s shop.
POWERFUL ENEMIES
The tip from a source about BlackPOS infections found at Home Depot comes amid reports from several security firms about the discovery of a new version of BlackPOS. On Aug. 29, Trend Micro published a blog post stating that it had identified a brand new variant of BlackPOS in the wild that was targeting retail accounts. Trend said the updated version, which it first spotted on Aug. 22, sports a few notable new features, including an enhanced capability to capture card data from the physical memory of infected point-of-sale devices. Trend said the new version also has a feature that disguises the malware as a component of the antivirus product running on the system.
Trend notes that the new BlackPOS variant uses a similar method to offload stolen card data as the version used in the attack on Target.
“In one the biggest data breach[es] we’ve seen in 2013, the cybercriminals behind it offloaded the gathered data to a compromised server first while a different malware running on the compromised server uploaded it to the FTP,” wrote Trend’s Rhena Inocencio. “We surmise that this new BlackPOS malware uses the same exfiltration tactic.”
An Internet search on the unique malware “hash” signature noted in Trend’s malware writeup indicates that the new BlackPOS verison was created on June 22, 2014, and that as late as Aug. 15, 2014 only one of more than two-dozen anti-malware tools (McAfee) detected it as malicious.
ANTI-AMERICAN MALWARE
Other clues in the new BlackPOS malware variant further suggest a link between the cybercrooks behind the apparent breach at Home Depot and the hackers who hit Target. The new BlackPOS variant includes several interesting text strings. Among those are five links to Web sites featuring content about America’s role in foreign conflicts, particularly in Libya and Ukraine.
Three of the links point to news, editorial articles and cartoons that accuse the United States of fomenting war and unrest in the name of Democracy in Ukraine, Syria, Egypt and Libya. One of the images shows four Molotov cocktails with the flags of those four nations on the bottles, next to a box of matches festooned with the American flag and match ready to strike. Another link leads to an image of the current armed conflict in Ukraine between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian separatists.
This is interesting given what we know about Rescator, the individual principally responsible for running the store that is selling all of these stolen credit and debit cards. In the wake of the Target breach, I traced a long list of clues from Rescator’s various online identities back to a young programmer in Odessa, Ukraine. In his many personas, Rescator identified himself as a member of the Lampeduza cybercrime forum, and indeed this site is where he alerts customers about new batches of stolen cards.
As I discovered in my profile of Rescator, he and his crew seemed somewhat taken with the late despotic Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, although they prefer the phonetic spelling of his name. The Web site kaddafi[dot]hk was among four main carding shops run by Rescator’s crew (it has since been retired and merged with Rescator[dot]cc). The domain kaddafi[dot]me was set up to serve as an instant message Jabber server for cybercrooks, advertising its lack of logging and record keeping as a reason crooks should trust kaddafi[dot]me to handle their private online communications.
When I reached out to Rescator last December to obtain comment about my findings on his apparent role in the Target break-in, I received an instant message reply from the Jabber address “kaddafi@kaddafi[dot]me” (in that conversation, the person chatting with me from that address offered to pay me $10,000 if I did not run that story; I declined). But I also discovered that the kaddafi[dot]me domain was a blog of sorts that hosted some harsh and frankly chilling anti-American propaganda.
The entire three-part manifesto posted on the kaddafi[dot]me home page is no longer available, but a professionally translated snippet of this tirade reads:
“The movement of our Republic, the ideology of Lampeduza – is the opposition to Western countries, primarily targeting the restoration of the balance of forces in the world. After the collapse of the USSR, we have lost this fragile equilibrium face of the planet. We – the Senate and the top people of the Republic are not just fighting for survival and our place under the sun, we are driven by the idea! The idea, which is living in all of us – to return all that was stolen and taken from our friendly countries grain by grain! We are fighting for a good cause! Hot blood is flowing in us, in citizens, who want to change situation in the world. We do not bend to other people’s opinions and desires, and give an adequate response to the Western globalism. It is essential to be a fighter for justice! Perhaps we would be living completely differently now, if there had not been the plan of Allen Dulles, and if America had not invested billions in the collapse of the USSR. We were deprived of a common homeland, but not deprived of unity, have found our borders, and are even closer to each other. We saw the obvious principles of capitalism, where man to a man is a wolf [[see here for more context on this metaphor]]. Together, we can do a lot to bring back all the things that we have been deprived of because of America! We will be heard! Citizens of Lampeduza – “free painters” ready to create and live the idea for the good of the Motherland — let’s first bend them over, and then insert deeper!!!
Tags: American Sanctions, BlackPOS, Home Depot breach, home depot databreach, Kaptoxa, Muammar Gaddafi, point-of-sale malware, rescator, Rhena Onocencio, target data breach, trend micro ||||| Martin Knuth has made so many purchases at Home Depot that he regards the store as “my second home.”
But the recent security breach at the home renovation retailer upset Mr. Knuth, a retiree who lives in Regina, Sask., so much that he volunteered to become the representative plaintiff in the first Canadian class action lawsuit against Home Depot.
The suit has been launched on behalf of all Canadian customers of retailer Home Depot Inc. who may have had their credit and debit cards hacked.
Saskatchewan lawyer Tony Merchant – a long-time class-action activist – said he filed the claim on behalf of as many as four million Canadians who have been affected. Home Depot customers could get hit with financial losses and inconvenience, Mr. Merchant said.
The suit, filed in the Court of Queen’s Bench for Saskatchewan, will also be filed in other jurisdictions and will cover all Canadian customers, Mr. Merchant said.
In early September, Home Depot acknowledged that its payment system was hit by a security breach, affecting customers in Canada and the United States who used credit and debit cards from April onward. The company said no customer would be responsible for any fraudulent charges on their accounts, and promised it would take aggressive steps to protect customer data going forward.
The suit alleges Mr. Knuth’s “personal and financial information associated with his credit card was compromised. …as a result of the Home Depot security breach,” although when contacted Thursday he said he doesn’t know yet whether it has been used for nefarious purposes. But he has used his card at Home Depot many times since April, and he is worried about identity theft, unauthorized charges, or that “some day I may do a credit check on myself and find that it’s gone down the toilet.”
Mr. Merchant said he does not think he will have any trouble getting the class action suit certified in Canada. “The courts are very open to these privacy breach claims,” he said. The amount of the claim has not yet been set.
Several class action lawsuits have already been filed in the United States on behalf of Home Depot customers. Home Depot spokeswoman Paula Drake said the company hasn’t reviewed any of the suits against it yet. “Our focus is on our customers and our investigation,” she said. Home Depot said Thursday that the “unique, custom-built malware” that hit its computer systems and put 56 million payment cards at risk has now been eliminated. Enhanced encryption has been completed at U.S. stores and will be in Canadian stores by early 2015.
The Canadian lawsuit alleges Home Depot breached its fiduciary duty to keep personal data confidential, and was negligent in allowing the breach. The company also waited too long to warn customers of the problem, the suit alleges.
“They weren’t telling people until [security blogger] Brian Krebs broke the story at the beginning of September,” Mr. Merchant said. “An awful lot of people have spent [money] at Home Depot in the last six months, and every one of them is at risk.”
He noted that in an earlier case against the owners of Winners and HomeSense stores – after a similar data breach – an out-of-court settlement included a payment to all customers as a “worry award.” It also paid back people who had actually suffered financial losses, and reimbursed those who spent money to get extra security for their cards.
Home Depot has offered free identity theft protection and credit monitoring to any customer who used a payment card at a store since April, but Mr. Merchant said “what they are offering ... is almost nothing and very little in value.”
Some Canadian customers have also complained that the protection offered in this country is inferior to that offered in the United States. For example, the identity theft insurance in the package offered to Canadians – from credit bureau Equifax – has an upper limit of $50,000. In the United States the insurance in the package from AllClear covers up to $1-million.
Ms. Drake said the $50,000 maximum is the “best available coverage offered by the [credit] bureaus in Canada.” There are “regulatory and market differences,” between the two countries that account for the contrast, she said.
Raymond Vankrimpen, head of the risk management practice at Richter Advisory Group Inc. in Toronto, noted that a portion of the $1-million in coverage available to U.S. residents goes to cover legal fees. “Americans are typically more litigious and so the cost of recovering your identity in the U.S. may in fact cost more,” he said.
Report Typo/Error ||||| In this Tuesday, Aug. 14, 2012 photo, a Home Depot sign is shown in Nashville, Tenn. The Home Depot Inc. said Thursday, Nov. 6, 2014, that hackers stole 53 million email addresses in addition to the payment... (Associated Press)
The nation's largest home improvement chain had disclosed the massive, months-long breach of 56 million debit and credit cards in September.
Home Depot's breach surpassed Target's pre-Christmas 2013 data theft, which compromised 40 million credit and debit cards and hurt sales and profits. Since late last year, Michaels, SuperValu and Neiman Marcus have been among a string of retailers that have also reported breaches, though they were smaller.
While shoppers appear to have grown numb to the hacks, the breaches have forcing changes in retailing. Target's breach pushed banks, retailers and card companies to increase security by speeding the adoption of microchips in U.S. credit and debit cards, which supporters say are more secure. Home Depot reiterated Thursday that it will be activating chip-enabled checkout terminals at all of its U.S. stores by the end of the year.
The file containing the email addresses did not contain passwords or other sensitive personal information, according to Home Depot. However, it said that customers should be on guard against phishing scams. Phishing attacks are sent through texts or emails and try to trap you into disclosing personal information.
The company is notifying affected customers in the U.S. and Canada.
Home Depot also explained how the hackers got into its system. It said that the hackers initially accessed its network in April with a third-party vendor's username and password. Home Depot said hackers stole information through malware installed on self-checkout systems in the U.S. and Canada. That's similar to what happened at Target where thieves hacked into the password of a third-party supplier.
Home Depot said that its investigation with law enforcement and efforts to further enhance its security measures are ongoing.
On Thursday it confirmed its sales growth estimate for the year and said it still expects annual profit of $4.54 per share. But unclear is how much Home Depot's future profits will be affected.
Home Depot's outlook for its fiscal 2014 year includes estimates for the cost to investigate the data breach, providing credit monitoring services to its customers, increasing call center staffing and paying for legal and professional services. However, it doesn't include any potential losses related to the breach.
Home Depot is expected to announce fiscal third-quarter results on Nov. 18.
"It's scary. The numbers are too big to comprehend," said John Kindervag, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. "But what are you going to do about it?" He noted that Home Depot is lucky that there are only a few big players in the home improvement arena and so there aren't a lot of other choices to shop.
The company's stock rose 5 cents to $97.34 in extended trading Thursday. Shares have gained 18 percent in 2014.
_____
Follow Anne D'Innocenzio at — https://twitter.com/adinnocenzio | – Home Depot admitted today that hackers really did breach the company's payment systems in US and Canadian stores and may have been breaking in since April, the Wall Street Journal reports. The Atlanta-based home-improvement chain said it investigated the hack with banks, law enforcement, and tech security companies like Symantec. The company promised that no customers would end up paying "fraudulent" charges, but it didn't say how many accounts were hacked or how long the hackers had access to the system, the Atlanta-Journal Constitution reports. Krebs on Security, which broke both the hack and the probe results, reports that the same hackers who got their hands on 40 million Target customer accounts last year may have struck Home Depot. They used a variation of the same software, BlackPOS (or "Kaptoxa"), which was invented by a Russian teenager two years ago. What's more, Home Depot customer card numbers have already shown up on the black-market cybercrime website Rescator.cc, where millions of cards from the Target hack were sold. Designed to breach point-of-sale systems that use Windows, BlackPOS can disguise itself as part of the system's antivirus software, reports Trend Micro. |
Related Coverage Veteran claims state took kids from him over use of medical marijuana
TOPEKA, Kansas (KSNT) – A father is trying to answer one, multi-faceted question.
“What is going on,” Raymond Schwab wondered on his 14th day of a hunger strike.
Schwab, as of Tuesday night, had not ingested any solid food since March 14. The hunger strike camp, set up on the north steps of the Statehouse, is an effort to bring awareness to an injustice Schwab said his family is going through at the hands of the Department for Children and Families.
But, late Tuesday afternoon, Schwab said his hunger strike would end if he is happy with a federal lawsuit expected to be filed on Wednesday.
“If I agree with what’s happening (Wednesday), after the press release, the hunger strike will be officially over,” Schwab said. In anticipation of the end, Schwab said he did drink a protein shake and some coconut water.
Last April, he said his children were taken away while he and his wife, Amelia, were packing to move the family to Colorado. Documents from DCF show the claims of emotional abuse were unsubstantiated.
“The first thing to point out is a lot of people assume that when we say that the case is unsubstantiated it means abuse didn’t occur and that is not the case,” Theresa Freed said about the investigation result categories DCF uses. Freed, the public relations director for the department, did not comment specifically about the findings in the Schwab case.
She said the investigation findings determine if a person should be put on a list that would prohibit them from working in a licensed child care facility. It does not mean the children will automatically be returned home.
“It’s very confusing and we understand that,” Freed said about the investigation process. “We hear that from the courts, we hear that from a number of individuals within the community and we want to help clarify the process.” According to Freed, DCF will present a new, three-tiered investigation process this summer.
The Schwabs say their family is being also being subjected to this procedure because of their use of marijuana for medicinal purposes. Marijuana is illegal in Kansas but not in Colorado, where the family was moving.
In November of last year, DCF paperwork indicates that less than 10 percent of the cases involved parental drug abuse as the reason children were removed from their homes.
Freed said marijuana use alone is not a reason for children to be put into state custody. The drug use is often coupled with other allegations.
Of the cases in November, the highest number of cases, 18 percent, involved physical neglect. DCF says in 14 percent of the cases, children were moved after allegations of physical abuse.
Last Thursday, Schwab was arrested on the steps of the Statehouse after an anonymous tip about a warrant out in his name. That warrant stemmed from a 2015 incident.
He was released from the Shawnee County Jail the following day. He resumed sitting on the steps on Sunday, this time covered with a make shift tent. On Monday, Brownback administrators told Schwab he is not allowed to have tents. As of 10:30 p.m. Tuesday, he was using a lawn chair, sleeping bags and a giant umbrella to fend against the elements during his hunger strike.
The press conference announcing the lawsuit is expected to start at 11 a.m. on the south steps of the Statehouse. ||||| A Kansas dad who has been on hunger strike for 17 days to protest the placing of his kids in foster care could end his fast Wednesday if a federal lawsuit is filed on his behalf.
Raymond Schwab, a Gulf War veteran who claims the state took his children because he uses medical marijuana to treat his constant pain and PTSD, told NBC affiliate KSN "the hunger strike will be officially over" if "I agree with what's happening."
In anticipation of the legal move, Schwab treated himself to a protein shake and coconut water, the station reported.
Schwab and his wife, Amelia, lost custody of five of their six children last April as they were preparing to move from Kansas to Colorado, where medical marijuana is legal.
The Kansas Department for Children and Families removed the kids from their home when it began investigating allegations the children were being emotionally abused, according to reports.
Three months later, the agency concluded the claims were unsubstantiated, the reports stated. But they didn't return the kids.
That's when Schwab, 40, stopped eating, grabbed some sleeping bags, and began camping out on the Statehouse steps in Topeka to get his kids back.
Meanwhile, medical marijuana advocates in support of Schwab offered to sue the state on his behalf.
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DCF spokeswoman Theresa Freed declined to comment specifically about the Schwab case but said marijuana use is generally not reason enough for the state to keep children in foster care.
Freed told KSN, an "unsubstantiated" finding doesn't necessarily mean abuse wasn't found.
"It's very confusing and we understand that," Freed said. "We hear that from the courts, we hear that from a number of individuals within the community and we want to help clarify the process."
Kansas father goes on hunger strike to get his kids back https://t.co/7JhzDzwEz3 via @KSNNews pic.twitter.com/fPXTywErJw — KSN News Wichita (@KSNNews) March 30, 2016
The Schwabs say they've only seen their children three times since last April.
"Until people stand up and say this needs reform, this needs stopped, we may not get our kids back," Schwab told the station earlier this year. "They're threatening to terminate our rights." ||||| With a lawsuit written by a Los Angeles-based lawyer ready to be filed at U.S. District Court in Topeka, Raymond Schwab was finally ready Wednesday afternoon to end a 17-day hunger strike.
As he stood at 12:15 p.m. on the steps of the Statehouse, a beaming Schwab proclaimed, “Now I can eat! Maybe we can figure out how to get a barbecue up here.”
A few minutes earlier, Schwab spoke at a news conference attended by about 35 supporters to provide an update on his appeal to regain custody of five of his six children, who in 2015 were removed from his custody by the Kansas Department for Children and Families.
In what has become a public battle against DCF, Schwab, a military veteran, contends his children were removed by authorities and placed in foster care because of his use of medical marijuana to treat chronic pain and post-traumatic stress disorder. He and his wife, Amelia, live in Colorado, where his marijuana use is legal.
As he and his wife prepared to move to Colorado from Topeka in 2015, Schwab said, the state removed five of their six children. Their eldest child is over age 18 and considered an adult.
DCF officials have countered that Schwab is only telling part of the story, but the state agency can’t divulge details because of confidentiality rules.
Supporters at Wednesday’s news conference were vocal in their belief that Schwab is a victim, saying the case centers on use of medical marijuana. Many took selfies with Schwab, while others gave him hugs.
Schwab, 40, said Wednesday that after lunching with supporters, he would return to his makeshift shelter at the top of the Statehouse’s north steps.
Schwab said he has a permit to remain at the Statehouse until April 23 but hopes the lawsuit filed by Matthew Pappas, the attorney who was to file papers on his behalf, would lead to an injunction against the state and bring the return of his children.
As of 3 p.m. Wednesday, DCF hadn’t been served with the lawsuit, said spokeswoman Theresa Freed.
Freed said DCF is expediting review of a “fairly thick file” on the Schwabs’ case. Earlier this month, Schwab signed power of attorney to former gubernatorial candidate Jennifer Winn to allow DCF to release information to her. Freed said determinations on what identifying information to release are in progress, and reports from law enforcement and attorneys must be reviewed to assess whether information from other agencies or offices may be released.
Schwab earlier had said he would continue his hunger strike until either his children were returned; a “higher authority,” such as the federal government, intervened; or someone filed a federal lawsuit on his behalf.
Pappas took a red-eye flight to Kansas City, Mo., then drove straight to Topeka to meet with Schwab, who on Tuesday began transitioning to a liquid nutrient diet.
Pappas, a civil rights lawyer, said there were cases in which state officials need to remove children from their homes. However, he said, in Schwab’s case, the use of marijuana for medical purposes posed no threat to his children.
Cheryl Shuman, chief executive officer and president of the Beverly Hills Cannabis Club, arrived Tuesday night in Topeka to go to bat for Schwab. View an interview with Shuman at http://bit.ly/1VUbe6T.
She said Schwab reached out to her via Twitter this past weekend. They discussed Schwab’s situation, and Shuman said she believed his case warranted her coming to Topeka. Shuman said she contacted Pappas, with whom she has worked on previous cannabis-related issues, and he also decided to come to Topeka.
Shuman said her “team from L.A. works on these cases on a daily basis throughout the country.”
Shuman said she hopes to focus national media attention on Schwab, using his case as an example that could be used by federal courts to open up cannabis laws across the nation. She said she has been in touch with network TV programs with which she has previously worked, including “Dr. Phil,” “The View” and “Good Morning America,” in hopes one or more will decide to highlight Schwab’s story.
A “Fools No More” rally in support of Schwab and relaxing cannabis laws in Kansas will be held at 11 a.m. Friday on the Statehouse’s south steps. | – Raymond Schwab, a Gulf War veteran and father of six, has ended his 17-day hunger strike on the steps of the Kansas Statehouse now that an LA-based attorney is filing a lawsuit on his behalf. Schwab, who says he uses medical marijuana to manage chronic pain and post-traumatic stress disorder, lost custody of five of his six children last April, when the state placed them in foster care under allegations of emotional abuse, reports the Topeka Capital-Journal. (His other child is an adult and can thus remain in the home.) "Now I can eat!" exclaimed Schwab in front of 35 supporters on Wednesday, adding that he hopes the lawsuit will result in an injunction against the state and ultimately return his children to his custody. The Kansas Department for Children and Families said Wednesday that the lawsuit had not yet been filed, and it notes it's expediting the review of a "fairly thick file" on the case; Schwab says he lost custody because of his pot use, but the DCF says it can't disclose details. While documents from the department do show that claims of emotional abuse were unsubstantiated, its public relations director tells KSN that this doesn't mean abuse didn't occur, and it also doesn't mean that the children will be automatically returned. NBC News reports that Schwab and his wife, who were in the process of moving to Colorado (where medical marijuana is legal) when their children were removed from their home, have only seen their children three times since April. (A student held a hunger strike last year in neighboring Missouri.) |
BOSTON (AP) — For a few minutes, a Boston woman says she was a millionaire.
Ellen Fleming says she received a voicemail from a TD Ameritrade financial consultant Wednesday afternoon that a deposit had been made into her account.
The 26-year-old opened the company's app on her cellphone and was surprised to find $1.1 million instead of the $50 that she had left a few months ago.
Fleming tells The Boston Globe that she immediately thought about quitting her job and paying her student loans. Instead, she called the consultant back and informed them of the mix-up.
Fleming says the money was meant for a woman with the same name who lives in Florida.
She jokes that in her obituary she would like to be referred to as a "one-time millionaire." ||||| A screen grab from Ellen Fleming’s account where more than $1 million was briefly — and mistakenly — deposited.
Around 1:50 p.m. Wednesday, Ellen Fleming became a millionaire. Almost immediately, her mind began to race.
“I was thinking, ‘Oh, wow, how neat would this be?’ ” Fleming said. “I could quit my job, do whatever I wanted to do, pay off my student loans.”
Unfortunately, none of that panned out. By 2 p.m., she had lost it all. And Thursday morning, Fleming was back at her day job.
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“Being a millionaire really was a dream come true for 10 minutes,” she said in a phone interview. “I am very humbled that I lost my money and my family stood by me.”
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Fleming’s fleeting stint as a member of the 1 percent came after more than $1 million was accidentally transferred to her TD Ameritrade account this week, a case of mistaken identity that left the 26-year-old scratching her head and wondering what she would do if a sum of money truly had landed in her lap unexpectedly.
The mishap started when a TD Ameritrade financial consultant in the Boston area left a voicemail for Fleming informing her that “a deposit” had been made into an account she has with the company.
Fleming said she had opened a TD Ameritrade account months ago but only added around $50 to her balance and hadn’t thought about it since.
Confused by the voicemail, she launched the company’s app on her smartphone. That’s when she was greeted by a number much higher than expected: A whopping $1.1 million stared back at Fleming from the screen.
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For a moment, the devil danced on Fleming’s shoulder, and she contemplated what might happen if she just kept quiet. Then, her conscience kicked in.
“You need to take every opportunity that’s handed to you,” she said. “But that seemed like an opportunity that could lead me to federal prison, so it didn’t seem worth it.”
After talking to her mother to tell her what had happened, Fleming called the financial consultant back, a conversation she said was “extremely uncomfortable” given the sizeable mistake.
The employee, she said, was grateful that she had flagged the problem so quickly.
As it turned out, he explained to her, the money was meant to go into the account of an Ellen Fleming who lived in Florida, but something got “mixed up” along the way, Fleming said.
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“There’s some Ellen Fleming out there, living in some alternate universe life in Florida,” she said.
A spokeswoman for TD Ameritrade confirmed Thursday that an “errant deposit temporarily inflated the balance of Ms. Fleming’s account” but was quickly fixed after Fleming called and pointed out the blunder. The account now stands at $63.
Fleming tweeted about the incident Wednesday evening, letting her followers know that when she dies, she might not die rich — but she should be remembered for what occurred.
“Please make sure that in my obituary, I am referred to as ‘One-time millionaire, Ellen Fleming,’ ” she wrote.
A bank account that I had $50 in had over $1 million dollars deposited into it. A banker made a HUGE mistake and confused me with another Ellen Fleming. I was rich for 10 mins & I can tell you, life was in fact better. I'm now humbled from loosing all my money. pic.twitter.com/skwlbUodTY — Ellen Fleming (@EllenFlem) July 18, 2018
Steve Annear can be reached at [email protected] . Follow him on Twitter @steveannear | – For a few brief but glorious minutes, a Boston woman was a millionaire. Ellen Fleming says she received a voicemail from a TD Ameritrade financial consultant Wednesday afternoon that a deposit had been made into her account. The 26-year-old opened the company's app on her cellphone and was surprised to find $1.1 million instead of the $50 that she had left a few months ago, per the AP. Fleming tells the Boston Globe that she immediately thought about how nice it would be to pay off her student loans and quit her job. Instead, she called the consultant back and informed them of the mix-up. Fleming says the money was meant for a woman with the same name who lives in Florida. “You need to take every opportunity that’s handed to you,” she tells the Globe. “But that seemed like an opportunity that could lead me to federal prison, so it didn’t seem worth it.” In a tweet, she asks that in her obituary she is referred to as a "one-time millionaire." |
HONG KONG (AP) — Hackers defaced the website of Malaysia Airlines on Monday and threatened to dump stolen information online after posting a glimpse of customer data obtained in the attack.
Workers stand behind a computer which shows the hacked website of Malaysia Airlines, at a cafe in Petaling Jaya outside Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Monday, Jan. 26, 2015. The airline's site was changed on... (Associated Press)
A man points at the computer screen showing Malaysia Airlines' hacked website, at a cafe in Petaling Jaya outside Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Monday, Jan. 26, 2015. The airline's site was changed on Monday,... (Associated Press)
The airline's site was down for at least seven hours, replaced by a message from the Lizard Squad hacker group, before the company brought it back online by mid-afternoon in Malaysia.
The hackers at first changed the site to display a message saying "404 - Plane Not Found" and that it was "Hacked by Cyber Caliphate," with a photo of one of the airline's Airbus A380 superjumbo jets. The browser tab for the website said "ISIS will prevail."
Malaysia Airlines is struggling to recover from twin disasters last year, including the disappearance of Flight 370, which authorities believed crashed 1,800 kilometers (1,100 miles) off Australia's west coast, and the downing of Flight 17 over Ukraine.
The hackers later replaced the jet with a picture of a lizard in a top hat, monocle and tuxedo smoking a pipe. The Islamic State reference was removed and the claim of responsibility changed to "Lizard Squad - Official Cyber Caliphate," with a link to the group's Twitter account.
Notorious from their attention-seeking antics, Lizard Squad has claimed responsibility for a variety of hacks over the past year, most of them aimed at gaming or media companies. Lizard Squad occasionally makes tongue-in-cheek claims to support Islamic State, although there are no known links between the groups.
The airline said in a statement that it was a "temporary glitch" that didn't affect passenger bookings and that the breach had been reported to Malaysia's transport ministry and Internet security agency. It said user data "remains secured."
Lizard Squad, however, tweeted that it was "going to dump some loot found on malaysiaairlines.com servers soon," and posted a link to a screenshot of what appeared to be a passenger flight booking from the airline's internal email system.
The particular booking was made by Malaysian Amy Keh, who said she had made it in October for her mother and two relatives to travel from Kuala Lumpur to Taiwan in March.
"I am a bit worried about their security. Now the whole world knows that they will be going to Taipei," said Keh, who logged on Monday to check the itinerary. She said the website looked different and called the airline, which told her of the hacking. However, she only found out when contacted by The Associated Press that the travel information was posted online
The Lizard Squad group last year claimed it was behind attacks on Sony's online PlayStation network and Microsoft's Xbox site.
In August, it also tweeted to American Airlines that there might be explosives on a plane carrying the president of Sony Online Entertainment, which makes video games, forcing the flight to be diverted.
Explaining how the hack had occurred, Malaysia Airlines said its domain name system was "compromised" and users were redirected to the hacker group's website. The domain name system translates web addresses typed into browsers into the numbers that computers use to identify and connect with each other on the Internet.
The Islamic State group now holds about a third of both Syria and Iraq, territory it has declared a caliphate. Police in Malaysia detained 43 people last year on suspicion of links to the extremist group, underscoring concerns held by Prime Minister Najib Razak that the spread of Islamic State ideology could lead to conflict in predominantly Muslim Malaysia.
___
AP Writer Eileen Ng in Kuala Lumpur contributed to this report. ||||| Story highlights Malaysia Airlines website taken down by group calling themselves Cyber Caliphate
But the airline claims its systems were intact and users were instead redirected to hackers' site
Hong Kong (CNN) The official Malaysia Airlines website has been hacked by a group claiming to support Islamist terror group, ISIS.
On logging into www.malaysiaairlines.com on Monday morning, users were presented with an image of a Malaysia Airlines Airbus and messages that read "404 -- Plane Not Found" and "Hacked by Lizard Squad -- Official Cyber Caliphate."
The browser tab also read "ISIS will prevail."
The Malaysia Airlines homepage later changed to a black background featuring a mocked-up image of a lizard in a top hat complete with monocle. Users were directed to a Twitter page called "@lizardmafia," which featured a series of largely asinine posts.
The airline, which is currently restructuring itself in the wake of the loss of two of its airliners last year, could not be contacted by telephone.
Hack denied
In a post on its Facebook account, the airline denied its internal servers, which contain passenger information, had been compromised. It said its Domain Name System (DNS) had instead been hijacked, with users redirected to the hackers' website.
The airline added the issue has now been resolved with its service provider and the system is expected to be fully recovered within 22 hours. The matter has also been reported to Malaysian authorities, it said.
But the hackers, identifying themselves as the Lizard Squad, took to Twitter claiming they had penetrated Malaysia Airlines' email account and posted a screenshot.
Meanwhile, tweets from the airline's official account directed users to a separate URL for its online booking service. This link worked as normal.
READ: Malaysia Airlines slashes 6,000 jobs in major restructuring ||||| American Airlines flight 362 en route to San Diego was diverted to Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport on Sunday after a hacking group targeting the Playstation Network (PSN) tweeted a bomb threat to the airline company.
.@AmericanAir We have been receiving reports that @j_smedley‘s plane #362 from DFW to SAN has explosives on-board, please look into this. — Lizard Squad (@LizardSquad) August 24, 2014
The threat appears to have been made specifically to inconvenience John Smedley, president of Sony Online Entertainment, who was on board the flight, in addition to a cyber attack on Sony’s online service that has resulted in PSN being offline for most of the day. The group, identifying itself as Lizard Squad, also tweeted a video from the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks of planes flying into the World Trade Center with the hashtag #PrayForFlight362 to Smedley’s Twitter account.
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American Airlines confirmed that the flight was rerouted “due to a security related issue,” and Smedley addressed the incident on his own Twitter account:
Yes. My plane was diverted. Not going to discuss more than that. Justice will find these guys. — John Smedley (@j_smedley) August 24, 2014
Sony released a statement to Shacknews indicating that the FBI was investigating the threat but that no further details could be released “as this has now become a matter of national security.” Lizard Squad had made several tweets earlier in the day referencing Islamic State, the jihadist group terrorizing Syria and Iraq.
Kuffar don’t get to play videogames until bombing of the ISIL stops. #ISIL #PSN #ISIS — Lizard Squad (@LizardSquad) August 24, 2014
The kuffar plays call of duty while the ISIS responds to the call of duty. #ISIS — Lizard Squad (@LizardSquad) August 24, 2014
The seriousness of these tweets is questionable, as the group later laughed at the suggestion that the incident had become a matter of national security in a Facebook post.
Lizard Squad launched a cyber attack against PSN early Sunday morning, resulting in gamers being unable to play online or access the Sony store. Popular video apps like Netflix and Amazon Video appear to be unaffected. Sony confirmed that the denial-of-service attack had resulted in a PSN outage on the company’s official blog. The company also claimed that no personal information of customers with PSN accounts was compromised as a result of the cyber attack.
Lizard Squad has since claimed to have attacked Xbox Live, the online service for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Xbox One gaming platforms. Microsoft customer support has confirmed a disruption of service. ||||| Image caption The PlayStation Network allows gamers to take part in multiplayer titles via the internet
Sony's PlayStation Network was forced offline for much of Sunday by a cyber-attack in what appears to be a campaign against several online gaming services.
Microsoft's XBox Live, Blizzard's Battle.net, and Grinding Gear Games are among others to have reported being disrupted over the weekend.
The attacks coincided with a bomb scare involving a flight carrying a Sony executive.
An American Airlines jet was diverted after a threat was made online.
A warning that the flight - from Dallas-Fort Worth to San Diego - was carrying explosives was subsequently repeated by a Twitter account that had been used to claim responsibility for the online attacks.
John Smedley, president of Sony Online Entertainment, had been tweeting about his firm's efforts to combat a "large scale DDoS" before posting a message saying he was about to board the plane.
DDoS stands for distributed denial of service attack - a technique in which many computers are used to flood an online service with requests in an attempt to overload its systems.
Image caption Blizzard's Diablo III has faced disruption after Battle.net was attacked
After the threatened plane landed in Phoenix, Arizona, Mr Smedley tweeted: "Yes, my plane was diverted. Not going to discuss more than that. Justice will find these guys."
A spokeswoman for Sony said that the FBI was now investigating the diversion. However, the Bureau has yet to issue a statement of its own.
Jihadist links
A Twitter account that has claimed responsibility for attacking Sony and the other video games firms has linked the attacks to the jihadist group Islamic State, posting: "Kuffar [non-believers] don't get to play videogames until bombing of the ISIL stops."
It also makes several references to Isis - the former name used by the Islamic militants.
But it is unclear whether this is a diversionary tactic, since an earlier post by the same account states: "Sony, yet another large company, but they aren't spending the waves of cash they obtain on their customers' PSN service. End the greed."
To complicate matters another hacker, who is associated with the Anonymous hacking collective, has claimed responsibility for the DDoS on the PlayStation Network, saying they mounted it to highlight vulnerabilities in Sony's system.
This hacker has criticised the other claims of responsibility and posted screenshots that purport to support their case.
Xbox disruption
Sony's PlayStation Network was notably taken offline for more than three weeks in 2011 after a hack attack that compromised its members' personal details and exposed their encrypted debit and credit card accounts.
However, the firm's social media manager has sought to reassure subscribers about the latest attack.
"We have seen no evidence of any intrusion to the network and no evidence of any unauthorized access to users' personal information," Sid Shuman blogged.
Image caption The Xbox Live support site continues to report problems
"In light of today's issue, the networks will not undergo the regularly scheduled maintenance, which was planned for Monday, August 25.
"We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused by this issue."
Microsoft declined to "comment on the root cause" of disruption its rival Xbox Live online gaming service has faced.
However, a message on is support site stated that Xbox One owners were experiencing "server unavailability issues" when trying to join other players in online games.
The webpage also mentions problems faced by owners of the Xbox 360 trying to connect to Diablo III's party chat feature.
This appears to be a consequence of an attack on Activision Blizzard's gaming service Battle.net, which also supports World of Warcraft and Starcraft titles.
"Battle.net game services have recently been subject to DDoS attacks. We worked diligently along with our ISPs [internet service providers] to improve the situation and currently are seeing more stability," said a message posted to the facility's site.
Image caption The PC role-playing game, Path of Exile, has also been struck by a DDoS attack
Meanwhile, Grinding Gear Games posted a message on the Twitter account of its game Path of Exile on Sunday, saying: "We're having some server issues due to a DDoS attack. Should have it sorted out soon. Sorry for the inconvenience!"
The incidents follow reports of earlier DDoS attacks on other multiplayer titles on Friday, including Eve Online, League of Legends, RuneScape and Guild Wars 2. | – A hacker group that's claimed responsibility for PlayStation and Xbox network outages in recent months has hit a new target. Hackers claiming to be from "cyber caliphate" Lizard Squad took over Malaysia Airlines' website for at least seven hours today, replacing the homepage with an image of a lizard in a tuxedo and the message "404 - Plane Not Found," the Guardian and the AP report. (The site is currently back up and running.) The words "Hacked by Lizard Squad -- Official Cyber Caliphate" were also visible. At one point, the browser tab read "ISIS will prevail," CNN reports. Users were directed to the Twitter page for @lizardmafia, where a posted tweet read, "Going to dump some loot found on malaysiaairlines.com servers soon." In a Facebook post, Malaysia Airlines said its domain name system was hacked rather than its internal servers, which hold passenger data. The "glitch" redirected visitors to the hackers' site, the airline said, noting the issue was reported to CyberSecurity Malaysia and the Ministry of Transport. However, a tweet from @lizardmafia says the airline is "lying about user data not being compromised." The account claims to have hacked Malaysia Airlines' email system and posted a screenshot of what appeared to be a flight booking by customer Amy Keh. She tells the AP she booked a flight for her mother and two relatives in October. "I am a bit worried about their security," she says. "Now the whole world knows that they will be going to Taipei." |
France's main airport has only a few days' worth of jet fuel left, it was announced today, as the strikes against government pension plans continued to disrupt infrastructure.
The transport ministry warned of the fuel shortage at the Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris as hundreds of thousands took part in another national protest against President Nicolas Sarkozy's bill to raise the retirement age.
The country has already endured four days of strikes, affecting flights, rail services, hospitals and schools. Diesel supplies were running low in parts of France as unions announced that workers at all 12 fuel-producing refineries were now on strike, and many depots were being blockaded. Police yesterday forced three crucial fuel depots to reopen.
A ministry spokesman said officials were working to restore aviation fuel supplies, and the transport minister, Dominique Bussereau, said there was no reason to fear a general shortage.
The fuel supply into the Paris region and international airports was cut yesterday from a pipeline running south from Le Havre. Trapil, the company that operates the pipeline to the Paris airports, said Roissy-Charles de Gaulle could run out of fuel as early as next week.
A transport ministry spokesman said reserves would last until late on Monday or Tuesday. But he said the pipeline was now working intermittently, adding: "We are exploring possible solutions to supply the airport [at Roissy]. We are confident."
Bussereau authorised oil companies to use some reserves after trucking companies complained of difficulties finding fuel.
About 10% of petrol stations have run out of fuel and panic buying has broken out in some areas. A sign at a station in Feyzin, near Lyon, announced a fuel shortage at all pumps and frustrated motorists reported other problems.
"When the government says there will be no shortage, it means there will be a shortage," said Bernard Martin, a 60-year-old retiree who found no fuel at a Carrefour gas station in Ecully, near Lyon. "Since this morning, there is no more diesel fuel."
Strikers at oil refineries said their protest was about fighting recession-induced government spending cuts, such as Sarkozy's plan to raise the minimum retirement age from 60 to 62, and from 65 to 67 for a full state pension.
"[These protests are] an attempt to say stop abusing the workers and citizens," Christian Coste, head of the CGT Union at Total's La Mede refinery, said. "We are not here to bring France to its knees and create a shortage, we are here to make ourselves heard." Workers have been striking for five days straight at the refinery in southern France.
In cities around France excluding Paris, some 340,000 protesters were out in protest by midday, according to the interior ministry. Union figures have been consistently far higher than official counts.
On the streets of Marseille, garbage was left uncollected for the fourth straight day and firefighters had to extinguish some rubbish piles set on fire.
The pension reforms are seen by unions as an attack on their near-sacred social protections. The government says that is the only way to stop a €32bn (£28bn) annual pension shortfall ballooning to €50bn by 2020 and insists people must work longer because they are living longer.
The reforms have already been approved by the national assembly, the lower house of the French parliament. The senate has endorsed the key articles on raising the retirement age, and is due to vote on the full text on Wednesday.
"The French understand that those who are blocking this country are at the head of the government," CFDT union leader Francois Chereque said.
The CGT union called for the strikes at the SNCF train authority to be strengthened. About one-third of fast trains were hobbled by strikes yesterday, though the Eurostar train to London was running normally today.
A sixth day of protest is set for Tuesday, a day before the senate vote. In another sign of growing protest, truck drivers – the heavyweights of French demonstrations because of their ability to block roads – have heeded a call to join the action.
Maxime Dumont, head of the CFDT union's trucking section, said drivers could block fuel depots, refineries and food warehouses and clog roads by driving slowly along them. "In the transport sector we can do a bit more to help the workers. We are going to join the movement to make the government give way," Dumont said.
More than a million people took to the streets on Tuesday, according to police. Trade unions organisers said 3.5m had taken part.
About 70% of people polled this week think the strikes will build into a national protest movement like the one in 1995, and more than half of those questioned said they would support it.
France has a long tradition of overpowering unpopular government proposals through militancy on the street, although analysts believe many French people are reluctantly coming to terms with the fact that raising the retirement age in line with other European countries is inevitable – though 62 would still be one of the lowest retirement ages in Europe.
Elsewhere, thousands of students and teachers across Italy demonstrated yesterday against planned cuts in education, while Portugal's minority government faced a battle in parliament over abrupt tax hikes and deep spending cuts.
In Greece, riot police used teargas on hundreds of culture ministry workers yesterday to end a labour dispute that shut down the country's top attraction, the Acropolis, for three days. ||||| Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Christian Fraser says President Sarkozy faces a testing few days
A fifth day of protests in France against proposed pension reforms brought 825,000 people on to the streets, police said, although unions put the figure at 2.5m to 3m.
The government wants to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 and the full state pension age from 65 to 67.
Most oil refineries have been hit by strike action, causing fuel shortages at some airports and filling stations.
A further day of strikes is scheduled for Tuesday.
The pension reforms have already been approved by the National Assembly, the lower house of the French parliament.
The upper house, the Senate, has endorsed the key articles on raising the retirement age, and is due to vote on the full text on Wednesday.
Public and private sector workers took part in strikes on Saturday across France, in cities including Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux, Lille and Toulouse. Unions had called for more than 200 marches nationwide.
"We are not here to bring France to its knees and create a shortage, we are here to make ourselves heard," Christian Coste, of the CGT trade union, told the Associated Press.
A group of what the police described as anarchists operated on the fringes of the main demonstration, says the BBC's Hugh Schofield in Paris.
As the protest drew to a close, they began ransacking café terraces, breaking windows and setting fire to bins.
Some of them briefly occupied the Opera House at Bastille.
The clashes did not last long, but they are a reminder to the government and unions of how quickly things can get out of hand, our correspondent says.
Panic buying
All 12 refineries in mainland France have been affected by strike action. Ten have shut down or are in the process of closing. A number of fuel depots have been blockaded.
However, a pipeline supplying the two main airports in Paris, Charles de Gaulle and Orly, is now back in service. It was cut off by strike action, raising fears that Charles de Gaulle would run out of fuel by Tuesday.
France also has a strategic fuel reserve which holds up to three months of supplies.
However, some 10% of filling stations have run out of petrol and panic buying has broken out in some areas.
Pension protest numbers Saturday 16 October: 825,000 (police) - 2.5-3m (unions)
Tuesday 12 October: 1.2m - 3.5m
Saturday 2 October: 899.000 - 3m
Thursday 23 September: 997,000 - 3m
Tuesday 7 September: 1.2m - 2.7m
In Marseille, rubbish is piling up around the port amid a strike by bin collectors that has now lasted four days.
More than 300 high schools have been affected by strikes and blockades - about one in 15 across the country - as students have joined the pension protests in the past week.
Lorry drivers will decide on Monday whether to join the strikes.
More than one million people took to the streets in the previous national protest on Tuesday, according to police. Trade unions organisers said 3.5m had taken part.
The last weekend day of demonstrations was Saturday 2 October, when the numbers were about 900,000 according to police and 3m according to unions.
Seventy percent of people polled this week think the sporadic strikes will build into a national protest movement like the one in 1995, and over half said they would support it.
In 1995, three continual weeks of strikes by public and transport workers forced the government to abandon plans for economic reforms, including raising the retirement age. | – Judging by the throngs on the streets of France today—somewhere between 800,000 and 3 million, depending on who's counting—it's safe to say that Nicolas Sarkozy's plan to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 is not all that popular. (Another day of protests is set for Tuesday, the day before a Senate vote.) Meanwhile, strikes at refineries have caused nationwide fuel shortages—serious enough that Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport warned planes to make sure they land with enough fuel to get home. "They must come with a maximum capacity in their fuel tanks," said a spokesman. "Obviously, these instructions apply only to short- and medium-haul flights" because oceanic flights can't "double carry" fuel. The finance minister went on TV to insist "there is no reason, no reason, I repeat, to panic because there is no risk of shortages." Late today, a key pipeline that supplies the airport resumed service, easing the immediate concern. More details from the AP, BBC, and the Guardian. |
"WE'RE WORKING ON OUR FRIENDSHIP NOW," SAYS BROWN
Just a day after ex-girlfriend Rihanna went on the record to say she has not rekindled her romance with Chris Brown, the “Don’t Wake Me Up” singer took to the airwaves to explain their complex relationship.
Sitting down with Los Angeles’ Power 106 radio station, the 23-year-old R&B artist flat out denied that he was dating Rihanna, 24, again.
“No,” he bluntly told the DJ. “And that’s just quick — the quick answer.”
Brown then went on to explain why he decided to release his homemade video after splitting with girlfriend Karreuche Tran, where he famously mused is there “such a thing as loving two people.”
“With that is just me being honest with myself,” he said. “Me and her have history and me and her are definitely always going to be best of friends.”
“We’re working on our friendship now,” Brown continued.
The former couple famously had a falling out when Brown attacked his then-girlfriend at a pre-Grammys party in 2009. Brown is currently still on probation for the assault.
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“I think everybody feels so attached to this old situation,” he said of the attack. ”I mean, it’s still a detrimental situation because it’s still stuff we’re dealing with today … that shows that domestic violence is not okay. But, as far as our personal lives, I think people’s got to give it a chance.”
A split second later, Brown corrected himself, “Well, not even give it a chance. Shut the hell up! It is what it is.”
Recently, Brown and Rihanna made headline news after they were spotted getting close at various celebrity hangouts.
Aside from being snapped together at a Jay-Z concert just hours before Brown broke the news that he was back on the market , the two were seen hitting the dance floor at the GreyStone Manor on Halloween.
“Rihanna and Chris were dancing and drinking the entire night,” an eyewitness told Celebuzz. “She wasn’t even looking at any other guys but Chris.”
While some may scorn Brown and Rihanna for talking again after the assault, Brown defended his friendship during Friday’s radio interview.
“It’s me. At the end of the day, whatever opinions they have ain’t going to affect what I’m doing,” he said.
Do you think Brown and Rihanna should become friends again? Sound off below.
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Written by Celebuzz ||||| Chris Brown wishes ex Rihanna a happy birthday on Twitter amid rumors of music collaboration Singer answers 'Thanks!' as rumors fly that the two may be seeing each other again
Rihanna's fans showed an outpouring of love and well wishes on her birthday Monday, but the singer — and the rest of the world — took notice of one message in particular.
"HAPPY BIRTHDAY ROBYN!" her ex Chris Brown, 22, tweeted early Monday morning, to which the singer, whose real name is Robyn Rihanna Fenty, replied with a quick "Thanks!"
Rihanna turns 24 this year.
The "We Found Love" singer's fans quickly posted responses of disbelief and disapproval, with "OMG" and "WTF" comments flying around the Web.
The musical pair, who split in 2009 after Brown assaulted Rihanna during a dispute the night before the Grammys, have been recently rumored to have reconciled.
According to Vibe.com, Brown may appear as a guest vocalist on Rihanna's "Birthday Cake (Remix)."
The two last collaborated on the hit "Cinderella (Umbrella Remix)" while they were still dating.
Rumors have also been swirling that the two have been seeing each other in more than just the professional sense — with sources telling Us Weekly that "Rihanna loves to live dangerously and talking to and hooking up with Chris is all part of that."
At the time, Brown's rep denied the reports, saying that the two were "just friends."
Brown is currently dating model Karrueche Tran, 23, and the pair are reportedly happy together, despite the fact that Brown and Rihanna still tweet loving messages at one another.
"Karrueche thinks Chris' studio is where most of the hookups have taken place," a source told Us Weekly back in January, though another source added that Brown's new girl "won't give him up for a few discretions."
[email protected] ||||| Miranda Lambert and Chris Brown have been battling in a public Twitter feud since the Grammy Awards last Sunday night.
On Monday, country singer Lambert, who is married to "The Voice" co-host Blake Shelton, tweeted: "And Chris Brown Twice? I don't get it. He beat on a girl…Not cool that we act like that didn't happen"
In 2009, Brown pleaded guilty for assaulting former girlfriend Rihanna and is now serving five years of probation.
Brown was applauded by the Grammy audience, which included Rihanna, for his performance and win for best R&B; album. His performance resulted in some very disturbing tweets from fans, including things like, "I'd let Chris Brown beat me up."
Brown responded to Miranda's tweet with one he has since taken down saying, "Hate all you want because I got a grammy now! That's the ultimate f*** off."
On Wednesday Lambert tweeted back, "I'm done for now. But not for good:) nite love bugs & remember… Be who you are an stand for what u believe in. NO MATTER WHAT!" later adding, "Oh and one more thing for all who are asking….I have a Grammy too:)"
In a concert Thursday night at the Amherst, Mass., Mullins Center, Lambert held up a handwritten poster that read, "Take notes Chris Brown" and said, "Listen, I just need to speak my mind. Where I come from, beating up on a women is never OK."
After the crowd applauded, she added, "So that's why my daddy taught me early on in life how to use a shotgun."
She then sang her hit song "Gunpowder and Lead," which is about a woman preparing to shoot her abusive husband: "I'm goin' home, gonna load my shotgun/ Wait by the door and light a cigarette/He wants a fight well now he's got one/He ain't seen me crazy yet."
Many of Lambert's songs, like "White Liar" and "I Wanna Die" are known to bash men.
In three separate tweets yesterday, Brown fired back, "Using my name to get publicity? I love it! Perform your heart out! Go buy @miranda_lambert! So motivational and "PERFECT." Goodnight to all the people who live life and who aren't stuck in the past!"
Lambert has yet to respond to Brown's tweets but Jack Osbourne, Michelle Branch and Eric Stonestreet have also expressed their disappointment in Brown's Grammy acceptance. | – Are Chris Brown and Rihanna getting cringingly close? Evidence is mounting that the relationship between the ex-lovers is percolating. Brown tweeted a happy birthday to Rihanna yesterday (in the wake of possible love tweets late last year), and Rihanna responded, triggering a tidal wave of OMGs and WTFs from startled fans, notes the New York Daily News. The two have also collaborated on not one but two new songs. The on-probation singer gushes: "I miss your body" on Rihanna's "Birthday Cake," and adds that he wants to do something with his missing Lady Love that does not involve punching (Rihanna's also featured on a new remix of Brown's "Turn Up the Music."). Rihanna and Brown have been into some sizzling extracurricular activities, sources tell Us, even though he has (another) girlfriend. "Rihanna loves to live dangerously and talking to and hooking up with Chris is all part of that," said one. One singer not about to forgive Brown for his 2009 assault on Rihanna is Miranda Lambert, reports Good Morning America. She's keeping up her criticism with a new tweet, noting: "I don't get it. He beat on a girl." Check out Brown's (NSFW) contribution to Rihanna's song in the gallery, or listen to Rihanna on Brown's remix at the Huffington Post. |
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As investigators prepare to concede defeat in their search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, some scientists are pondering the unthinkable: they’ve been looking in the wrong place for more than two years.
Ships scouring an almost endless expanse of southern Indian Ocean have whittled down the area to a patch little bigger than the U.S. state of Delaware. They’ve turned up nothing of the jet that disappeared March 8, 2014, en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur with 239 people on board.
With no closure in sight, transport ministers from Malaysia, China and Australia meet Thursday in Kuala Lumpur to assess the A$180 million ($135 million) operation. There are no plans to look beyond the designated 120,000 square kilometers (46,330 square miles), the Australian Transport Safety Bureau said in an e-mail before today’s meeting. More than 90 percent of the search area has already been covered.
The absence of wreckage in the search area to date may question one of the recovery mission’s central assumptions -- that no one was in control of the plane when it ran out of fuel and spiraled sharply into the ocean, said Vaughan Clarkson, a former University of Queensland radar and tracking specialist and one of the scientists who helped recreate MH370’s flight path for the Australian government.
Rather, the fruitless hunt suggests someone glided the aircraft into the water -- beyond what would become the outer limits of the search zone, he said. Leidschendam, Netherlands-based Fugro NV is the contractor carrying out the search operations.
“Probably what we’ve discovered from this exercise is that the plane was under active control,” said Clarkson, who’s now an independent consultant. “The search area must be basically right, but perhaps it’s not quite big enough.”
The implications of a controlled glide into the ocean are vast. Even with no fuel, a pilot could have guided MH370 for a further 230 kilometers, the ATSB said in a December 2015 report. That’s more than enough to reach Philadelphia from New York. It could mean combing an area almost as big as California for the best part of a decade.
For a related story, click: Missing Malaysia Jet Weeks Away From Keeping Secrets Forever
If the assumptions were accurate, there’s little chance the wreck could remain hidden in the search area, Australian government scientists said in a report last year. At depths of up to 6 kilometers (4 miles), the underwater search has been so thorough that not even lumps of coal on the seabed have escaped detection, the ATSB said in an e-mail to Bloomberg News this week.
Recreating Flight 370’s last moments has always been one of the biggest challenges. Earlier satellite data from the plane suggested it cruised south over the Indian Ocean for about six hours. And a final automated electronic message probably coincided with fuel exhaustion, scientists concluded. But after that, scientists had little help other than flight simulations and data from old plane crashes.
Air-traffic controllers lost contact with MH370 less than an hour after takeoff as it approached Vietnam. Malaysia Prime Minister Najib Razak has said the plane was deliberately steered off course.
Step Back
After an effective but fruitless search of this nature, it may be time to step back and reevaluate, Larry Stone, the chief scientist at Reston, Virginia-based consultant Metron Inc. who has tracked missing aircraft and ships for half a century, said in an e-mail.
“You have effectively exhausted the information on which your search was planned,” said Stone, who mapped out the resting place of Air France Flight 447, which was recovered two years after plummeting into the Atlantic Ocean with 228 people aboard in 2009.
One option is to revise the assumptions on which the search is based and question whether neglected information should be included in a new hunt, Stone said in an email.
Families of the passengers are already petitioning for the search to be extended.
Wild winter weather and waves more than five stories high have delayed the mission in the Indian Ocean. An original mid-year completion target has been pushed back by up to eight weeks, investigators said in a July 13 update.
The first debris from MH370 was found on Reunion Island in July 2015. Four other pieces that turned up on Africa’s eastern seaboard and in Mauritius almost certainly belong to the doomed jet, according to investigators.
Officials are also analyzing a possible wing flap found late June on Pemba Island off the coast of Tanzania. Investigators haven’t yet confirmed that the debris belongs to MH370.
Ultimately, the decision by ministers in Kuala Lumpur may boil down to time and money.
“My own feeling is that it would be a shame if we let the search drop,” said tracking specialist Clarkson. “But I appreciate that a hard-headed decision needs to be made at some point.” ||||| Image copyright AP Image caption The search in the Indian Ocean began immediately after the disappearance of MH370 in March 2014
Experts leading the hunt for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 have said the plane is unlikely to be found in the current search area, and recommended looking further north.
No trace of the plane has been recovered in the southern Indian Ocean, after more than two years of searching.
MH370 disappeared while flying to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur with 239 people on board in 2014.
With the search to end soon, Australian officials say it will not be extended.
Australia's Transport Minister Darren Chester said the search would be unlikely to go beyond the scheduled end of January or February 2017 as the report does not give a "specific location" for the aircraft.
The governments of Australia, Malaysia and China, who are funding the search, had previously agreed that "we will be suspending the search unless credible evidence is available" that identifies the location, he said.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), tasked to coordinate the search, convened a review with a multi-national team of aviation and science experts in November.
Its latest report, based on that meeting, said "there is a high degree of confidence that the previously identified underwater area searched to date does not contain the missing aircraft".
Search vessels have been looking in a 120,000 sq km (46,332 sq miles) part of the southern Indian Ocean.
Experts identified a new area of approximately 25,000 sq km to the north of the current search area that had the "highest probability" of containing the wreckage.
"The participants of the First Principles Review were in agreement on the need to search an additional area representing approximately 25,000 km²".
This was the last area the plane could possibly be located, given current evidence, the report said.
Image copyright EPA Image caption The current search for the Malaysia Airlines plane is due to end in early 2017
Their conclusion was based on new flight simulations and analysis of satellite communications, as well as drift modelling patterns based on the timing and locations of the discovery of debris.
Some debris pieces confirmed to be from MH370 have been found along the African coast and islands in the Indian Ocean by private citizens in recent months.
The experts also said the plane was on an "unstable flight path" and that its wing flaps were in a retracted position, in line with earlier findings by the ATSB that the plane made a "rapid and uncontrolled descent".
The ATSB said it had presented the recommendation to the Malaysian, Chinese and Australian governments.
Only one vessel is left searching for the plane in the current search area. ||||| Story highlights Australian leader: "We should not underestimate the difficulty" of the search
The search for the missing Malaysia Airlines airliner has gone on for three full weeks
Authorities recently shifted the focus of the search area some 1,100 kilometers
5 aircraft spotted debris in the new area, but none is confirmed to be from Flight 370
Three weeks after Malaysia Airlines Flights 370 set off from Kuala Lumpur, search aircraft set off Saturday from Australia -- hoping to, finally, find the Boeing 777 in the southern Indian Ocean where experts now believe it ended up.
The area that search teams -- including a Chinese Ilyushin IL-76 and an Australian P-3 Orion that set off Saturday morning from Perth -- are now focusing on is 1,100 kilometers (680 miles) to the northeast from where they'd been concentrating for more than a week, and it's closer to the Australian coast. This change is thanks to a new analysis of satellite data that Australian authorities say show the commercial airliner could not have flown as far south as once thought.
Saturday's renewed search comes days after Japan and Thailand both said they'd sent new satellite images to Malaysia showing separate debris fields that could be related to the plane, which vanished with 239 people aboard.
Air Vice-Marshal Kevin Short, commander of Joint Forces New Zealand, told CNN's Erin Burnett five of the dispatched aircraft "located debris in their search area" on Friday. Some of the spottings were "hundreds of miles away" from each other, although Short said this vast expanse is "not unusual" given the ocean conditions and the time passed since the airplane's purported crash.
That includes 11 small objects spotted by one of his military's P-3 planes. CNN's Kyung Lah, who went out on a U.S. Navy P-8 search plane Friday, said the crew of that plane spotted white objects, orange rope and a blue bag.
40 photos: The search for MH370 40 photos: The search for MH370 Police carry a piece of debris on Reunion Island, a French territory in the Indian Ocean, on Wednesday, July 29. A week later, authorities confirmed that the debris was from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared on March 8, 2014. Hide Caption 1 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 Relatives of the flight's passengers console each other outside the Malaysia Airlines office in Subang, Malaysia, on Thursday, February 12. Protesters had demanded that the airline withdraw the statement made in January that all the passengers aboard the plane were dead. Hide Caption 2 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 A police officer watches a crying couple cry outside the airline's office building in Beijing after officials refused to meet with them on June 11, 2014. The couple's son was on the plane. Hide Caption 3 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 Members of the media scramble to speak with Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, director general of Malaysia's Civil Aviation Department, at a hotel in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on May 27, 2014. Data from communications between satellites and the missing flight was released the day before, more than two months after relatives of passengers said they requested it be made public. Hide Caption 4 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 Operators aboard the Australian ship Ocean Shield move Bluefin-21, the U.S. Navy's autonomous underwater vehicle, into position to search for the jet on April 14, 2014. Hide Caption 5 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 A member of the Royal New Zealand Air Force looks out of a window while searching for debris off the coast of western Australia on April 13, 2014. Hide Caption 6 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 The HMS Echo, a vessel with the British Roya; Navy, moves through the waters of the southern Indian Ocean on April 12, 2014. Hide Caption 7 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 A Royal Australian Air Force AP-3C Orion, on a mission to drop sonar buoys to assist in the search, flies past the Australian vessel Ocean Shield on April 9, 2014. Hide Caption 8 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 A relative of a missing passenger cries at a vigil in Beijing on April 8, 2014. Hide Caption 9 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 Australian Defense Force divers scan the water for debris in the southern Indian Ocean on April 7, 2014. Hide Caption 10 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 A towed pinger locator is readied to be deployed off the deck of the Australian vessel Ocean Shield on April 7, 2014. Hide Caption 11 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 A member of the Royal New Zealand Air Force looks at a flare in the Indian Ocean during search operations on April 4, 2014. Hide Caption 12 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 On March 30, 2014, a woman in Kuala Lumpur prepares for an event in honor of those aboard Flight 370. Hide Caption 13 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 The sole representative for the families of Flight 370 passengers leaves a conference at a Beijing hotel on March 28, 2014, after other relatives left en masse to protest the Malaysian government's response to their questions. Hide Caption 14 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 A member of the Royal Australian Air Force is silhouetted against the southern Indian Ocean during the search for the missing jet on March 27, 2014. Hide Caption 15 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 Flight Lt. Jayson Nichols looks at a map aboard a Royal Australian Air Force aircraft during a search on March 27, 2014. Hide Caption 16 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 People in Kuala Lumpur light candles during a ceremony held for the missing flight's passengers on March 27, 2014. Hide Caption 17 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, center, delivers a statement about the flight on March 24, 2014. Razak's announcement came after the airline sent a text message to relatives saying it "deeply regrets that we have to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that MH 370 has been lost and that none of those onboard survived." Hide Caption 18 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 Grieving relatives of missing passengers leave a hotel in Beijing on March 24, 2014. Hide Caption 19 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 A passenger views a weather map in the departures terminal of Kuala Lumpur International Airport on March 22, 2014. Hide Caption 20 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 A Chinese satellite captured this image, released on March 22, 2014, of a floating object in the Indian Ocean, according to China's State Administration of Science. It was a possible lead in the search for the missing plane. Surveillance planes were looking for two objects spotted by satellite imagery in remote, treacherous waters more than 1,400 miles from the west coast of Australia. Hide Caption 21 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 Satellite imagery provided by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority on March 20, 2014, showed debris in the southern Indian Ocean that could have been from Flight 370. The announcement by Australian officials raised hopes of a breakthrough in the frustrating search. Hide Caption 22 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 Another satellite shot provided by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority shows possible debris from the flight. Hide Caption 23 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 A distraught relative of a missing passenger breaks down while talking to reporters at Kuala Lumpur International Airport on March 19, 2014. Hide Caption 24 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 On March 18, 2014, a relative of a missing passenger tells reporters in Beijing about a hunger strike to protest authorities' handling of information about the missing jet. Hide Caption 25 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 U.S. Navy crew members assist in search-and-rescue operations in the Indian Ocean on March 16, 2014. Hide Caption 26 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 Members of the Chinese navy continue search operations on March 13, 2014. After starting in the sea between Malaysia and Vietnam, the plane's last confirmed location, search efforts expanded west into the Indian Ocean. Hide Caption 27 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 A Vietnamese military official looks out an aircraft window during search operations March 13, 2014. Hide Caption 28 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 Malaysian air force members look for debris near Kuala Lumpur on March 13, 2014. Hide Caption 29 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 Relatives of missing passengers wait for the latest news at a hotel in Beijing on March 12, 2014. Hide Caption 30 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 A member of the Vietnamese air force checks a map while searching for the missing plane on March 11, 2014. Hide Caption 31 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 A Vietnamese air force plane found traces of oil that authorities had suspected to be from the missing Malaysia Airlines plane, the Vietnamese government online newspaper reported on March 8, 2014. However, a sample from the slick showed it was bunker oil, typically used to power large cargo ships, Malaysia's state news agency, Bernama, reported on March 10, 2014. Hide Caption 32 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 A U.S. Navy Seahawk helicopter lands aboard the USS Pinckney to change crews on March 9, 2014, before returning to search for the missing plane in the Gulf of Thailand. Hide Caption 33 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 Buddhist monks at Kuala Lumpur International Airport offer a special prayer for the missing passengers on March 9, 2014. Hide Caption 34 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 Members of a Chinese emergency response team board a rescue vessel at the port of Sanya in China's Hainan province on March 9, 2014. Hide Caption 35 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 The rescue vessel sets out from Sanya in the South China Sea on March 9, 2014. Hide Caption 36 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, center, arrives to meet family members of missing passengers at the reception center at Kuala Lumpur International Airport on March 8, 2014. Hide Caption 37 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 A relative of two missing passengers reacts at their home in Kuala Lumpur on March 8, 2014. Hide Caption 38 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 Chinese police at the Beijing airport stand beside the arrival board showing delayed Flight 370 in red on March 8, 2014. Hide Caption 39 of 40 40 photos: The search for MH370 Malaysia Airlines Group CEO Ahmad Juahari Yahya, front, speaks during a news conference at a hotel in Sepang on March 8, 2014. "We deeply regret that we have lost all contacts" with the jet, he said. Hide Caption 40 of 40
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"At one point, sure, everybody on board got a little excited, but it's impossible to tell from that distance what anything is," she said.
Aircraft setting off Saturday will try to relocate those objects, take photos of them for analysis, and direct four ships in the area "to their exact location," according to Short.
But again, the world must wait -- there's no confirmation that anything spotted from the air so far has anything to do with the missing airliner, which authorities have been hunting since early March.
"We should not underestimate the difficulty of this work (in) an extraordinarily remote location," Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said Saturday. "... While we are throwing everything that we have at it, the task goes."
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority stressed what's been detected so far "cannot be verified or discounted as being from MH370 until they are relocated and recovered by ships," six of which are to arrive Saturday in the new search area. They could be flotsam, like one distinctive piece of fishing gear spotted in the revised zone.
This was not the first time it turned out suspected debris ended up being unrelated to the mystery plane: A Chinese aircraft reported spotting possible aircraft debris early in the search, but that sighting turned out to be nothing.
Still, Short said, "Finding debris ... gives a lot more hope."
Malaysia plane saga: Your questions answered
Better conditions
The new search zone remains vast -- roughly 123,000 square miles (319,000 square kilometers). It is still also remote -- 1,150 miles (1,850 kilometers) west of Perth.
But John Young of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said conditions there are "likely to be better more often" than they were in the old search area, where poor weather grounded flights two days this week.
Planes will be able to spend more time in the air because the new search zone is closer to land, Young said.
U.S. flight crews involved in the search aren't frustrated or disillusioned by the sudden change in the search, Cmdr. William Marks of the Navy's U.S. 7th Fleet said.
"For the pilots and the air crews, this is what they train for," he said. "They understand it."
Marks told CNN's Anderson Cooper on Friday night that finding the debris is just part of the goal. Oceanographers could then analyze data about current, winds and more, then, to chart where they believe the bulk of the plane lies deep underwater
"Finding the debris in of itself is OK. But it's working backwards to that starting point," Marks said aboard the USS Blue Ridge. "And this area will be, hopefully, much better (than the previous search area) for that."
If and when the body of the 777 is found, the question still remains: Why did it go down? That may not be answered until investigators undertake the arduous process of retrieving the aircraft and trying to, literally, piece together what happened to it.
Wasted time?
Some analysts have raised their eyebrows at the sudden search area shift.
"Really? That much debris and we're not going to have a look at it to see what that stuff might be?" said David Gallo of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who helped lead the search for the flight recorders from Air France Flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009.
Others lamented the amount of time, money and resources that were spent in the old search area.
"This is time that has been wasted, there's no question," said CNN aviation analyst Miles O'Brien.
Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein disputed that suggestion.
"I don't think we would've done anything different from what we have done," he said.
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CNN safety analyst David Soucie said it was "a good sign" that experts had adjusted their assumptions.
"Assumptions are the key to all of this," he said. "If you assume something and you end up with a final conclusion, you have to constantly review that."
Vast, evolving search
The shifting hunt for Flight 370 has spanned oceans and continents.
It started in the South China Sea between Malaysia and Vietnam, where the plane went out of contact with air traffic controllers.
When authorities learned of radar data suggesting the plane had turned west across the Malay Peninsula after losing contact, they expanded the search into the Strait of Malacca.
When those efforts proved fruitless, the search spread north into the Andaman Sea and northern Indian Ocean.
It then ballooned dramatically after Malaysia announced March 15 that satellite data showed the plane could have flown along two huge arcs, one stretching northwest into the Asian landmass, the other southwest into the Indian Ocean.
The search area at that point reached nearly 3 million square miles.
On Monday, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said that further analysis of the data had led authorities to conclude the plane went down in the southern Indian Ocean, far from land.
Malaysian officials told the families of those on board that nobody would have survived. But many relatives have said that only the discovery of wreckage from the plane will convince them of the fate of their loved ones.
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How they're searching for debris ||||| Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Investigators hunting for missing Flight MH370 have widened their ocean floor search to a larger zone and don’t know where else to focus if the jet can’t be found there, authorities announced Wednesday.
The underwater operation has been "modified" and experts have started searching a larger area of the southern Indian Ocean even before a survey of the original zone has been completed.
Until now, the hunt for Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 had been focused on a 23,000-square mile patch where investigators said it probably crashed.
The expanded zone covers 46,000 square miles — an area about the size of Pennsylvania — and will be increasingly difficult to cover as the local winter weather sets in.
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The jetliner disappeared on March 8 last year en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. A joint investigation by Australia and Malaysia, helped by other international experts, has so far concluded from satellite data that the jet probably changed course and headed south for several hours before running out of fuel.
More than three-quarters of the original search area has been covered so far with no sign of the doomed plane, the Australia Transportation Safety Bureau’s Joint Agency Coordination Centre said in a short written update.
“The search into the expanded area has already commenced, with search efforts focused in the south to take advantage of the last of the usable weather in that area,” it said. "The search plan has been modified to enable continuous search operations during winter and to ensure that the entire [46,000 square mile] area is searched as quickly and effectively as possible.
The statement added: “Expert advice is that the highest probability of locating the aircraft is within the [46,000 square mile] search area. Beyond that, it is not possible to refine the search area to one of greater likelihood.”
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The statement did not explain further, and the ATSB did not immediately respond to a request for clarification.
The expanded search zone was agreed in April by ministers from Australia, Malaysia and China. Most of the missing passengers are Chinese.
Three specialist ships involved in the ocean floor search — GO Phoenix, Fugro Discovery and Fugro Equator – were all bound for, or returning from, the Australian supply port of Fremantle.
“Our work will continue to be thorough and methodical, so sometimes weekly progress may seem slow,” it said. “Please be assured that work is continuing and is aimed at finding MH370 as quickly as possible.”
The expert vessels last week found a previously-uncharted shipwreck almost 13,000 feet below the surface. | – The only boat left searching for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 isn't likely to find it, experts say. A new report from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau says "there is a high degree of confidence" that the plane that disappeared from radar on March 8, 2014, isn't in the Pennsylvania-sized search area that's been combed over two years, reports the BBC. Instead, experts believe MH370 lies to the north, within a 10,000-square-mile patch of the Indian Ocean that's about 20% of the size of the current search area, based on new flight simulations, an analysis of satellite communications, and debris drift patterns. The report adds there's only a 5% chance the plane was missed over the 42,500 square miles searched so far, reports CNN. Experts and investigators are "in agreement in the need to search an additional area" and "concluded that, if this area were to be searched, prospective areas for locating the aircraft wreckage, based on all the analysis to date, would be exhausted," the report states, per the Guardian. However, the governments of Australia, Malaysia, and China previously agreed to suspend the $145 million search effort in the new year "unless credible evidence is available that identifies the specific location of the aircraft." Australia's transport minister notes it does "not give a specific location of the missing aircraft." The report has been presented to the governments "for their consideration," an ATSB rep says. |
Enlarge Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu waves as he arrives May 23, 2011, to address the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Policy Conference 2011 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a speech Monday that Israel must be mindful of its security and therefore cannot return to the 1967 borders.
"(A peace agreement) must leave Israel with security, and therefore Israel cannot return to the indefensible 1967 lines," he said in a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel American lobby, as reported in CNN.
Netanyahu, speaking to the lobby after he had a testy meeting with President Obama Friday, acknowledged the "agony of war" but blamed the Palestinians for the inability to secure peace between the two sides.
"This conflict has raged for a nearly a century because the Palestinians refuse to end it. They refuse to accept the Jewish state," he said.
Palestinians have refused to restart stalled peace talks until the Israelis halt the settlement building in areas Palestinians hope will be their new state. The Israeli government, meanwhile, has criticized the Palestinian Authority for partnering with Hamas, a terrorist organization.
Obama raised the issue of borders in a major policy speech he gave last week, arguing that negotiations on final borders for the Jewish and Palestinian states must be based on the 1967 lines. This would mean Israel would have to give up land it captured in the Six Day War, notably east Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Netanyahu, who reacted harshly to Obama's speech, promised to present his vision for peace between the Israelis and Palestinians when he gives a speech before a joint meeting of Congress Tuesday.
"I will outline a vision for a secure Israeli-Palestinian peace," he said, as reported by Reuters.
"I intend to speak the unvarnished truth. Now more than ever what we need is clarity."
The Israeli leader received a warm welcome at the AIPAC event, drawing cheers and standing ovations, the Washington Post reports. He is also likely to receive a warm greeting by members of Congress, where he has strong bipartisan support.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, an ally of Obama, said at Monday's dinner: “No one should set premature parameters about borders, about building or about anything else."
After his comment, the lights at the Washington Convention Center turned on and most of the crowd gave Reid a standing ovation, Politico reports.
The support by both the lobby group and Congress may remind Obama that he will have a tough political price to pay in the 2012 election if he pushes Netanyahu too hard on land swaps and settlement building, the Washington Post states.
In his own speech to AIPAC on Sunday, Obama stressed that the borders could be adjusted through mutually agreed upon land swaps.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/middle-east/israel-and-palestine/110524/netanyahu-aipac-1967-borders ||||| Top Democrats have joined a number of Republicans in challenging President Obama’s policy toward Israel, further exposing rifts that the White House and its allies will seek to mend before next year’s election.
The differences, on display as senior lawmakers addressed a pro-Israel group late Monday and Tuesday, stem from Obama’s calls in recent days for any peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians to be based on boundaries that existed before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, combined with “mutually agreed swaps” of territory.
Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.), House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer (Md.) and other Democrats appeared to reject the president’s reference to the 1967 lines in his latest attempt to nudge along peace talks, thinking that he was giving away too much, too soon.
White House officials say Obama’s assertion did not reflect a shift in U.S. policy. But the president’s comments touched a nerve among pro-Israel activists, drew a rare Oval Office rebuke from Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and instantly became a litmus test in domestic American politics.
Now Obama — whom critics often accuse of employing a play-it-safe governing style in which he waits for others to take the lead — is largely isolated politically in raising the issue of boundaries.
By this week, White House aides were reaching out to Israel supporters in the Jewish community to try to ease concerns, according to people familiar with the effort. The White House has arranged a conference call with Jewish leaders and contacted others for advice on repairing ties.
The political uproar, coming as Netanyahu received a bipartisan hero’s welcome Tuesday for a speech to Congress, underscored the careful calculations being made by leaders in both parties.
Democrats and Obama must balance the need to pursue delicate international diplomacy while retaining the party’s traditional support among Jewish campaign donors and voters, particularly in competitive states such as Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The party’s liberal base, however, is divided, with many on the left urging more concessions by Israel.
Republicans increasingly consider Israel a core issue that can unify sometimes disparate party factions, with evangelical voters and foreign policy hawks alike emerging as some of the Jewish state’s most vocal U.S. backers.
Netanyahu, who since Thursday has repeatedly called the 1967 borders “indefensible,” helped set the stage for the torrent of White House criticism.
His response was quickly followed by criticism from Republicans vying to take on Obama next year. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, the presumed GOP front-runner, accused the president of throwing Israel “under the bus.” Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty said Obama had made a “mistaken and very dangerous demand.”
The pressure from Republicans and fellow Democrats leaves the White House and top political aides with the added task of making amends with Israel backers by touting Obama’s history of support for that nation.
Among the prominent Israel supporters upon whom Obama has relied for advice are Lee Rosenberg, president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and Alan Solow, who will leave his post as chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations next month. Both have been key behind-the-scenes advocates for Obama in reassuring skeptical backers.
This week, the president’s newly chosen national Democratic Party chairman, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, signaled that she, too, will serve as an emissary. Her South Florida district is home
to one of the country’s biggest Jewish populations, a place where Obama’s 2008 campaign tapped prominent Jewish lawmakers and local elected officials to visit synagogues and community centers and debunk rumors that Obama is a Muslim and anti-Israel.
“As a Jewish member of Congress who cares deeply about preserving Israel as a Jewish, democratic state, I am proud that President Obama spoke forcefully about continuing the United States’ strong and stalwart support of Israel,” Wasserman Schultz said in a written statement.
As part of their defense, a number of White House allies said Tuesday the political row had been fueled by Netanyahu, who seized on Obama’s reference to the 1967 lines but glossed over his additional point regarding land swaps.
Appearing irritated by the controversy, Obama said in his own speech to AIPAC on Sunday that his views had been “misrepresented several times.”
“Let me reaffirm what ‘1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps’ means,” Obama said, sounding exasperated. “By definition, it means that the parties themselves — Israelis and Palestinians — will negotiate a border that is different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967. That’s what ‘mutually agreed-upon swaps’ means. It is a well-known formula to all who have worked on this issue for a generation.” Obama went on to play down his remarks, saying “there was nothing particularly original in my proposal.”
Even so, he tried to portray his position as a sign of political courage, while also offering a subtle reminder that two of his closest advisers, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, are Jewish. “I know very well that the easy thing to do, particularly for a president preparing for reelection, is to avoid any controversy,” he said. “I don’t need Rahm to tell me that. Don’t need Axelrod to tell me that.”
But between his Thursday speech, which was aimed in part at an Arab audience, and his Sunday address to AIPAC, Obama shifted some of his rhetoric toward the Israeli position. For instance, he referred to the Islamist militant group Hamas more directly as a “terrorist organization.”
Several experts said the president’s stance on boundaries was in line with past U.S. policy, albeit stated more bluntly. But some said it marked a significant shift, at least in tone, that Obama seemed open to an even swap of territory while deferring the more emotional questions of dealing with Jerusalem and the future rights of Palestinian refugees.
“He has shown a willingness to use political capital in pushing forward ideas that are not always going to be what people want to hear,” said David Makovsky, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who co-wrote a book in 2008 with Obama adviser Dennis Ross that suggested a land swap and waiting on Jerusalem and refugees.
Makovsky noted that Obama received about eight in 10 Jewish votes in 2008, and that “many of those people who voted for him understand some of the positions that he has articulated,” such as his argument that further delays risk undermining Israel’s security and emboldening extremists.
Still, some Jewish Democrats said they remain concerned. One major party donor who attended AIPAC described a sense of “disappointment” in the hall about Obama’s remarks.
Reid said late Monday night at AIPAC that “no one should set premature parameters about borders, about building or about anything else.” Hoyer said negotiations must begin “without preconditions.” And Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (D-Pa.), drew applause Tuesday when he said Israel’s borders “ must be determined by parties on the ground.” | – Top Democrats are making a show of standing behind Benjamin Netanyahu in his sort-of face-off with the White House, leaving President Obama more or less isolated, the Washington Post reports. In his own speech before AIPAC, Harry Reid offered a thinly-veiled jab at President Obama’s calls for a two-state solution based on Israel’s pre-1967 borders, saying, “No one should set premature parameters about borders, about building or about anything else.” Steny Hoyer, meanwhile, said that negotiations should begin “without preconditions,” and Robert Casey drew cheers for saying that Israel’s borders “must be determined by parties on the ground.” But then, Congress was in an applauding mood yesterday—it gave Benjamin Netanyahu a whopping 29 standing ovations during his speech, ABC News reports—four more than President Obama’s State of the Union address. Obama, of course, argues that the entire controversy is overblown. Click here for what he told AIPAC. |
(CNN) -- The Endreson family lottery pool -- a tradition born out of their mother's long-term dreams -- finally paid off when the 17 siblings won a $20 million jackpot, New Jersey lottery officials said Thursday.
The siblings, ranging in age from 53 to 76, began playing the lottery decades ago because of their mother's dream of buying bungalows at the Jersey Shore, where most of the family lives.
After the hopeful matriarch, Flossie Endreson, passed away in 2004, the siblings chipped in to pay for funeral expenses and realized they had set aside too much. Instead of taking the remaining money back, the siblings started a new lottery pool in their mother's honor, said family spokeswoman Marie McHenry.
"We're a family of working people," McHenry said, "We just go to work every day like everyone else."
The Endresons' good fortune comes after their share of hardships.
Four family members lost their homes during Superstorm Sandy in 2012, and one sibling lost his life shortly after the storm.
The jackpot winnings "couldn't have come at a better time," McHenry said.
The siblings' father emigrated from Norway in the early 20th century, later meeting their mother on the Jersey Shore, where the family remained and settled in Ocean County, McHenry said. The pair had 19 children, according to N.J. lottery. One child died at birth.
When asked what their mother would say about winning the lottery, one sibling shouted: "Hallelujah!"
The total jackpot was $20.1 million with the family opting to take a lump sum payment of $14 million, about $10 million after taxes, according to the New Jersey lottery.
Family members would not comment on how they plan to divide the winnings, but said they would share it with the three children of their recently deceased brother.
John Endreson, one of the siblings who lost his home during Superstorm Sandy, broke down during the press conference as he talked about the devastation of the storm.
The storm "depleted my savings and now things are looking pretty good. Thanks to the state of New Jersey and my mom. Thank you all," he said.
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Lottery winner gives $40 million jackpot to charity ||||| Seventeen brothers and sisters from New Jersey who pooled money for a decade to buy lottery tickets got the ultimate payout. Danielle Elias reports. (Published Friday, July 25, 2014)
Seventeen brothers and sisters from New Jersey who pooled money for a decade to buy lottery tickets got the ultimate payout -- a $20 million Pick-6 jackpot they'll use to repair homes they lost in Sandy, send their children to college and preserve the legacy of their late mother, who urged them to vie for the pot together in the first place.
The Endreson clan members, who range in age from 53 to 76, accepted the check from the New Jersey Lottery Thursday. They opted for a lump sum payment of $14 million -- about $10 million after taxes -- to share amongst themselves and with three children of a brother who died a few years ago.
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One of the sisters said the family began pooling small bills together 10 years ago because their mother wanted to invest in a future of family bungalows at the Jersey Shore. When she died, there was money left in a pot and they invested that in the lottery. They didn't win -- that time.
As the brothers and sisters considered how to preserve their mother's legacy, they decided to continue the tradition of the lottery pool.
Eventually, they won. The family describes themselves as hard-working people who "go to work every day like everyone else."
"You just can't even imagine the feeling," said sister Faith Schiabor, recalling when her sister phoned her to tell her they had won the top prize. "I just went into instant shock. I was really happy for her at first - i didn't think that it was our ticket. I thought she won. Then when she said it was the family lottery, I said, 'Oh my god.'"
Asked what their mother would say about the big lotto win, Schiabor's sister who purchased the winning ticket said, "She'd just be so laid back."
The lottery says the family's patriarch emigrated from Norway in the early 20th century and married a woman from the Jersey Shore. They set roots in Ocean County, and most of the family has been there since.
Copyright Associated Press / NBC New York | – A huge Norwegian-American clan in New Jersey has a huge $20.1 million lottery jackpot to divvy up. The 17 Endreson siblings, ranging in age from 53 to 76, started a lottery pool a decade ago after the death of their mother, who dreamed of buying homes on the Jersey Shore, CNN reports. The sibling who bought the winning ticket—a $1 Pick 6 with the numbers 3, 12, 18, 34, 35, and 42—opted for a lump-sum payment of $14 million, which will be split among her 16 brothers and sisters and the three children of a brother who died a few years ago. Asked what their late mom would say about the jackpot, the woman who purchased the winning ticket said, "She'd just be so laid-back," while another sibling shouted, "Hallelujah!," reports NBC. At least three of the siblings lost their homes during Superstorm Sandy. "I just feel so lucky, and then this is just the icing on the cake," says John Endreson, who was able to rebuild with help from his brothers. "I depleted my savings and now things are looking up pretty good thanks to the state of New Jersey and my mom." Most of the siblings live in Ocean County, where 16 vehicle maintenance workers split an $86 million lottery prize last year. |
FILE - This undated family file photo provided by the Law Offices of John Burris shows Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old transit rider who was shot and killed by BART police on New Year's Day, 2009. With Grant... (Associated Press)
Violent protests erupted in Oakland with stores damaged and dozens arrested after a Los Angeles jury convicted a white former transit officer of involuntary manslaughter in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man.
Prosecutors had wanted Johannes Mehserle convicted of murdering Oscar Grant. So Thursday's lesser verdict raised concerns of a repeat of the rioting that followed the shooting on New Year's Day in 2009 on an Oakland train platform. The trial was moved to Los Angeles following the riots.
Police in riot gear Thursday had maintained a watchful eye over a crowd of protesters as emotions ran high with about 500 people marching in the street. Members of a crowd near City Hall moaned and cursed when they heard the verdict.
Sporadic violence later broke out and police said they made 83 arrests throughout the night for violations that included failure to disperse, vandalism and assaulting a police officer.
At least a dozen businesses were damaged, including a looted Foot Locker store and a ransacked jewelry store, police said. Protesters also smashed the windows of a bank, set fires in several trash bins, and detonated a small incendiary device near a police station that caused no damage.
"This city is not the wild, wild west," said Oakland Police Chief Anthony Batts. "This city will not tolerate this sort of activity."
Though police did not release a damage estimate, the protesting appeared to be much less severe than the rioting that hit Oakland after Grant was shot.
Even though the protests wound down late Thursday, Batts expected the number of arrests to double overnight.
During the trial, prosecutors said the 28-year-old Mehserle became angry at the 22-year-old Grant for resisting arrest. He was shot in the back while he lay face-down. Mehserle claims he mistakenly drew his gun instead of his Taser.
The jury had a choice between second-degree murder and lesser charges of voluntary and involuntary manslaughter. The jury found that Mehserle didn't mean to kill Grant, but that his behavior was still so negligent that it was criminal. Involuntary manslaughter convictions carry a sentence of two to four years.
During the trial, Wanda Johnson sat most days in the second row of a Los Angeles courtroom less than 30 feet from the man who killed her son. She hoped and prayed the justice system wouldn't fail her.
After the jury's finding, Johnson denounced the verdict and let loose emotions that had been mostly bottled up during the three-week trial.
"My son was murdered! He was murdered! He was murdered," she said outside the courthouse.
As Mehserle was placed in handcuffs and taken away, he turned to his family and mouthed, "I love you guys."
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger issued a statement urging Californians to remain calm and not resort to violence. Schwarzenegger said he had informed Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums the state was well prepared to assist in maintaining order.
The finding on use of a gun allegation could be used to add as much as 10 years to a prison sentence. The next hearing was set for Aug. 6.
The jury included eight women and four men. None listed their race as black. Seven said they were white, three were Latino, and one was Asian-Pacific. One declined to state their race. They left the courthouse under tight security.
"As we have come to notice, and we as a family has been slapped in the face by a system that has denied us a right to true justice," said Cephus Johnson, Grant's uncle. "We truly do not blame the jury, but we blame the system."
At least five bystanders videotaped the incident in what was among the most racially polarizing cases in California since four Los Angeles officers were acquitted in 1992 in the beating of Rodney King.
The trial was moved from Alameda County to Los Angeles because of racial tension and extensive media coverage.
The case was a rare instance in which a police officer stood trial for an on-duty killing and that was captured on video from so many different angles.
Legal experts said the verdict shows the jury sympathized with Mehserle's version of events.
"It is legally as low as they could go without acquitting him," University of California, Berkeley, law school professor Erin Murphy said. Prosecutors had a "huge hurdle" to overcome in convincing a jury that an officer with a spotless record meant to kill, even with video of the killing, she said.
Mehserle testified that he struggled with Grant and saw him digging in his pocket as officers responded to reports of a fight at a train station. Fearing Grant may have a weapon, Mehserle said he decided to shock Grant with his Taser but pulled his .40-caliber handgun instead.
Alameda County Deputy District Attorney David Stein said in his closing argument that Mehserle let his emotions get the better of him and intended to shoot Grant with the handgun without justification.
Defense attorney Michael Rains contended the shooting was a tragic accident. Mehserle had no motive to shoot Grant, even though he was resisting arrest, the lawyer argued.
___
Associated Press Writer Trevor Hunnicutt in Oakland and Thomas Watkins in Los Angeles contributed to this report. ||||| A former police officer convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the shooting of an unarmed man on an Oakland train station platform was sentenced Friday to two years in prison, sparking outrage from relatives and supporters of the victim who denounced the punishment as too lenient.Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Robert J. Perry said evidence in the racially charged case showed that the shooting was an accident caused when Johannes Mehserle mistakenly reached for a firearm instead of an electric Taser weapon he meant to use.As Perry spoke, the victim's mother rushed from the courtroom with other relatives and supporters. "Nothing, he got nothing!" she told reporters after she exited.The sentencing followed a tearful apology from Mehserle, who, handcuffed to a waist chain over his orange jail scrubs, insisted that the shooting was unintentional."I want to say how deeply sorry I am," said Mehserle, 28. "Nothing I could ever say or do could heal the wound I created."Grainy video footage of the New Year's Day 2009 shooting was captured by several witnesses and shows Mehserle, who is white, firing one round into the back of Oscar J. Grant III, who was black. Grant, 22, was lying face-down on the Fruitvale Station platform when he was shot.The shooting triggered rioting days later and again in July, when a Los Angeles jury rejected murder and voluntary manslaughter charges but found that the officer acted with gross negligence.A four-hour peaceful demonstration at Oakland City Hall moved into the surrounding streets and took on a more aggressive tone Friday evening with marchers smashing windshields, making obscene gestures at surrounding police and noisily shouting slogans.Police in riot gear allowed several hundred marchers to move through the streets for about an hour before encircling a smaller number near 6th Avenue and East 17th Street. Demonstrators left a trail of broken windshields as they moved down 17th Street, angering some residents.Police moved in after one officer was injured when struck by a car and another's gun was grabbed by a protester. By late Friday, police had arrested more than 100 demonstrators.The criminal case against Mehserle was moved to downtown Los Angeles amid concern about the extensive media coverage of the killing in the Bay Area.The former Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer faced up to 14 years in prison. But the judge sharply reduced the maximum possible sentence by dismissing a finding by jurors that Mehserle intentionally used a gun. Among the reasons Perry cited was that he failed to provide jurors with clear instructions on the gun allegation and that the evidence was insufficient to show that the officer used his firearm deliberately.The judge had the option of releasing Mehserle on probation but sentenced him to the minimum possible prison term.Perry signaled that he might dismiss the gun allegation early on in the emotional hearing, prompting the victim's uncle to confront the judge when given a chance to talk about the impact of Grant's death."We want justice," Cephus Johnson told Perry in a shaking voice. "We should not lose this case because of you."Grant's mother, Wanda Johnson, told the judge that Mehserle's explanation for the shooting was a "fabrication." She said anything less than the maximum punishment would show that police officers are above the law."He must be held accountable," she said through sobs.But Perry cited a long list of factors that he said showed the killing was unintentional. Among them was testimony from two people, including a friend of Grant, who said they heard the officer say he intended to use his Taser shortly before the shooting. Video footage, the judge said, also showed Mehserle putting his hands to his head in "shock and dismay."Perry said Grant did nothing to justify being shot, but he said the evidence showed that Mehserle was not influenced by race and that Grant was resisting arrest before his death. | – Oakland police racked up 152 arrests last night of demonstrators angry that a transit cop got a 2-year-sentence for shooting an unarmed black man to death. Protesters took to the streets after a judge gave Johannes Mehserle the minimum prison sentence for killing Oscar Grant last year, reports the LA Times. Mehserle maintains that he mistook his gun for a Taser. Demonstrators staged a largely peaceful 4-hour rally in downtown Oakland, but police moved in when things turned aggressive after it broke up. Most of the arrests were for disorderly conduct or unlawful assembly, and the protest was far tamer than previous ones over the shooting, notes the Oakland Tribune. |
UPDATE: George Lucas has released a statement regarding his comments about Disney and Star Wars that ruffled some feathers in a December 25 interview with Charlie Rose. Here it is in full:
“I want to clarify my interview on the Charlie Rose Show. It was for the Kennedy Center Honors and conducted prior to the premiere of the film. I misspoke and used a very inappropriate analogy and for that I apologize.
I have been working with Disney for 40 years and chose them as the custodians of Star Wars because of my great respect for the company and Bob Iger’s leadership. Disney is doing an incredible job of taking care of and expanding the franchise. I rarely go out with statements to clarify my feelings but I feel it is important to make it clear that I am thrilled that Disney has the franchise and is moving it in such exciting directions in film, television and the parks. Most of all I’m blown away with the record breaking blockbuster success of the new movie and am very proud of JJ and Kathy.”
PREVIOUS, WEDNESDAY, 4:32 PM: Star Wars creator George Lucas sat down with Charlie Rose to talk about the franchise’s legacy — and he appears to be a little bitter with what Disney did with it. Late in the interview, when the filmmaker was musing about the protocols of “breakups,” he let slip — and quickly laughed off — a line that has raised a few eyebrows and rankles. After agreeing that the first six Star Wars films are his “kids,” Lucas referred his $4 billion deal with Disney: “I love [the movies], I created them, I’m very intimately involved in them, and I sold them to the white slavers that take these things and …” — with a rather nervous laugh, he trailed off.
Rose lets him off the hook and moves on. (That awkward moment is at the two-minute mark of the clip above and at about the 50-minute mark in the full video posted below.)
About a minute later, Lucas said of Disney: “They wanted to do a retro movie. I don’t like that. I like — every movie, I worked very hard to make them completely different, with different planets, with different spaceships — you know, to make it new. … You do end up with this thing, which is, you know, you gotta live with it. People are gonna talk about it and all that kind of stuff. It’s like talking about your divorce or something. It’s just awkward, but it’s not painful.”
Earlier in their interview, Lucas laments about “two things that got abused” with the original Star Wars film from 1977. “One, when Star Wars came out, everyone said, ‘Oh it’s just a silly movie with a bunch of space battles and stuff. It’s not real. There’s nothing behind it.’ And I said … ‘There’s more to it than that. It’s much more complicated than that.’ But nobody would listen. … So the spaceships and that part of the science fantasy, whatever, got terribly abused. And of course, everybody went out and made spaceship movies. And they were all horrible, and they all lost tons of money. … The other thing that got abused — naturally in a capitalist society, especially in American point of view — the studios said, ‘Wow, we can make a lot of money. This is a license to kill.’ And they did it. And of course the only way you can do that is to not take chances. Only do something that proven.”
Here’s the full interview: ||||| George Lucas may have mixed feelings about parting ways with the galaxy he built. In an interview on "Charlie Rose" the "Star Wars" creator called the past films he directed his "kids" and likened the split from the franchise to that of a breakup with a romantic partner. And then Lucas implied that he had sold those kids to "white slavers."
In a 50-minute interview with Rose, Lucas discussed his long career as well as the task of parting ways with the space opera he's been a part of since 1977. Lucas lamented that he avoids the movies now much as one would avoid someone they have severed ties with in a relationship -- no phone calls and definitely do not drive by the person's home.
FULL COVERAGE: 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens'
"You have to put it behind you and it's a very, very, very hard thing to do," Lucas told Rose. "But you have to just cut it off and say, 'End of ball game, I gotta move on.' Everything in your body says, 'Don't, you can't.' These are my kids.... All the 'Star Wars' films. I loved them, I created them.... I'm very intimately involved in them.... I sold them to the white slavers that take these things and..."
Lucas also didn't seem terribly pleased with the direction of new film "The Force Awakens."
"They wanted to do a retro movie," Lucas said. "I don't like that. Every movie I work very hard to make them different, I make them completely different with different planets, with different spaceships, make it new."
However, the filmmaker went on to explain that he was at peace with everything despite dealing with the earlier breakup issues.
The public was not. The comments, particularly those about "white slavers," hit the media with a whirlwind. Lucas has since responded with an apology and a statement released to the media (via Deadline):
“I want to clarify my interview on the 'Charlie Rose Show.' It was for the Kennedy Center Honors and conducted prior to the premiere of the film. I misspoke and used a very inappropriate analogy and for that I apologize.
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I have been working with Disney for 40 years and chose them as the custodians of Star Wars because of my great respect for the company and Bob Iger’s leadership. Disney is doing an incredible job of taking care of and expanding the franchise. I rarely go out with statements to clarify my feelings but I feel it is important to make it clear that I am thrilled that Disney has the franchise and is moving it in such exciting directions in film, television and the parks. Most of all I’m blown away with the record breaking blockbuster success of the new movie and am very proud of JJ and Kathy.”
Watch the full 50-minute interview over on Hulu. Clearly Lucas is still grappling with the power of the Force.
MORE:
Carrie Fisher thinks slave Leia bikini haters are asinine
Harrison Ford on reuniting with Han's blaster, and forgiving Lawrence Kasdan for the Ewoks
J.J. Abrams on going old school and how 'Star Wars' differs from 'Star Trek'
Star Wars screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan on the past, present and future of 'Star Wars'
The women of 'Star Wars' speak out about their new Empire
The harsh reality of building a 'Star Wars' fantasy in Abu Dhabi | – George Lucas has made clear that he's not happy with all of Disney's decisions regarding the new generation of Star Wars films, but he's now apologizing for his eyebrow-raising choice of words, reports the LA Times. Turns out, he doesn't think Disney is made up of "white slavers," after all, a phrase he used in an interview with Charlie Rose. "I misspoke and used a very inappropriate analogy and for that I apologize," he says in a statement released via Deadline. "I have been working with Disney for 40 years and chose them as the custodians of Star Wars because of my great respect for the company and Bob Iger’s leadership. Disney is doing an incredible job of taking care of and expanding the franchise. I rarely go out with statements to clarify my feelings but I feel it is important to make it clear that I am thrilled that Disney has the franchise and is moving it in such exciting directions in film, television and the parks." Lucas added that he's "blown away" by the success of the new JJ Abrams films. He sang a different tune to Rose, however, lamenting that Disney had taken his "kids," as he called his films, in a direction more about pleasing fans than telling a compelling story. |
NBC 6's Gilma Avalos has the details on a family that is suing an event group and a local charter school after the family said their daughter suffered brain injuries while in an inflatable sumo wrestling suit. (Published Tuesday, July 22, 2014)
An inflatable sumo wrestling suit is at the center of a lawsuit from the family of a 15-year-old freshman student at Mater Academy in Hialeah Gardens.
According to the lawsuit, Celaida LIssabet, 15, was dressed in the inflatable suit at the school’s “Spirit Day” when things went wrong.
The suit lets people have mock sumo wrestling matches where the wrestlers try to push each other out of a ring. In the version played in the sumo suits, the match is conducted on a ring that features a protective mat.
But the lawsuit claims that Lissabet was not fitted in the suit properly and she ended up with severe brain damage after her head repeatedly hit the floor.
“Her head was hurting and her vision was blurry and she didn’t want to do it anymore,” Celaida’s mom Raquel Lissabet said. “The third time she was finally knocked down and they stood her up and sent her to class.”
The suit said as a result of the injuries Celaida suffered, she can no longer communicate properly and displays child-like behavior.
“It’s not my daughter,” Raquel Lissabet said. “It’s a completely different person. She now acts about seven or eight years old. She hasn’t been back to school. I don’t know if she’s ever going back to school.”
The lawsuit targets both Mater Academy and Mega Party Events, the company that provided the suits used during the Spirit Day activities. The lawsuit claims both the school and the event company failed to provide adequately trained employees or personnel at the time of the accident, or adequately fitting protective helmets.
The director of the Florida Consortium of Public Charter Schools said they could not confirm that Mater Academy had been served with the lawsuit, “therefore I cannot comment at this time.” Mega Party Events told NBC 6 that their equipment is up to the standards of the industry and that the victim was taken to the hospital several hours after she had left the event.
“You send your kids off to school to be safe and like I said, you come back and in a split second, your whole life has changed,” Raquel said. “She had plans. She had big plans which are no longer going to be.”
According to the Miami Herald, there have been other lawsuits over the inflatable sumo wrestling suits. The Herald reported that in a Colorado case where a woman claimed she suffered severe brain damage while in the suit and was awarded $2 million in damages by a jury. ||||| Celaida Lissabet, 16, pats her mother Raquel Lissabet on the head as she wipes tears while describing how her daughter suffered brain damage from an inflatable sumo suit. The family is suing Mater Academy and a party rental company after the girl was injured during a school event.
During a Hialeah Gardens school Spirit Day, a teen girl dressed in an inflatable sumo wrestler suit for what was supposed to be a goofy match with a classmate.
But a lawsuit claims the sumo fun went horribly wrong, leaving the teen with severe brain damage after her head repeatedly struck the floor.
The girl, 15-year-old freshman Celaida Lissabet, and her mother late last week sued charter school Mater Academy and Mega Party Events, the company that supplied the inflatable suits, which the lawsuit contends are designed for use in violent recreational sumo wrestling games.
Adrian De La Rosa, owner of Mega Party Events, said the girl was outfitted according to instructions from the suits manufacturer.
The suit is fairly safe. Weve never had an injury like this, De La Rosa said. I really hope she is doing OK.
The Lissabets allege the school and company failed to ensure her helmet fit properly during the event last October. She was later rushed to the hospital after complaining of blurred vision, dizziness, nausea and headaches, according to to the negligence lawsuit filed by Davie attorney Lance Rudzinski.
The once-vibrant ninth-grader can no longer communicate properly and exhibits child-like behavior, Rudzinski said.
Now, she sits in her room at night, in the darkness and doesnt talk to anyone, he said. She has severe anxiety. Its a complete 180-degree turn for her and her family. Its really tragic.
Wrestling in inflatable sumo body suits is a party activity loosely fashioned after the ancient Japanese sport in which hefty wrestlers compete to push each other out of a circular ring.
In the American game, the match is conducted on a protective mat ring. But Celaida fell backward, hitting her head three times against the ground outside the mat, according to her attorneys.
The lawsuit was filed against Mater Academy, 7901 NW 103rd St., and West Kendalls Mega Party. The lawsuit alleges the company knew from prior similar incidents that participants faced serious injury.
A representative for Mater Academy said she could not immediately comment because the school had not been served the lawsuit, and the principal was out of town.
De La Rosa of Mega Party Events said the companys insurance carrier is exploring whether the girl had suffered the head injury prior to the October event.
Its not the first lawsuit involving the inflatable sumo game.
The most prominent: In 2007, Colorado woman sued the makers of an inflatable sumo suit after she fell and suffered severe brain damage during a company retreat. Jurors awarded her $2 million in damages. ||||| July 22, 2014 6:11 PM
MIAMI (CBSMiami) — An attorney announced Tuesday a lawsuit against a Hialeah school and a Miami event company, after a 15-year old girl suffered a major brain injury at a school event last year.
The attorney for 15-year old Celaida Lissabet announced a lawsuit against Mater Academy and Mega Party Events which was the company that organized the event.
He said what happened to Lissabet has left her unable to adequately communicate and with anxiety issues.
Her mother, Raquel Lissabet, said Celaida now acts like a 7-year old.
“It’s not my daughter. It’s a completely different person,” said Raquel Lissabet.
Click here to watch Carey Codd’s report.
As her mother spoke at a news conference Tuesday, Lissabet played tic tac toe with her father.
Raquel Lissabet said her daughter suffered a severe brain injury while wrestling in a sumo wrestling suit at a Spirit Day event at Mater Academy in Hialeah Gardens last October.Her mother said Celaida hit her head during the event and wanted to stop but event workers would not let her.
“The second time she told the gentleman that her head was hurting and she was seeing blurry and she didn’t want to do it anymore and he told her that she had to do it three times,” said Raquel Lissabet.
Her mother said there have been changes in the way her daughter eats, communicates and behaves.
“You thank God you have your daughter but at the same time it’s not who you know. You’re starting all over…a new child…a new person you need to learn and get used to,” said Raquel Lissabet.
The owner of Mega Party Events spoke to CBS4’s Carey Codd about the allegations in the lawsuit claiming the company was negligent.
Adrian de la Rosa said she didn’t think the allegations are accurate.
“Our attendants are very well-trained. The truth will come out one day,” said De La Rosa.
Lissabet’s attorney said the truth is that the girl was seriously injured at a school event where she should have been protected.
Celaida’s mother said her daughter dreamed of being a criminal profiler.
“She had big plans which no longer gonna be…that’s what doesn’t need to happen again,” she said.
Codd reached out to Mater Academy for a comment. They told our news partners at Univision that they have not yet been served with the lawsuit and could not speak about the allegations.
The owner of Mega Party Events told Codd that he hopes Celaida improves. He says he never reached out to her because the claim is being handled by the company’s insurance company.
RELATED CONTENT: | – Celaida Lissabet, 15, was participating in what was supposed to be a fun event at her Miami-area charter school last October, wrestling with a classmate while wearing an inflatable sumo suit during "Spirit Day"—but things went terribly awry, leaving the girl with severe brain damage, according to a new lawsuit. The 9th-grader fell off the protective mat and hit her head on the ground three times; after being sent back to class, she complained of blurred vision, dizziness, nausea, and headaches, and was taken to the hospital. Her mom says the teen now acts like a child, has trouble communicating, and is plagued by anxiety, the Miami Herald reports. "The second time [she fell] she told the gentleman that her head was hurting and she was seeing blurry and she didn’t want to do it anymore and he told her that she had to do it three times," says Celaida’s mom, Raquel Lissabet, according to CBS Miami. "The third time she was finally knocked down and they stood her up and sent her to class." Now Raquel Lissabet is suing the school, Mater Academy, and Mega Party Events, the company that provided the suits. The lawsuit claims that both failed to provide adequately trained personnel and adequately fitting helmets, reports NBC 6 South Florida. "It’s not my daughter," Raquel Lissabet says. "It’s a completely different person." In 2007, a woman in Colorado won $2 million in damages after falling in an inflatable sumo wrestling suit at a company retreat and suffering severe brain damage. (In another freak accident last month, a 2-year-old was killed by a statue.) |
Howard Stern has been engaging in "locker room talk" for more than 35 years, but during his return to the air on Monday morning (Oct. 17) after a week off, the notorious shock jock claimed he's never heard anyone use the phrase uttered by frequent guest Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in a now-infamous hot mike moment with entertainment reporter Billy Bush. And he had some harsh words for reporters who are claiming to have "discovered" some damning interviews Trump did on Stern's show between 2002-2013.
"These conversations that I had with Donald Trump weren't done in private like the Billy Bush tapes, this was on the radio," said SiriusXM host Stern, lashing out at reporters who claim to have unearthed the chats. "Why don't I play all the tapes? I have to tell you why: I feel Donald Trump did the show in an effort to be entertaining and have fun with us and I feel like it would be a betrayal to any of our guests if I sat there and played them now where people are attacking him."
Stern -- who said he's exhausted by the whole election cycle -- did a 25-minute segment at the top of Monday morning's (Oct. 17) show reacting to reporting last week about a number of his old interviews with Trump that painted the GOP candidate in a dim light. In the trove of tapes, the billionaire real estate mogul talked about inviting his first wife and mistress to go skiing in Aspen at the same time, bragged about his sex life, said "deeply troubled women" are "always the best in bed" and playfully batted away questions about his alleged past infidelities.
An avowed supporter of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Stern said he was honored the chats are sparking controversy and conversation, saying it would be very easy to play all the Trump tapes in their entirety. But, he argued, that they weren't made in an effort to "f--k someone over... we were having a good time. I fully knew what I was doing when I interviewed Trump," he said. "I knew I had a guy who loved to talk about sex... I had a guy who loved to evaluate women on a scale of 1-10. These are avenues I went down because I knew it would entertain the audience."
He said Trump called him at home last year when the unlikely GOP candidate began winning some primaries and the radio talker tried to figure out what the endgame was. "I said, 'why are you doing this?'" Stern recalled asking Trump. "Why would a guy with billions of dollars [run for president]?... Don't you know what they're gonna do to you? Don't you know they're gonna open up everything?" Stern then praised a CNN segment from last week that noted he has not tried to inject himself into the election by dredging up the tapes with the billionaire, whom he considers a friend.
"I wasn't imagining that I would be in the middle of this election and literally so prominently mentioned," said Stern, who has hardly shied away from controversy and attention seeking in the past for his probing interviews and studio stunts. "Quite frankly, as someone just said, I'm surprised they didn't find these earlier," he said, adding that he hasn't spoken to Trump since just before the Republican convention this summer. "There's nothing to find. As the guy said, they were right there in the open."
Stern, who rarely grants interviews, claimed he'd turned down "500" requests from a variety of publications seeking to chat with him about his Trump talks.
After decades of pumping out thousands of hours of the most explicit "locker room talk" ever heard on radio, Stern also weighed in on that phrase, which Trump used in last week's second presidential debate to explain his vulgar comments on the now-infamous Access Hollywood hot mic recording. But, because he's still got a radio show to do, not before he played a Clinton-focused parody of the hot mic moment (as well as a series of explicit parody songs). "Do you think this is locker room talk?" asked Stern's longtime sidekick Robin Quivers. "A lot of the show that I've been doing for my entire life, radio show publicly, is an effort to sort of do 'locker room talk,' to express all kinds of s--t and just not even care what anyone thinks," said Stern.
"But this idea of 'locker room talk'... all the times I've been around guys -- and believe me when I'm around guys 85 percent of the times you're talking about p---y-- but I have never been in the room when someone has said 'grab them by the p---y," said Stern, repeating Trump's boast from the bus. "No one's ever advocated going that step where you get a little bit, 'hey I'm going to invade someone's space.' ... A lot of [locker room banter is] real kind of desperate talk. The reason it's in a locker room is because no one's proud of it." ||||| Donald Trump said that the 2005 “Access Hollywood” recording in which he makes lewd remarks to co-host Billy Bush was “illegal,” telling Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly that he was considering legal action.
The leak of the tape earlier this month was a bombshell in the campaign, forcing him to make a rare videotaped apology and to address it at the second presidential debate.
Earlier on Thursday, Trump told the Catholic network EWTN that the microphones that captured the conversation “should never have been on.”
On “The O’Reilly Factor” later on Thursday, Trump said that the recording “was certainly illegal.” It’s unclear whether he was referring to the release of the tape — which was leaked to The Washington Post — or the fact that he was being recorded. Trump and Bush were having a conversation aboard a bus as the cameras rolled outside, capturing their arrival at the NBC sound stages where “Days of Our Lives” is filmed. Trump was to record a cameo.
As the bus rolled along, Trump and Bush’s conversation can be heard, with the audio so clear that they were obviously speaking while wearing mics or with mics nearby. Trump, however, called the bus a “private dressing room.”
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TheA question is whether Trump gave his consent to the recording — even by implication, given that he was wearing one. California state law makes it illegal to record a conversation without consent. But the law makes an exception to circumstances “in which the parties to the communication may reasonably expect that the communication may be overheard or recorded.”
Trump told O’Reilly that “you’re going to see after the election if he takes legal action.” He said that the remarks “shouldn’t have been said,” but that they were “locker room talk.”
In his conversation, Trump boasted of how he approaches women. “You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
“Whatever you want,” Bush said.
“Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything,” Trump said.
Bush was ousted from his role on NBC’s “Today” in the wake of the furor over the tape. ||||| Donald Trump agreed to let radio personality Howard Stern refer to his daughter Ivanka as a "piece of a--" and made other lewd remarks about women in recordings uncovered by CNN's KFile from the GOP presidential nominee's various appearances on "The Howard Stern Show" in the 1990s and 2000s.
CNN published 18 clips today from Trump’s appearances on the radio show. The exchange about Ivanka’s attractiveness came during an appearance in 2004 in which Trump was asked by Stern, “Your daughter ... can I say this? A piece of a--?”
“Yeah,” Trump responded, later adding that Stern would be “the last person I would introduce her [to].”
In another recording from 2006, Trump noted that Ivanka's "always been voluptuous" after Stern asked whether she got breast implants. "She's tall, she's almost 6 feet tall, and she's been, she's an amazing beauty," said Trump.
The "Howard Stern Show" recordings were surfaced amid fallout over lewd remarks Trump made in a separate 2005 recording that was published Friday by The Washington Post, in which Trump is heard talking about how he tried to have an affair with a married woman and describing how he makes moves on women.
Ivanka was not the only female to be the subject of discussion in Trump’s appearances on "The Howard Stern Show."
In one clip from 2002, Trump discusses feeling embarrassed being seen on dates with younger women, saying, “Over the past couple of years, I’d go out with somebody and she’s like 21, and she’s talking about you know, ‘What are you doing?’ and she’s studying algebra.”
He used the anecdote to explain why he believed 30 was “the perfect age” to date, going on to describe age 35 as “check-out time.”
In another appearance in 2006, Trump was asked if he “could now be banging 24-year-olds?” to which he replied, “Oh, absolutely. I’d have no trouble.”
Stern asked, “Would you do it?”
“I’d have no problem,” Trump answered.
In the same interview, Trump said, “If I weren’t married, I’d be able to get all of the girls I want.”
Trump has not commented on the recordings uncovered by CNN.
ABC News’ Candace Smith contributed to this report. | – Howard Stern has had Donald Trump on his radio show quite a few times, and last week, the Washington Post used clips from his appearances between 2002 and 2013 in a disparaging story about Trump. The paper noted that though none of the tapes are as lewd as the 2005 Billy Bush tape currently making waves, they do feature Trump rating women's bodies, discussing his sex life, and listening to Stern quiz Ivanka Trump about her own sex life, among other things. On his show Monday, Stern lashed out at the idea that the media "discovered" the tapes, since the shows were aired to the general public, Billboard reports. He also explained that he considers Trump a friend and that he won't be re-airing the interviews because that would be a "betrayal," the Los Angeles Times reports. "Donald Trump did the show in an effort to be entertaining and have fun with us," he said. "I fully knew what I was doing when I interviewed Trump. I knew I had a guy who loved to talk about sex … I had a guy who loved to evaluate women on a scale of 1 to 10. These are avenues I went down because I knew it would entertain the audience." But Stern did not defend the 2005 tape, and he disagreed with Trump's insistence that his words were simply "locker room talk." "I have never been in the room when someone has said, 'Grab them by the pussy,'" Stern said. "No one's ever advocated going that step where you get a little bit, 'Hey I'm going to invade someone's space.'" Billboard notes that Stern supports Hillary Clinton for president. |
A new and troubling trend in which youth deliberately do not eat and then go on to drink alcohol in excess appears to be sweeping US college campuses, new research suggests.
Known as "drunkorexia," the practice refers to a combination of diet-related behaviors, such as food restriction, excessive exercise, or binge eating and purging, with alcohol use, lead investigator Dipali V. Rinker, PhD, research assistant professor, University of Houston, in Texas, told Medscape Medical News.
Dr Rinker's research showed that 8 of 10 college students, many of whom were men, recently engaged in at least one behavior related to drunkorexia.
The aim of the practice, said Dr Rinker, seems to be to get drunker or get drunk faster. This may involve induced vomiting, the consumption of laxatives or diuretics, or not eating at all before drinking.
Dr Rinker presented the findings at the 39th Annual Research Society on Alcoholism Scientific Meeting in New Orleans.
The study included 1184 college students from the University of Houston and from a crowdsourcing Internet marketplace. All participants completed a Web-based survey. They had to have engaged in at least one episode of heavy drinking in the past 30 days. An episode of heavy drinking was defined as having four or more drinks in one sitting for women and five or more drinks in one sitting for men.
The mean age of participants was 22.3 years. Almost 60% were women, and almost two thirds (63.3%) were white.
Results showed that 81% of the sample reported engaging in at least one drunkorexia behavior once in the past 3 months.
The analysis also showed that young people living in fraternity or sorority houses were the most likely to engage in negative behaviors surrounding alcohol use. The next most likely group were those living in residence halls, followed by those living off campus, and, finally, those living at home.
Living away from family for the first time and feeling intense stress at school may be contributing factors, said Dr Rinker. But there are other driving forces.
"Our data suggest that college students are more likely to engage in these specific compensatory behaviors if they are athletes, are already heavy drinkers, are coping with negative emotions, are engaging in disordered eating practices already, and, most importantly, because they perceive it to be a highly normative behavior among college students."
She said she was surprised that it is not just young women who engage in drunkorexia.
"Our study suggested that males are just as likely, if not more likely, to engage in these behaviors. We suspect that this is because men, in general, just tend to engage in riskier drinking behaviors than women."
Drunkorexia can have significant fallout in terms mental and physical health. "Engaging in these behaviors is associated with heavier and more problematic drinking and alcohol-related consequences, such as blacking out, getting into fights, passing out, or driving under the influence," said Dr Rinker.
Because the phenomenon has only been studied among college students, researchers do not know whether nonstudents are also engaging in these behaviors.
Clinicians can play a role in reducing or controlling the drunkorexia phenomenon, said Dr Rinker.
"They can provide information to college students that indicates that these behaviors are far less normative than they think they are and can encourage students to eat and exercise in a healthy manner."
The research was supported by a grant from the University of Houston and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
39th Annual Research Society on Alcoholism Scientific Meeting: Presented June 27, 2016. ||||| “Drunkorexia” is a colloquial term for the practice of skipping meals or exercising heavily before consuming alcohol. The trend isn’t new for college students, with the word “drunkorexia” appearing in news headlines -- and alarming parents -- for a few years now.
But a new study, presented this week at the Research Society on Alcoholism’s annual meeting, suggests the behavior may be more common than previously thought, and is an issue for male and female students. Eight out of 10 college students who participated in the study said they had recently engaged in at least one behavior related to drunkorexia.
"College students appear to engage in these behaviors to increase alcohol effects or reduce alcohol-related calories by engaging in bulimic-type or diet/exercising/calorie-restricted eating behaviors," Dipali Rinker, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Houston and author of the study, said in a statement. "Our information examines the association between these different types of drunkorexic behaviors and other predictors of problem drinking among college students, such as gender differences."
Rinker’s study was based on a survey that included responses from 1,184 college students, most of them from the University of Houston, who had drunk heavily at least once in the past 30 days. More than 80 percent of the students said they had engaged in at least one behavior in the last three months that Rinker considered to be related to drunkorexia.
The behaviors included inducing vomiting, consuming laxatives or diuretics, or not eating anything before drinking.
“Long term, it’s not a good idea to skip nutritious meals in order to consume more calories from alcohol,” Aaron White, the program director of college and underage drinking prevention at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, said. “Then there are the short-term consequences. Having food in your stomach reduces peak blood alcohol levels about a third, so if you flip that, your peak level is significantly higher, increasing risk of blackouts, injuries and poor decisions. The consequences are worse than the consequences of not saving the calories.”
It's often students who drink heavily that engage in the behaviors, White added.
"We're not talking about someone concerned about a 150-calorie glass of wine," he said. "We're talking about someone who is concerned about 1,000 calories from binge drinking, and that's the person you just don't want skipping meals."
Rinker found that students who lived in fraternity and sorority houses were the most likely to report engaging in the behavior, followed by those living in residence halls. Women were more likely to engage in the bulimic-type behaviors than men, according to the study, but both genders were equally likely to engage in some kind of drunkorexic behavior, such as skipping meals.
The new study aimed to expand the definition of drunkorexia, Rinker said, which may explain why earlier research had suggested fewer students engaged in the behavior. Other studies had also suggested there was a sharper gender divide.
A 2009 study found that 50 percent of college women reported restricting food intake before drinking, more than 1.5 times the share of men who reported the behavior. Research also suggests that men and women often have different motivations for engaging in the behavior. A 2014 study, published in the Journal of American College Health, concluded that “women were significantly more likely than men to restrict what they ate prior to alcohol consumption,” and that “this was driven by women’s greater desire to control their weight.”
Nearly 60 percent of female college students responding to a 2012 survey who reported drinking alcohol said they had also engaged in self-induced vomiting. The National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders states that 72 percent of women who say they abuse alcohol also suffer from an eating disorder.
In 2011, researchers at the University of Missouri at Columbia found that 16 percent of college students responding to a survey reported restricting calories to “save them” for drinking. Women were three times as likely to report engaging in the behavior than men. Male students, on the other hand, were more likely to engage in the behavior to save money for purchasing alcohol.
A study from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism found that 20 percent of incoming female freshmen responding to a survey said they had engaged in drunkorexic behavior in the last two weeks. Most of them said they did it not for dieting or cost-saving reasons, however.
Instead, they skipped meals because they knew they could get more intoxicated more quickly on an empty stomach.
“We are now aware that this is happening, but there’s still a lot that we just don’t know,” White, of the NIAAA, said. “For instance, how do we prevent it? Students doing this to save calories are different than students doing this to save money or students who are doing it to get as drunk as possible. There’s a lot left to untangle here about what exactly is happening.” | – The term "drunkorexia" has been used for several years to describe a particularly risky type of behavior on college campuses—students skip meals or exercise intensely before drinking, or deliberately purge during or afterward. Generally, the idea is to cut down on calories consumed or to increase the buzz, and sometimes a little of both. A new study, however, suggests that the practice is far more common that thought, reports Inside Higher Ed. The University of Houston survey rounded up nearly 1,200 students who had at least one bout of heavy drinking in the previous month and found that eight in 10 had engaged in at least one behavior linked to drunkorexia, including inducing vomiting, consuming laxatives, or skipping food entirely before drinking. The other surprise to lead researcher Dr. Dipali Rinker: This wasn't a phenomenon exclusive to female students. "Our study suggested that males are just as likely, if not more likely, to engage in these behaviors," she tells Medscape. "We suspect that this is because men, in general, just tend to engage in riskier drinking behaviors than women." Rinker presented her findings at the Research Society on Alcoholism's annual meeting in New Orleans, and another researcher's paper shows that the issue isn't confined to America. An Australian study of female college students found that nearly 60% used drunkorexia behavior. “It’s a new phenomenon involving disordered eating purely for the sole purpose of saving calories for alcohol,” says researcher Alissa Knight of the University of South Australia. (These are the heaviest drinking cities in America.) |
(CNN) Katie Prager, the wife in the real "Fault in Our Stars" couple, died Thursday after complications from cystic fibrosis and a lung transplant. She was 26 years old.
"Early this morning, she gained her wish of being at home, in her bed, surrounded by her mom, dad, brother and her dogs, dying peacefully, away from the hospital, tubes, IVs," her mother, Debra Donovan, posted on Facebook. "The days to follow will not be easy but I find comfort in knowing that my girl lived, she really lived."
Katie had been in hospice care in her Flemingsburg, Kentucky, home since September 7.
Her husband, Dalton Prager, died just days earlier , on Saturday, after suffering from the same disease. He was 25.
"Dalton fought a long hard battle with cystic fibrosis," Katie posted on Facebook at the time. "He was a courageous fighter and 'give up' wasn't in his vocabulary."
A love story stronger than fiction
The young couple garnered worldwide attention last year after CNN wrote about Katie's fight to get a lung transplant.
They were known as the real "Fault in Our Stars" couple, as their love story bore a resemblance to the 2012 book and 2014 movie "The Fault in Our Stars," in which teenage cancer patients fall in love.
Katie and Dalton met on Facebook in 2009, when they were both 18. Katie noticed that Dalton's mother had posted a photo of Dalton in the hospital.
"If you ever need a friend to talk to, you can reach out to me," she wrote.
"Sorry, but do I know you?" he responded.
No, you don't, Katie wrote back and told Dalton a bit about herself.
"My breathing is pretty crappy and I see you are in the hospital. I'm sorry. I know it sucks!...But you just gotta stay strong," she wrote to him.
Messages between the two flew back and forth. They realized they were falling in love, but Katie's doctor urged her not to meet with him in person, because Dalton had an infection called Burkholderia cepacia, which can be deadly for people with cystic fibrosis.
She defied her doctor, and on August 28, 2009, Dalton and his mother drove more than six hours from their home in St. Charles, Missouri, to Flemingsburg, where they'd arranged to meet at the Dairy Queen.
At 7:10 p.m. -- they remember the time precisely -- Katie got out of her car and saw Dalton leaning against a brick wall, looking cool and handsome in his sunglasses.
"My heart was racing, but I just went right up to him and hugged and kissed him on the mouth without even saying hello," she remembered. "I'm usually not that kind of girl, but it just felt so right."
For their first date, the couple rode the roller coasters at Kings Island amusement park a few hours away in Ohio. Dalton gave Katie a necklace for her 19th birthday, which was two days before.
Katie caught Dalton's Burkholderia cepacia infection immediately, she said.
The couple wed less than two years later, and despite their infections, they were relatively healthy for the next few years.
They bought a house in Flemingsburg and filled it with wedding photos and board games, hosting regular game nights and cooking and traveling.
Those years "were great," Katie told CNN days before she died. "We did stuff; we had fun. It was like something out of a fairy tale."
Their fairy-tale ending
In 2014, the infection got the best of their lungs, and both Katie and Dalton entered the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center together to wait for new lungs. Dalton's came first, and on November 17, he had his transplant. In July 2015, after a long fight with Medicare, Medicaid and her hospital, Katie got her transplant, too.
Join the conversation See the latest news and share your comments with CNN Health on Facebook and Twitter.
But their medical struggles continued. Dalton seemed to do well at first after his transplant but then developed lymphoma. He overcame the cancer but was recently hospitalized in Missouri with pneumonia and a viral infection.
Katie's transplant never worked well. She was in and out of the hospital, and earlier this month, doctors told her there was nothing more they could do. She entered hospice care at her home in Kentucky.
The family had hoped to fly Dalton from Missouri to a hospital in Kentucky so they could could be together again. Ultimately, Dalton was never healthy enough to make the trip. He died in a St. Louis hospital, while Katie spoke to him through FaceTime.
The day before Dalton died, Katie told CNN she had no regrets about their decision to meet in person. For all the time spent sick or in the hospital, it's the time they spent together that stood out to her.
"It gave me some of the best years of my life," she said. "I'd rather have five years of being in love and just really completely happy than 20 years of not having anybody."
The last time they saw each other was July 16, their fifth wedding anniversary. Their love story was short, but she knew it brought joy and inspiration to others.
"I think that if we had gotten the chance to write a book that it would have been a bestseller," Katie said days before she died.
She even knew how their fairy tale would end.
"And they lived happily ever after," Katie said, "in each other's arms for eternity." ||||| The St. Louis community is mourning after a woman who survived a heart transplant surgery seven years ago died eight hours after giving birth to her first child on Tuesday.
5 On Your Side’s Kay Quinn first shared Megan Moss Johnson’s story seven years ago after she received a heart transplant.
The Ferguson native fought an infection in the heart called ‘myocarditis’ when she was 15-years-old, she was put on medications for several years and then on a transplant list.
In April 2010, after Megan had surgery to be put on a bridge-to-transplant LVAD machine, she developed pneumonia. Doctors told her family that even if a heart came she would be too weak to receive it. An hour later, her white blood cell count came down and her fever dropped and a heart became available, her father wrote on her blog.
Two years after the heart transplant, Megan married Nathan Johnson in 2012 and moved to Nashville.
One of Nathan’s band members start a ‘Team Johnson’ GoFundMe Wednesday morning and it's raised over $338,000.
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“My name is Josh Wilson, and I have the privilege of knowing Nathan Johnson. He plays guitar in my band. Nathan loves life. He loves people. He loved his wife, Meg. He talks about her every day. Half of his posts online are about his "boo," his "goddess," his "beauty."
Yesterday, Megan went Home to be with Jesus. At about 2:40am, she gave birth to the beautiful miracle who is "Eilee Kate." The delivery was beautiful and smooth. Nathan and Megan got to be together with Eilee for about 6 hours. Megan held, fed, and burped little Eilee. Nathan says they couldn't sleep because they were too excited. They talked all night and morning,” Wilson shared on the GoFundMe.
Wilson shared a song dedicated to Nathan. “Recorded this for my friend Nate, who lost his wife yesterday. Love you buddy,” He wrote on his Facebook.
The 5 On Your Side team sends ours condolences to Megan’s parents, Wayne and Kathy Moss, her husband Nathan and the entire family.
Kay Quinn's follow up story with Megan three months after her heart transplant
Our story that aired right after Megan's transplant ||||| Christine Fensome, from Herefordshire, was on a dream trip to Mexico with her husband Andy Bennetts when she became ill
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A NEWLYWED bride died on her honeymoon from a heart attack believed to have been caused by eating fish.
Christine Fensome, 54, was on a dream trip to Mexico with her husband Andy Bennetts, 58, when she became ill during the night on September 27 - just 10 days after her wedding.
Facebook Chris Fensome, pictured with her new husband Andy Bennetts, died while they were on their honeymoon in Mexico
Facebook The 54-year-old became ill after eating fish while on the dream holiday
Her children have been told the evening before she died Chris ate fish, thought to have contained high levels of mercury, which may have led to her organs shutting down.
It is the second tragedy to hit the family after they lost their dad Craig in 2004, who was killed in a hit-and-run at the age of 41.
Her three children Brad, 33, Richard, 30 and Hayley, 29, say their mother struggled to get over the loss until meeting Andy seven years ago.
related stories MEAT THE FAMILY Oxo release new advert with first TV family since the death of Loose Women star Lynda Bellingham DEATH THREAT Bowler Doug Bollinger accused of saying 'I'm going to kill you' to batsman Phillip Hughes during tragic match 'tragic case' Couple lose court battle to stop granddaughter they didn't know existed from being adopted Part of the family Bindi Irwin's bloke takes on croc as he tries to emulate her tragic dad Crocodile Hunter Steve ‘S***, I CAN'T STOP' Cries of nurse killed in tragic accident when she was thrown off her horse after it was suddenly spooked CHANGING FACES Eighties pop icons Bros reveal tragic loss of their mum brought them back together and first interview in 27 years
They say Andy taught her to "love again" and the pair tied the knot on September 17 before jetting off on their honeymoon.
Her brother James Bowyer, 49, said the family had been told her fatal sudden illness had been caused by eating a grouper fish contaminated with a toxin from a plankton that is found on coral, algae and seaweed.
He said: "If anything can come from my sister's death it is raising awareness about eating fish abroad. Knowledge appears to be quite limited about ciguatera food poisoning but it can be a hidden killer.
"Due to global warming the toxin is becoming more prevalent and is found on algae on coral reefs in certain parts of the world - including the Gulf of Mexico.
"The algae gets eaten by smaller fish and those fish get eaten by larger fish like groupers and barracudas.
"There are no known tests to detect it and there is no effective treatment for it. So there was nothing Christine could have really done.
Facebook Christine (right) was having the time of her life when she suddenly fell ill
"Restaurants over there tend to serve smaller fish as that means smaller the amount of potential toxins.
"Ciguatera poisonings are quite common but deaths are extremely rare. It can cause shooting pains in the chest and in my sisters' case it caused her to have a heart attack."
Daughter Hayley said: "Everyone says to me 'stay focused, stay strong, keep going for your mum and dad.'
"But it is hard. I used to cry to mum that my dad would not be able to walk me down the aisle and she would tell me that she would be there to walk me down the aisle. But now I haven't got anyone.
"She would talk to anyone. People met her once and fell in love with her. She would do anything for any of us.
"She loved her life for us. She tried so hard to be both mum and dad. We can't really grieve our mum as we don't know how [she died] or why."
Christine, from Burghill, Herefordshire, was described as being a "fit and active" regular gym-goer who doted on her five grandchildren.
Hayley said when their father died Christine had struggled to come to terms with the shock and became a recluse.
Facebook Christine took this photo while she was holidaying in Mexico
Facebook The couple were on their dream honeymoon in Mexico when she died
She added: "Our mum didn't come out of the house for five years. She couldn't get going.
"But she found her feet again slowly and found happiness at the end.
"She just looked beautiful [on her wedding day]. It was a lovely day and the sun was shining."
Son Richard said: "The fact she went from happy to dark times and finally got happiness again and then this.
"It is too much to take in. It is a major shock. Mum stuck us all together. She was the glue and now she has gone."
Christine had started working as an office administrator at Hartwell Ford a few months ago.
She also leaves behind her mum Sybil Bowyer, her brother James Bowyer, and sister Marion Bevan.
Her funeral will be held on October 21 at St Paul's Church in Tupsley, Hereford.
Richard added: "She didn't have the ending she deserved for what she gave to life but she is going to have the farewell she deserves."
WHAT IS CIGUATERA FISH POISONING? Ciguatera fish poisoning is an illness caused by eating fish that contain toxins produced by algae.
Terrifyingly, the illness has no cure and symptoms such as vomiting, tingling toes and fingers and nausea can last for years.
In rare cases, it triggers respiratory or heart failure which causes death.
The risk is mostly limited to those eating reef fish such as snapper, barracuda and grouper.
Unfortunately, contaminated fish display no effects and so identifying potential instances of contamination is extremely difficult.
It is also heat-resistant, meaning cooking the fish thoroughly does not stop it causing sickness.
We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online news team? Email us at [email protected] or call 0207 782 4368. | – The story of a real-life couple who was compared to the fictional couple in the best-selling book and movie The Fault in Our Stars has reached its end. Katie and Dalton Prager, who both had cystic fibrosis, met on Facebook when they were 18 after Katie saw a picture of Dalton in the hospital, CNN reports. Though doctors warned them not to meet in person because CF patients can pass dangerous bacteria to one another, they not only met, but got married. "My heart was racing, but I just went right up to him and hugged and kissed him on the mouth without even saying hello," Katie once recalled of her first meeting with Dalton, soon after they started talking in 2009, when his mom drove him six hours from their Missouri home to Katie's Kentucky home. Seven years later, Dalton succumbed to his illness Saturday, and on Thursday, his wife also died. Dalton and Katie wed less than two years after their first meeting, and had some happy years in a home they bought in Kentucky. But in 2014, their lungs deteriorated; Dalton got a transplant that year, and Katie the year following. But he later fought lymphoma, pneumonia, and a viral infection, while Katie struggled with her transplant until doctors determined there was nothing more they could do and she entered hospice care. They last saw each other on their fifth wedding anniversary in July. Dalton's funeral was Wednesday, Kentucky.com reports. Then, "early this morning, [Katie] gained her wish of being at home, in her bed, surrounded by her mom, dad, brother and her dogs, dying peacefully, away from the hospital, tubes, IVs," Katie's mom wrote on Facebook. "I know Dalton was waiting with open arms." Click for more on their story. |
Pirate of the Cabernet? Johnny Depp Had $30K Monthly Wine Habit, Ex-Managers Claim “Pirates of the Caribbean” star’s former managers file countersuit to actor’s $25 million complaint, claiming he lived a lifestyle he can’t afford
Johnny Depp’s former managers have fired back at the “Pirates of the Caribbean” star after he sued them for fraud, filing their own cross-complaint accusing Depp of living “an ultra-extravagant lifestyle” that he “simply could not afford.”
“[T]hroughout the entire 17-year period that TMG represented Depp, Depp lived an ultra-extravagant lifestyle that knowingly cost Depp in excess of $2 million per month to maintain, which he simply could not afford,” the cross-complaint filed by The Management Group, Joel Mandel and Robert Mandel on Tuesday, reads.
Among the ill-considered extravagances alleged in the cross-complaint: Spending $75 million on 14 residences throughout the world; dropping more than $18 million to buy and renovate a 150-foot yacht; and spending $30,000 a month on “expensive wine that [Depp] had flown to him around the world for his personal consumption.”
“Depp also paid over $3 million to blast from a specially made cannon the ashes of author Hunter S. Thompson over Aspen, Colo.,” the lawsuit also alleges.
Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Image 1 of 1 Pirate of the Cabernet? Johnny Depp Had $30K Monthly Wine Habit, Ex-Managers Claim 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
Also Read: Johnny Depp Slaps His Managers With $25 Million Fraud Lawsuit
“In addition to the above, throughout the years, Depp supported his friends, family and certain employees at a cost of over $10 million,” the cross-complaint, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, claims.
The new legal papers claim that The Management Group “regularly and repeatedly advised and warned Depp … that Depp’s wanton spending could not be maintained and jeopardized his financial future.”
When faced with the warnings, the cross-complaint alleges, Depp “often responded by rebuking and cursing his business managers for issuing such warnings and advice, while increasing his extravagant lifestyle and spending, and demanding that his business managers find some way to pay for it all.”
Also Read: Johnny Depp and Amber Heard's Divorce Is Finalized, Finally
After Depp’s spending caught up with him, the papers allege, Depp fired the management firm “with no notice of any kind” and refused to pay the company back on a $5 million loan.
“Johnny Depp alone was solely responsible for his extravagant spending. Over 17 years, The Management Group (TMG) did everything possible to protect the actor from himself. In fact, when Depp’s bank demanded repayment of a multi-million-dollar loan and Depp didn’t have the money, the company loaned it to him so that he would avoid a humiliating financial crisis,” a statement from The Management Group provided to TheWrap reads. “Over 30 years, TMG has never been sued by a client. The only reason Depp filed this lawsuit was to interfere with TMG’s ongoing efforts to be repaid on the loan they had made to bail him out. TMG worked day and night to professionally manage Depp’s business affairs, adhering to the highest standards.”
Depp sued The Management Group earlier this month, accusing his former managers of “self-dealing and gross misconduct.” Among the misdeeds that Depp, who is seeking $25 million, alleges: Taking a 5 percent commission of the actor’s income, “in some cases regardless of whether Mr. Depp actually received any income himself or not” — a commission that was “exorbitant, excessive, and far outstripped the actual value of services TMG would be performing for Mr. Depp.”
Also Read: Johnny Depp's Lawyer Accuses Amber Heard of 'Desperate and Misguided Attempt to Maintain Attention'
The cross-complaint filed Monday calls Depp’s claims “absurd and untrue.”
Alleging breach of oral contract, breach of written contract and other counts, the countersuit is seeking unspecified damages.
Pamela Chelin contributed to this report.
Read original story Pirate of the Cabernet? Johnny Depp Had $30K Monthly Wine Habit, Ex-Managers Claim At TheWrap ||||| FILE - In this May 23, 2016 file photo, Johnny Depp arrives at the premiere of "Alice Through the Looking Glass" at the El Capitan Theatre, in Los Angeles. Johnny Depp is suing his former business managers... (Associated Press)
FILE - In this May 23, 2016 file photo, Johnny Depp arrives at the premiere of "Alice Through the Looking Glass" at the El Capitan Theatre, in Los Angeles. Johnny Depp is suing his former business managers alleging they mismanaged his earnings throughout his career, although the company says the actor’s... (Associated Press)
FILE - In this May 23, 2016 file photo, Johnny Depp arrives at the premiere of "Alice Through the Looking Glass" at the El Capitan Theatre, in Los Angeles. Johnny Depp is suing his former business managers alleging they mismanaged his earnings throughout his career, although the company says the actor’s... (Associated Press) FILE - In this May 23, 2016 file photo, Johnny Depp arrives at the premiere of "Alice Through the Looking Glass" at the El Capitan Theatre, in Los Angeles. Johnny Depp is suing his former business managers... (Associated Press)
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Johnny Depp sued his former business managers on Friday alleging they mismanaged his earnings throughout a lucrative period of his career, although the company says the actor's spending is to blame.
Depp's lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court against The Management Group seeks more than $25 million, alleging its owners failed to properly pay his taxes, made unauthorized loans and overpaid for security and other services.
Michael J. Kump, an attorney for The Management Group, calls Depp's lawsuit a "fabrication" and wrote in a statement that Depp never alleged any wrongdoing. The company "did everything possible to protect Depp from his irresponsible and profligate spending," Kump wrote.
Depp's lawsuit accuses the company and its owners, attorneys Joel and Robert Mandel, of receiving $28 million in payments for their services over the roughly 16 years they managed his finances. The company "actively concealed the true state of Mr. Depp's finances while driving him deeper and deeper into financial distress," the lawsuit states.
Depp hired the Mandels in 1999 and their compensation was not subject to a written contract, his lawsuit states. It states they received 5 percent of his income on hit films such as the "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise and other major releases, including "Alice in Wonderland" and the 2005 film "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."
It alleges the company failed to file Depp's tax returns on time, costing him nearly $5.7 million in penalties. The lawsuit also alleges the company overpaid for several services, including forgetting to terminate the lease on a home where Depp's mother lived temporarily, and spending $8 million on security between 2012 and 2015 alone.
Depp learned of the problems after hiring a new management company in March 2016, the complaint states.
Kump wrote that Depp owes The Management Group $4.2 million from a $5 million loan they provided the actor. "His tactics and lawsuit will fail, and he will be forced to pay back the loan as promised," Kump wrote.
The lawsuit came on the same day Depp finalized his divorce from actress Amber Heard. Their divorce judgment calls for the actor to pay his ex-wife $7 million in installments — which she has earmarked for two charities — while allowing him to keep numerous properties and vehicles.
Depp isn't the only blockbuster star to take his former managers to court alleging mismanagement. Nicolas Cage sued his former business manager seeking $20 million for alleged mismanagement in 2009 and the manager in a countersuit cited the actor's spending for his financial troubles. The case was resolved before trial.
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Anthony McCartney can be reached at http://twitter.com/mccartneyAP | – Johnny Depp spent more than $3 million on a cannon to blast Hunter S. Thompson's ashes over Aspen, Colo., spent $30,000 a month on expensive wines, and apparently just wasted much of the rest of his income, according to a lawsuit filed by his former managers. The lawsuit, filed as a countersuit to Depp's $25 million suit against The Management Group, claims that Depp lived an "ultra-extravagant lifestyle" that he couldn't really afford, with other spending including $75 million on 14 residences around the world, $18 million on a 150-foot yacht, and $10 million to support family and friends, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The countersuit claims Depp needed 12 storage facilities for his collection of Hollywood memorabilia and fine art, the Telegraph reports. The former managers, who represented the actor from 1999 until 2016, say they repeatedly warned Depp about the unsustainable spending, meaning "Depp, and Depp alone, is fully responsible for any financial turmoil he finds himself in today." Depp's lawsuit accuses the managers of mishandling more than $25 million and failing to file his taxes on time, costing him millions in penalties. (In 2016, Depp topped a list of overpaid actors for the second year in a row.) |
Tequila shots may do more than lighten the mood at a party; the drink may be beneficial for your health as well.
According to researchers from Mexico, natural sugars derived from the agave plant, called agavins, greatly protected a group of mice against diet-induced obesity and type 2 diabetes, MedPage Today reported.
In a new study presented at the American Chemical Society (ACS) annual meeting in Dallas, mice were distributed into seven groups. One group received a diet of plain water, while the other groups received water supplemented with either aspartame, glucose, fructose, sucrose, agave syrup or agavins.
The mice that consumed agavins showed a reduction in food intake and weight and a decrease in blood glucose levels. These findings were similar to the control group that received standard water.
Because agavins act as dietary fibers and do not raise blood sugar, the researchers believe the ingredient could be used as an alternative sweetening agent.
"We believe agavins have a great potential as a light sweetener," Mercedes G. López, of the Centro de Incetagcioan y de Estudios Avanzados, Biotechnology and Biochemistry Irapuato, in Guanajuato, Mexico wrote in the ACS abstract. "They are sugars, highly soluble, with a low glycemic index and a neutral taste…This puts agavins in a tremendous position for their consumption by obese and diabetic people."
The alcoholic beverage tequila is made from the blue agave plant, primarily around the Mexican city of Tequila. However, Lopez noted that agavins are not widely available and not as sweet as regular sugars.
Click for more from MedPage Today. ||||| Action Points Note that this study was published as an abstract and presented at a conference. These data and conclusions should be considered to be preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Agavins, natural sugars derived from the stem of the agave plant, reduced weight and blood sugar in mice prone to diet-induced obesity and type 2 diabetes, according to researchers from Mexico.
In the study, male C57BL/6J mice were randomly distributed into seven groups of four mice. One group received a standard diet plus plain water. The others received a standard diet plus water supplemented with either glucose, fructose, sucrose, agave syrup, agavins, or aspartame.
Mice that consumed agavins in their water reduced their food intake, lost weight, and showed a reduction in blood glucose levels, said Mercedes G. López, PhD, of the Centro de Investigacion y de Estudios Avanzados, Biotechnology and Biochemistry Irapuato, in Guanajuato, Mexico, at the American Chemical Society (ACS) annual meeting in Dallas.
"They were, most of the time, not different from the control," she said in an email to MedPage Today.
The study is the first to attempt to evaluate agavins -- fructans that are made of long branched chains of fructose that act as a dietary fiber and do not raise blood sugar -- as an alternative sweetener.
"We believe agavins have a great potential as a light sweetener," wrote López in the ACS abstract. "They are sugars, highly soluble, with a low glycemic index and a neutral taste."
Most importantly, she noted, they are nondigestable and act as dietary fiber. "This puts agavins in a tremendous position for their consumption by obese and diabetic people."
López's past research has shown that agavins reduce glucose levels and increase glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), a hormone that slows stomach emptying and stimulates production of insulin.
"In certain circumstances, artificial sweeteners are useful in helping people maintain glucose control," Nora Saul, MS, RD, CDE, manager of nutrition services at Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, who was not involved in the study, told MedPage Today. "If this is all true, it sounds like it could be another additional tool for people with diabetes."
One potential challenge with agavins is that they are not widely available. Also, while agavins have half the calories of regular sugars, they are not as sweet, noted López in her email. The latter could be solved at least somewhat by partial hydrolysis, she said.
"People must somehow understand that we cannot have the best of both worlds," in terms of finding an alternative sweetener that is still very sweet, she commented.
There's a significant difference between agavins and the agave syrup and nectar that are marketed as an alternative to sugar, López explained. Those agave products are made of fructans that have been broken down into individual fructoses and are similar to high-fructose corn syrup, she said.
High sugar intake contributes to cardiovascular disease, obesity, and type 2 diabetes. The American Heart Association and the American Diabetes Association have said they are not sure whether sugar alternatives are a solution.
In a joint statement in 2012, the organizations said the data is "still inconclusive about whether using non-nutritive sweeteners to displace caloric sweeteners, such as added sugars, can reduce carbohydrate intake (important for diabetes control), calorie intake or body weight, benefit appetite, or lower other risk factors associated with diabetes and heart disease in the long run. "
The study was supported by Mondelez International and Agavaceae Produce. López is on a patent for the methodology to extract agavins.
1969-12-31T19:00:00-0500 | – The plant tequila is derived from could play a role in fighting obesity, and it doesn't involve getting people so drunk they forget to eat, researchers say. Natural sugars found in agave appear to protect mice against obesity and type 2 diabetes, Fox News reports. The sugars, known as agavins, acted as a dietary fiber and were not absorbed into the bloodstream, leading researchers to believe they could be an ideal artificial sweetener for obese or diabetic people. "In certain circumstances, artificial sweeteners are useful in helping people maintain glucose control," an expert tells MedPage Today. "If this is all true, it sounds like it could be another additional tool for people with diabetes." The researchers say "agavins have a great potential as a light sweetener," though two big obstacles exist: They aren't that widely available, and they aren't very sweet. And if you're an agave syrup fan, take note: That syrup is very different from agavins; the researchers liken it more to high-fructose corn syrup. (In more booze- and health-related news, click to read about the case of a man whose body produces its own alcohol.) |
BRUSSELS Euro zone members have given Greece until the end of the week to come up with a proposal for sweeping reforms in return for loans that will keep the country from crashing out of Europe's currency bloc and into economic ruin.
"The stark reality is that we have only five days left ... Until now I have avoided talking about deadlines, but tonight I have to say loud and clear that the final deadline ends this week," European Council President Donald Tusk told a news conference.
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has until Friday to present the proposal, but German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she hoped to have convincing reform commitments from Tsipras on Thursday so she could ask the German parliament to authorize negotiations on a new aid program.
Merkel said she was "not exaggeratedly optimistic" for a solution.
At an emergency summit in Brussels on Tuesday, representatives of the 19-country euro zone said all 28 European Union leaders would meet on Sunday to decide Greece's fate. The talks were organized after Greeks voted in a referendum on Sunday against a bailout that carried stringent austerity measures.
French President Francois Hollande said the European Central Bank would ensure that Greek banks had the minimum necessary liquidity to stay afloat until Sunday.
The situation in Greece worsened with banks closed for a second week, limited cash withdrawals and businesses feeling the crunch of demands from vendors for cash payments.
Tsipras sounded upbeat as he left the summit, even though many of the reforms demanded by his partners would inflict more pain on Greeks who voted at his behest to reject the austerity measures in return for financial aid.
"The discussion took place in a positive climate," he said. "The process will be extremely fast. It starts in the coming hours, with the aim to conclude by the end of the week at the latest."
He promised to work for a socially just deal that would bring a "final exit" from the crisis, return Greece to growth and restructure Greek debt to make it viable.
Failure, Tusk warned, would undermine the EU's standing in the world and said the six-decade-old bloc may face "the most critical moment in our history".
STRICT TIMETABLE LAID OUT
Under a timetable agreed by the 19 leaders of the common currency area, Greece will submit on Wednesday a formal request for a two-year loan program, with a first list of reform commitments to be spelled out in greater detail on Thursday.
If the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank approve, Eurogroup finance ministers will meet on Saturday to recommend opening negotiations on a conditional assistance program.
"The ball is in Greece's court," Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said, calling Sunday "the final meeting on Greece".
He said positions had hardened since previous bailout talks collapsed in late June, when Tsipras called a referendum at short notice to defy Greece's creditors.
Merkel said if Athens came up with satisfactory proposals and took "prior actions" by passing laws to convince creditors of its intent, short-term financing could be made available to help Greece over a repayment hump this summer.
She did not rule out rescheduling Greek debt in the longer run by extending loan maturities, lowering interest rates and allowing a longer moratorium on debt service payments, but she said a "haircut", or writedown, was impossible because it would be illegal.
Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann warned that if there were no deal on Sunday, euro zone governments would have to prepare "Plan B," code for Greece losing all access to euros and finding itself excluded from the currency bloc.
Even EU chief executive Jean-Claude Juncker, who has worked tirelessly to keep Greece in the euro, said he now had detailed plans to cope with a "Grexit" if Tsipras failed to deliver.
People familiar with Greece's financial system said the banks could start running out of money within two days unless they received more liquidity.
BRIDGE FINANCING
Euro zone sources said bridge financing could be provided by "Greece's friends" and by releasing past ECB profits on Greek bonds to prevent Athens from missing a crucial 3.5 billion euro bond redemption to the ECB due on July 20.
Some of Athens' 18 partners in Europe's common currency expressed exasperation at five years of crisis wrangling with Greece. Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite complained, "With the Greek government it is every time manana."
Merkel, under pressure in Germany to cut Greece loose, made clear it was up to Tsipras to present convincing proposals after Athens spurned tax rises, spending cuts and pension and labor reforms that were on the table before its 240 billion euro (US$262.7 billion) bailout expired last week.
As of Tuesday night, she said, the conditions for opening new aid negotiations with Greece still had not been met.
Euro zone finance ministers complained that their new Greek colleague Euclid Tsakalotos, while more courteous than his abrasive predecessor Yanis Varoufakis, had brought no new proposals to a preparatory meeting before the summit.
"I have the strong impression there were 18 ... ministers of finance who felt the urgency of the situation and there is one ... who doesn't feel the urgency of the situation," Belgian Finance Minister Johan Van Overtveldt said.
Greek officials said the leftist government had broadly repeated a reform plan Tsipras sent to the euro zone last week.
Jeroen Dijsselbloem, chairman of the Eurogroup of currency zone finance ministers, said the ministers would hold a conference call on Wednesday to review a Greek request for a medium-term assistance program from the European Stability Mechanism bailout fund, due to be submitted within hours.
At stake is more than just the future of Greece, a nation of 11 million that makes up just 2 percent of the euro zone's economic output and population.
If Greek banks run out of money and the country has to print its own currency, it could mean a state leaving the euro for the first time since it was launched in 1999, creating a precedent and fuelling doubts about the long-term viability of an incomplete European monetary union.
"Even if it did not trigger a short-term domino effect, the integrity of the euro zone would come under fresh threat with each episode of political uncertainty within member countries," said Thibault Mercier, an analyst at BNP Paribas.
Even in France, the euro zone country most sympathetic to Athens, an opinion poll published on Tuesday showed one in two people want Greece to leave the euro zone.
(Additional reporting by Costas Pitas, Angeliki Koutantou and George Georgiopoulos in Athens, Julia Fioretti, Adrian Croft, Francesco Guarascio, Robin Emmott, Robert-Jan Bartunek, Tom Koerkemeier, Julien Ponthus, Alexander Saeedy and Alastair Macdonald in Brussels, John O'Donnell in Frankfurt and Mark John in Paris; Writing by Paul Taylor; Editing by Mark Trevelyan, Toni Reinhold) ||||| Image copyright Reuters Image caption Greek PM Alexis Tsipras spent Thursday seeking support for his reform plans
Greece's government has agreed a reform programme and will submit its proposals to its international lenders soon, the defence minister has said.
The reforms are thought to include tax rises and pension changes.
Greece is due to present the proposals by 22:00 GMT on Thursday to try to secure a third bailout and prevent a possible exit from the eurozone.
The new proposals will be studied by eurozone finance ministers on Saturday and a full EU summit on Sunday.
Defence Minister and junior coalition party leader Panos Kammenos gave no further details of the agreed plans as he left the prime minister's official residence, where ministers had been meeting.
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has spent the day discussing the proposals with his cabinet.
Greek media are reporting that the reforms will be put to the Greek parliament on Friday for approval.
On Wednesday Greece formally submitted a request for an unspecified loan from the European Stability Mechanism bailout fund.
This would be a fresh loan "to meet Greece's debt obligations and to ensure stability of the financial system", Greece says - in other words, to avoid bankruptcy.
The President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, who will chair Sunday's EU summit, said he hoped to receive "concrete and realistic proposals of reforms from Athens".
Such proposals "will have to be matched by an equally realistic proposal on debt sustainability from the creditors. Only then will we have a win-win situation," Mr Tusk added.
Image copyright AP Image caption Mr Tsipras was applauded by his cabinet as he arrived in parliament on Thursday morning
Image copyright AP Image caption The PM's official residence was the venue for the Greek cabinet's meeting on Thursday afternoon
However the German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that "a classic haircut" (meaning reducing the value of Greece's debts) was "out of the question" for her.
All Greek to you? Debt jargon explained
Speaking in Sarajevo, Mrs Merkel said the eurozone had dealt with the issue of debt sustainability in 2012.
'Just do it'
She described Sunday's EU summit as a decisive and important meeting.
"We must not forget that the Greek people are suffering at the moment," she said.
German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble also ruled out debt relief for Greece, saying "there cannot be a haircut because it would infringe the system of the European Union".
Greece needs to implement reforms to win the trust of its eurozone partners, Mr Schaeuble said. He told a conference in Frankfurt that his message to the new Greek Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos was: "Just do it!".
Follow the latest updates here
Image copyright EPA Image caption Greek pensioners have been queuing at banks to get cash, as many do not have ATM cards
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Cash machine withdrawals are limited to just 60 euros a day
The Greek government has meanwhile extended bank closures and the €60 (£43; $66) daily limit on cash machine withdrawals until Monday.
The curbs were imposed on 28 June, after a deadlock in bailout talks with creditors led to a rush of withdrawals.
Louka Katseli, the head of the Greek bank association, said on Thursday that there was enough liquidity in cash machines to serve the public until Monday.
Crisis countdown
Thursday 9 July: 22:00 GMT deadline for Greece to submit new proposals
Friday 10 July: ECB, EU and IMF discuss proposals at technical level
Saturday 11 July: Eurozone finance ministers discuss plans (Brussels 13:00 GMT)
Sunday 12 July: Eurogroup leaders meet (14:00 GMT) followed by summit of all 28 members of the European Union (16:00 GMT). Both Brussels
Monday 20 July: €3bn payment due from Greece to the European Central Bank
Tsipras, Greece's high-stakes gambler
Why Greece sees France as last hope
How easy is it to swap currencies?
Full coverage of Greek debt crisis
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Germans have sympathy for Greeks but not their government, Jenny Hill explains
On Thursday, EU Economics Commissioner Pierre Moscovici said he was hopeful of a new deal: "I have the sense that the dialogue is established, or restored, and that there is a way out."
The IMF, lowering its economic growth forecast for the world for 2015, said events in Greece would have a "limited" effect on the rest of the global economy, as Greece makes up just 2% of the eurozone.
Greek scenarios
What happens next?
European Stability Mechanism explained
Greece's creditors - the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF - have already provided more than €200bn in two bailouts since a rescue plan began five years ago.
The second bailout expired on 30 June.
The creditors had hoped for new, concrete proposals from Greece at a meeting on Tuesday but these were not submitted and they instead agreed to set a new deadline of Thursday.
Greece has been warned this is the "final deadline".
Mr Tusk has said this is "now maybe the most critical moment in the history of the eurozone".
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Athens newspaper seller Pavlos Giannopoulos: "The closing of the banks was the worst that could happen"
"This is really and truly the final wake-up call for Greece and for us, our last chance," he said, adding that failure "may lead to the bankruptcy of Greece".
Mr Tsipras's Syriza party was elected in January pledging to oppose the harsh austerity measures demanded by creditors.
And on Sunday, the Greek people decisively rejected the latest bailout proposals from creditors in a referendum.
Energy minister and influential Syriza member Panayiotis Lafazanis insisted on Thursday that Greece would not sign up to a third bailout if it brought "harsh austerity, suffering and deprivation to the Greek people".
He insisted Greece had "alternative options to a new bailout deal" and there was "no gun pointed at its head".
Supporters of Greece staying in the euro held a rally in central Athens on Thursday night. ||||| Hopes fade for quick solution to thwart Grexit as Eurogroup finance chiefs show incredulity as new Greek finance minister arrives without detailed proposals
The Greek government has been told by its eurozone partners not to expect debt relief any time soon, amid fading hopes of decisive action to stop the country tumbling out of the currency union.
Arriving at an emergency summit of eurozone leaders, Angela Merkel said there was no clear basis to negotiate with Athens after Greek voters rejected an EU bailout plan in a referendum on Sunday. The German chancellor warned that time was running out. “It is not a matter of weeks anymore, it is a matter of days.”
Eurozone finance ministers meeting ahead of the summit made it clear they were waiting on Athens to make the first move and were in no hurry to discuss debt relief.
Diplomatic niceties were abandoned as it emerged Greece’s new finance minister Euclid Tsakalotos had not come armed with detailed proposals.
“[With] the Greek government it is every time mañana,” said Lithuania’s president Dalia Grybauskaitė, one of the Greek government’s most tough-talking critics. “It can always be mañana every day.”
Greek banks are almost out of cash and some Eurozone figures are already saying that Grexit is the only option for the debt-ridden country.
The head of Latvia’s central bank told domestic radio that the “brave” Greek nation had “voted itself out of the eurozone”.
Angela Merkel must act now for Greece, Germany and the world | Letters from Thomas Piketty, Jeffrey Sachs and others Read more
The president of the European commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, said he was not in favour of a Greek exit from the eurozone, but dampened hopes of a breakthrough from the summit. “What we are going to do today is to talk to each other and restore order,” he said.
Tsakalotos, the Oxford-educated economics professor, who was sworn in as Greek finance minister on Monday night, arrived at Tuesday’s meeting without talking to reporters.
Neither did he bring any detailed proposals – an omission that caused incredulity among other eurozone governments. Malta’s prime minister Joseph Muscat said “the absence of a concrete proposal” wouldn’t help the eurozone leaders’ summit.
Joseph Muscat (@JosephMuscat_JM) The absence of a concrete proposal by #Greece government doesn't help this evening's #Eurozone leaders' meeting -JM
Greece will a make formal proposal on Wednesday to tap the EU’s €500bn bailout fund, the European stability mechanism, said the chair of the Eurogroup, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, after the meeting ended with scant results. Finance ministers will discuss the idea by phone.
“All of this has to be done in a matter of days. We have very little time,” he said.
The leaders of France and Germany said they expected Greece to come up with “serious and credible proposals” at today’s summit.
The demand was echoed by finance ministers, who stressed they wanted to see the Greek government sign up to reforms. Several made it clear they would not support any write-off of Greek debt.
“We are not in the business of renegotiating debt,” said Finland’s finance minister, Alexander Stubb. “That was already done in 2011 and 2012,” referring to restructuring of Greek debts that imposed heavy losses on private creditors.
Stubb said Finland’s commitments to Greece had proved to be more than anyone ever expected, totalling 10% of the Finnish government budget.
The European commission, the guardian of EU law, was openly split. Valdis Dombrovskis, the Latvian commissioner in charge of the euro, said a Greek exit from the eurozone could not be excluded. Pierre Moscovici, the French commissioner in charge of the economic policy, struck a different note, saying that Grexit would be a terrible collective failure.
Juncker blamed the Greeks for walking out of talks and said it was up to Athens to come up with proposals that would allow Europe to get out of this situation.
The depths of mistrust were highlighted by Latvia’s finance minister, Jãnis Reirs, who said his compatriots were surprised at the referendum result. “Latvian people do not understand Greek people,” he said.
As talks in Brussels grind on, Greek banks remain closed and it is far from clear they will be able to reopen on Thursday, when an extended bank holiday is due to end.
Greece has to find €3.5bn to meet a debt repayment to the European Central Bank in two weeks’ time (20 July). Failure to make the payment would leave the ECB with little choice but to declare Greek banks insolvent and cut off all emergency aid, almost certainly triggering a eurozone exit.
But many analysts suspect Greek banks cannot last this long without financial help.
The European Central Bank raised the pressure on Greek banks on Monday night by tightening access to emergency credit. The Frankfurt-based institution has pumped €89bn (£63bn) into the Greek financial system in recent months, but Greek banks can only tap this emergency aid by putting up collateral, such as Greek government bonds.
The bank said on Monday it was “adjust[ing] the haircuts accepted on collateral”, meaning that Greek assets are now deemed more risky, to secure smaller amounts of emergency funds.
“Restoration of liquidity in the Greek banking system [is] an immediate priority,” Greek president Prokopis Pavlopoulos wrote in a letter to the European council president Donald Tusk.
The Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, pressed for capital controls to be lifted when he spoke to the head of the ECB, Mario Draghi, on Monday. After a hectic day of meetings with Greek party leaders, Tsipras also spoke to Christine Lagarde of the International Monetary Fund. She told him the IMF was no longer able to provide money to Greece until it clears its arrears, following last week’s default on a €1.6bn loan repayment.
Analysts at Capital Economics said Greece’s creditors may soon have to “accept the inevitable” and cut Greece loose.
“Greece and its creditors may yet find a way to step back from the brink. But without major debt relief, any near-term deal looks likely just to put off the inevitable for a bit longer,” wrote chief European economist Jonathan Loynes.
“Meantime, Greece’s economic and fiscal position will continue to worsen and the eurozone’s policymakers will devote yet more time and effort to what looks increasingly like a hopeless cause. We don’t say it at all lightly. But it might well be time to let Greece go.” ||||| ATHENS/BRUSSELS Prospects for a deal on a second international bailout for Greece brightened on Wednesday when euro zone finance ministers were summoned to talks in Brussels while Greek political leaders met to approve a tough new reform and austerity program.
Eurogroup chairman Jean-Claude Juncker invited ministers from the 17-nation single currency area to meet on Thursday evening and the International Monetary Fund said managing director Christine Lagarde would also attend.
They are expected to examine a complex package involving a 130 billion euro EU/IMF rescue and a bond swap with private creditors, which hinges on Athens accepting conditions that require big cuts in many Greeks' living standards.
Greeks face a dreadful year of recession, a government source said. Athens now forecast the economy will shrink between four and five percent in 2012, the source said, adding to a relentless dive in economic output for the last four years which has sent unemployment soaring.
The figure, contained in a draft letter to Lagarde, is far worse than the 2.8 percent fall in gross domestic product forecast when the 2012 budget went to parliament in November, highlighting the conundrum that more austerity will damage the economy further and drive Greece's massive debts yet higher.
Juncker called the Eurogroup meeting even though leaders of the three Greek coalition parties were still discussing with Prime Minister Lucas Papademos the terms of a rescue package to avoid a chaotic default in March that would send tremors around the euro zone and possibly further afield.
Two sources close to the Athens talks said the government would promise spending cuts and tax rises totaling 13 billion euros from 2012 to 2015, almost double the seven billion it originally pledged.
The bailout package also pledges a 22 percent cut to the minimum wage level, a party official said.
RELUCTANT LEADERS
International lenders are demanding that the leaders of the conservative New Democracy party, PASOK socialists and far-right LAOS commit themselves in writing to implement the program of pay and pension cuts, structural and administrative reforms.
Euro zone officials say the full package must be agreed with Greece and approved by the euro zone, European Central Bank and IMF before February 15 so that complex legal paperwork can be completed in time for a bond redemption deadline on March 20.
However, the leaders have been loath to accept the lenders' tough conditions, which are certain to be unpopular with voters,
as they face parliamentary elections possibly as early as April.
After a series of delays, the leaders finally received a 15-page document on Wednesday morning laying out the principles of the bailout and its conditions, a party official told Reuters. Attached were a further 30 or so pages laying out how the program will be implemented.
The leaders will have to decide whether to push through a 15 percent cut to supplementary pensions or a combination of cuts in main and supplementary pensions, the official said.
Other elements of the deal have been gradually slotting into place, including a bond swap with private creditors to ease Greece's debt burden by reducing the value of government bonds held by banks and insurers.
The new bonds would have an average interest rate of around 3.5 percent, said state NET TV, with creditors having to swallow a 70 percent cut in the value of their debt holdings.
Private holders of Greek debt will discuss the debt swap plan aimed at slashing the country's debt pile in Paris on Thursday, a banking official told Reuters.
German Deputy Finance Minister Thomas Steffen said in Berlin the bond swap offer to private creditors could be made as early as next week.
He voiced exasperation at Greece's failure to implement economic and fiscal reforms since the debt crisis erupted two years ago, saying governance remained below European standards.
"I believe we can say today that we have made little progress on Greece since 2010, worryingly little progress," Steffen said.
ECB NEEDED
Ratings agency Standard & Poor's said Greece would likely fail to achieve sustainable debt levels if it relied on a 70 percent reduction in the value of bonds held by private creditors, putting the onus on the ECB to also take losses.
"The reduction ... is probably not sufficient to make the debt sustainable, given the outlook for GDP itself," S&P; analyst Frank Gill said.
With banks and insurers having mostly agreed to take a hefty writedown, Athens and the commercial banks are urging the ECB to forego profits on its Greek bond holdings to help cut the debt to a sustainable level. That could raise 12 billion euros or more.
But ECB policymakers are still divided on what contribution the bank could make to a restructuring of Greek debt, two euro zone monetary policy sources said.
While the ECB has ruled out joining private creditors in voluntarily accepting losses on its Greek bonds, it could provide indirect relief by renouncing profits from bonds it bought at below face value.
The ECB's 23-member Governing Council, which holds a regular monthly meeting on Thursday, has yet to agree a position. Some policymakers are reluctant to share the burden for fear of easing pressure on Athens to agree spending cuts. There are also concerns about setting a precedent for other countries.
"There is no agreement yet. Some people on the Council still oppose this," said one monetary policy source, adding that ECB President Mario Draghi had not yet revealed his position.
An opinion poll on Wednesday showed that PASOK, which ruled Greece until Papandreou's government collapsed last November, has most to fear from elections. The monthly survey by Public Issue for Kathimerini newspaper showed support for PASOK had collapsed to eight percent from the nearly 44 percent it commanded when it returned to power in 2009.
(Additional reporting by Ingrid Melander, George Georgiopoulos and Harry Papachristou in Athens and Paul Carrel in Frankfurt; Writing by David Stamp and Deepa Babington,; editing by Mike Peacock) | – There have been plenty of meetings and plenty of deadlines over the years of the Greek debt crisis, but European Union leaders have never sounded so serious—and fed up—as last night, when Greece was ordered to deliver a workable plan for reforms in return for loans by the end of this week. "Tonight I have to say it loud and clear—the final deadline ends this week," European Council President Donald Tusk said after an emergency meeting of 19 eurozone leaders ended fruitlessly, per the New York Times. The BBC clarifies the recent timeline: After Greece didn't bring a proposal to the table yesterday as expected, a deadline of tomorrow night has been set for its proposal of which economic reforms it will institute in exchange for loans. On Sunday, EU leaders will again gather at a summit and decide, as the AP puts it, "whether the plan is good enough." European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker—who was "sputtering with rage," according to the Times—told reporters last night that plans for Greece exiting the eurozone have now been drawn up in detail. German Chancellor Angela Merkel says that after the "serious, candid discussion," she is not optimistic that a solution will be found, reports the BBC. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras seems to have been at a different meeting than everybody else: Reuters reports that he "sounded upbeat" after the summit, saying the talks had taken place in a "positive climate" and promising to deliver a plan quickly. Meanwhile, Greece this morning formally asked Europe's bailout fund for a three-year bailout, per the Wall Street Journal, which saw the letter Greece submitted. The Journal reports that the letter isn't very detailed on the measures Greece intends to implement; "the full list of overhauls and budget cuts is what will determine whether the application ... will be approved by the rest of the eurozone." |
Go deeper: From Rob Goldstone to the Agalarovs, the news surrounding this meeting has introduced a whole host of colorful new characters to the Trump-Russia web, many of whom hadn't been mentioned widely in previous reports.
Looks like he needed it: The story exploded this afternoon when Trump Jr. tweeted the full email chain that led to the meeting, which explicitly called the meeting a "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump."
This weekend's report that Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner attended a meeting at Trump Tower last June with a Kremlin-linked lawyer who promised damaging information on Hillary Clinton was another drip in the ever-expanding Russia story — and it led to Trump Jr. lawyering up for the Russia probe last night.
Natalia Veselnitskaya, the lawyer at the Trump Tower meeting
Veselnitskaya is known for her lobbying against the Magnitsky Act, signed into law by President Obama in 2012 and designed to seize the assets of and deny visas to suspected Russian human rights abusers. The law so enraged Russian President Vladimir Putin that he halted the adoption of Russian children by American families. Veselnitskaya told the NYT that she "never acted on behalf of the Russian government," but her anti-Magnitsky campaign is obviously a cause that's deeply personal for Putin.
Rob Goldstone, the music publicist who linked up Trump Jr. and Veselnitskaya
Goldstone is a friend of Trump Jr., often involved in the Miss Universe pageant, who claimed to set up the meeting for Veselnitskaya to discuss the adoption issues caused by the Magnitsky Act, per a WaPo report. His social media pages show him interacting with President Trump as far back as 2013 — and include an Instagram of him wearing a shirt that simply says "Russia" just after Trump won the presidency in November.
Emin Agalarov, the Russian pop star who asked Goldstone to set up the meeting
Agalarov is a 37-year-old pop star who became close to Trump following the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Emin has performed at Trump golf courses, received a videotaped birthday message from Trump in 2013, and even got Trump to cameo in one of his music videos, per Forbes' definitive Agalarov profile. He reportedly exchanged text messages with Trump Jr. around the inauguration, inquiring about the potential for new business deals.
Aras Agalarov, Emin's father and a billionaire real estate mogul in Moscow
According to Forbes, the 2013 Miss Universe pageant ended up in the Moscow — hosted at one of the Agalarovs' properties — after Aras and Emin made a concerted effort to reach out to Trump. Aras' bigger goal was a licensing deal with Trump to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, which Emin told Forbes was in the pipeline before Trump announced his campaign, putting the deal on ice. ||||| Rob Goldstone, the man who says he connected Donald Trump Jr. with a Russian lawyer who claimed to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton, is a British-born music producer with ties to a Russian billionaire through his pop star son.
Trump Jr. confirmed in a statement that he and other Trump campaign officials met with Natalia Veselnitskaya in June 2016. The president’s son on July 11 released an email chain between himself and Goldstone that raised further questions about the meeting.
In one email, Goldstone, the British-born music producer facilitating the meeting, wrote, “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump…” Trump Jr. responded, “If it’s what you say, I love it.”
The person who asked Trump Jr. to attend the meeting was Goldstone, a music producer with ties to a Russian pop star named Emin Agalarov, according to The Washington Post.
Rob Goldstone very much likes his hats pic.twitter.com/44yUnMu8CE — Allan Smith (@akarl_smith) July 10, 2017
The New York Times broke the story that Trump Jr., Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort had attended the meeting, although Trump Jr. says Veselnitskaya never produced information negative to Clinton.
A special prosecutor is investigating whether members of the Trump campaign colluded with Russian interference into the 2016 presidential election. Goldstone is a colorful addition to the cast of characters in the Trump/Russia controversies.
Here’s what you need to know:
1. The Emails Reveal Goldstone Told Trump Jr. That Veselnitskaya Was a Government Lawyer With Information Damaging to Hillary Clinton
In the statement that he released on the meeting, Trump Jr. did not name the intermediary. However, Rob Goldstone told The Washington Post that “he had arranged the meeting at request of a Russian client and had attended it along with Veselnitskaya.”
He initially wouldn’t identify the Russian client, according to The Post, but he said that Veselnitskaya wanted to speak with Trump Jr. about Russian adoptions.
Goldstone later released a statement, in which he alleged Veselnitskaya had said she had information about illegal campaign contributions to the DNC. He has now identified the “client” as Russian pop star Emin Agalarov.
Just into @CNN, Rob Goldstone, music publicist who set up mtg bw Trump Jr and Veselnitzkaya, says Trump "halted" talk when Magnitzky came up pic.twitter.com/ysDZVMm1Bj — David Shortell (@davidgshortell) July 10, 2017
The New York Times is now reporting that Goldstone allegedly sent an email to Trump Jr. before the meeting informing him “that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy.”
Trump Jr. then released all of the emails himself. On June 3, in one key exchange, Goldstone wrote, “Good morning. Emin just called and asked me to contact you with something very interesting. The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father. This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump – helped along by Aras and Emin. What do you think is the best way to handle this information and would you be able to speak to Emin about it directly?”
In his own statement, Donald Trump Jr. wrote that he was “asked to have a meeting by an acquaintance I knew from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant with an individual who I was told might have information helpful to the campaign.” The Times reported that Trump Jr. accused the lawyer of being a “Kremlin proxy.”
Veselnitskaya told The New York Times in a statement to the newspaper that “nothing at all about the presidential campaign” was discussed at the meeting and said she has “never acted on behalf of the Russian government” and “never discussed any of these matters with any representative of the Russian government.”
Trump Jr. also says in the statement that he was told that Veselnitskaya “had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Mrs. Clinton.”
You can release the Trump Jr. emails with Goldstone here:
2. Goldstone Works With a Russian Pop Star Whose Father Is a Wealthy Developer in Moscow
According to The Post, Goldstone “works as a manager for Emin Agalarov, a Russian pop star whose father is a wealthy Moscow developer who sponsored the pageant in the Russian capital in 2013.”
Trump was featured in a music video with Emin Agalarov.
Emin’s father is Aras Agalarov, a Russian billionaire. Forbes says Aras is worth almost $2 billion, a fortune he made from real estate, and added that he brought the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow. According to Bloomberg, “The last time Donald Trump made an appearance in Moscow was November 2013 for the Miss Universe contest he famously owned.”
According to The New York Times, “The elder Agalarov boasts close ties to Mr. Putin: his company has won several large state building contracts, and Mr. Putin awarded him the “Order of Honor of the Russian Federation.”
The son has boasted of the family’s ties to Trump.
Ermin Agalarov told Forbes in an interview that “he and his billionaire developer father, Aras, had plans to build a Trump Tower in Russia that would now likely be under construction had Trump not run for office; that he has maintained contact with the Trump family since the election, and has exchanged messages with Donald Trump Jr. as recently as January; and that President Trump himself sent a handwritten note to the Agalarovs in November after they congratulated him on his victory.”
Politico has called Aras Agalarov “a billionaire Russian real estate mogul with ties to Putin,” and described Emin as “a dance-pop singer with ambitions to international stardom who got Trump to appear in one of his music videos.”
Bloomberg reported that, while Trump was in Moscow, he was invited to meet with “more than a dozen of Russia’s top businessmen, including Herman Gref, the chief executive officer of state-controlled Sberbank PJSC, Russia’s biggest bank.” Gref, “who was President Vladimir Putin’s economy minister from 2000 to 2007, organized the meeting together with Aras Agalarov, the founder of Crocus Group, one of the country’s largest real-estate companies, which was hosting the beauty pageant at one of its concert halls,” reported Bloomberg.
3. Goldstone Is a Former Journalist From the UK & Has Represented Many Famous Clients
Goldstone got his start in journalism and runs a PR firm. He has a penchant for profane and colorful hats that he displays frequently on social media.
“Oui 2 PR founder, Rob Goldstone is a former journalist, publicist and international marketing director, whose previous clients include Michael Jackson, BB King, HMV Record Stores, Richard Branson, The Hard Rock Cafe and Oscar-winning lyricist Tim Rice,” his bio says.
“Born in the United Kingdom, Rob studied as a journalist and by his early 20’s worked for daily newspapers and radio stations. In 1985, The Band Aid Relief Fund invited Rob to accompany Bob Geldof to Ethiopia.”
The New York Times referred to Goldstone as a former “tabloid journalist,” writing that he is “a former British tabloid journalist and the president of a company called Oui 2 Entertainment who has worked with the Miss Universe pageant.”
The bio continues, “In 1986, Rob moved to Australia, first as a journalist – as the only journalist chosen by Michael Jackson to accompany him on his tour “down under” – and later as a publicist and co-president of his own PR company, Crawford Goldstone Publicity. For six years, Sydney-based Rob represented almost every major international artist touring Australia; from Cyndi Lauper to Julio Iglesias, James Taylor, Tracy Chapman, BB King, Marianne Faithful and Poison! Among his corporate clients were Saatchi and Saatchi, The Hard Rock Cafe, Chess: The Musical, Richard Branson’s Virgin Megastores, and HMV Music Stores.”
The Oui 2 company bio for Goldstone says he founded Oui 2 Entertainment with David Wilson in 1998.
“Manhattan-based Oui 2 and has since gone on to represent some of the biggest music brands and entertainment events in the country, including a decade relationship with EMI Music Publishing (then the world’s largest music publisher), Best Buy (handling their PR and creating events to introduce them into New York and San Francisco including Sting in Central Park), The Friars Club (handling media for their Roasts and tributes),” the bio says.
4. Goldstone Was in Moscow Two Weeks Before the Meeting
Goldstone has since privatized his Instagram account, but a July 27, 2016 post read, “It’s the last full day in Russia today and it’s been a 3 week whirlwind between Baku, St. Petersburg and Moscow.”
Trump Jr. associate Rob Goldstone was in Moscow less than 2 weeks before the June 9 meeting at Trump Tower, then went back for most of July: pic.twitter.com/GxLRiDwK9I — Jon Swaine (@jonswaine) July 10, 2017
He also posted from Red Square in May 2016. He visited Russia in July and May 2016, according to various social media posts he made.
Goldstone has written about Hillary Clinton on social media.
Also Rob Goldstone, one day prior pic.twitter.com/JAyRSNJvOx — Allan Smith (@akarl_smith) July 10, 2017
He didn’t hide the Trump meeting – he checked in at Trump Tower on Facebook on the day in question.
Rob Goldstone on June 9, 2016 — day of the Trump Tower meeting with Trump Jr., Kushner, Manafort, and Veselnitskaya pic.twitter.com/7toeAYMxzi — Allan Smith (@akarl_smith) July 10, 2017
On June 23, 2016, Goldstone wrote on Facebook, “To my friends who doubt Donald Trump will ever be President – they also thought Britain would never vote to leave the EU and as I go bed, it looks like the UK has voted to leave the European Union. I rest my case.”
On Facebook, Goldstone says that he is single, lives in New York, New York, and is from Manchester, United Kingdom. His most recent public Facebook posts show travels to Greece, Croatia, and Italy.
5. Trump Jr. Admits Meeting With Veselnitskaya but Says She Had ‘No Meaningful Information’
According to a statement released by Trump Jr., he was not told the lawyer’s name before the meeting and asked Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort to attend “but told them nothing of the substance.”
The meeting occurred in June 2016, and Veselnitskaya “stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense.”
JUST IN: Donald Trump Jr. responds to reports that he met with Kremlin-linked lawyer during campaign pic.twitter.com/5mqRX38Wio — NBC News (@NBCNews) July 9, 2017
She didn’t provide details or supporting information and “it quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information. She then changed subjects and began discussing the adoption of Russian children and mentioned the Magnitsky Act.”
Trump Jr. said it became clear to him that “this was the true agenda all along and that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting.”
Trump Jr. released another statement on July 11. It reads,
To everyone, in order to be totally transparent, I am releasing the entire email chain of my emails with Rob Goldstone about the meeting on June 9, 2016. The first email on June 3, 2016 was from Rob, who was relating a request from Emin, a person I knew from the 2013 Ms. Universe Pageant near Moscow. Emin and his father have a very highly respected company in Moscow. The information they suggested they had about Hillary Clinton I thought was Political Opposition Research. I first wanted to just have a phone call but when that didn’t work out, they said the woman would be in New York and asked if I would meet. I decided to take the meeting. The woman, as she has said publicly, was not a government official. And, as we have said, she had no information to provide and wanted to talk about adoption policy and the Magnitsky Act. To put this in context, this occurred before the current Russian fever was in vogue. As Rob Goldstone said just today in the press, the entire meeting was the “most inane nonsense I ever heard. And I was actually agitated by it.”
Trump Jr. originally said only that the meeting dealt with adoptions, according to The New York Times.
In a statement, a spokesman for President Trump’s outside counsel said Veselnitskaya misrepresented herself and alluded to ties to Democrats.
“We have learned from both our own investigation and public reports that the participants in the meeting misrepresented who they were and who they worked for,” Mark Corallo, spokesperson for Trump’s outside counsel, said in a statement. “Specifically, we have learned that the person who sought the meeting is associated with Fusion GPS, a firm which according to public reports, was retained by Democratic operatives to develop opposition research on the president and which commissioned the phony Steele dossier.” | – The Russian lawyer who has emerged front and center in the new Trump-Russia stories tells NBC News that she has no ties to the Kremlin or any damning information about Hillary Clinton or Democrats. In describing her 20- to 30-minute meeting with Donald Trump Jr. last year, Natalia Veselnitskaya said he asked her only question: "whether I had any financial records which might prove that the funds used to sponsor the DNC were coming from inappropriate sources." She says she has no such information. So why did Trump, who was accompanied at the meeting by Jared Kushner (she says he left after about 10 minutes) and Paul Manafort (she called him "absent-minded") think otherwise? "It is quite possible that maybe they were longing for such an information," she says. "They wanted it so badly that they could only hear the thought that they wanted." Her account raises more confusion about why the meeting was brokered in the first place. The New York Times has reported that Trump Jr. got an email beforehand from a publicist named Rob Goldstone suggesting that Veselnitskaya would provide dirt on Democrats that came from the Russian government. (The tangled web: Goldstone works with a Russian pop star whose billionaire father has ties to Vladimir Putin and President Trump, per Heavy.com. Goldstone has said he arranged the meeting at the request of the pop star, Emin Agalarov.) Veselnitskaya, however, says she wanted to meet mainly to present her case against the Magnitsky Act, under which the US blacklists Russians accused of human rights abuses. She represents a client affected by it. Putin, who is a bitter opponent of that act, has said he doesn't know Veselnitskaya. |
(CNN) The Senate Judiciary Committee will vote on whether to favorably recommend Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court as previously scheduled Friday morning, though top GOP senators did not know as of Thursday night whether enough key Republican votes had been convinced to confirm President Donald Trump's nominee.
Kavanaugh's supporters and critics are now closely watching a handful of key Republican senators as they decide whether to support the nominee, following a day-long, blockbuster hearing that featured both Kavanaugh and the woman who accused him of sexual assault.
The vote scheduled for Friday morning means undecided GOP members of the committee -- including Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake -- have just hours to publicly choose a side in a deeply polarizing political fight.
As of Thursday night, Flake -- who also met earlier with fellow key votes Republican Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski and Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin -- told reporters, "There's more doubt than certainty moving ahead."
"This isn't easy for anybody," Flake told reporters. "Some of us have been talking for a while -- similar questions I guess."
When asked if he thought more time before the deadline would help with his decision, Flake said he didn't know.
"When you have more time, you look at what more time has done in the past couple of days in term of ludicrous allegations, some of which have been recanted. Others just were anonymous to begin with, and what does that do to the accused. Just to give it more time. I don't know. You have to weigh those things, You have to weigh all those things."
GOP senators told reporters that members meeting behind closed doors said the committee vote would happen as previously scheduled Friday morning and that the first procedural vote will take place on the Senate floor Saturday. GOP leaders had pushed for a full Senate vote on Tuesday, October 2.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnnell would not confirm if he had the votes following a conference wide meeting Thursday night.
When asked if he was confident the nomination would advance out of committee, he replied: "well the next step is the committee will be voting in the morning."
He added, "We're optimistic, basically."
'We're meeting at 9:30'
Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley declined to answer questions Thursday night from reporters as he repeatedly said, "we're meeting at 9:30" -- a reference to the committee meeting where the panel is scheduled to vote on whether to give Kavanaugh a favorable recommendation.
When asked by the media if the nomination will come to the full Senate floor for a vote, Grassley responded "Depends on what happens tomorrow."
Republicans can advance Kavanaugh's without any support from Democrats, but given their 51-49 seat majority in the chamber, Kavanaugh's supporters can only lose one vote and still advance his nomination.
Sen. John Cornyn, who as majority whip is the second-ranking GOP member in the chamber, expressed optimism following a Republican meeting Thursday night that Kavanaugh's nomination will be favorably reported out of the committee on schedule.
Asked if he is confident that Kavanaugh can advance out of the committee, he said, "I am optimistic, yes."
At least one long-undecided Republican senator, Bob Corker of Tennessee, announced his support for Kavanaugh just before 9 p.m. ET on Thursday night.
"While both individuals provided compelling testimony, nothing that has been presented corroborates the allegation," Corker said in his announcement. "There is no question that Judge Kavanaugh is qualified to serve on the Supreme Court, and in a different political environment, he would be confirmed overwhelmingly."
Four key senators meet
The meeting of Flake, Collins, Manchin and Collins occurred less than hour after Kavanaugh finished his testimony before the Judiciary Committee , where he forcefully and passionately maintained his innocence and defiantly challenged Democratic senators who grilled him on multiple allegations of inappropriate behavior.
On Thursday morning, that same committee heard from Ford, who she said was "100%" certain Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers in the 1980s. In Kavanaugh's testimony, he also said he was "100%" sure he did not sexual assault anyone.
Collins and Murkowski have appeared to be the most outspoken Republican senators in seeking additional investigation into the allegations of inappropriate behavior that have surfaced against Kavanaugh in recent days.
Multiple sources familiar with a private Wednesday meeting -- the night before the hearing -- told CNN that Collins appeared unnerved by the latest allegations, citing in particular that a sworn statement from accuser Julie Swetnick sent to the panel, which carries with it the possibility of perjury for lying to Congress. At that Wednesday meeting of Republican chairmen, GOP leaders tried to reassure Collins, keenly aware of the critical role she plays.
When asked by reporters earlier this week whether there should be a full FBI investigation into the allegations, Murkowski responded, "It would sure clear up all the questions, wouldn't it?"
On Thursday night, Murkowski said she was leaving to think over the nomination at home.
"I'm going to go home, have dinner and have a chance to think about all that's gone on today," Murkowski told reporters.
Manchin is up for re-election this fall in a state Donald Trump won overwhelmingly and supported Trump's last Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch. Manchin was among a handful of Democrats from red and purple states that Kavanaugh supporters were targeting as possible votes.
"We are still talking," Manchin told CNN leaving that meeting. "There are no decisions on anything. There are some concerns that people have and we're going to try to close the loop." ||||| Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., with actress and comedian Amy Schumer, right, and actress model Emily Ratajkowski, center, speaks at a rally against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh at the Supreme... (Associated Press)
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., with actress and comedian Amy Schumer, right, and actress model Emily Ratajkowski, center, speaks at a rally against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh at the Supreme Court in Washington, Thursday, Oct. 4, 2018. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta) (Associated Press)
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate is poised to take a crucial vote Friday on whether to advance Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court as key Republican senators remain undecided amid allegations of sexual misconduct and intense protests that have divided the nation.
The 53-year-old judge made what were in effect closing arguments by acknowledging that he became "very emotional" when forcefully denying the allegations at a Judiciary Committee hearing last week.
"I said a few things I should not have said," he wrote in an op-ed published Thursday evening. But he said he remains the same "hardworking, even-keeled" person he has always been. "Going forward, you can count on me," he wrote in The Wall Street Journal.
The op-ed, as well as a late boost from President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Minnesota, appeared aimed at winning over the three wavering senators from the slim GOP majority — Susan Collins of Maine, Jeff Flake of Arizona and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — and one Democrat, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who has yet to announce his position.
Ahead of Friday's voting, Republicans emerged confident that an FBI investigation into the allegations unearthed no new corroborating details, they said. But a level of uncertainty lingered as Collins and Flake spent hours Thursday pouring over confidential FBI documents in the secure basement briefing room long after others had left seemingly satisfied with the findings.
Even without locking in support, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pushed ahead with trying to move Trump's nominee forward in what would be an election year win for his party. The Republican leader has little room for error with his party's slim 51-49 hold on the Senate, even if Vice President Mike Pence is called in to break a tie. A final vote is expected Saturday.
Tensions have been high at the Capitol with opponents of Kavanaugh, including survivors of sexual assault, confronting senators in the halls and holding vigil across the street at the Supreme Court. Supporters of Kavanaugh also turned out.
Trump said the protesters' "rage-fueled resistance is starting to backfire at a level nobody has ever seen before." He was referring to polling that shows some improvement for Republicans heading into the midterm election.
Friday's vote is a procedural one to end the debate, and some fence-sitting senators could conceivably vote to advance Kavanaugh's nomination but still hold out their support ahead of a final confirmation roll call over the weekend.
Two of the undeclared Republicans emerged from the secure briefing facility Thursday accepting the FBI report as "thorough," bolstering GOP hopes for confirmation.
Flake told reporters that "we've seen no additional corroborating information" about the claims against Kavanaugh.
Collins also expressed satisfaction, calling it "a very thorough investigation." She paid two visits to the off-limits room where the document was being displayed to lawmakers.
Murkowski said she was "still reviewing" her decision.
Democrats complained that the investigation, running just six days after Trump reluctantly ordered it, was shoddy, omitting interviews with numerous potential witnesses. They accused the White House of limiting the FBI's leeway.
Those not interviewed in the reopened background investigation included Kavanaugh himself and Christine Blasey Ford, who ignited the furor by alleging he'd molested her in a locked room at a 1982 high school gathering.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the Judiciary Committee's top Democrat, said while her party had agreed to a weeklong FBI probe with a finite scope, "We did not agree that the White House should tie the FBI's hands."
A hefty police presence added an air of anxiety, as did thousands of anti-Kavanaugh demonstrators. U.S. Capitol Police said 302 were arrested — among them comedian Amy Schumer, a distant relative of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who chairs the Judiciary Committee, issued a statement late Thursday that said the FBI reached out to 11 people and interviewed 10. Six of the witnesses involved Ford's claims, including an attorney for one of them, and four were related to Deborah Ramirez, who has asserted that Kavanaugh exposed himself to her when both were Yale freshmen. Grassley said the FBI concluded "there is no collaboration of the allegations made by Dr. Ford or Ms. Ramirez."
Senators said the documents they examined totaled about 50 pages.
The underlying material from the FBI included text and Facebook messages, said Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., including screenshots that "were very helpful" in understanding the communications between various people discussing the situation.
Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said nine of the pages were about Mark Judge, the Kavanaugh friend who Ford said also jumped on her while Kavanaugh assaulted her. Judge has said he doesn't recall the incident.
White House spokesman Raj Shah rebuffed Democrats' complaints, saying, "What critics want is a never-ending fishing expedition into high school drinking."
Barring leaks, it was unclear how much if any of the FBI report would be made public.
___
AP reporters Mary Clare Jalonick, Matthew Daly, Kevin Freking, Padmananda Rama, Juliet Linderman, Eric Tucker, Michael Balsamo, Catherine Lucey and Zeke Miller in Washington and John Raby in Charleston, West Virginia, contributed. ||||| Judge Brett Kavanaugh picked up a key Republican vote shortly after a full GOP conference meeting immediately following Thursday’s hearing, one day before a key committee vote. Kavanaugh Confirmation GOP barrels toward Kavanaugh vote with key Republicans undecided The Senate Judiciary Committee is moving toward a Friday vote, and GOP leaders are planning to keep the chamber in session on Saturday.
Senate Republicans are racing to confirm Brett Kavanaugh, betting that the Supreme Court nominee was persuasive enough in his denial that he sexually assaulted a high school acquaintance to counter the powerful testimony of his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is planning to vote on Friday to advance Kavanaugh’s nomination to the full Senate floor. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) then plans a Saturday procedural vote to formally move to the nomination, with a potential confirmation vote as early as Tuesday.
Story Continued Below
Publicly, Republicans do not have the votes yet to confirm Kavanaugh, but GOP leaders seem confident they can push him through with brute force. Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) wouldn’t say whether undecided Republicans would back Kavanaugh. They received a burst of momentum on Friday morning, when Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), one of the key swing votes, announced he would back Kavanaugh.
“We’re still talking through all those issues, and I’m optimistic we’ll get to confirmation,” Cornyn said as he left the Capitol.
Flake was agonizing over the decision, he said, and seemed to be vacillating on where would land, viewing both Kavanaugh and Ford as credible on Thursday. But he ultimately decided that without corroboration of the assault allegation, he could vote against Kavanaugh.
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“I left the hearing yesterday with as much doubt as certainty," Flake said in a statement. "What I do know is that our system of justice affords a presumption of innocence to the accused, absent corroborating evidence."
Kavanaugh also picked up a key Republican vote shortly after a full GOP conference meeting immediately following Kavanaugh’s hearing, as Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) announced he would support the nominee. Corker and Flake were key to applying the brakes to Kavanaugh’s confirmation in order to hear out Ford.
But Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) remain undecided. Those two moderate Republicans, along with Flake and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), met privately before the Republican meeting to discuss the nomination. Manchin said no one in the room gave anything away on how they will come down.
Then, in the full GOP conference meeting, Murkowski, Collins and Flake offered their colleagues no signal of where they would land, according to an attendee. Rachel Mitchell, a lawyer who was retained by the Senate GOP to question Ford, broke down her analysis of the testimony to Republicans, but did not advise them how to vote. She told them that as a prosecutor she would not charge Kavanaugh or even pursue a search warrant, according to a person briefed on the meeting.
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Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) would not say how he would vote as he left the meeting. Sasse, one of the most vocal Trump critics in the Senate, said Mitchell gave Republicans in the room a “30-ish minute” presentation during which she laid out “facts that were established and not established.”
Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) received three standing ovations from Republicans for how he conducted the hearing. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who skewered Democrats for what he called a “despicable” attempt to derail Kavanaugh’s nomination, also received applause from the GOP, said Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.).
"There was an awful lot of exchange back and forth but it wasn't always positive,” Roberts said of the Republican gathering.
In addition to Manchin, Democratic Sens. Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota are viewed as potential votes for Kavanaugh. All are up for reelection in red states. Senators and aides expect that Donnelly, Manchin, Murkowski and Collins will all vote the same way, though which way that is remains unclear.
Democrats believe Heitkamp could vote no. But her opponent in her Senate race, Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), said he expects her to support the nominee despite Ford’s allegations.
Grassley declined to forecast how he thinks the critical Judiciary Committee meeting will go on Friday. “We’re meeting at 9:30 a.m., that’s all I can tell you,” he said. “There will be a debate starting at 9:30.”
His panel has 11 Republicans and 10 Democrats; only Flake's vote is in play. McConnell can bring Kavanaugh's nomination to the Senate floor regardless of whether he receives a favorable committee vote.
After the committee acts, McConnell is expected to move to a procedural vote on Saturday. If that's successful, another procedural vote would occur on Monday, and a final vote on Tuesday.
Kavanaugh needs at least 50 votes to be confirmed; Vice President Mike Pence would vote if the chamber is evenly split. If all Democrats vote against Kavanaugh, it would take two Republicans voting "no" to block his confirmation.
Rachael Bade, Sarah Ferris and Marianne Levine contributed to this report. | – After Thursday's high drama, the Senate Judiciary Committee looks poised to advance Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination to the full Senate. The vote is scheduled for 1:30pm Eastern, reports NPR. Going into the day, the main suspense had been whether Republican Jeff Flake of Arizona would side with Democrats in voting against Kavanaugh, but he announced his support for President Trump's pick before the panel convened, reports the Washington Post. “I wish that I could express the confidence that some of my colleagues have conveyed about what either did or did not happen in the early 1980s," said Flake in a statement. “What I do know is that our system of justice affords a presumption of innocence to the accused, absent corroborating evidence." Several Democrats walked out of the panel's meeting Friday morning, reports the AP, though top Democrat Dianne Feinstein was among those who stayed. Assuming the committee OKs Kavanaugh's nomination later in the afternoon, it would move on to the full Senate, with a final vote possible as early as Tuesday, reports the AP. Kavanaugh's prospects there remain uncertain, with key moderate Republicans such as Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski undecided, notes Politico. Another senator to watch is Democrat Joe Manchin, up for re-election in red-state West Virginia. |
If you have ever stood in line at airport security, you will know that no matter how many signs they post, or how curtly they shout at you, there is always that one person who fails to follow the directions about what you can and cannot pack in your carry-on bag.
Just last month a man was cited when officers discovered a loaded gun in his toiletry bag as he was passing through security at Ronald Reagan Airport in Washington, DC. It doesn’t take a genius to know that as a regular passenger, you can’t bring a deadly weapon on board. But flying in the face of common sense — and despite the fact that it could be against the law or potentially lead to criminal charges and huge fines — people attempt to take crazy things on planes all the time. Firearms and ammunition are just the tip of the iceberg.
In fact, there are so many scary and strange items, the people at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) have decided to show the world, via Instagram, the insane stuff people try to smuggle through the scanners, whether intentional or not. Here are our top 20 things discovered by the TSA.
Hand grenade
This scary-looking grenade was found in a carry-on bag at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. Thank goodness it was inert — which, by the way, doesn’t matter to TSA. No bueno.
Smoke bomb
A live, purple smoke grenade, usually used by the military, was discovered inside a checked bag at Las Vegas McCarran International Airport last month. This passenger will just have to buy his smoke grenade when he gets to his destination.
Throwing knives
These scary-looking blades were inside a carry-on bag at Chicago O’Hare International. The more frightening thing? They can be carried in checked baggage.
Six-bladed throwing star
Someone at Los Angeles International Airport attempted to take this through airport security in July 2012.
Live eels
It’s not quite snakes on a plane, but these live eels were hidden inside a checked bag leaving Miami International Airport in 2012. The owner also attempted to smuggle 163 tropical fish and 22 invertebrates out of the country.
Propane tanks
These three full and highly flammable propane tanks were inside someone’s carry-on bag going through a TSA checkpoint at Oakland International Airport. Perhaps there was a grill in the person’s checked bag.
Avalanche charge
This homemade explosive device, used for setting off an avalanche, was found inside a carry-on bag at Anchorage International Airport. The TSA was not amused, and the passenger was arrested.
Throwing axes
These deadly, sharp tactical throwing axes were inside a carry-on bag at Baltimore Airport.
Sickle
This was found in a carry-on at Newark International Airport last year. We are assuming the offending passenger was not the Grim Reaper.
Suicide bomber vest
Discovered in March 2013 inside a checked bag at the Indianapolis International Airport, luckily this vest was just a dummy used as a training aid that belonged to an explosives trainer.
Anti-tank weapon
This AT4 anti-tank weapon was hidden in a checked bag at Arnold Palmer Regional Airport in Pennsylvania in 2012. It was expended, but still prohibited.
Snakes
This passenger was no Samuel L. Jackson (who starred in “Snakes on a Plane”), but he had seven of these small, very much alive slithery fellas stuffed into nylon stockings and shoved down his pants as he attempted to board a flight in Miami in August 2011. We really hope the TSA agent asked, “Are those snakes in your pants, or are you just happy to see me?”
Meat cleaver
The owner of this cleaver tried to carry it on a flight from Newark International. No dice. If you must cut some meat, you will have to do it at your final destination — checking it is just fine.
Leather glove with finger spikes
Who knew Wolverine flew commercial? Maybe the owner of this crazy-looking glove was just a massive X-Men fan. Whatever the case, this gnarly-looking device was confiscated at Birmingham-Shuttlesworth Airport in February 2013.
Cannon barrel
Isn’t that heavy? Not something you see every day, let alone in someone’s luggage, but this centuries-old cannon barrel was found in a bag at Kahului Airport in Hawaii.
Stun gun
Is it makeup or is it a stun gun? This crafty-looking personal protection device was very cleverly disguised as a lipstick, but it was still spotted and disallowed on board a flight from Chicago Midway.
Human skull
In April 2013, TSA officers discovered these grim human remains in clay pots during a security check at Fort Lauderdale International Airport. The traveler who owned the pots had no idea about the skull inside.
Small dog
Back in February, this poor little chihuahua climbed into his owner’s suitcase while she was packing for a trip and she accidently locked him in. The stowaway was discovered by scanners at New York’s La Guardia Airport as the bag went through security. The pup was OK and happily reunited with his owner.
Signal flares
These seven high-powered flares and a launcher are usually used by the military. Not what you’d expect to find in a carry-on bag at Norfolk International Airport.
??????
The TSA people aren’t really sure what this is. But they’re positive it’s not allowed in a carry-on. ||||| Our officers have had some good finds this year at our checkpoints and we wanted to share our top 10 good catches with you. Some are dangerous, some simply look dangerous and can cause major delays, and others are just plain weird. Click on the links to read more about each good catch.
Top 10:
10) Snakes, turtles, and birds were found at Miami (MIA) and Los Angeles (LAX). I’m just happy there weren’t any lions, tigers, and bears… were found at Miami (MIA) and Los Angeles (LAX). I’m just happy there weren’t any lions, tigers, and bears…
9) A science project shut down a checkpoint at Omaha (OMA). I wonder if mentioning the shutting down of the checkpoint added enough flare to his presentation to score him some bonus points? shut down a checkpoint at Omaha (OMA). I wonder if mentioning the shutting down of the checkpoint added enough flare to his presentation to score him some bonus points?
8) An artfully concealed non-metallic martial arts weapon called a “Tactical Spike” was found in the sock of a passenger at Pensacola (PNS) after being screened by a body scanner. The only thing I keep in my sock is my foot. was found in the sock of a passenger at Pensacola (PNS) after being screened by a body scanner. The only thing I keep in my sock is my foot.
7) Inert landmines were found at Salt Lake City (SLC). I always travel with mine, don’t you??? were found at Salt Lake City (SLC). I always travel with mine, don’t you???
6) A stun gun disguised as a smart phone was found at Los Angeles (LAX). Not very smart to travel with this stunning device. was found at Los Angeles (LAX). Not very smart to travel with this stunning device.
5) A flare gun with seven flares was found in a passenger’s carry-on bag at Norfolk (ORF). Hmmm… pressurized cabin + 7 live flares = no good can come from this. was found in a passenger’s carry-on bag at Norfolk (ORF). Hmmm… pressurized cabin + 7 live flares = no good can come from this.
4) Two throwing knives concealed in hollowed out book were found at Washington National (DCA). Killer book… concealed in hollowed out bookwere found at Washington National (DCA). Killer book…
3) Over 1,200 firearms were discovered at TSA checkpoints across the nation in 2011. Many guns are found loaded with rounds in the chamber. Most passengers simply state they forgot they had a gun in their bag.
2) A loaded .380 pistol was found strapped to passenger’s ankle with the body scanner at Detroit (DTW). You guessed it, he forgot it was there… was found strapped to passenger’s ankle with the body scanner at Detroit (DTW). You guessed it, he forgot it was there…
1) Small chunks of C4 explosives were found in passenger’s checked luggage in Yuma (YUM). Believe it or not, he was brining it home to show his family. were found in passenger’s checked luggage in Yuma (YUM). Believe it or not, he was brining it home to show his family.
If you’re interested in reading about more finds such as these, be sure to read our weekly “TSA Week In Review” blog posts, posted every Friday.
Honorable mentions: 13) Invisible Space Aliens were detected at numerous checkpoints nationwide. were detected at numerous checkpoints nationwide. 12) Five inert grenades were found in passenger’s bag at Newark (EWR). were found in passenger’s bag at Newark (EWR). 11) 240 live fish were found swimming in 4 checked bags at Los Angeles (LAX). were found swimming in 4 checked bags at Los Angeles (LAX).
Blogger Bob Burns
TSA Blog Team | – While many travelers fret about whether they've exceeded the TSA limits for liquids in their carry-on luggage or whether they mistakenly packed their e-cigarettes in their checked bags (not allowed), others saunter right up to security checkpoints and baggage drop-offs with what the TSA calls "more offbeat items." The agency has compiled a short clip of the weirdest things its agents found in 2017, both in checked and carry-on luggage, and it's hard to imagine anyone would think these things would clear security. Here, the top five, which includes a scythe in a carry-on bag: |
A Chicagoland special House election to replace disgraced former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. has suddenly become Ground Zero of the national gun control debate, courtesy of anti-gun crusader Mike Bloomberg.
The billionaire New York City mayor’s super PAC is poised to dump at least $2 million into the race, sources told POLITICO — a staggering sum for a single House race that’s meant to thwart a National Rifle Association-aligned Democrat who was cruising along as the frontrunner until a barrage of Bloomberg-financed attack ads hit the airwaves.
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The massive independent expenditure by Independence USA PAC dwarfs what any of the 17 Democratic candidates have raised themselves. It’s a none-too-subtle statement of Bloomberg’s intention to take on the NRA after the Newtown, Conn. school shooting — though it’s debatable how much of a test case it is since the NRA is staying out of the race.
(PHOTOS: An interview with Michael Bloomberg)
The bulk of Bloomberg’s cash has financed an air war against Debbie Halvorson, a former one-term congresswoman and longtime ex-state legislator with an “A” rating from the NRA. The lone white candidate in the Democratic field, she’s hoping that her base of suburban and rural voters in the southern outskirts of the district — who by and large favor gun rights — will be enough to give her the small plurality it will take to win.
The Democratic primary is on Feb. 26. The general election is all but irrelevant given the district’s heavy Democratic makeup.
“I believe that substantial expenditure by the forces doing battle with gun violence will likely send a real … loud warning to a lot of members of Congress that it’s no longer safe to side with the NRA — that’s really what’s going on here,” said Robert Creamer, a partner at Democracy Partners who has followed the race.
Indeed, gun control advocates believe that defeating Halvorson would send a message nationally that the climate has changed in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre in December.
With the NRA steering clear, the air waves are awash in Bloomberg’s millions without any significant response. Still, Bloomberg’s ad onslaught comes as a number of Democrats have urged him to become a counterweight to the NRA when it comes to political spending, and as his aides have met with President Barack Obama’s advisers about coordinating on gun control efforts.
(Also on POLITICO: Obama: Chicago gun toll 'Newtown every 4 months')
A Bloomberg adviser said he made the decision to spend the money “without blinking.”
“The fact that it’s a special election, the fact that it’s in the middle of a national debate over the president’s plan … [there is an] understanding that it’s both a bellwether and a harbinger.”
Devora Kaye, a spokeswoman for the PAC, said the group is trying to seize “distinct window of opportunity” to make headway on gun control while the public is paying close attention.
“We must and we will continue to be aggressive in informing voters across the country about the necessity of electing leaders who will stand up to the NRA and help pass the president’s gun reform package,” she said.
An NRA spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Bloomberg, who until this week had only gone after Halvorson, is now backing Democratic state lawmaker Robin Kelly. A number of other members of the Illinois congressional delegation are also rallying around Kelly, who released internal data showing her inching ahead of Halvorson in the wake of the Bloomberg ads.
(Also on POLITICO: Bloomberg's D.C. footprint explodes)
Bloomberg also backed a handful of candidates last year in general elections in House districts, largely over the gun issue. But that was before the schoolhouse massacre. ||||| Mario Tama / Getty Images Newtown residents Claire Swanson, Kate Suba, Jaden Albrecht, Simran Chand and New London, Connecticut residents Rachel Pullen and her son Landon DeCecco, hold candles at a memorial for victims on the first Sunday following the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 16, 2012.
I haven’t read any stories about the innocent children and teachers whose lives were cut short because they went to school at Sandy Hook Elementary on Friday. I couldn’t read about the innocent victims who died because they went to a movie in July, either. It’s just too hideous. It would make me too angry. I know that at times like this I’m just supposed to hug my kids and think about the fragility of life, but you know what? I hug my kids all the time. I’ve been thinking about politics.
I explained after the Aurora movie-theater murders why I think this kind of tragedy ought to be politicized. Politics is serious business. At least it ought to be. The kind of people who believe politics is inappropriate at times like this tend to be the kind of people who believe politics is trivial entertainment. But politics matters, even though it’s typically covered like a game. I think Mike Huckabee’s remarks blaming the Newtown murders on restrictions on God in schools were absurd, but I agree with him that public policies have consequences. Now is a time to debate them, not to STFU.
(MORE: Full Transcript – Read the President’s address)
I’ve noticed that after the latest horrifying massacre, Beltway pundits (and not just liberal gun control advocates, the usual targets of the don’t-politicize-tragedies crowd) seem more receptive than usual to the idea that it ought to spark a policy discussion. To me, the carnage in Aurora seemed just as horrifying, the fates of the slaughtered at that Christian college in Oakland (no restrictions on God at that school, Governor Huckabee!) and Virginia Tech just as unfair. But apparently the specific targeting of small children makes this particular abomination different. Now it’s apparently OK to talk politics, even gun politics.
Well, here’s what I’m thinking: The politics of this particular abomination probably won’t be different at all. I explained last year after a psychopath shot Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and a bunch of bystanders in Tucson why Congress was unlikely to pass even modest gun restrictions, even after an attempted assassination of a colleague. Part of this was about Democratic uneasiness about guns; some Democrats with large rural constituencies are quite gun-friendly, while President Obama, an urban guy who supports gun control, avoided the topic for most of his first term to avoid alienating gun-friendly voters. But the main obstacle has been the modern Republican Party, which caters almost exclusively to its base. In 1994, dozens of Republicans supported President Clinton’s ban on assault weapons like the one used to mow down children in Newtown; in 2012, GOP congressmen who deviate from the party line become ex-congressmen.
(MORE: A City in Mourning: The View Inside Newtown)
Anyway, Republicans still control the House of Representatives. And even if Democratic leaders do get aggressive about gun control, they don’t have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, much less a filibuster-proof anti-gun majority. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid gets along fine with the National Rifle Association. Maybe Obama will start pushing for restrictions now that he doesn’t have to worry about reelection, but he doesn’t have a magic bully pulpit. Maybe Republican leaders will have a change of heart, or enough Republican back-benchers will defy their leaders to tip the scales, but I doubt it.
The point is that elections have consequences. And as I’ve written over and over in the Obama era, legislation that doesn’t pass Congress doesn’t make change. In his first term, liberals complained about Obama’s reluctance to push for a bigger stimulus, a second stimulus, a public option for health care, a cap-and-trade regime to combat global warming. But he didn’t have the votes for any of that stuff. In 2011, he finally launched a public campaign for a second stimulus, the American Jobs Act, but it went nowhere, because Republicans didn’t want it, and Obama’s public campaign made them want it even less. He doesn’t have superpowers. And a party unified around reality-defying ideas has a virtual veto on domestic policy legislation.
(PHOTOS: Connecticut Community Copes After School Shooting)
Still, Obama did manage to get a big and transformative stimulus, including $90 billion to launch a green energy revolution that is helping to combat global warming. He got a universal health care bill, including unprecedented support for the mental health resources that gun advocates keep saying are more important than gun controls. His Environmental Protection Agency just enacted new pollution regulations on soot that could save more lives than renewing the assault weapons ban. Change is hard, not impossible.
Of course, soot regulations aren’t going to comfort heartbroken families in Newtown. But they’re another reminder that politics is more than gaffes and memes. It’s life and death. And if this massacre really is different, if Americans decide they really do want to do something about guns, they’ll need to elect different politicians to Congress.
MORE: Funerals at Christmastime: Newtown Prepares to Mourn | – To gauge how well the Newtown massacre translates into political reality, keep an eye on the special election to fill the congressional seat vacated by Jesse Jackson Jr. in Chicago, reports Politico. Its story says New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is pouring up to $2 million into the race via his super PAC to defeat Democratic frontrunner Debbie Halvorson, who gets an A rating from the NRA. The gun lobby group hasn't joined the fight by putting up ads for Halvorson, but Politico sees the race nonetheless as "ground zero of the national gun debate." An adviser to Bloomberg agrees: “The fact that it’s a special election, the fact that it’s in the middle of a national debate over the president’s plan … [there is an] understanding that it’s both a bellwether and a harbinger." The election is Feb. 26. President Obama, meanwhile, returned to Chicago last night to make his case not only for stricter laws but for stronger community intervention to fight gun violence, reports the Chicago Tribune. One of his key quotes: "There was something profound and uniquely heartbreaking and tragic, obviously, about a group of 6-year-olds being killed. But last year, there were 443 murders with a firearm on the streets of this city, and 65 of those victims were 18 and under. So that's the equivalent of a Newtown every four months." |
Where does lightning flash most frequently? According to satellite observations, it occurs more often over land than over the oceans. And lightning seems to happen more often closer to the equator.
The map above shows the average yearly counts of lightning flashes per square kilometer from 1995 to 2013. Areas with the fewest number of flashes each year are gray and purple; areas with the largest number of lightning flashes—as many as 150 per year per square kilometer—are bright pink.
The map is based on data collected from 1998–2013 by the Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) on NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite, and from 1995–2000 by the Optical Transient Detector (OTD) on the OrbView-1/Microlab satellite. Flashes above 38 degrees North were observed by OTD only, as the satellite flew to higher latitudes.
The higher frequency of lighting over land makes sense because solid earth absorbs sunlight and heats up faster than water; this means there is stronger convection and greater atmospheric instability, leading to the formation of thunder and lightning producing storms.
According to NASA’s Daniel Cecil, a member of the Global Hydrology and Climate Center’s lightning team, the data also have revealed some interesting regional trends. For example, scientists have observed a large number of flashes during the month of May in the Brahmaputra Valley of far eastern India. The heating and weather patterns are unstable and changeable at that time—just before the onset of the monsoon, which brings plenty of rain but much less lightning. In contrast, locations in Central Africa and Northwestern South America have large amounts of lightning throughout the entire year.
As the map shows, the highest amounts of lightning flashes occur in the far eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and Lake Maracaibo in northwestern Venezuela.
Cecil noted that more years of data has not necessarily brought notable big-picture differences when compared to the earlier maps. “The longer record allows us to more confidently identify some of these finer details,” he said. “We can examine seasonality, and variability through the day and year-to-year.”
NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens using LIS/OTD data from the Global Hydrology and Climate Center Lightning Team. Caption by Kathryn Hansen. ||||| Earth has a new lightning capital, scientists have announced. Satellite data has shown that Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela receives more lightning flashes than anywhere else in the world.
Previously, the Congo Basin in Africa was identified as the lightning capital of the world, with a peak of 160 flashes per square kilometre each year. Researchers from the University of São Paulo and Nasa's Marshall Space Flight Center wanted to create an updated lightning map. Their findings will help weather forecasters understand lightning's relationship to weather.
The researchers used data from Nasa's Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS), a lightning sensor on a satellite in space. The LIS captures the time of a lightning flash, the location and its energy, even in daylight. They ranked lightning hotspots across the world by the amount of lightning flashes, using data spreading 16 years.
The results, published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, showed Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela has the most lightning flashes on Earth. On average, it had 233 lightning flashes per square kilometre per year.
"Lake Maracaibo has a unique geography and climatology that is ideal for the development of thunderstorms," said Dennis Buechler, researcher working on the study. Storms regularly form over the lake at night, as mountain breezes converge over the warm, moist air above the water. The conditions contribute to deep convection currents of air, which results in an average of 297 night-time thunderstorms each year.
The number two hotspot is near the city of Kabare in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The north west ridges of the Himalayas in Pakistan was the highest-ranked lightning hotspot in Asia. The Everglades in Florida was the top area in the US.
Africa has six of the world's top 10 lightning hotspots; the most of all continents. Most of these were close to Lake Victoria and other lakes along the East African Rift Valley. These lakes have a similar geography to Lake Maracaibo, explaining why they receive so many lightning flashes.
Richard Blakeslee, a researcher working on the study, said: "We can now observe lightning flash rate density in very fine detail on a global scale. Better understanding of lightning activity around the world enables policy makers, government agencies and other stakeholders to make more informed decisions related to weather and climate." ||||| You know the saying “lightning never strikes the same place twice”? Forget it. On a good night, one lake in Venezuela hosts thousands of lightning strikes every hour.
The phenomenon is known variously as the Beacon of Maracaibo, Catatumbo lightning or – cue dramatic roll of thunder - the “everlasting storm”. That last one might be a slight exaggeration but where the Catatumbo River meets Lake Maracaibo there is an average of 260 storm days per year.
Here the night sky is regularly illuminated for nine hours with thousands of flashes of naturally produced electricity.
Summer storms are familiar to many of us but along the equator, where temperatures are higher, skies rumble throughout the year. DR Congo in Central Africa is known as the thunderstorm capital of the world where the mountain village of Kifuka, with 158 lightning flashes per square kilometre each year, was thought to be the most electric place on Earth. That was until more detailed data was analysed.
Did you know: lightning almost never strikes the north or south poles
In 2014, official figures from NASA revealed that the Brahmaputra Valley of far eastern India had the highest monthly lightning flash rate between April and May when thunderous activity ushers in the annual monsoon.
But Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo earned a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for “highest concentration of lightning” with 250 lightning flashes per square kilometre each year. The storms ease off in the dryer months of January and February and are most spectacular at the peak of the wet season around October. At this time of year, you can see an average of 28 lightning flashes each minute.
Experts have sought reasons for the area’s uniquely intense storms for decades. In the 1960s it was thought uranium deposits in the bedrock attracted more lightning strikes. More recently, scientists suggested the conductivity of the air above the lake was boosted by the abundance of methane from oil fields below.
Neither theory has been proved though, so for now this record-breaking light show is attributed to a potent combination of topography and wind patterns.
“A lot of the [lightning] hotspots are tied to features in the terrain - slopes of mountain ranges, curved coastlines, combinations of those,” explains Dr Daniel Cecil from the Global Hydrology and Climate Centre’s lightning team.
“Having irregularities like that in the terrain can help generate wind patterns and heating or cooling patterns that would boost the likelihood of thunderstorms.”
In North West Venezuela, South America’s largest lake flows past the city of Maracaibo to join the Caribbean Sea. It lies in a fork of the Andes, so is surrounded on the other three sides by high mountain ridges. During the day, the hot tropical sun evaporates water from the lake and surrounding wetland. As night approaches, trade winds from the sea push this warm air into cold air cascading from the mountains. The hot air rises and dense cumulonimbus clouds form as towering plumes reaching up to 12 km (39,000 ft) high.
These distinctive storm clouds might look fluffy on the outside but inside a battle is raging. Where water droplets in the rising humid air collide with ice crystals in the cold air, static charges are produced and an electrical storm is unleashed.
The static electricity discharges in zig-zags of lightning that strike the ground, pass between clouds or flash inside them. The thunder itself is the shock wave of sound created when the heat of the lightning, which can be three times hotter than the surface of the sun, suddenly compresses the surrounding air. Alongside the sound and visuals are the special effects of heavy rain and hail.
The Catatumbo lightning is bright enough that it can be seen 400 km (250 miles) away and colonial sailors were said to use it for navigation. The force and duration of the storms have inspired many tales but eyewitness claims the lightning is multi-coloured are a trick of the light.
As it passes through dust or moisture, portions of the white light are absorbed or diffracted making it appear a different colour. There are also reports of it being silent but this is another perspective trick. The sluggish speed of sound compared to light means thunder may not reach distant spectators.
If you’re wondering how scientists record all of their lightning data you can put the idea of kites and keys out of your mind. Benjamin Franklin might have famously proved the electrical nature of lightning with that equipment but in the modern age more sophisticated technology has allowed us to observe from a safe distance – an altitude of 402.5km (250 miles) to be exact.
For 17 years, instruments on board the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), a joint project between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, collected a wealth of meteorological data as the satellite orbited the Earth. This included the Lightning Image Sensor which recorded flashes of light in tropical skies. With this data scientists were able to produce a map of the world’s lightning hotspots.
“To me the next generation of weather satellites is especially exciting,” says Dr Cecil, as TRMM finally runs out of fuel and returns to Earth.
“In the next few years, there are plans for lightning mapping instruments on a few different geostationary satellites placed over different parts of the globe. These will give us continuous measurements of lightning activity, instead of the brief snapshots we have seen from previous satellites in low-earth orbit.”
The ability to predict storms is becoming increasingly important as the global population grows, particularly in developing countries where people are more likely to work outdoors and lack sufficient lightning protection. To help us understand where in the world lightning strikes, storms are also analysed from below.
The World Wide Lightning Location Network (WWLLN) comprises sensors based at 70 universities and research institutions that pick up the very high frequency signals emitted by lightning. Prof Robert H. Holzworth, who leads the network from the University of Washington, says the ground based observations compliment the satellite data.
“The ground based systems can see the whole world instantaneously, and continuously, something no satellite system past, present or future can do. On the other hand, to be recorded electrically using VLF radio waves requires the more powerful lightning stroke energies. So, the global ground based systems do not see all the little strokes in the clouds, which can be seen by the satellites.”
For any aspiring storm chasers that can’t quite give up the mug of cocoa and cosy blanket, the WWLLN produce a real-time map of lightning strokes around the globe.
For the brave, tours to Lake Maracaibo are available. ||||| Shocking Find: Central Africa is the lightning 'capital' of the world
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Scott Sutherland
Meteorologist/Science Writer
Sunday, April 5, 2015, 11:32 AM - Think where you live gets a lot of lightning? Now, thanks to a new map from NASA's Earth Observatory, you can compare your region to others, to see who comes out on top. However, unless you live in a very specific area of Central Africa, you're going to come in at least second in this contest.
Using data collected from two orbiting satellite sensors - the Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) on NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite and the Optical Transient Detector (OTD) on the OrbView-1/Microlab satellite - NASA has put together a map of lightning strikes across the Earth, plotted by rate (number per square kilometre, per year).
The result was this:
Global lightning activity. Credit: Joshua Stevens/NASA Earth Observatory
Some regions stand out, like near Venezuela's Lake Maracaibo, along Lake Taha, in northwestern Ethiopia, throughout northwestern Colombia and most of central Africa.
However, for shear concentration of strikes, nowhere comes close to what a swath of land in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo sees. Stretching between Maiko National Park and the the Itombwe National Reserve, near the borders of Rwanda and Burundi, this region shows up like a beacon, with each square kilometre receiving around 100 lightning strikes every year.
Given that the entire region represents roughly 100,000 square kilometres, that's more than 10 million lightning strikes per year, concentrated in a very small part of the planet!
By comparison, the entire country of Canada - all 10 million square kilometres of it - apparently only sees a little over 2 million lightning strikes per year.
Zoom in closer and The two most concentrated areas, each about 100 kms on a side, are located at the northern and southern ends of that bright swath, just to the east of both Maiko and Itombwe. These two, each, receive around 15,000 strikes per year. An equivalent area in Canada - from Toronto to Hamilton, including all adjacent townships - would have to receive over 50 strikes each and every day, from April 1 to October 31, to match it.
Source: NASA Earth Observatory ||||| Where does on our planet does lightning flash most frequently? According to satellite observations, lightning occurs more often over land than over the oceans. And lightning seems to happen more often closer to the equator.
The map above shows the average yearly counts of lightning flashes per square kilometer from 1995 to 2013. Areas with the fewest number of flashes each year are gray and purple; areas with the largest number of lightning flashes—as many as 150 per year per square kilometer—are bright pink.
The higher frequency of lighting over land makes sense because solid earth absorbs sunlight and heats up faster than water. This means there is stronger convection and greater atmospheric instability, leading to the formation of thunder and lightning producing storms.
According to NASA’s Daniel Cecil, a member of the Global Hydrology and Climate Center’s lightning team, the data also have revealed some interesting regional trends. For example, scientists have observed a large number of flashes during the month of May in the Brahmaputra Valley of far eastern India. The heating and weather patterns are unstable and changeable at that time — just before the onset of the monsoon, which brings plenty of rain but much less lightning. In contrast, locations in Central Africa and Northwestern South America have large amounts of lightning throughout the entire year.
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As the map shows, the highest amounts of lightning flashes occur in the far eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and Lake Maracaibo in northwestern Venezuela.
The heat and humidity are at optimum levels at Lake Maracaibo, and the addition of wind caused by the surrounding Andes makes the lightning here the most intense and predictable in the world.
Bottom line: New map based on satellite data from 1993-2013 show where lightning occurs most frequently on Earth.
Read more from NASA’s Earth Observatory | – Bad news for us landlubbers: Lightning strikes more often here than it does on water, NASA reports. And things are particularly bad near the equator. In fact, some 90% of lightning on Earth strikes between the 38th parallels south and north, LiveScience reports. Want more specifics? A new NASA map reveals where lightning strikes occur most frequently, and Discovery reports the two top spots. One is northwestern Venezuela's Lake Maracaibo, which gets major storms thanks to local heat, humidity, and windiness. According to an io9 report from a few years ago, the area's residents experience so much lightning that they need to shut their blinds 300 nights per year; each night brings some 40,000 strikes. The other place is in the Democratic Republic of Congo's far east, between the country's Maiko National Park and Itombwe Nature Reserve. That not-so-big area gets more than 10 million lightning strikes each year, the Weather Network reports, compared to the 2 million that all of Canada gets. As for why the equator experiences so much lightning—and why it happens more on land than on water—Popular Science explains that it's a result of heat. The equator is, of course, hot thanks to the amount of sun it gets; meanwhile, land gets hot faster than water does. The map comes from the data two satellites collected between 1998 and 2013. (Lightning could increase in the coming years.) |
Throughout his childhood, Welles Crowther carried and wore a red bandanna, and as a Division I athlete playing lacrosse and hockey at Boston College, the bandanna was always there under his helmet.
After graduation, the 24-year-old took a job as an equities trader at Sandler O’Neill and Partners on the 104th floor of the south tower of the World Trade Center. It was Crowther's dream job, but something was missing.
"Welles called me one day. He said, 'You know, Dad, I think I want to change my career. I think I want to be a New York City firefighter,'" Jefferson Crowther recalled.
Welles Crowther had been a volunteer firefighter in Rockland County, N.Y., and when terrorists attacked the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, he put that training to work and lost his life while helping others.
Crowther's story is told in the new book "The Red Bandanna: A Life," by ESPN reporter Tom Rinaldi, who appeared on “GMA” today to explain that Crowther had become attached to carrying a red bandanna after receiving one from his father when he was just 6 years old.
After the north tower was struck by a passenger airplane that had been hijacked by terrorists, Crowther called his mother, Alison Crowther, and left a message to let her know he was OK.
But then the south tower -– the one in which Crowther’s office was located -- was struck by another hijacked commercial airliner.
On that same day, terrorists also commandeered airliners that crashed in Shanksville, Pa., and at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Nearly 3,000 people were killed that day as a result of the attacks at the three locations.
Multiple survivors of the attack on the south tower describe being helped by a man whose mouth and nose were covered by a red bandanna who set up triage and helped get them to safety.
“You heard this man's voice say, ‘I found the stairs. Follow me,’” Ling Young, one of those survivors, said.
That man -– later identified as Crowther -- reportedly carried one woman on his back down 17 flights of stairs and then went back up for another group of people. It's believed that he helped save as many as 12 lives.
"When I heard the news that the tower had come down, I knew in my heart of hearts that Welles was gone," his mother said. "It was just a mother's heart knowing."
Her son's body was found months later next to the bodies of a group of firefighters. He was posthumously made a member of the New York Fire Department.
Jefferson Crowther said he is amazed by what his son did for others in his final moments.
"To know that Welles in that figurative sense took off the equity trader hat and put it on the table, picked up his helmet -- firefighter's helmet and went to work. For me, that was an incredible, incredible thing to know," he said. ||||| When President Obama spoke at the opening of the 9/11 Museum at Ground Zero in New York City in 2011, he told the story of Welles Crowther, a young man who worked at a financial firm on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center but dreamt of and was considering actually becoming a New York firefighter.
Then the planes hit the towers and on that terrible day, a man wearing a red bandanna saved dozens of people by leading them to safety, even carrying one woman on his back down nearly 20 flights of stairs. Instead of fleeing for safety, like the firefighter he dreamed of becoming, Crowther went back inside again and again.
Here is an excerpt from The Red Bandanna (Penguin Press), the new book about a hero and the legacy he left behind.
They waited at bedrock.
Seven stories below the ground, seventy feet deep in the earth, they sat. On a bright spring morning, while flags flew at half-staff in the memorial plaza far above, some seven hundred had made the long descent to gather in this chamber. Together they met: strong and weak, mournful and hopeful, persistent and diminished.
Families and firefighters, city officials and rescue workers, orphans and political leaders, they waited for the solemn ceremony to begin.
Shortly after ten-thirty a.m., the president of the United States stepped to the lectern, dressed in a black suit and tie. He faced a cavernous room called Foundation Hall, a soaring open space with remnants of twisted steel and an exposed sixty-four-foot-high slurry wall, bolted in place as if it were still holding back the tidal waters of the nearby Hudson River. The president looked out at the numbered seats and ordered rows set up for the program, at the day’s invited guests, including the governors of New York and New Jersey, the previous two mayors of New York City and the one currently holding the office, and a former president and his wife, who was the current secretary of state.
In this hole in the heart of a city, in a quiet and somber voice, Barack Obama began his speech for the occasion: the dedication ceremony of the National September 11 Memorial Museum at ground zero.
If it were a time for platitudes or soaring themes, he chose not to use them. He spoke slowly, in the measured and deliberate cadence of an elegy. As he delivered his first words, a mother sat backstage. After the president’s remarks were finished, she would walk to a different microphone and share some of her family’s story. For now, she sat out of sight of the assembly. There was a television monitor set up for her to watch the president’s address, but she couldn’t bear to look. Her eyes remained on the floor.
In the second row of seats, directly behind the mayor of New York City, a father kept his chin up and eyes forward, looking toward the podium. It was good that his wife would soon speak for him and their family. He couldn’t yet bear to; the emotion would overwhelm him. As the president spoke, he sat and listened. At the first mention of his son’s name, he began to weep. On September 11, 2001, in the worst terrorist attack in the history of America, 2,977 people died. Standing in the footprint of the fallen towers that spring morning, the president chose to speak about just one. He singled out a young man who helped save people he didn’t know in the South Tower of the World Trade Center before its collapse. He recounted the scene in the 78th floor sky lobby. As fires burned and smoke filled the air, in darkness and chaos, a voice rose, leading people toward the stairs and then down seventeen flights to safety. One victim was too weak to make the descent, so he carried her across his back. When the young man reached a lower floor with clear air, he urged the group to continue down. Then he left them, turned around, and climbed those long flights back up, looking for others he might rescue. For months, the man’s identity remained a mystery, but one clue had emerged, the common thread to the descriptions of the people he guided and carried.
“They didn’t know his name,” the president told those assembled at the ceremony. “They didn’t know where he came from. But they knew their lives had been saved by the man in the red bandanna.”
The words echoed across the hall and off a graffiti-covered steel beam, standing tall in this part of the museum, a remnant of the towers. Amid the colorful messages and notes scrawled across the steel of the I beam was a photo of the young man, a picture holding the promise that one day he would be found.
By the time he was recovered at ground zero in March 2002, six months after the towers collapsed, the truth was beginning to emerge. And so, too, would the story of his finest moments, his selfless, fatal choice on that September morning. Welles Crowther was the man in the red bandanna.
“All those who come here will have a chance to know the sacrifice of a young man,” the president said toward the end of his speech. “A man who gave his life so others might live.”
Excerpted from The Red Bandanna by Tom Rinaldi. Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © Tom Rinaldi, 2016. ||||| In the footprint of Ground Zero, the site of the tragedy that killed more than 2,000 people, President Obama and New York political leaders gathered to remind us that the emotional weight of Sept. 11, 2001, still hasn't lifted.
They, along with hundreds of people, were gathered to dedicate the 9/11 Museum, which opens to the public Monday.
The dedication began with a children's choir singing the song "Somewhere" from the musical West Side Story—their voices echoing in the cavernous room bordered by the walls that formed the original bedrock of the Twin Towers.
At the event were Barack and Michelle Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, along with former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, current Mayor Bill de Blasio, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Notably absent from the event was George W. Bush.
Read President Obama's full remarks from the event:
Mayor Bloomberg, Governor Cuomo, honored guests, families of the fallen: In those awful moments after the South Tower was hit, some of the injured huddled in the wreckage of the 78th floor. The fires were spreading. The air was filled with smoke. It was dark. They could barely see. It seemed as if there was no way out. And then there came a voice—clear, calm, saying he had found the stairs. A young man, in his 20s, strong, emerged from the smoke, and over his nose and his mouth, he wore a red handkerchief. He called for fire extinguishers to fight back the flames. He attended to the wounded. He led those survivors down the stairs to safety, and carried a woman on his shoulders down 17 flights. Then, he went back, back up all those flights, then back down again, bringing more wounded to safety, until that moment when the tower fell. They didn't know his name. They didn't know where he came from, but they knew their lives had been saved by the man in the red bandanna.
Again, Mayor Bloomberg, distinguished guests, Mayor DeBlasio, Governors Christie and Cuomo, the families and survivors of that day, to all those who responded with such courage, on behalf of Michelle and myself and the American people, it is an honor for us to join in your memories. To recall and to reflect, but above all, to reaffirm the true spirit of 9/11—love, compassion, sacrifice—and to enshrine it forever in the heart of our nation.
Michelle and I just had the opportunity to join with others on a visit with some of the survivors and families—men and women who inspire us all—and we had the chance to visit some of the exhibits. And I think all who come here will find it to be a profound and moving experience. I want to express our deep gratitude to everybody who was involved in this great undertaking, for bringing us to this day, for giving us this sacred place of healing and of hope. Here at this memorial, at this museum, we come together. We stand in the footprints of two mighty towers, graced by the rush of eternal waters. We look into the faces of nearly 3,000 innocent souls, men and women and children of every race, every creed, from every corner of the world. We can touch their names and hear their voices and glimpse the small items that speak to the beauty of their lives—a wedding ring, a helmet, a shining badge. Here we tell their story so that generations yet unborn will never forget. Of coworkers who led others to safety. The passengers who stormed the cockpit. Our men and women in uniform who rushed into an inferno. Our first responders who charged up those stairs. A generation of service members—our 9/11 generation—who have served with honor in more than a decade of war. A nation that stands tall and united and unafraid because no act of terror can match the strength or the character of our country. Like the great wall and bedrock that embrace us today, nothing can ever break us. Nothing can change who we are as Americans.
On that September morning, Allison Crowther lost her son, Welles. Months later, she was reading the newspaper, an article about those final minutes in the towers. Survivors recounted how a young man wearing a red handkerchief had led them to safety. And in that moment, Allison knew. Ever since he was a boy, her son had always carried a red handkerchief. Her son, Welles, was the man in the red bandanna. Welles was just 24 years old, with a broad smile and a bright future. He worked in the South Tower on the 104th floor. He had a big laugh, a joy of life, and dreams of seeing the world. He worked in finance, but he had also been a volunteer firefighter. And after the planes hit, he put on that bandanna and spent his final moments saving others. Three years ago this month, after our SEALS made sure that justice was done, I came to Ground Zero. And among the families here that day was Allison Crowther, and she told me about Welles and his fearless spirit. And she showed me a handkerchief like the one he wore that morning. And today, as we saw on our tour, one of his red handkerchiefs is on display in this museum. And from this day forward, all those who come here will have a chance to know the sacrifice of a young man who, like so many, gave his life so others might live. Those we lost live on in us—in the families who love them still, in the friends who remember them always, and in a nation that will honor them now and forever. And today it is my honor to introduce two women forever bound by that day united in their determination to keep alive the true spirit of 9/11: Welles Crowther's mother, Allison, and one of those he saved, Ling Young. | – President Obama today helped dedicate the National September 11 Memorial Museum, and his comments opened with the recollection of a man who "emerged from the smoke, and over his nose and his mouth, he wore a red handkerchief." It was Welles Crowther, a 24-year-old working on the South Tower's 104th floor who, as Obama explained, had carried a red handkerchief with him since he was a child. And on 9/11, the "man in the red bandana" was a hero: "He called for fire extinguishers to fight back the flames. He attended to the wounded. He led those survivors down the stairs to safety, and carried a woman on his shoulders down 17 flights. Then, he went back, back up all those flights, then back down again, bringing more wounded to safety, until that moment when the tower fell. ... And today, as we saw on our tour, one of his red handkerchiefs is on display in this museum. And from this day forward, all those who come here will have a chance to know the sacrifice of a young man who, like so many, gave his life so others might live." In advance of his comments, Obama, the first lady, and former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg toured the museum, whose seven stories hold artifacts from the attack, including what CNN calls the "ordinary": leather gloves (used during the recovery effort), a red wallet (owned by a Cantor Fitzgerald employee), a $2 bill (from the wallet of a victim who gave his wife one, too, as a reminder of their second chance at love). USA Today reports that 9/11 survivors, the victims' families, and first responders can visit for free between now and when it opens to the public (admission: $24) on Wednesday. |
With no place to go and no one to turn to, Tierra Gray took her two young children to the Butler County Sheriff’s Office Saturday night.
Gray said they needed a place to stay after being evicted from their home. But making that decision, Gray said, was one of the lowest points of her life.
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"I was just like Lord, what is it that I am supposed to do? What am I supposed to do right now? My kids are here sleeping inside of a jail lobby. I never thought I'd go through that, I mean, to that point. That right there was my breaking point,” Gray said.
Gray said she spent that night crying, and praying, asking God to send her an angel.
The next morning Deputy Brian Bussell pulled Gray into his office. Gray thought he was going to ask her to take her children and leave, instead, to her surprise, they talked about life and God.
Bussell then told Gray he was going to help her get back on her feet.
"He told me that he was going to help and that we were going to get everything we need taken care of, and I just cried,” Gray said. “I was like, 'Thank God, you are the angel I have been praying for all night.'”
Gray said Bussell loaded the family into his cruiser and took them to get food, then he paid for a hotel room for the family for the next 10 days, but that’s not all.
According to Gray, the day ended with a shopping spree: new shoes and clothes for the kids, toiletries, snacks, and money out of the deputy’s own wallet. His actions did not go unnoticed, even by Gray’s 8-year-old son, Ziare.
“He’s the best,” Ziare said. “He’s like a friend to me.”
Gray decided to share the message on her Facebook page, hoping to spread a good news story surrounding law enforcement:
"God is so good!! He brought this Angel Officer Brian Bussel and the Butler County Sheriff Department to our rescue this morning. I knew God has a reason for everything he does even though we have been going through storm after storm our rainbow sure has come this morning. My kids and myself will never forget what God and his Angels had done for us!! Did I say God is good? I think I did but I'm gonna say it again, GOD IS GOOD ALL THE TIME EVEN THROUGH THE MIST OF YOUR STORMY WEATHER!!! Amen!! Will everyone please share this post so that he is recognized for being our Angel sent from God please!!! This should make news. Share!!!! share!!!! share!!!!"
“There are good cops,” Gray said. “They’re still out there. They’re still heroes to our children.”
Gray said it’s important for parent’s to teach their children respect for officers. Her hope, is others will take notice of what Bussell did and share her message on Facebook.
“I’m just really, really grateful,” she said. "Prayer goes a long way.”
The Butler County Sheriff’s Office said it's not surprised by Bussell’s kindness and that he would not call attention to his actions.
In the meantime,Gray said family and friends are trying to gather enough money to get the young family a place to live. Gray’s husband is working in Cincinnati in hopes of saving enough money to buy a car. ||||| OXFORD, Ohio — If not for one Butler County Sheriff’s deputy, a local mother and her two children might have found themselves sleeping on the street.
Tierra Gray never thought she would find herself homeless, but recently, she said, her landlord evicted her — along with her two young sons — after she missed a rent payment.
Since, she said, they have bounced from friends to family to church members’ homes.
Finally, they turned to the Butler County Sheriff’s Office for help, where they were met with blankets and allowed to stay in the lobby overnight, having only the clothes on their backs.
The next morning, Gray was approached by Deputy Brian Bussell.
“I’m thinking he’s going to say, ‘You guys can’t be here any longer… You have to find something else.’”
But that’s not what Bussell had in store for Gray and her children. Instead, he arranged for the three to have as many as 10 days’ stay in a hotel while Gray looks for a new place to live.
Not only that, Gray said, but Bussell also helped arrange for new clothes and shoes for the boys, as well as stocking them up on food.
In a Facebook post Monday, said “(she) doesn’t know what (she) would have done” and said “no one sees the good in our officers.”
Here is Gray's full, unedited Facebook post relating the story in her own words. The post was accompanied by the above photo: | – While feeling like she had finally hit rock bottom, a homeless mother of two found her guardian angel in the form of an Ohio sheriff's deputy, WCPO reports. Tierra Gray and her sons were rotating between the homes of friends, family, and church members after being evicted for failing to make a rent payment. On Saturday, with nowhere else to go, the family ended up staying at the Butler County Sheriff's Office. "My kids are here sleeping inside of a jail lobby," Gray tells WLWT. "I never thought I'd go through that, I mean, to that point. That right there was my breaking point." In the morning, she was approached by Deputy Brian Bussell. She thought he was about to kick them out, WCPO reports. Instead Bussell paid for a hotel room for Gray and her sons for 10 days while they looked for a new place to stay, WCPO reports. He also bought them food and new clothes. "There are good cops," Gray tells WLWT. "They're still out there. They're still heroes to our children." But Bussell wasn't done yet. With Gray's friends and family trying to pull together enough money for an apartment, Bussell used a connection to get them one, WLWT reports. It looks like they won't need all 10 days in that hotel: The family moves in Friday. "God has blessed us this week," Gray writes on her Facebook. "I don't know what I would have done." (An Indiana man's positive encounter with police is also going viral.) |
"Girls Gone Wild" creator Joe Francis must complete a year of psychological counseling and anger management as part of a sentence for assault and falsely imprisoning three women.
Francis was sentenced Tuesday to 270 days in jail and three years probation after his conviction on five charges stemming from a Jan. 29, 2011, incident.
The judge handed down the sentence after denying Francis' lawyer's motion for a new trial. The judge told Francis the women "were very credible" and that he needed anger management for his "temper."
He was ordered held in lieu of $250,000.
"Whether a celebrity or not, you will be held accountable for your misdeeds," former City Atty. Carmen A. Trutanich said in a statement at time of the conviction.
The victims told police they had gone to the Supper Club in Hollywood to celebrate a college graduation and had a brief conversation with Francis.
At closing time, Francis grabbed one of the women by the hand and took her to his limo. The two other women followed, believing Francis would give them a lift to their car.
But during the ride, Francis' bodyguard and driver allegedly produced sheriff's badges and did not allow the women to get out of the limo.
The group was taken to Francis' gated home, where a physical altercation ensued between Francis and two of the women as he allegedly attempted to pull one of them away from the others, authorities said.
Francis grabbed one of the women by the throat and hair and pushed and slammed her head into the tile floor four times, according to authorities.
The women were escorted out of the house and allegedly told a taxi would not be called and paid for if they called the police. Authorities said Francis threatened the women if they called police.
While in a taxi driving back to Hollywood, the women called 911 and met LAPD officers where their car was parked. The results of the investigation were forwarded to the city attorney’s office for prosecution.
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Lancaster man convicted in San Diego County freeway shootings in 2011 ||||| Arnold Turner/ARNOLD TURNER/INVISION/AP A California judge issued a warrant for the arrest of Joe Francis, the founder of "Girls Gone Wild," after he failed to turn in two of his luxury cars as part of a bankruptcy deal.
The founder of "Girls Gone Wild" is a wanted man.
A Los Angeles judge issued an arrest warrant for the bankrupt porn company’s creator, Joe Francis, after he failed to fork over two high-end cars as part of his liquidation deal.
He was due to turn in the 2007 Cadillac Escalade and the 2012 Bentley Flying Spur to the lawyers who sold his nearly naked college girl empire last year, the Wall Street Journal’s Bankruptcy Beat reported.
But Francis, who is likely living in Mexico, said a Mexican strip-club boss stole the two ritzy cars as payback for several "Girls Gone Wild" events that fell through at his joints.
The racy brand was sold last year after it filed for bankruptcy in 2013. Francis did not own the company at the time of the bankruptcy filing.
The chapter 11 protection meant the Las Vegas resorts — where Francis racked up more than $30 million in gambling and other debts — couldn’t snatch up the Girls Gone Wild assets.
Last year a second U.S. Judge recommended jail time for Francis, however Bankruptcy Judge Sandra Klein turned to Olguin, a district court judge, for a final decision.
[email protected] | – Your fondest dream has come true: Joe Francis, creator of that oh-so-classiest of franchises, Girls Gone Wild, has been sentenced to jail. Francis got a 270-day sentence yesterday for his conviction in a pretty crazy assault, but he assures TMZ he's not going anywhere. The sentence is "ridiculous" and "absurd," he says, and he's appealing it. It could take years for a judge to reject the appeal, TMZ explains, and Francis won't have to turn himself in until that happens. (Or he could win the appeal, which of course is what he predicts will happen.) "I'm 100% innocent and the evidence showed I'm 100% innocent and, I mean, there's really nothing else to say. I'm 100% innocent and the evidence showed it," Francis said. "There's no way that I kidnapped three girls in this car, this very car. ... There's no way I've ever had to force anyone to get in this car. Ever." Also included in his sentence: a year of psychological counseling and anger management, and three years of probation, the Los Angeles Times reports. |
University Of Minnesota Football Team Ends Boycott, Will Play Bowl Game
Enlarge this image toggle caption Paul Battaglia/AP Paul Battaglia/AP
Ending a boycott that was sparked by the suspension of 10 players over an alleged sexual assault, the University of Minnesota's football team says they'll play in the Dec. 27 Holiday Bowl. The team relented after meeting with school administrators Friday.
In addition to promising to play in the game in San Diego later this month, the team sought to clarify its position.
"Let me first state so there is no misperception: sexual harassment and violence against women have no place on this campus, on our team, in our society, and at no time is it ever condoned," said senior wide receiver Drew Wolitarski.
The team's statement, delivered by Wolitarski, also faulted the school's leaders for not giving them any advance notice about the suspensions.
The players had earlier complained that several of the athletes had already been punished with multiple-game suspensions because of the case, and that the new suspensions — and in some cases, potential expulsions — levied by the university's Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action had come without due process.
From St. Paul, Minnesota Public Radio's Tim Nelson reports: ||||| Play Facebook
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The University of Minnesota's football team will hit the field for the upcoming Holiday Bowl, they said Saturday, ending a brief boycott done in protest after 10 players were indefinitely suspended from the team.
While those players remain suspended, the team said they agreed on other conditions in order for the rest of them to return.
In making their decision, the team also acknowledged the issue of sexual assault — the reason that led to the players' suspension this week — and said finishing out the year was important.
Related: University of Minnesota Football Players Boycott Activities
"So many before us have given so much to this University and this football team; so many coaches, staff, administrators, professors, alumni, fans, and our community have invested heavily in the success of our program," the team said in a prepared statement. "We recognize that we must not let these people down."
On Thursday, the uniformed Gophers players stood shoulder-to-shoulder during a news conference to say all 99 teammates would boycott practices before the Dec. 27 bowl — and would skip the sporting spectacle against Washington State University altogether — if the school did not lift the suspensions of the 10 players.
But the team said Saturday they recognized they were in a losing position.
"After many hours of discussion within our team, and after speaking with President (Eric) Kaler, it became clear that our original request of having the 10 suspensions overturned was not going to happen," their statement said.
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During a meeting Friday night with Kaler and university athletic director Mark Coyle, the students said they came to a different agreement: Allow the suspended players to get a "fair hearing" on the issue with a "diverse review panel" and have the school show greater support for the overall team.
In addition, the team said, the players would "use our status as public figures to bring more exposure to the issue of sexual harassment and violence against women." Details of the agreements would be forthcoming, the team added.
Kaler told reporters Saturday that the school does stand behind its football team.
"I think the statement by the students today around support for victims of sexual assault is important," he said. "I will continue to amplify the fact that the football team's action in support of their teammates was not in support of sexual violence."
The suspension of the 10 players stems from a Sept. 2 incident in which a female student had sexual contact with players. In a redacted police report, a police investigator said the sexual encounter with one player appeared to be consensual based on videos taken at the time and shown to police by the player, according to the Star-Tribune newspaper.
However, the Star-Tribune reported, the woman told police that sexual contact with three other players was not consensual. During the course of the night, she said, she had been drinking and had sex with one player. But she was forced to have sex with others against her will, she said in court testimony in order to obtain a restraining order against five of the players.
University of Minnesota football team members talk to reporters in Minneapolis on Dec. 15, 2016. Jeff Wheeler / AP
While six players were involved in the incident itself, police said, it's unclear why the others have been implicated.
In the end, no players were ever arrested, and the Hennepin County Attorney's Office on Oct. 3 said it declined to press charges because of "insufficient" evidence.
An attorney for the 10 players said he will appeal the suspensions.
Students opposed to the team's decision to have a boycott gathered to protest on the university's campus Saturday. The demonstration asked for the community to "#standwithsurvivors."
Nevertheless, in addressing the boycott Saturday, the team said while they still have questions about why certain players were suspended, the players don't condone violence against women.
"There is only one acceptable way to treat all women and all men, and that is with the utmost of respect at all times," the team said. ||||| Five of the 10 University of Minnesota football players suspended from the team in the fallout of a student’s sexual assault allegation now face expulsion from school, the players’ attorney, Lee Hutton, said Wednesday night.
Four other players face a one-year suspension and another could get probation stemming from the Sept. 2 incident. The school discipline comes weeks after a criminal investigation resulted in no arrests or charges.
A woman’s claim that she was assaulted in the early morning hours after the Gophers’ first game, documented through police reports and court testimony, ultimately led to an investigation by the school’s office for Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action.
Hutton said the EOAA recommended expulsion for Ray Buford, Carlton Djam, KiAnte Hardin, Dior Johnson and Tamarion Johnson; one-year suspensions from the university for Seth Green, Kobe McCrary, Mark Williams and Antoine Winfield Jr., and probation for Antonio Shenault.
Some of the players were directly accused in the alleged sexual assault; the involvement of others is unclear. Hutton, who is representing all 10 players, said he is working on their appeals.
University President Eric Kaler wrote in a letter to donors Wednesday that football coach Tracy Claeys, with athletic director Mark Coyle’s support, decided to suspend the players from the team ahead of its Dec. 27 bowl game in San Diego.
“The need to take actions like this is incredibly disappointing. Unfortunately, these types of situations are difficult for the University because we are limited in what we can say,” Kaler wrote. “While we strive to be transparent in all that we do, the fact is that, under the law, our students have privacy rights that we value and respect.”
Hutton confirmed that all the suspensions stem from the incident in a Dinkytown apartment after the team’s season-opening victory over Oregon State. After the complaint was first reported, the Gophers suspended four players — Buford, Hardin, Dior Johnson and Tamarion Johnson — for an unspecified violation of team rules. Those players missed three games while police investigated.
They were reinstated when the Hennepin County attorney declined to press charges. The Star Tribune initially did not specify the nature of the investigation because the players were not charged.
The university’s statement said: “Due to privacy restrictions relating to student educational data, there is nothing further the University can share.”
Reporting to police
According to police reports and the student’s testimony, the student, who is part of the gameday operations at TCF Bank Stadium, drank five to six shots of vodka on the night of Sept. 1 before heading out of her apartment with her roommates toward Dinkytown.
She then went with two football players to the Radius, an off-campus apartment building. Though she said her memory was spotty, she recalled Djam in a common area asking her to go up to his apartment. She would later testify that she had no intention of having sex.
She said she felt panicked when Djam walked her into his bedroom, but later testified that he never pushed her, prevented her from leaving or said anything threatening to her.
Asked during a court hearing why she didn’t leave, she said, “I felt scared, trapped, isolated with someone I felt had power over me.”
At some point, they began having sex. The police report said “she doesn’t have a recall about how the sex acts started.”
After Djam, others followed. She told police she saw a line of men waiting to take turns.
“I was removing myself from my mind and my body to help myself from the pain and experience going on,” she testified.
She estimated there were at least a dozen men. “I was shoving people off of me,” she testified. “They kept ignoring my pleas for help. Anything I said they laughed. They tried to cheer people on.”
About an hour and a half later, she said, she was allowed to leave. She called her sister, who told her to go to the hospital immediately, where she was given a rape exam, while her mother made a report to Minneapolis police. The next day, an officer sat down with the student, who described her version of what happened.
On Sept. 8, police investigators Eric Faulconer and Matthew Wente interviewed Djam. He acknowledged having sex with the woman, but was adamant that it was consensual. As proof, he played them three separate videos, totaling about 90 seconds, taken that morning.
During an 8-second clip, the woman “appears lucid, alert, somewhat playful and fully conscious; she does not appear to be objecting to anything at this time,” Wente wrote in his report. After viewing two additional videos, he wrote “the sexual contact appears entirely consensual.”
Police later interviewed four other players, who each said the sex was consensual.
On Sept. 30, Wente sent the investigation to the Hennepin County Attorney’s office for possible prosecution. In it, he wrote about the videos, “at no time does she indicate that she is in distress or that the contact is unwelcome or nonconsensual.”
On Oct. 3 the attorney’s office announced there would be no charges.
Afterward, the alleged victim filed a restraining order against six of the players, asking that they be made to stay away from the stadium. After a judge granted the orders, the woman dropped a petition against one of the players.
Hutton, the players’ attorney, appealed, setting up a hearing where the woman testified for several hours. The hearing eventually ended in a settlement — the restraining order would be dropped, but the players still had to stay 20 feet away from the woman and have no contact with her. The two sides also agreed that neither would be able to file a lawsuit.
“I’m glad this is over,” the student read in a statement after the hearing. “This has never been about punishing anyone, I just wanted to feel safe. Because of this resolution that we came to, now I do.”
Claeys and Coyle briefly addressed the matter separately Wednesday. Both said they were prohibited from discussing details of the university investigation. | – The University of Minnesota football team has ended its boycott of all football activities—meaning the team will compete in the Holiday Bowl on Dec. 27. NBC News reports the team announced the boycott Thursday after 10 players were suspended for an alleged sexual assault. Players were upset they weren't notified of the suspensions ahead of time and felt the Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action investigation that led to them lacked "due process," according to NPR. The team met with school administrators Friday. They said they decided to end the boycott after "it became clear" the suspended students would not be reinstated. In return, they say the university agreed to give the suspended players a "fair hearing" with a "diverse review panel." The 10 players are facing a range of punishments from expulsion to a one-year suspension for the alleged gang rape of a female student in September, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports. The woman had been drinking when she went to a football player's apartment. According to police reports and her testimony, at least a dozen men got in line to have sex with her against her will. She says she "felt scared, trapped, isolated." She says the men ignored her cries for help, laughed at her, and cheered each other on. The accused players say the sex was consensual, and no criminal charges were filed. In a statement following the end of their boycott, the football team said, "There is no misperception: Sexual harassment and violence against women have no place on this campus, on our team." |
Tripoli, Libya (CNN) -- As rebel and pro-government forces in Libya maneuvered on the battlefield Wednesday, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi urged U.S. President Barack Obama to end the NATO bombing of his war-torn country.
Gadhafi made the appeal in a letter to the American president, a senior administration official said.
But the official said there was "nothing new" in the letter, the thrust of which was an appeal for an end to the alliance's air operations. It contained no offers to negotiate or step down, and the official said the administration isn't taking the note seriously.
Gadhafi asked Obama to stop the "unjust war against a small people of a developing country" and said those in the opposition are terrorists and members of al Qaeda, the official said.
"We have been hurt more morally than physically because of what had happened against us in both deeds and words by you," Gadhafi wrote, according to the official. "Despite all this you will always remain our son."
The strongman expressed hope that Obama wins re-election next year, the official added. And he wrote that a democratic society cannot be built through missiles and aircraft.
"You are a man who has enough courage to annul a wrong and mistaken action," the leader wrote to the president.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the NATO strikes will stop when Gadhafi steps down and leaves the country.
"I don't think there is any mystery about what is expected from Mr. Gadhafi at this time," Clinton said.
The letter came amid diplomatic, economic and military developments in Libya, which remains in a deadly stalemate as pro-Gadhafi forces battle opposition fighters demanding democracy and an end to Gadhafi's nearly 42-year-rule.
A British airstrike hit an oil field in the eastern Libyan town of Sarir on Wednesday, causing damage to a main pipeline, Libyan Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Kaim told reporters.
A tanker carrying crude oil left the eastern Libyan port of Tobruk on Wednesday in what was the first known export of oil by the fledgling opposition during the conflict, a sign of optimism for them.
Rebel fighters and pro-Gadhafi forces have been pushing back and forth between al-Brega and Ajdabiya, while residents in the western city of Misrata are spending their days in fear.
Also Wednesday, ex-U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon, who met with Gadhafi within the past decade, paid a visit to the Libyan capital with a cease-fire plan and a clear message to the embattled ruler that he must step down.
Former U.S. Congressman Weldon says he will meet with Gadhafi
Weldon, speaking in an interview with CNN affiliate WPIX-TV in New York, said he planned to meet with Gadhafi and Libyan Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Kaim.
"It's a very solemn time because there's so much at risk here," said Weldon, who led a congressional delegation to Libya in 2004 and is visiting Tripoli at Gadhafi's invitation. Weldon is a Republican who represented a suburban Philadelphia district.
"I'm here to tell him face to face it's time for him to leave. It's time for him to step down, allow the people to take over the government of this country."
In an opinion piece published Wednesday in The New York Times, Weldon said he is proposing a cease-fire, "with the Libyan Army withdrawing from contested cities and rebel forces ending attempts to advance."
There's been seesaw fighting between pro- and anti-Gadhafi troops between al-Brega and Ajdabiya, CNN's Ben Wedeman reported.
On Tuesday night, Gadhafi forces moved 40 kilometers (about 25 miles) from al-Brega to Ajdabiya, and then Wednesday, the rebels pushed them back 10 kilometers (six miles).
At one point, rebels let loose with barrage of rockets, and they were answered by artillery and mortars.
Gadhafi paid U.S. firms to polish his image
"It moves back and forth," Wedeman reported.
A CNN team saw equipment the rebels didn't have before such as night-vision goggles and two Milan anti-tank missiles. Fighters said they obtained the missiles from the transitional government in Benghazi but didn't know their origin.
Rebel leaders have criticized NATO's mission to help protect civilians in recent days, saying residents in Misrata and elsewhere have suffered under horrific attacks from pro-Gadhafi forces with little evidence of NATO air power overhead.
"I am extremely sorry to say this, but NATO truly disappointed us," Gen. Abdul Fatah Younis, the opposition's top military official, said Tuesday. "Civilians are being killed every day, including children, women and elderly. If NATO will wait another week, Misrata will be finished. No one will be left alive. Do they want to wait, and watch them die, and let this crime be a shameful disgrace for the international community forever?"
NATO Brig. Gen. Mark van Uhm said weather conditions and tactics by Gadhafi regime have hindered their efforts.
In addition to using human shields and hiding equipment in populated areas, pro-Gadhafi forces have started abandoning heavy military equipment in favor of the same kinds of cars and light trucks the rebels travel in, making it difficult for pilots to distinguish rebel convoys from those carrying forces loyal to the regime, van Uhm said.
Libyan opposition: Compromise with Gadhafi not an option
NATO is operating under a Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force to protect Libyan civilians.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is "deeply concerned about the deterioriating situation facing civilians in Libyan cities under military attack," according to a statement. Conditions in Misrata are "especially grave," the statement said, "with reports of the use of heavy weapons to attack the city, where the population is trapped and unable, as a result of heavy shelling that has continued over several weeks, to receive basic supplies, including clean water, food and medicines."
But residents in Misrata said this week that Gadhafi forces have trapped the city, with snipers shooting indiscriminately. Access to food has been hampered.
"Normal life is a luxury that we don't have," one resident said. "I haven't taken my family out for four weeks now. All schools are closed, my children didn't go to school since the 19th of February. All government offices are closed. Even dead people are buried without death certificates."
After weeks of relentless fighting, a military victory for either side seems remote. A political or diplomatic solution might be the only way to end the crisis.
Weldon said that in addition to his proposals for Gadhafi's stepping down, a cease-fire on both sides and the withdrawal of government forces from key cities, he is calling for a halt in further advances by rebel forces; the creation of a joint interim government run by Libya's current prime minister and the opposition leader; unfettered humanitarian access; and the establishment of a parliamentary commission that would include U.S., Middle Eastern, European and African politicians helping to establish a new parliament in Libya.
Alleged Libyan rape victim thankful for support
As for the Gadhafi family, Weldon's proposals also suggest a possible title for Gadhafi as honorary chairman of the African Union and allowing his second-oldest son, Saif, to stand in elections.
On the economic front, the tanker with crude oil that left Tobruk was sailing to Qatar, where the oil will be refined, CNN confirmed. Final destination of the export is not known at this time.
The civil war in Libya has severely curtailed oil exports from the North African nation, which produced some 1.6 million barrels per day last year. This move symbolizes the opposition's intent to manage the country's affairs.
The U.S. Treasury has frozen more than $32 billion in assets held by Gadhafi and members of his regime. Asked whether the opposition should be able to have access to those funds, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the United States "is well aware there is an urgency, that the Transitional National Council does need funding if it's to survive, and we're looking at ways to assist that." But Toner said he did not know the status of the $32 billion.
CNN's Nic Robertson, Reza Sayah, Ben Wedeman, Elise Labott, Jill Dougherty and Yousuf Basil contributed to this report ||||| BENGHAZI, Libya - French fighter jets fired the first shots at Moammar Gadhafi's troops on Saturday, launching the broadest international military effort since the Iraq war in support of an uprising that had seemed on the verge of defeat.
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In the hours before the no-fly zone over Libya went into effect, Gadhafi sent warplanes, tanks and troops into Benghazi, the rebel capital and first city to fall to the rebellion that began Feb. 15. Then the government attacks appeared to go silent.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy said after an emergency summit in Paris that French jets were already targeting Gadhafi's forces. The 22 participants in Saturday's summit agreed to do everything necessary to make Gadhafi respect a U.N. Security Council resolution Thursday demanding a cease-fire, Sarkozy said.
"Our consensus was strong, and our resolve is clear. The people of Libya must be protected, and in the absence of an immediate end to the violence against civilians our coalition is prepared to act, and to act with urgency," President Barack Obama said in Brasilia, Brazil, on the first day of a three-country Latin American tour.
The rebels, who have seen their advances into western Libya turn into a series of defeats, said they had hoped for more, sooner from the international community, after a day when crashing shells shook the buildings of Benghazi and Gadhafi's tanks rumbled through the university campus.
"People are disappointed, they haven't seen any action yet. The leadership understands some of the difficulties with procedures but when it comes to procedures versus human lives the choice is clear," said Mustafa Gheriani, a spokesman for the opposition. "People on the streets are saying where are the international forces? Is the international community waiting for the same crimes to be perpetrated on Benghazi has have been done by Gadhafi in the other cities?"
A doctor said 27 bodies had reached hospitals by midday. As night fell, though, the streets were quiet.
Libyan state television showed Gadhafi supporters converging on the international airport and a military garrison in Tripoli, and the airport in Gadhafi's hometown of Sirte, in an apparent attempt to deter bombing.
In an open letter, Gadhafi warned: "You will regret it if you dare to intervene in our country."
In Paris, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Gadhafi's government had lost all legitimacy and lied about the cease-fire.
"We have every reason to fear that left unchecked, Gadhafi will commit unspeakable atrocities," she said.
Saturday's emergency meeting involved 22 leaders and top officials, including Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and the foreign ministers of Jordan, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates. It was the largest international military action since the beginning of the Iraq war, launched almost exactly eight years ago.
Earlier Saturday, a plane was shot down over the outskirts of Benghazi, sending up a massive black cloud of smoke. An Associated Press reporter saw the plane go down in flames and heard the sound of artillery and crackling gunfire.
Before the plane went down, journalists heard what appeared to be airstrikes from it. Rebels cheered and celebrated at the crash, though the government denied a plane had gone down -- or that any towns were shelled on Saturday.
The fighting galvanized the people of Benghazi, with young men collecting bottles to make gasoline bombs. Some residents dragged bed frames and metal scraps into the streets to make roadblocks.
"This city is a symbol of the revolution, it's where it started and where it will end if this city falls," said Gheriani.
But at Jalaa hospital, where the tile floors and walls were stained with blood, the toll was clear.
"There are more dead than injured," said Dr. Ahmed Radwan, an Egyptian who had been there helping for three weeks.
Jalaa's Dr. Gebreil Hewadi, a member of the rebel health committee, said city hospitals had received 27 bodies.
At a news conference in the capital, Tripoli, the government spokesman read letters from Gadhafi to Obama and others involved in the international effort.
"Libya is not yours. Libya is for the Libyans. The Security Council resolution is invalid," he said in the letter to Sarkozy, British Prime Minister David Cameron, and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon.
To Obama, the Libyan leader was slightly more conciliatory: "If you had found them taking over American cities with armed force, tell me what you would do."
In a joint statement to Gadhafi late Friday, the United States, Britain and France -- backed by unspecified Arab countries -- called on Gadhafi to end his troops' advance toward Benghazi and pull them out of the cities of Misrata, Ajdabiya and Zawiya. It also called for the restoration of water, electricity and gas services in all areas. It said Libyans must be able to receive humanitarian aid or the "international community will make him suffer the consequences" with military action.
Foreign Minister Moussa Koussa said that Libyan officials had informed the U.N. and the Security Council that the government was holding to the cease-fire it had announced Friday and called for a team of foreign observers to verify that.
"The nation is respecting all the commitments put on it by the international community," he said, leaving the podium before answering any questions about Benghazi.
In the course of the rebellion, Libya has gone from a once-promising economy with the largest proven oil reserves in Africa to a country in turmoil. The foreign workers that underpinned the oil industry have fled; production and exports have all but ground to a halt; and its currency is down 30 percent in just two weeks.
The oil minister, Shukri Ghanem, held a news conference calling on foreign oil companies to send back their workers. He said the government would honor all its contracts.
"It is not our intention to violate any of these agreements and we hope that from their part they will honor this agreement and they will send back their work forces," he said.
Italy, which had been the main buyer for Libyan oil, offered the use of seven air and navy bases already housing U.S., NATO and Italian forces to enforce the no-fly zone over Libya.
Italy's defense minister, Ignazio La Russa, said Saturday that Italy wasn't just "renting out" its bases for others to use but was prepared to offer "moderate but determined" military support.
A French fighter jet fired Saturday on a Libyan military vehicle, the first reported offensive action in the international military operation against Gadhafi's forces, French Defense Ministry spokesman Thierry Burkhard said.
Warplanes from the United States, Canada, Denmark arrived at Italian air bases Saturday as part of an international military buildup. Germany backed the operation but isn't offering its own forces.
British Prime Minister David Cameron said after the summit: "The time for action has come, it needs to be urgent."
___
Al-Shalchi contributed from Tripoli, Libya. Associated Press writers Ben Hubbard in Cairo; Nicole Winfield in Rome; and Jamey Keaten in Paris also contributed to this report. | – Plenty of observers see the Libya conflict in the shorthand of Obama vs. Gadhafi (as much as the US president objects), and the two main players made fresh appeals today: Gadhafi: In a 3-minute address on state television, he remained defiant, reports the BBC. "In the short term, we'll beat them, in the long term, we'll beat them," he said in during a visit to a site in Tripoli hit by bombs. "I am here, I am here, I am here." He also called for "all Islamic armies" to join the fight. "We will be victorious in the end." Obama: Amid reports of friction about which nation will take the lead once the US steps back, Obama declared in El Salvador that "I have absolutely no doubt that we will be able to transfer the control of this operation to an international coalition." Obama also spoke with Britain's David Cameron and France's Nicolas Sarkozy on the phone aboard Air Force One, notes the New York Times. Click to read Hillary Clinton's view that Gadhafi may be looking for an exit strategy. |
For millions of iPhone owners, or would-be iPhone owners, who dislike AT&T's wireless service or prefer Verizon Wireless service, liberation is at hand. Starting Feb. 10, Apple's iconic smart phone finally will be available in the U.S. on a second carrier, Verizon, instead of just on AT&T, which has been the exclusive iPhone network since the device launched in 2007. Current Verizon customers can pre-order the iPhone Thursday.
Walt Mossberg compares the new Verizon iPhone 4 to an AT&T; iPhone 4, and finds that they aren't interchangeable. The Verizon has much better voice calls, he says, but there's a trade off in data speed.
Complaints about dropped voice calls, or calls that can't be initiated, on AT&T's service, especially on iPhones, have been legion. Meanwhile, Verizon has enjoyed a general reputation for reliable voice service. So, many frustrated AT&T iPhone users and those scared off by reports of dropped calls, or simply loyal to Verizon, have been eagerly anticipating this move. To these people, I'm here to say: Yes, there are some major benefits to having your iPhone on Verizon, but, as with all good things, there are also trade-offs.
I've been testing a Verizon iPhone 4 and comparing it to an AT&T iPhone 4, which has been out since last summer. The phones themselves are essentially identical, except for the fact that they have different radios inside to accommodate the two carriers' differing network technologies. They aren't interchangeable.
Mossberg's Mailbox A Computer for Preparing Taxes
On the big question, I can say that, at least in the areas where I was using it, the Verizon model did much, much better with voice calls. In numerous tries over nine days, I had only three dropped calls on the Verizon unit, and those were all to one person who was using an AT&T iPhone in an especially bad area for AT&T: San Francisco. With the nearly identical AT&T model, I often get that many dropped calls in one day.
Calls on the Verizon unit were mostly crisp and clear, including speakerphone calls and those made over my car's Bluetooth connection. On my first full day of testing, I did have several Verizon calls that dropped out for a few seconds, before recovering. Apple attributed this to a very minor glitch I'd encountered in my initial setup of the phone and urged me to reboot it. I did and suffered no more momentary dropouts.
The Verizon model also introduces a feature that some iPhone power users have been craving but that AT&T hasn't allowed in the past: the ability to use the phone, for an extra monthly fee, as a Wi-Fi hot spot for Internet connectivity to multiple laptops or other devices. In my tests, this worked fine with Windows and Macintosh laptops, and an iPad. Wednesday afternoon, AT&T countered by announcing a similar Wi-Fi hot spot plan for the iPhone at an unspecified future date.
Bloomberg News For an extra fee, Verizon iPhone users can use the phone as a Wi-Fi hot spot. AT&T has rushed to counter this feature with one of its own.
Also, Verizon is, for an unspecified but limited time, offering an unlimited $30 a month data plan for the iPhone. That is something AT&T once offered new customers, but has since replaced with capped plans offering fixed amounts of data at $15 or $25 a month. (Existing AT&T customers have been allowed to keep their $30 unlimited plans.)
What about the trade-offs? Chief among them is data speed. I performed scores of speed tests on the two phones, which I used primarily in Washington, and its Maryland and Virginia suburbs, and for part of one day at Chicago's O'Hare Airport. In these many tests, despite a few Verizon victories here and there, AT&T's network averaged 46% faster at download speeds and 24% faster at upload speeds. This speed difference was noticeable while doing tasks like downloading large numbers of emails, or waiting for complicated Web pages to load. AT&T's speeds varied more while Verizon's were more consistent, but overall, AT&T was more satisfying at cellular data.
Also, because Verizon's iPhone—like most other Verizon phones—doesn't work on the world-wide GSM mobile-phone standard, you can't use it in most countries outside the U.S. AT&T's iPhone does work on this standard, and can be used widely abroad, albeit at very high roaming rates. In the midst of my testing, I had to travel to Hong Kong, one of the few countries where the Verizon iPhone functions. But even there, it only worked for voice, not data, at least in the areas where I was working. The AT&T model handled both voice and data everywhere I tried it there.
Finally, the Verizon model can't fetch Internet data at the same time it is making a voice call, something the AT&T model can do. In fact, if you try to, say, call up a Web page while on a voice call with the Verizon model, you get an error message warning the two things can't be done simultaneously. While this distinction is a weapon in the war of words between the carriers, I doubt it's a big deal for most average users. My guess is that the most common things you'd want to check while talking would be your calendar, contacts and notes. And, in my tests, it was possible to check all those things on the Verizon model during calls, even though I have them set up to sync via the Internet.
I did have some issues with the Verizon model. In the D.C. area, long a coverage stronghold for Verizon, it kept switching briefly from 3G mode to slower 2G mode. This didn't affect voice quality, and didn't last long, but it slowed data downloads drastically for short periods. Also, on my first day of testing—after the setup glitch but before I rebooted—the Verizon phone showed poor battery life, and had trouble connecting to my car's Bluetooth setup. After that, these problems disappeared. Bluetooth worked fine and I was able to make it through a day with the battery on both phones.
Apple lists the specs on the two models as identical. They both start at $199, both have the same battery-life rating, both run the same operating software. In my tests, I was easily able to transfer all my apps, music, photos, settings, music and videos from the AT&T iPhone to the Verizon model, using iTunes, and I didn't run into any apps or media that failed to work as expected.
Prices for voice and data plans are a bit different. The least you can pay monthly for an iPhone on Verizon is $75, which includes 450 voice minutes, 250 text messages and unlimited data. On AT&T, you can pay just $65, but your data is limited to a paltry 200 megabytes, though you get 1,000 text messages in this scenario.
The Verizon wireless hot-spot plan costs $20 a month for 2 gigabytes of data, but gets expensive if you run over: $20 for each extra gigabyte.
One big question about the Verizon iPhone that neither company is answering is whether it will be updated to a new iPhone 5 model when the AT&T model is updated. Such updates typically have occurred in June or July, which could make people who buy a Verizon iPhone now resentful that their new phone was bested so soon. Of course, Verizon customers who wait might be resentful if their version of the iPhone isn't upgraded at the same time as AT&T's.
Officials at both Apple and Verizon will only say they don't intend to make Verizon customers unhappy, but that could mean anything.
Bottom line: In my tests, the new Verizon version of the iPhone did much better at voice calling than the AT&T version, and offers some attractive benefits, like unlimited data and a wireless hot-spot capability. But if you really care about data speed, or travel overseas, and AT&T service is tolerable in your area, you may want to stick with AT&T.
—See a video of Walt Mossberg discussing the Verizon iPhone at WSJ.com/PersonalTech. Find all his columns and videos at the All Things Digital website, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at [email protected]. ||||| Yesterday, I made a 45-minute phone call from my office.
This seemingly unremarkable statement is remarkable for two reasons. First, I was able to place a call from my office — something which was impossible for me to do a week prior. Second, I made it through the entire 45-minutes without the call being dropped once. Again, this was impossible a week prior.
So what changed? Well, my iPhone changed.
I’ve been an iPhone user since day one: June 29, 2007. Over the course of the past three and a half years, the coverage I’ve gotten from my service provider for the device, AT&T, has gone from bad to worse. AT&T would talk about how much money they were putting into upgrades for their system, and would continually promise that things would get better soon. But for whatever reason, in major cities like San Francisco and New York City, the situation has continued to deteriorate.
It’s so bad, in fact, that in the TechCrunch office in the SoMa district of San Francisco it’s impossible to make or receive calls. Perhaps our office is a Faraday cage — one that only seems to affect AT&T — I’m not sure. But what I am sure of is that our office is hardly the only place in the city where the same is true. And even outside of the Bay Area, there’s a reason why there’s so much excitement for the Verizon iPhone.
And now it’s here. And yes, it works. Beautifully.
Build
I’ve had a chance to carry around a Verizon iPhone for the past week or so. It’s a bit odd to write a review about it now because, well, I’ve already reviewed this product before. This initial Verizon iPhone, of course, is just an iPhone 4. It’s the same phone that was released on AT&T’s network last summer. But it has been slightly reworked to make room for a CDMA chip that Verizon’s network requires, replacing the GSM chip that AT&T’s network requires.
But holding it in your hand, most regular users would have no idea that there’s any difference. In fact, the only physical difference is that the single rivet at the top of the device near the headphone jack has been replaced by two matching rivets on either side of the top of the Verizon version of the device. While Apple won’t talk specifics, presumably, this is a change made to the antenna of the device, which is the metal band that wraps around the iPhone 4. As you’re probably aware, Apple had an antenna issue shortly after the iPhone 4’s launch this past summer. As I’ve said time and time again, the issue was real, but it wasn’t a really big issue. And the millions of iPhone 4s that Apple has sold so far are testament to that.
This Verizon version of the iPhone 4 seems to have none of the same antenna issues. Try as I might, using the “death grip” and every other grip I can actually do, I can no longer reproduce the same attenuation problem that the previous iPhone 4 model had. I death grip the thing, and no bars drop. More importantly, calls don’t drop and data doesn’t stop. Again, Apple won’t comment, but problem, apparently, solved.
Moving on.
(Quickly, as an aside, I have noticed that the back of the Verizon version of the iPhone 4 is missing some of the FCC, etc symbols usually found at the bottom of the device — no clue why those are gone, but it’s another small change in the design. It makes the back look even cleaner!)
Service
The single most important thing that would-be AT&T switchers and some new iPhone customers will want to know is: how does it compare to the AT&T version in terms of signal, dropped calls, data, etc. The answer, at least in my neck of the woods (again, San Francisco), is very, very good.
It’s funny, if you spend time in various parts of this city, you’ll know where you can and cannot use an iPhone. Huge swaths of SoMa, for example, are awful. Some parts of the Mission are even worse. Then there are random streets throughout the entire city where AT&T service seemingly disappears into a black hole. I’ve more or less trained myself to know not to even try to use the iPhone in these parts of the city. So it was very, very odd to test out the Verizon iPhone in many of those areas. But guess what? Nearly across the board, the Verizon version of the iPhone worked — as both a phone and a mini data-sucking machine.
I can’t tell you how wonderful it has been to walk through the city while being able to maintain a phone call, or Internet connection. Naturally, there are still a few places I was unable get service, but they’re typically places where it’s understandable — like underground.
Many skeptics will be quick to point out that things may change when Verizon’s network gets swamped with iPhones in the same way that AT&T’s was. The difference is that Verizon’s network is already swamped with data-sucking Android devices. Millions of them. Maybe I’m being naive, but I really don’t expect there to be a problem with Verizon’s network in the same way that there was with AT&T’s. And neither does Verizon. We’ll see, I guess. But the early results are very promising.
Speed
AT&T, in their PR scramble to attempt to hold on to some of their disgruntled users, has been playing up two key things that are advantages of their network over Verizon’s. The first is the ability to make a call and surf the web at the same time. It’s true, you definitely cannot make a call and surf the web at the same time on the Verizon iPhone. To some people, this will matter. But I have really never seen this as a huge issue. If I’m talking on the phone with someone, I’m concentrating on talking with them, not surfing the web. But I realize that everyone is different. But apparently some 90+ million current Verizon subscribers don’t have too much of a problem with this either — as none of them have that capability.
The second issue AT&T has been playing up is the speed of their network. It’s “the fastest 3G network” according to their ad campaigns. In my tests, when both phones have had signal, that is also true. There’s no question that AT&T’s network is faster than Verizon’s for data transfers — both up and down. I’ve tried this all over the city a number of times. AT&T is faster. But — and this is a very big but — in order for AT&T to be faster, it needs to have a signal. And again, that’s simply not the case in large parts of the city. So speed or not, Verizon still wins this battle hands down in my book. I’ll take Verizon’s coverage over AT&T’s speed any day.
As sort of an aside, the one other issue brought up when taking about CDMA versus GSM is that the CDMA version of the iPhone won’t be able to roam internationally. For many countries, particularly those in Europe, that is true. One can only hope that Verizon or Apple come up with some sort of way around this — perhaps partner with another carrier for a deal on a per-use MiFi card to carry around in another country. Or better, just make a CDMA/GSM version of the phone. For now, if you’re going to be doing a lot of traveling, you’re likely to be out of luck.
Hotspot
The big new feature that was touted at the press conference unveiling the Verizon iPhone was the “Personal Hotspot” option. This allows you to turn your iPhone 4 into a WiFi hub that can accept up to five connections. I’ve previously done a walk-through of how this will work. And in the field, it’s just as easy as it initially seemed.
I’ve used this feature a number of times over the past week. It’s brilliant. It could not be any easier to set up and manage. Once you enable it and connect, a blue bar will appear at the top of the phone’s screen letting you know that the hotspot feature is enabled. And it will tell you how many devices are currently connected.
Unlike with phone calls, other data can also come in at the same time you’re using the phone as a hotspot. For example, Push Notifications still stream in when you’re connected. If you receive a call, the phone will ask you if you want to connect. If you do, it will sever your data connection, ending the hotspot capabilities. But when you hang up, you can push one button to resume.
Yes, I realize other phones have had this hotspot capability for some time now. In fact, when I reviewed the EVO 4G, it was pretty much the only thing I liked about the device. But the iPhone 4’s Personal Hotspot blows it away for one reason: battery life.
The EVO’s battery lasted something ridiculously low, like 90 minutes, with the hotspot feature turned on. In my tests, the iPhone 4 can give you a solid 4 hours of hotspot/tethering time. That’s from a fully charged battery, all the way down to zero. I’ve run it down fully twice. Both times, just about four hours.
Verizon plans to charge an extra $20 for the hotspot feature. That’s on top of the $30 you’ll pay for data for the iPhone 4 (which is currently unlimited, unlike AT&T’s capped plans). But if you’ve ever owned a wireless dongle, you’ll know that $20 is well worth it — the dongles usually cost you upwards of $60 a month for the same 2 GB of data usage.
The Verizon iPhone Versus The iPhone On Verizon’s Network
A few months ago, before the Verizon iPhone was announced, I wrote a post entitled: The “Verizon iPhone” Versus “The iPhone On Verizon’s Network”. The main idea behind the post was to wonder what the Verizon version of the device would be like when Verizon and Apple finally came to terms they could agree upon? As I said at the time, Verizon would undoubtedly love to load the device up with crapware in the same fashion that they’ve done with their Android devices, and all of the other devices they’ve sold over time. Apple, on the other hand, obviously would not want that. But would they have to make any concessions to get a deal done?
The best part of the Verizon iPhone is that no, Apple did not have to make any concessions. The Verizon iPhone is not a “Verizon iPhone” — it’s an “iPhone on Verizon’s network”. There’s no Verizon branding anywhere on the device aside from the upper left of the screen which shows you the carrier next to the signal strength. There are no pre-loaded Verizon apps. There are no apps that work on the AT&T iPhones that won’t work on this model. Every app you’ve bought in the App Store will install and work on this Verizon version of the device. FaceTime is interoperable over the two devices. So is Game Center.
Will Verizon have their own apps in the App Store that they’ll want you to buy? Undoubtedly. But this is very clearly Apple’s device. Not Verizon’s.
So Is It Worth It?
If you’re an AT&T iPhone customer at the end of your contract who lives in an area with poor AT&T service, you need to get to an Apple or Verizon store next week to get this updated device. Seriously, mark down February 9 on your calendar so that you pre-order it. Then show up at a store on February 10 to pick it up.
If you’re an AT&T iPhone customer still on contract who lives in an area with poor AT&T service, I would definitely consider getting this updated device. It may be a few hundred dollars out of pocket, but think of that compared to what you’ve paid to AT&T over the years. If you’re anything like me, it makes you want to scream.
If you’re an AT&T iPhone customer still on contract who lives in an area with good AT&T service, then no, this probably isn’t the device for you.
If you’re a non-iPhone user who is interested in checking it out but has been waiting for it to come to Verizon, this is absolutely for you.
The caveat to all of this is that it’s well known that Apple releases a new version of the iPhone every summer. Expect this summer to be no different. So if you buy this iPhone 4 on Verizon right now, know that there’s a good chance that an iPhone 5 will be out in six months or less. One can only hope that Apple and Verizon would do the right thing and allow the early Verizon iPhone adopters to upgrade to the iPhone 5 for a heavily discounted (if not fully subsidized price). But it’s still very much up in the air.
Hell, we don’t even know for sure that Verizon will get the iPhone 5 this summer. Perhaps it will be AT&T-only based on some sort of contractual agreement. But the latest rumors suggest that a CDMA/GSM hybrid iPhone 5 that works on both AT&T and Verizon may be the most likely bet. So again, it comes down to how badly you want an iPhone on Verizon right now — and the hope that Verizon and Apple will do the right thing for customers in a few months.
For me, as someone who has spent three and a half years fed up with AT&T, the Verizon iPhone is absolutely, 100 percent worth it. I’ve already cancelled my AT&T contract (by way of Google Voice, actually) and I cannot forsee a future where I ever go back.
There’s long been a slogan that goes along with many Apple products — “it just works”. It’s also the best way to sum up this review. The iPhone 4 on Verizon: it just works. ||||| Verizon Wireless warned it will slow down the data connection of its most-active users when its network is stressed, a new policy that comes as the company prepares to add Apple Inc.'s iPhone 4 to its network.
View Full Image Bloomberg News An Apple Inc. iPhone 4 displayed during an event to announce that Verizon will start selling a version of the device.
The biggest U.S. carrier by subscribers hasn't previously taken such measures to manage demand on its network, a process known as throttling. It is one of several ways carriers are dealing with the dilemma of offering unlimited data while managing the costs associated with carrying that traffic on their networks.
The change, which applies only to new contracts, took effect Thursday, the same day Verizon began letting customers order an iPhone. Verizon executives had previously stressed the company was prepared to handle any surge in smartphone usage, thanks to heavy investment in its wireless network.
Verizon Wireless is offering a $30 unlimited data plan with its version of the iPhone, which hits its stores Feb. 10. On Thursday the carrier and Apple began taking advance orders from existing Verizon customers. Verizon said it saw a spike in visitors to its website but declined to say how many units were sold; as of Thursday afternoon the iPhone was still available.
Verizon hopes the iPhone will convince existing subscribers to upgrade their phones and attract new customers. Only 26% of Verizon subscribers had smartphones at the end of 2010. Rival AT&T Inc. struggled to manage the surge in bandwidth demands after it sold millions of iPhones, and last year stopped offering unlimited data plans.
To combat potential traffic jams, Verizon added language Thursday to its contract terms saying it may slow down connections for customers that fall in the top 5% of bandwidth use. For those users, Verizon said "we may reduce your data throughput speeds periodically for the remainder of your then current and immediately following billing cycle..."
Verizon said the throttling will only be applied in areas where a user is affecting surrounding customers.
Verizon Wireless spokesman Jeffrey Nelson said the introduction of the policy wasn't related to the debut of the iPhone. "This is clearly something we've been looking at for some time and introducing now," he said. "There's nothing magic about the timing."
While most of Verizon's 94 million subscribers won't be affected, some expressed their concerns.
"Imagine if McDonald's told their top 5% heavy eaters that they had to wait longer for their food because they consumed more than others—it doesn't make much business sense, does it?" said Christopher Murphy, an executive at a Maryland manufacturing company who ordered a Verizon iPhone Thursday morning. He added, however, that the policy wouldn't affect him since he didn't consider himself a heavy user.
David Shein, 35 years old, a marketing executive from Florida who woke up at 2:45 a.m. ET to buy the iPhone, said he is perturbed he didn't notice the change in the terms of service.
"Frankly they did not promote that," said Mr. Shein. "I would be extremely aggravated if [throttling] happened to me. I am paying top dollar for service. To lessen the quality of service is unprofessional. It doesn't fit their brand reputation."
T-Mobile USA, a unit of Deutsche Telekom AG, is the other U.S. carrier that is willing to throttle heavy users. AT&T and Sprint Nextel Corp. say they don't throttle customers, but have language in customer agreements that lets them disconnect or modify a connection if the user is harming the network through excessive usage.
Managing traffic has been an increasingly important issue to the carriers as more people use their phones to browse the Internet or stream online videos. The impact of the iPhone on AT&T's network was evident over the last few years, damaging the carrier's reputation and forcing it to rededicate resources to shoring up its infrastructure in high-profile trouble spots such as New York and San Francisco.
In December 2009, AT&T's top wireless executive said 3% of its customers make up 40% of the total traffic. The company opted to employ a tiered pricing structure, putting new customers into plans with a limited amount of monthly data to consume.
AT&T declined to comment on Verizon's move. Sprint has no plans to limit its customers' connection, and doesn't currently have the technical ability to do so, according to a spokeswoman.
Verizon and Apple saw a spike in traffic to their websites during the first hour that the iPhone was available for preorders, but Verizon Wireless spokeswoman Brenda Raney said the preorder process has "been going smoothly." She said some customers had gotten error messages but that the carrier was dealing with many of those customers directly.
In anticipation of the iPhone launch, Verizon shored up its online ordering system and streamlined the in-store sales process, she said.
There were early complaints that Verizon and Apple were affected
by the heavy traffic, but Ms. Raney said the order system never went down.
Barclays analyst Ben Reitzes estimates Verizon could sell 500,000 iPhones during its first three days. Apple sold 1.7 million iPhone 4s in its first three days when it launched in June, although that figure includes global sales.
AT&T has been scrambling to ensure Verizon's gains don't come at its expense. On Wednesday, it doubled the amount of data—to four gigabytes—available to customers who subscribe to the tethering plan for the iPhone.
It also sent an email to many of its iPhone and other smartphone customers, touting the carrier's ability to simultaneously talk on the phone and browse the Internet—a key limitation to the Verizon iPhone.
Verizon Wireless is a joint venture between Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group Plc.
—Spencer E. Ante
contributed to this article.
Write to Roger Cheng at [email protected] | – The iPhone 4 has finally arrived on Verizon, and what that means is … now you can actually make successful phone calls on your iPhone. Reviewers give it a thumbs-up: “The Verizon iPhone is nearly the same as AT&T’s iPhone 4—but it doesn’t drop calls. For several million Americans, that makes it the holy grail,” writes David Pogue in the New York Times. In five cities, including San Francisco and New York (“the two Bermuda Triangles of AT&T reception”), the Verizon version successfully held a call to a landline while the AT&T version dropped it, sometimes more than once. OK, the “holy grail” did drop one call, and AT&T has better coverage in some areas, but the bottom line is: “The Verizon iPhone has more bars in more places.” Walter S. Mossberg concurs that the Verizon version is “much, much better with voice calls,” and it also has “the ability to use the phone, for an extra monthly fee, as a Wi-Fi hot spot for Internet connectivity to multiple laptops or other devices,” a feature he found to work fine. But, he writes in the Wall Street Journal, “if you really care about data speed, or travel overseas, and AT&T service is tolerable in your area, you may want to stick with AT&T.” “It’s here. And yes, it works. Beautifully,” writes MG Siegler on TechCrunch. “I can’t tell you how wonderful it has been to walk through the city while being able to maintain a phone call, or Internet connection. Naturally, there are still a few places I was unable get service, but they’re typically places where it’s understandable—like underground.” The stellar reviews did come with some caveats (Verizon's "policies and prices are still among the worst" in America, Pogue writes). Click through for more reasons you might want to hold off on buying a Verizon iPhone. |
(updated below - Update II [Tues.])
The initial debate over the treatment of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev focused on whether he should be advised of his Miranda rights or whether the "public safety exception" justified delaying it. In the wake of news reports that he had been Mirandized and would be charged in a federal court, I credited the Obama DOJ for handling the case reasonably well thus far. As it turns out, though, Tsarnaev wasn't Mirandized because the DOJ decided he should be. Instead, that happened only because a federal magistrate, on her own, scheduled a hospital-room hearing, interrupted the FBI's interrogation which had been proceeding at that point for a full 16 hours, and advised him of his right to remain silent and appointed him a lawyer. Since then, Tsarnaev ceased answering the FBI's questions.
But that controversy was merely about whether he would be advised of his Miranda rights. Now, the Los Angeles Times, almost in passing, reports something which, if true, would be a much more serious violation of core rights than delaying Miranda warnings - namely, that prior to the magistrate's visit to his hospital room, Tsarnaev had repeatedly asked for a lawyer, but the FBI simply ignored those requests, instead allowing the interagency High Value Detainee Interrogation Group to continue to interrogate him alone:
"Tsarnaev has not answered any questions since he was given a lawyer and told he has the right to remain silent by Magistrate Judge Marianne B. Bowler on Monday, officials said. "Until that point, Tsarnaev had been responding to the interagency High Value Detainee Interrogation Group, including admitting his role in the bombing, authorities said. A senior congressional aide said Tsarnaev had asked several times for a lawyer, but that request was ignored since he was being questioned under the public safety exemption to the Miranda rule."
Delaying Miranda warnings under the "public safety exception" - including under the Obama DOJ's radically expanded version of it - is one thing. But denying him the right to a lawyer after he repeatedly requests one is another thing entirely: as fundamental a violation of crucial guaranteed rights as can be imagined. As the lawyer bmaz comprehensively details in this excellent post, it is virtually unheard of for the "public safety" exception to be used to deny someone their right to a lawyer as opposed to delaying a Miranda warning (the only cases where this has been accepted were when "the intrusion into the constitutional right to counsel ... was so fleeting – in both it was no more than a question or two about a weapon on the premises of a search while the search warrant was actively being executed"). To ignore the repeated requests of someone in police custody for a lawyer, for hours and hours, is just inexcusable and legally baseless.
As law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky explained in the Los Angeles Times last week, the Obama DOJ was already abusing the "public safety" exception by using it to delay Miranda warnings for hours, long after virtually every public official expressly said that there were no more threats to the public safety. As he put it: "this exception does not apply here because there was no emergency threat facing law enforcement." Indeed, as I documented when this issue first arose, the Obama DOJ already unilaterally expanded this exception far beyond what the Supreme Court previously recognized by simply decreeing (in secret) that terrorism cases justify much greater delays in Mirandizing a suspect for reasons well beyond asking about public safety.
But that debate was merely about whether Tsarnaev would be advised of his rights. This is much more serious: if the LA Times report is true, then it means that the DOJ did not merely fail to advise him of his right to a lawyer but actively blocked him from exercising that right. This is a US citizen arrested for an alleged crime on US soil: there is no justification whatsoever for denying him his repeatedly exercised right to counsel. And there are ample and obvious dangers in letting the government do this. That's why Marcy Wheeler was arguing from the start that whether Tsarnaev would be promptly presented to a federal court - as both the Constitution and federal law requires - is more important than whether he is quickly Mirandized. Even worse, if the LA Times report is accurate, it means that the Miranda delay as well as the denial of his right to a lawyer would have continued even longer had the federal magistrate not basically barged into the interrogation to advise him of his rights.
I'd like to see more sources for this than a single anonymous Congressional aide, though the LA Times apparently concluded that this source's report was sufficiently reliable. The problem is that we're unlikely to get much transparency on this issue because to the extent that national politicians in Washington are complaining about Tsarnaev's treatment, their concern is that his rights were not abused even further:
"Lawmakers were told Tsarnaev had been questioned for 16 hours over two days. Injured in the throat, he was answering mostly in writing. "'For those of us who think the public safety exemption properly applies here, there are legitimate questions about why he was [brought before a judge] when he was,' said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), a former federal prosecutor who serves on the House Intelligence Committee. "Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the committee, wrote Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. asking for a full investigation of the matter, complaining that the court session 'cut off a lawful, ongoing FBI interview to collect public safety information.'"
So now the Washington "debate" is going to be whether (a) the Obama DOJ should have defied the efforts of the federal court to ensure Tsarnaev's rights were protected and instead just violated his rights for even longer than it did, or (b) the Obama DOJ violated his rights for a sufficient amount of time before "allowing" a judge into his hospital room. That it is wrong to take a severely injured 19-year-old US citizen and aggressively interrogate him in the hospital without Miranda rights, without a lawyer, and (if this report is true) actively denying him his repeatedly requested rights, won't even be part of that debate. As Dean Chemerinsky wrote:
"Throughout American history, whenever there has been a serious threat, people have proposed abridging civil liberties. When that has happened, it has never been shown to have made the country safer. These mistakes should not be repeated. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should be investigated, prosecuted and tried in accord with the US Constitution."
There is no legal or ethical justification for refusing the request for someone in custody to have a lawyer present. If this report is true, what's most amazing is not that his core rights were so brazenly violated, but that so few people in Washington will care. They're too busy demanding that his rights should have been violated even further.
UPDATE
In March of last year, the New York Times' Editorial Page Editor, Andrew Rosenthal - writing under the headline "Liberty and Justice for Non-Muslims" - explained: "it's rarely acknowledged that the [9/11] attacks have also led to what's essentially a separate justice system for Muslims." Even if you're someone who has decided that you don't really care about (or will actively support) rights abridgments as long as they are applied to groups or individuals who you think deserve it, these violations always expand beyond their original application. If you cheer when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's right to counsel is denied, then you're enabling the institutionalization of that violation, and thus ensuring that you have no basis or ability to object when that right is denied to others whom you find more sympathetic (including yourself).
UPDATE II [Tues.]
For those who are still having trouble comprehending the point that objections to rights violations are not grounded in "concern over a murderer" but rather concern over what powers the government can exercise - just as objections to the US torture regime were not grounded in concern for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - perhaps the great American revolutionary Thomas Paine can explain the point, from his 1795 A Dissertation on the First Principles of Government:
"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."
That's the same principle that led then-lawyer-and-revolutionary John Adams to vigorously defend five British soldiers (of the hated occupying army) accused of one of the most notorious crimes of the revolutionary period: the 1770 murder of five colonists in Boston as part of the so-called Boston Massacre. As the ACLU explained, no lawyers were willing to represent the soldiers because "of the virulent anti-British sentiment in Boston" and "Adams later wrote that he risked infamy and even death, and incurred much popular suspicion and prejudice."
Ultimately, Adams called his defense of these soldiers "one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested actions of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country." That's because Adams understood what Paine understood: if you permit the government to trample upon the basic rights of those whom you hate, then you're permitting the government to trample upon those rights in general, for everyone.
This is not a platitude they were invoking but an undeniable historical truth. Governments know that their best opportunity to institutionalize rights violations is when they can most easily manipulate the public into acquiescing to them by stoking public emotions of contempt against the individual target. For the reasons Paine and Adams explained, it is exactly in such cases - when public rage finds its most intense expression - when it is necessary to be most vigilant in defense of those rights. ||||| WASHINGTON — Federal agents had to end what they termed "an urgent public safety interview" with Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev when a judge came to his hospital room, officials said Thursday, a disclosure that has renewed the debate over how the government should handle terrorism suspects.
Tsarnaev has not answered any questions since he was given a lawyer and told he has the right to remain silent by Magistrate Judge Marianne B. Bowler on Monday, officials said.
Until that point, Tsarnaev had been responding to the interagency High Value Detainee Interrogation Group, including admitting his role in the bombing, authorities said. A senior congressional aide said Tsarnaev had asked several times for a lawyer, but that request was ignored since he was being questioned under the public safety exemption to the Miranda rule. The exemption allows defendants to be questioned about imminent threats, such as whether other plots are in the works or other plotters are on the loose.
An article in the April 26 Section A about the Boston bombings identified Eugene Fidell, a legal expert on U.S. military law, as a professor at the Yale School of Law. He is a lecturer at the school, which is known as Yale Law School.
After being briefed on the sequence of events, lawmakers from both parties questioned Thursday why the Justice Department didn't seek to delay the judge's appearance on the grounds that the public safety interview was continuing. Legal experts said that once documents charging Tsarnaev with using a weapon of mass destruction were signed Sunday night, criminal rules of procedure require that he be brought before a judge "without unnecessary delay," which usually means the next business day.
Lawmakers were told Tsarnaev had been questioned for 16 hours over two days. Injured in the throat, he was answering mostly in writing.
"For those of us who think the public safety exemption properly applies here, there are legitimate questions about why he was [brought before a judge] when he was," said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), a former federal prosecutor who serves on the House Intelligence Committee.
Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the committee, wrote Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. asking for a full investigation of the matter, complaining that the court session "cut off a lawful, ongoing FBI interview to collect public safety information."
Justice Department officials Thursday did not address the question of why they signed documents charging Tsarnaev on Sunday night, knowing that could start the clock ticking toward an appearance by a magistrate. Once that was done, they said, they had no legal way to stop the hearing from going forward.
A congressional official said interrogators left the hospital room about an hour before the judge arrived, after they were told she was coming.
Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, said, "The prosecutors and FBI agents in Boston were advised of the scheduled initial appearance in advance." One Justice Department official put it another way: "You don't tell a federal judge to put off a hearing."
Eugene Fidell, a professor at Yale School of Law, said it was past time for Tsarnaev to have been read his rights, because the Constitution requires it.
"The notion that the public safety exemption was going to allow them all the time in the world is preposterous," he said.
In other developments in the case Thursday:
A source familiar with the inquiry said that the FBI two years ago linked the phone number of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the second bombing suspect and Dzhokhar's older brother, to two people who were investigated for possible terrorist ties. But the matter was not pursued because the cases were closed for lack of evidence.
The source, speaking confidentially because the case is still underway, added that the brothers' mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, told an associate at the time that Tamerlan was "going over to the dark side" — another sign that he was becoming radicalized.
Meanwhile, New York Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told federal interrogators while he was still talking that he and his brother Tamerlan had planned to drive to New York to set off another series of explosions in Manhattan's Times Square. They had another pressure-cooker bomb like the ones used in Boston and five smaller pipe bombs in the car when they were stopped by police in Watertown, Mass., Kelly said.
Kelly said the younger suspect described how he and his brother had carjacked a motorist in a Mercedes three days after the bombing and then "decided spontaneously on Times Square as a target. They would drive to Times Square that same night." | – In a recent Los Angeles Times article about suspected Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Glenn Greenwald spotted a tidbit that appalled him (emphasis Greenwald's): "Tsarnaev has not answered any questions since he was given a lawyer and told he has the right to remain silent by Magistrate Judge Marianne B. Bowler. Until that point, Tsarnaev had been responding to the interagency High Value Detainee Interrogation Group, including admitting his role in the bombing, authorities said. A senior congressional aide said Tsarnaev had asked several times for a lawyer, but that request was ignored since he was being questioned under the public safety exemption to the Miranda rule." If that detail is true—and Greenwald acknowledges that it's a bit thinly sourced—then we should all be concerned. This is a much bigger deal than delaying the reading of Tsarnaev's Miranda rights. "This is a US citizen arrested for an alleged crime on US soil: There is no justification whatsoever for denying him his repeatedly exercised right to counsel," writes Greenwald in the Guardian. Worse, no one in Washington cares, because they're more concerned that Tsarnaev's rights weren't violated even further—they're piling on the judge who finally Mirandized him. You may not like Tsarnaev, writes Greenwald, but you should still be concerned over the way he's treated. As Thomas Paine put it in 1795, "He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." Click for Greenwald's full column. |
Afghan officials say Taliban insurgents have beheaded 17 Afghan civilians for taking part in a music event in a Taliban-controlled area of southern Afghanistan.
The Interior Ministry says the attack happened Sunday in Helmand province and that gunfire was also involved.
Helmand provincial government spokesman Daoud Ahmadi says the attack happened in Musa Qala district. Ahmadi says all of the victims had their heads chopped off. He says it was not clear if they were shot first.
The Musa Qala government chief says the people had gathered for a celebration and were playing music and dancing and the insurgents wanted to stop the event. Neyamatullah Khan says the area where the slaughter took place is completely in Taliban control and so he does not have more details yet. ||||| Taliban execute pregnant woman in Afghanistan
HERAT, Afghanistan — The Taliban publicly flogged and then executed a pregnant Afghan widow by firing three shots into her head for alleged adultery, police said on Monday.
Bibi Sanubar, 35, was kept in captivity for three days before she was shot dead in a public trial on Sunday by a local Taliban commander in the Qadis district of the rural western province Badghis.
The Taliban accused Sanubar of having an "illicit affair" that left her pregnant. She was first punished with 200 lashes in public before being shot, deputy provincial police chief Ghulam Mohammad Sayeedi told AFP.
"She was shot in the head in public while she was still pregnant," Sayeedi said.
Sayeedi said a local Taliban commander, Mohammad Yousuf, carried out the execution before the woman's body was dumped in an area under government control.
The execution is a grim reminder of the Taliban's harsh six-year rule, from 1996 to 2001 in Afghanistan. The radical Islamists staged public stonings or lashings of those found to have committed adultery or sex outside marriage.
The then-Taliban government would also chop off the hands and feet of those accused of theft and robbery.
But a Taliban spokesman denied Monday that the militia was responsible for Sanubar's death.
"We have not done anything like that in Badghis or any other province," said Qari Yosuf Ahmadi, calling the report "propaganda" by foreigners and the Western-backed Afghan government.
The Taliban is not a unified national movement and small groups operate shadow government structures autonomously in pockets of the insurgent south.
The man who allegedly had an affair with Sanubar was not punished.
Head of Badghis provincial council Mohammad Nasir Nazaari confirmed the execution and said the Qadis district was entirely under Taliban control.
The deputy head of the religious council for western Afghanistan, Mohammad Kabaabiani, said the execution ran counter to Islamic principles.
Head of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission in western Afghanistan, Abdul Qadir Rahimi, condemned the killing.
"Any such trial is unacceptable and is a violation of human rights. All trials must take place in an authorised court observing every single measure of justice," said Rahimi.
Since their ouster in 2001, the hardline Taliban militants have executed many people they accused of spying for foreign forces, including at least one woman who was shot dead in Kandahar.
The insurgents last year publicly executed a young couple accused of eloping in Nimroz province, by firing squad in front of a mosque.
Copyright © 2012 AFP. All rights reserved. More » | – Taliban insurgents beheaded 17 men and women yesterday for participating in a music event in Afghanistan's Helmand province, officials report. The decapitations occurred after people gathered for a celebration, and were playing music and dancing, according to the chief of the Musa Qala government. They were apparently punished for breaking religious strictures. The area where the slaughter took place is completely in Taliban control. Gunfire was also reported by witnesses, so the victims may have been shot before they were beheaded, AP reports. |
RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. – A stunned Lexi Thompson received a four-stroke penalty walking off the 12th green Sunday at the ANA Inspiration. LPGA officials received an email from a viewer about a possible rules infraction during the third round when Thompson was on the seventh hole of Round 4.
Thompson lost the tournament on the first sudden-death hole to Soyeon Ryu.
Officials deliberated for two hours before informing Thompson that she had replaced her ball an inch away from its original position on a 1-foot putt on the 17th hole Saturday. She received two strokes for that violation plus two more for signing an incorrect scorecard. Her third-round 67 was changed to a 71.
“Oh my God,” Thompson said, walking to the tee. “This is ridiculous.”
“Is this a joke?” she asked.
LPGA rules official Sue Witters later said she was 100-percent certain that Thompson did not do it intentionally.
“It was a hard thing to do. To be honest, it made me sick.”
The LPGA said she breached USGA Rule 20-7c and Rule 16-1b. She incurred an additional penalty for incorrect scorecards under Rule 6-6d.
Our statement regarding Lexi Thompson penalty. pic.twitter.com/bQrlIFrebQ — LPGA (@LPGA) April 3, 2017
In a matter of seconds the tour’s top American went from a two-stroke advantage over Suzann Pettersen to a two-stroke deficit.
A teary-eyed Thompson pounded a drive on the 13th tee. Showing incredible mental fortitude, Thompson went on to birdie the hole, while Pettersen bogeyed.
Thompson, winner here in 2014, joined four other players – Inbee Park, So Yeon Ryu, Minjee Lee and Pettersen – in a tie for at 13 under with four to play.
The USGA’s proposed rules changes for 2019 would prevent such a thing from happening in the future because of the reasonable judgement standard. Thompson made a reasonable effort to return the ball to its original position.
Some big names in the golf world reacted with shock and anger:
Viewers at home should not be officials wearing stripes. Let's go @Lexi, win this thing anyway. — Tiger Woods (@TigerWoods) April 3, 2017
Who the F#*k is sitting at home zooming in on that stuff?? — Shane Lowry (@ShaneLowryGolf) April 3, 2017
Whatever number this is that people can call in, it needs to go away. Hoping it doesn't cost @Lexi! https://t.co/wtKkU9pg2o — Justin Thomas (@JustinThomas34) April 3, 2017 ||||| Another professional golf major, and another head-scratching rules controversy.
This time, LPGA star Lexi Thompson took center stage, and the blunder cost her a major championship.
Thompson led the tour’s first major of the season, the ANA Inspiration, by two strokes after 54 holes, but a ruling on Sunday cost her four strokes.
As Thompson was putting on the 12th hole during the final round, the Golf Channel commentators began talking about a rules infraction that had recently been brought to their attention — but it happened in the third round.
On the 17th hole on Saturday, video shows Thompson marking her ball before attempting a short putt. In the replay, Thompson’s coin was not visible when she marked her ball, but it was afterward when she placed the ball back on the green, meaning she had replaced the ball in the wrong place.
Officials retroactively assessed Thompson with a two-stroke penalty for playing from the wrong place, plus an additional two strokes for signing an incorrect scorecard after the third round.
Lexi Thompson was assessed a 4-shot penalty for an incorrect marking of a ball and signing an incorrect card yesterday at #ANAInspiration pic.twitter.com/6pNJ5haql9 — Golf Channel (@GolfChannel) April 3, 2017
Dan Maselli, manager of rules and competition for the LPGA, said on the telecast that the LPGA was not aware of the infraction until a viewer emailed the tour with the information when the final group was on the 7th hole Sunday. Rules officials then reviewed the video before making a decision and alerting Thompson and the other players.
"One of the unfortunate things about live professional golf and live television is people do see things and I wish they would speak up more quickly because then the additional two-point penalty, she wouldn’t have occurred that if we could have gotten this (taken care of) during her round (Saturday)," Maselli said.
A rules official told Thompson of the four-stroke swing as she walked off the 12th hole Sunday. She suddenly went from leading the tournament at 16 under to falling two strokes off the lead at 12 under.
Thompson called the ruling "ridiculous" and fought tears on the 13th tee as she prepared to hit her drive. "She’s trying to hit this tee shot from tears," Mike Tirico said on the telecast.
Thompson went on to birdie the 13th and then birdied the 18th to get to 14 under and join a playoff with So Yeon Ryu. Ryu birdied the first playoff hole to beat Thompson. Tiger Woods was among those who witnessed the ruling and voiced his displeasure.
UPDATE: The LPGA released the following statement. ||||| The rules are the rules.
Even when they stink -- which is the only way to describe the ruling the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association (MIAA) gave to Lunenburg High School junior Emily Nash in the Central Massachusetts Division 3 boys' golf tournament at Blissful Meadows on Tuesday.
Nash, who has been the best player for the Lunenburg boys' team since she arrived in eighth grade, fired an impressive 3-over 75 at Blissful Meadows, which should have been good for a four-stroke victory over runner-up Nico Ciolino of AMSA Charter School.
But it wasn't.
RELATED: 9 weird shots the rules of golf say you're free to hit
Why? Because of a rule that's so bad it makes a shank look good.
According to MIAA rules, "Girls playing on a fall boys' team cannot be entered in the Boys Fall Individual Tournament. They can only play in the Boys Team Tournament. If qualified, they can play in the spring Girls Sectional and State Championships."
So, let's get this straight. Nash's score which was the best in the field by four strokes, was OK to count toward the team effort, but not OK to count individually?
And for those wondering, yes, Nash did play from the same tees as the boys, which makes this situation all the more perplexing.
It's 2017. This rule sounds like it was created in 1917.
PGA.com put in a call to Blissful Meadows on Wednesday morning to learn more about the situation.
"It was complete garbage," said Dave Kocur, Pro Shop Manager. "She played the same tees, played under the same conditions and everything."
Kocur said that Nash and her coach were reminded before the round began of the MIAA's rules by Central Mass. Division 3 boys' golf tournament director Kevin Riordan, but the outcome still didn't feel right to anyone -- including Ciolino.
"He felt so bad about it that he actually tried to give the trophy to Nash," Kocur said. "That showed a lot of class. But, she didn't want to take it because she was too disappointed."
According to a story in the Worcester Telegram, it seems even Riordan himself recognized the absurdity of the rule, which will also keep Nash out of next week's state tournament at Wyantenuck CC in Great Barrington as an individual (her team did not qualify based on its combined total at Blissful Meadows).
"We don't make the rules, we just enforce them," Riordan told the Telegram. "Emily is the story of the day."
Riordan also said that he planned to personally purchase a first-place trophy for Nash.
A nice gesture to be sure. But the MIAA needs to get with the times. If they're going to let Nash compete in the first place, she should be allowed any and all of the same perks for an exceptional performance as the boys.
We put in a call to the MIAA to the number provided on its website that went unanswered. We also emailed for comment and will include their statement once they respond. | – Lexi Thompson is taking a "very needed" three-week break after what she describes on Instagram as "an emotional day." The professional golfer was taking part Saturday in the ANA Inspiration championship in Rancho Mirage, Calif., when she did something that no one noticed—except for a sharp-eyed viewer who emailed the golf association a day later after spotting the infraction, Golf.com reports. The rules violation: Thompson picked up her ball to mark it before a putt, then put it back in the wrong place. Officials on Sunday reviewed the video, then docked Thompson four strokes in total (two for the ball that was misplaced by an inch, two for signing an incorrect scorecard) and notified her as she was leaving the 12th hole, per Golfweek. "Is this a joke?" a stunned Thompson said, calling the ruling "ridiculous." She was leading the tournament when informed of the infraction but suddenly found herself trailing by two strokes. She managed to rally, only to lose in a playoff to So Yeon Ryu. An LPGA official involved in making the call says she doesn't think the ball-moving was intentional and that it "made me sick" to have to penalize Thompson. Even Tiger Woods weighed in, tweeting, "Viewers at home should not be officials wearing stripes." (Thompson was once the youngest person ever to win an LPGA competition.) |
CTV A 32-year-old man who went missing in 1977 following an Ontario barn fire on the property seen here has been found alive and living in Oklahoma, according to Ontario Provincial Police.
A Canadian man who was declared dead after vanishing 37 years ago has been found alive and living in Oklahoma.
Ontario Provincial Police say Ronald Stan, who was 32 when he went missing, was recently discovered living under the name of Jeff Walton after vanishing on Sept. 29, 1977, CTVNews reported.
Stan was suspected of dying in a barn fire, southwest of Toronto, which left firefighters painstakingly digging through the smoldering remains without any sign of his body.
"I remember that one quite well because we dug through dead pigs and so-on with our boots on, and had done our very best to find human remains," retired firefighter Jim Walsh told CTVNews. "And there was none in that barn."
CTV Retired firefighter Jim Walsh, pictured right, recently recalled sifting through the remains of the burned barn for Ronald Stan's body in September 1977 without any luck.
Nearly a decade later, after finding no trace of the missing man, an Ontario court declared him dead in 1986.
Fast forward to last July, authorities say a routine audit of his mysterious disappearance linked Stan to a 69-year-old man living more than 1,000 miles south. That man was positively identified as Stan. Police did not identify where in Oklahoma he was found.
"I can't speak to his motives," Const. Laurie Houghton with the Middlesex County Ontario Provincial Police told The Star of Stan's possible reason for disappearing.
CTV Ontario Provincial Police Middlesex County OPP Const. Laurie Houghton, pictured, said that charges are not expected to be filed against Stan, who has been living under the name of Jeff Walton.
Houghton said his family has been informed of his discovery and that he is not facing criminal charges in Canada.
As for how they found him this time around, she credited new technology for cracking the case.
"There's a lot that's available to us now for investigative tools that wasn't available to us back in 1977. As a result, we were able to connect the dots, essentially, and lead us to the state of Oklahoma," she told The Star. ||||| Photos View photos zoom
Through his entire life, Jeff Walton Jr. had no idea his father was keeping a secret.
The 35-year-old learned from police earlier this month that his father, who he knew as Jeff Walton the first — a 69-year-old New Orleans Saints fan living in small-town Oklahoma — is not who his son thought him to be.
The senior Walton was born Ronald Stan, a Canadian living in the former Township of East Williams, Middlesex County until September 29, 1977, when he was reported missing after a mysterious early-morning barn fire.
“I’m still trying to put all the puzzle pieces together myself,” said the younger Walton reached on the phone. He and the rest of Stan’s American family, which includes Walton’s stepmom and at least three grandchildren, only found out about his Canadian past this month.
Provincial police in Ontario pieced together the story of Stan in July, when they reopened the file on his disappearance as part of a routine audit of the case file. Const. Laurie Houghton with the Middlesex County OPP attributed the resolution of the case to modern investigative techniques not available in 1977.
“I can’t speak to his motives,” said Houghton. “We were able to connect the dots.”
Stan, who was 32 years old when he disappeared, is considered legally dead in Canada. He was declared deceased by a court in 1986, nearly a decade after his disappearance amid circumstances that still remain murky. Police responded to a fire at a barn near a piece of farmland property owned by Ronald Stan. A witness saw Stan in the area of the barn before the fire and he couldn’t be found afterwards.
At least one neighbour recalls the serious blaze in 1977. Bert Toonen said his brother Peter was out with Stan the night of the fire. A young man at the time, Toonen was one of many neighbours who helped investigators search the debris.
“They were my father’s pigs in that barn. We were out the next day combing through the wreckage with the police looking for human remains,” Toonen said. No human remains were found.
Decades later, Toonen now owns Stan’s former property, land which changed hands several times over the years. He lives down the street from Stan’s uncle Edward Stan, who moved in down the road with his family shortly after the fire.
Both Toonen and Edward say Stan left behind a wife. Edward says the couple had two children, but that he had little contact with his nephew’s family after Ronald Stan’s disappearance. The Star attempted to reach people believed to be the wife and children of Stan but was unable to verify whether they were his relatives.
It’s not clear how Stan came to be declared deceased. In Ontario at that time, a family member would have had to make the request through court, but Stan’s legal status was unclear to at least one family member — his uncle Edward did not know he was legally declared dead. In fact he said he knew Stan was alive, because he saw his nephew in 1997:
“We knew because he came up when his dad died. We saw him then.”
Edward said he refused to talk to Stan at his father Henry’s funeral, evading the happy-go-lucky nephew he once knew. He knows nothing about Stan’s new life in the United States, except for information gathered from provincial police after they contacted him early this month with Stan’s whereabouts.
In 2002 the province enacted stricter measures to make it harder to declare someone dead. Prior to the Declarations of Death Act, the court could declare a missing person dead incidentally to another sort of application, said Joshua Eisen, an associate at Toronto law firm Hull and Hull LLP, who deals with wills and estate litigation.
“(A person) would have to start litigation to get their life insurance . . . or something like that,” Eisen said. “The court could say that this person is dead for the purposes of a life insurance application or maybe to distribute the money in the will. There had to be some reason for it.”
Today, a spouse, next of kin or any person affected by an order declaring that an individual is dead can apply to the courts to have somebody declared dead under only two circumstances: the person has been missing for seven years or they disappeared in circumstance of peril.
The consequences of declaring a person dead are very severe, Eisen said; a person declared dead loses all right to their own property. An applicant has to show nobody has heard from the missing, they’ve made reasonable inquiries into the person’s location, they have no reason to believe the missing person is alive and there has to be enough evidence to find that the person’s dead.
Courts, he said, were always reluctant to grant this sort of release.
“You really have to go off the map to be declared dead,” said Eisen.
Jeff Walton Jr. doesn’t blame his father for what happened but is still dealing with the shock of the new information. He declined to discuss the specifics of his father’s flight or any potential motivation.
Stan, now 69 years old, suffers from vascular dementia and heart disease, his son says. He was in a nursing home when the police made the connection. Stan’s American wife, Debra Proctor, filed for divorce upon hearing the news, said Walton.
“It’s been tough on me, but he’s still my father. It doesn’t change the man I knew for 35 years,” said Walton. “Hopefully one day he can sit down and write a book and remember all the stuff he’s been through in his life. It’d be a damn good book I’ll tell you that, just from what I’ve heard.”
The Ontario Provincial Police said there are no charges being laid and the case is now closed. | – In 1977, a man went missing after a barn fire in Ontario; in 1986, with no sign of him, authorities declared Ronald Stan dead. Turns out they were wrong: He has now turned up again after decades, and he's living in Oklahoma, CTV reports. Stan went missing at age 32. He's now known as Jeff Walton, and he's 69, CTV notes. Police say they can't offer information as to why he went missing. "I’m still trying to put all the puzzle pieces together myself," Walton's son, Jeff Jr., tells the Toronto Star. Walton Jr. learned of his father's previous identity this month from police; his stepmother hadn't known, either. One uncle in Canada, however, does appear to have seen Stan in 1997: "He came up when his dad died," the uncle says. How police found him isn't entirely clear; the case was reopened in a routine audit, the Star notes, and new police methods solved it. "There's a lot that's available to us now for investigative tools that wasn't available to us back in 1977. As a result, we were able to connect the dots, essentially, and lead us to the state of Oklahoma," an officer tells that paper, per the New York Daily News. "It’s been tough on me, but he’s still my father," says the son of Walter/Stan. "It doesn’t change the man I knew for 35 years." No criminal charges are expected. (Elsewhere, police suspect a champion boat racer faked his own death.) |
Photograph by Phillip V. Caruso/Paramount Pictures and Mercury Productions. All rights reserved.
Click on the audio player below to listen to Slate's Spoiler Special podcast on Young Adult after you've seen the movie.*
Dan Kois Dan Kois edits and writes for Slate’s human interest and culture departments. He’s the co-author, with Isaac Butler, of The World Only Spins Forward, a history of Angels in America, and is writing a book called How to Be a Family.
December is the season of puffed-up Award Movies. Whether good or bad, War Horse and We Bought a Zoo and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy all have a prestige-y sameness to them. So consider Young Adult (Paramount)—a collaboration between the Juno tag team of director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody—a sharp stick to puncture those bloated hopefuls. Young Adult doesn’t fully work, but it’s still one of the year’s most memorable movies, a ruthless portrait of a heroine with a serious love/loathe relationship with herself.
That’s Mavis Geary (Charlize Theron), a ghostwriter of a once-popular series of young-adult novels. For Monster, Theron gained weight and wore deglamorizing prosthetics and was rewarded with an Oscar. In Young Adult, she looks as great as she ever has, but she’s a monster nonetheless. Indeed, I prefer this performance—it’s sly and acid rather than spectacular. Spurred on by a birth announcement she interprets as a cry for help, Mavis returns from Minneapolis to her hometown of Mercury, Minn., intent on rescuing her high school boyfriend Buddy (Patrick Wilson) from a life of what she assumes to be parental misery. That Buddy seems perfectly happy does not matter a bit. “I’m a married man!” he protests at one point. “I know,” she coos in response. “We can beat this thing together.”
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Mavis has plenty of problems. Her series is getting canceled, and she’s having trouble writing the final volume. She drinks to excess. (Number of times we see Mavis pass out face-down in her clothes: four.) She seems convinced that back home in Mercury, the social order of high school remains firm; after a few days, she’s wearing her old clothes and cruising around town in her Cabriolet. (Of course she had a Cabriolet.)
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In high school, however, she would never have hung out with nerdy Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt). When she runs into Matt in a bar, she doesn’t recognize his name, even though they had lockers next to each other for four years. Matt, now a bookkeeper at a local restaurant, tags along on Mavis’ ridiculous quest, and their budding friendship, such as it is, makes for the film’s best scenes. As an actor, Oswalt—a brilliant stand-up—has come a long way since his days of standing completely frozen for an entire opening sequence of The King of Queens. In Young Adult, he’s funny, appealing, and touching, a bitter truth-teller to Theron’s glamorous, relentless fabulist. “You’re fucking mentally ill,” he says with dawning realization as she spins her future with Buddy into a story out of her teen romance novels.
What I enjoyed most about Young Adult is how it functions as an anti-romantic comedy. Scenes from the rom-com playbook—the meet-cute, the big confession, the first kiss, the pep talk from a friend—turn skewed and absurd, thanks to Mavis’ appalling lack of self-awareness. It’s reminiscent of 2009’s Seth Rogen-starring Observe and Report, which also employed an imbalanced main character to turn formulaic story beats into moments of creeping horror. Young Adult isn’t as rigorous as that film, which never shied away from the dark and awful ramifications of its premise. The ending of Young Adult, on the other hand, is tonally uncertain; my colleague Dana Stevens and I, for instance, have completely opposite interpretations of what happens in the final moments.
As with Observe, audiences aren’t likely to embrace Young Adult; after the screening I attended, everyone on the elevator (other than me) was visibly angry about the movie they’d just watched. But I admired Young Adult for its chutzpah and Theron for her go-for-broke performance. Most of all, I rejoiced in Diablo Cody’s deft, funny, angry script. Where Juno hid a conventional story under its jargon-studded, ostensibly subversive surface, Young Adult is genuinely radical (and hamburger-phone free). I’m happy that Cody has mined her own obsession with teenagedom—and her experience of being a minor celebrity—and turned it into something spikier and more uncompromising than I would have expected. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for Cody’s happiness, but boy was I fascinated by Mavis’ misery. ||||| "Young Adult," the new collaboration from "Juno" director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody, shares some stylistic notes with their earlier effort. It's set in Minnesota, features a pop-saturated soundtrack (including the Replacements), a woman-child stuck between adolescence and adulthood, and a droll appreciation of daily life in suburbia. Yet it's a step in a new direction, both for the creative team and for movies, a mature and humane comedy centered on a misanthropic female antihero.
Think of it as "Juno's" wicked stepsister.
Charlize Theron plays Mavis Gary, a divorced writer (or as she prefers it, "author") of "Sweet Valley High"-style teen novels. Though she's 37, Mavis never really graduated from high school. Her Minneapolis high-rise apartment has the depressing, slumlike impermanence of a crash pad. Her social life consists of bad overnight hookups and lunches spent belittling former acquaintances with a catty former classmate who fled Mercury, Minn., for the big (well, biggish) city.
At once haughty and insecure, Mavis is a textbook case of arrested development. To top it off, she's still obsessed with her former high school sweetheart, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson). Her fixation flares when Buddy's wife e-mails her an announcement welcoming their newborn child.
Mavis launches a mission to rescue Buddy from the bondage of family life, heedless of the fact that he's utterly content as a new dad. Equipped with an armory of makeup brushes, falsies and lethal little black dresses, she travels back to her hometown to reclaim her man. The comedy of awkwardness is honed to a stiletto edge. When two-faced Mavis, in slinky cocktail attire, seductively wheedles Buddy at a plaid-shirt sports bar, she's as out of place as a black widow on a slice of apple pie.
Looking on mockingly is Matt (Patton Oswalt), a wisecracking former classmate of Mavis and Buddy's. Though he's physically disabled from a brutal high school bullying attack, he's better adjusted than Mavis. As she pursues her romantic delusion to its bleak conclusion, the two misfits strike up an unlikely friendship. In Matt, Mavis discovers the one confidant who might have saved her from terminal self-absorption, if only she had met him when she was still young enough to change.
Edgy, subversive and hilariously embarrassing, "Young Adult" undercuts the conventions of female-centered comedies at each turn. It manages to keep us invested in the story despite focusing almost every scene on a thoroughly unpleasant protagonist. The supporting characters provide the homespun humanity Mavis lacks, especially Wilson as her Minnesota Nice former beau, and Elizabeth Reaser as his fun-loving wife.
Theron scores with a brave, darkly amusing performance as a onetime alpha female who sees life passing her by. She smiles charmingly while shooting death rays from her eyes. In her scenes with Oswalt, Theron drops her character's mean-girl bravado, revealing the fear, loneliness and confusion beneath her Revlon mask.
"Young Adult's" skepticism that Mavis can fan these flickers of self-awareness into a flame of understanding is a gauge of its sophistication. Cody and Reitman would rather close their film on a lifelike, unresolved note than force its characters into a contrived happy ending. Audiences may not embrace Mavis immediately -- she's too spiky for that. But there's little doubt that in time she'll join Marge Gunderson and Juno McGuff as another of Minnesota's enduring and iconic film characters. ||||| Shorter than a bad blind date and as sour as a vinegar Popsicle, “Young Adult” shrouds its brilliant, brave and breathtakingly cynical heart in the superficial blandness of commercial comedy. More radically than “J. Edgar” or even “Greenberg,” this movie, written by Diablo Cody and directed by Jason Reitman , challenges the dreary conventional wisdom that a movie protagonist must be likable. Along the way, it systematically demolishes a china shop full of shopworn sentimental touchstones about — for starters — high school, small-town life, heterosexuality, Minnesota and the capacity of human beings to change, learn and grow.
When we first encounter her, Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) seems to have grown, though perhaps not in the most constructive ways. Crossing the treacherous, unmarked boundary between her mid- and late-30s, Mavis has acquired some of the trappings and habits of adulthood. She lives in a spacious, slightly sterile high-rise apartment in Minneapolis (a Midwestern variant on the den of Manhattan anomie that Michael Fassbender’s sex-addled character inhabits in “Shame”) and has, for company, a fuzzy little dog and a big, flat-screen television permanently tuned to some Kardashian or another.
Eventually we hear about a divorce, though not much about the marriage that preceded it. Mavis supports herself by writing installments in a popular series of “Gossip Girl”-like novels for teenagers, and though her name does not appear on the cover, she derives some creative and professional satisfaction from the job. She drinks a lot, pulls at her hair and seems generally unconcerned with other people. She is pretty, poised and imperious in the way that can come naturally to tall, beautiful, blond women, but also weary and blue — a platinum princess suffering from metal fatigue.
Looking for a way to break out of her rut and return some luster to her life, Mavis decides to go back to her hometown, Mercury, Minn., and reconnect with her high school boyfriend, Buddy (Patrick Wilson). Just how spectacularly bad this idea is — how packed with vanity, magical thinking and plain, stupid meanness — emerges over the course of a few days, but the warning signs are there from the start.
Buddy, who is married, has just become a father for the first time. To Mavis, this can mean only that he is trapped in a domestic prison from which she must rescue him. And so she arrives in Mercury intent on breaking up his marriage, a plan she justifies to herself in the romantic language of destiny, soul mates and following your heart.
That is the native idiom of romantic fiction, both the kind Mavis writes and the genre she appears, at first glance, to inhabit. With sly understatement, Ms. Cody and Mr. Reitman (who previously collaborated on “Juno”) allow a set of comfortable expectations to emerge. We all know — from bad movies like “Cars,” say — that a big-city big shot on a visit to a small town will be constructively humbled by the simple, honest folks who live there. (Or else, as in “Straw Dogs,” terrorized by them). We are also conditioned to believe all kinds of contradictory claptrap about adolescence, which we are supposed to leave behind but also hold onto for (if I may show my own age by paraphrasing John Mellencamp) as long as we can.
One of the incidental pleasures of “Young Adult” is its specific sense of generational identity. The logos of bands like Black Flag, the Breeders and — of course, this being Minnesota — the Replacements serve as tokens of belonging and signifiers of nostalgia. On the road from Minneapolis to Mercury, Mavis plays an old mixtape (an actual cassette, by the way) from Buddy, fixating on “The Concept” by Teenage Fanclub, which serves as the film’s ambiguous anthem. It evokes warm and affectionate memories, but also, in her case, the pathological inability to let go of the past.
We assume that a romantic comedy will turn on the redirection of desire from the wrong person to the right one. In one sense — I don’t want to say too much about the details of the plot — this expectation and all the others are met. Mavis does get something of a city mouse’s comeuppance; she does come to difficult terms with her vanished youth; and she does find her attention divided between two guys, the hunk who is her heart’s desire and the nerd who serves as a sympathetic ear and shoulder to cry on. But at the same time, the established codes of modern movie comedy are scrambled and subverted in ways that are puzzling, amusing, horrifying and ultimately astonishing.
The heroine in “Juno” was briefly dazzled by Jason Bateman’s cool, not-nice guy, but she eventually found her way back to the sweet loser played by Michael Cera. That was impeccable young adult logic, but “Young Adult” itself is a little more complicated, and much harsher.
Buddy is perfectly nice and not especially cool. The other guy, Matt (Patton Oswalt), is kind of prickly and cool in a geeky way. He makes his own action figures, distills his own bourbon (something Mavis especially appreciates) and has an awesome collection of ’90s indie-rock T-shirts.
He is also a reminder of the brutal underside of high school, which Mavis chooses to remember as a time of power and glory. Back when she was prom queen, he was in the hospital, having survived a horrific beating that left permanent physical damage.
And yet Mavis can look at him and complain, without irony, about how much she has suffered in her life. Her cruelty and self-pity are downright shocking. If Ms. Theron hadn’t already appeared in a film called “Monster” (for which she won an Oscar), that title might suit “Young Adult” just as well.
But even as this movie revels in the punitive spectacle of Mavis’s humiliation, it also extends her a measure of sympathy. Not by justifying her appalling behavior, but rather by treating her honestly.
Popular culture weaves a tapestry of beautiful lies. “I didn’t want to hurt you,” the Teenage Fanclub vocalist swears, over and over, in the chorus of “The Concept.” The book Mavis is working on (we hear snippets in voice-over) is full of paeans to its heroine’s pluck, luck and intelligence. Big-studio comedies lull us with smiles and fairy tales. The truth, in these circumstances, can be a painful shock, even when it makes you laugh.
“Young Adult” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Harsh language, bad sex, unpleasant situations — grown-up stuff, in other words.
YOUNG ADULT
Opens on Friday in Manhattan.
Directed by Jason Reitman; written by Diablo Cody; director of photography, Eric Steelberg; edited by Dana Glauberman; production design by Kevin Thompson; costumes by David C. Robinson; produced by Mr. Reitman, Ms. Cody, Russell Smith, Lianne Halfon, John Malkovich and Mason Novick; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes.
WITH: Charlize Theron (Mavis Gary), Patton Oswalt (Matt Freehauf), Patrick Wilson (Buddy Slade), Elizabeth Reaser (Beth Slade), Jill Eikenberry (Hedda Gary) and Richard Bekins (David Gary). | – Young Adult, from the writer/director team behind Juno, stars Charlize Theron as a selfish thirtysomething returning to her hometown with the belief that she can win over her high school boyfriend—who's now married with a kid. Critics love it, though it can be hard to take: The film "systematically demolishes a china shop full of shopworn sentimental touchstones about—for starters—high school, small-town life, heterosexuality, Minnesota, and the capacity of human beings to change, learn, and grow," notes AO Scott in a New York Times' Critics' Pick review. "In this tale of stunted development, Theron is a comic force of nature, giving her character considerable density and humanity despite her monstrous aspects," observes Peter Travers in Rolling Stone. "But fair warning: The laughs in Young Adult leave bruises." Several critics don't expect it to be an immediate fan favorite. "After the screening I attended, everyone on the elevator (other than me) was visibly angry about the movie they’d just watched. But I admired Young Adult for its chutzpah and Theron for her go-for-broke performance," writes Dan Kois in Slate. In the Star Tribune, Colin Covert agrees. "Audiences may not embrace Mavis," Theron's character, "immediately—she's too spiky for that. But there's little doubt that in time she'll join Marge Gunderson and Juno McGuff as another of Minnesota's enduring and iconic film characters." |
Shia LaBeouf 'He Will Not Divide Us' Protest Closed Due to Potential Violence
Shia LaBeouf's 'He Will Not Divide Us' Protest Shut Down Due to Violence
Breaking News
Shia LaBeouf vowed Donald Trump would not divide us, but the museum where he held the protest did -- the 24/7 webcam has been shut down.
The Museum of the Moving Image in NYC says it turned off the cam mounted on one of its walls because it had become a "flashpoint for violence." Shia was arrested on January 25 when he allegedly got physical with a protester who showed up to oppose the movement.
There had been other physical altercations where no one was arrested -- with and without Shia -- and NYPD started patrolling the spot regularly.
He opened the display on Prez Trump's inauguration day ... standing in front of the camera, chanting "He will not divide us" around the clock. Supporters showed up, sometimes by the dozens, to help him keep it going 24/7.
His plan was to continue the protest through Trump's 4 years in office. Oh well. ||||| On Inauguration Day, Shia LaBeouf launched an art project called “He Will not Divide Us” at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York. Outside the museum is a camera and people can come and stand in front of it for as long as they want repeating the words “He will not divide us.” The video will be streamed continuously for four years, or as long as Donald Trump is President.
Yesterday, the “He Will Not Divide Us” official Twitter account tweeted out this video of a White Supremacist who showed up and started talking into the camera, including saying, as our cousin site Gossip Cop pointed out, something that sounds like “praise Hitler.”
White supremacist yells into the camera and Shia LaBeouf shuts him down. This has been a very interesting live stream. #HeWillNotDivideUs pic.twitter.com/CqY9pLobWi — #HeWillNotDivideUs (@HWNDUS) January 23, 2017
LaBeouf, who has made multiple appearances in the live stream was there at the time, got into his face and screamed “he will not divide us” into the man’s ear. Before things got (more) physical, the man left, and the crowd cheered.
Other moments have been much more positive. At one point, a man was there by himself for a while. Eventually, a woman came and joined him, saying she had been watching from home and had become inspired.
[featured image via Featureflash Photo Agency/Shutterstock, Inc.]
Have a tip we should know? [email protected] ||||| A Queens museum said Friday it is shuttering its controversial anti-President Trump exhibit dreamed up by actor Shia LaBeouf, conceding that the installation has become a “flashpoint for violence,” The Post has learned.
A webcam mounted on a wall outside Astoria’s Museum of the Moving Image — titled “HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US” — began filming on Inauguration Day, and was to be in place 24/7, for the duration of Trump’s presidency.
But clashes between pro- and anti-Trump forces were too much for museum brass to justify the art project.
“The installation created a serious and ongoing public safety hazard for the museum, its visitors, its staff, local residents and businesses,” the museum said in a statement.
“While the installation began constructively, it deteriorated markedly after one of the artists was arrested at the site of the installation and ultimately necessitated this action.”
The statement said the controversy led to “numerous arrests” and prompted around-the-clock police patrols.
Those busted included LaBeouf, who was put in cuffs at a late January scuffle at the oddball installation.
Neighbors complained about noisy visitors loitering on their porches in the early morning hours, urinating and smoking marijuana, the local community board said.
Following a deluge of complaints, the 114th Precinct has set up a 24-hour patrol presence outside the museum, the NYPD said.
Community leaders and neighbors said something had to be done.
“Why don’t they put the cam inside the museum? That has been raised by some individuals,” said Community Board 1 District Manager Florence Koulouris.
“The concern is the quality of life. There’s action going on during unacceptable hours. The museum needs to find a way to make the project better for everyone involved,” she said.
Meanwhile, a prominent museum board trustee had slammed the project as misguided, and said it was authorized without her input.
“I was not told. I don’t really know how it happened. I was upset when I found out about it,” said Claire Shulman, a former Queens borough president.
“It was a mistake to do it. It’s unsafe for a public institution to do a project like this,” said Shulman, a Democrat.
“It’s inappropriate for that location. It’s a city building. It’s a city institution. It’s one of the finest institutions in the city.”
While valuing free speech, Shulman noted the American Museum is a tax-exempt, not-for-profit institution that is barred from engaging in partisan politics.
Opened in 1988, the Museum of the Moving Image showcases the art, history, technique and technology of film, television and digital media.
It is housed in a city-owned building and receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in government grants every year.
Related Video 0:49 More of Shia's wildest moments ||||| Shia LaBeouf is no stranger to curious uses of streaming video — this is the guy, after all, who livestreamed himself watching his entire filmography in reverse chronological order in 2015. But the Beef is taking his internet ambitions to new heights today with the launch of a caps-locked piece of performance art entitled HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US, co-created by frequent collaborators Nastja Säde Rönkkö and Luke Turner. It consists of a stationary webcam placed on an exterior wall of New York's Museum of the Moving Image, in front of which people are invited to place themselves and intone the words "he will not divide us." The footage will be broadcast live on the web at hewillnotdivide.us, and the piece will be in operation 24 hours a day for the duration of Donald Trump's time in office. Participants can say the phrase as many times as they want, for as long as they want — the idea is that it will become a "mantra" that "acts as a show of resistance or insistence, opposition or optimism, guided by the spirit of each individual participant and the community." Hey, every little bit counts.
The first participant, as it turned out, was none other than Jaden Smith! An anonymous tipster sent Vulture these on-the-scene photos of the kickoff, in which you can see LaBeouf sitting pensively against the wall.
Jaden Smith and Shia LaBeouf. ||||| HEWILLNOTDIVIDE.US is an ongoing durational artwork by LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner.
Commencing at 9am on January 20, 2017, the day of the inauguration of the 45th President of the United States, the public is invited to deliver the words "HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US" into a camera mounted on a wall outside the Museum of the Moving Image, New York, repeating the phrase as many times, and for as long as they wish.
Open to all, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the participatory performance will be live-streamed continuously for four years, or the duration of the presidency. In this way, the mantra "HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US" acts as a show of resistance or insistence, opposition or optimism, guided by the spirit of each individual participant and the community.
On February 10, 2017, the Museum of the Moving Image abandoned the project.
On February 18, 2017, the project relocated to a wall outside the El Rey Theater, Albuquerque.
On March 8, 2017, the project moved to an unknown location. A flag emblazoned with the words "HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US" will be flown for the duration.
On March 22, 2017, the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, Liverpool, adopted the project.
On October 16, 2017, le lieu unique, Nantes, adopted the project.
On June 8, 2018, the work was installed in its original format at Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, for the exhibition 'Peer-to-Peer. Collective Practices in New Art' until October 28, 2018.
On October 29, 2018, the stream returned to le lieu unique. | – Shia LaBeouf's "He Will Not Divide Us" project was supposed to be livestreamed for the duration of Donald Trump's presidency, meaning a minimum of four years. Instead, on Friday, 3 weeks into said presidency, the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens announced that it was shutting the project down, Page Six reports. LaBeouf had confronted a white supremacist on the livestream and even got himself arrested for another confrontation, but those weren't the only problems. TMZ reports there were other physical altercations, and the NYPD had started patrolling the area regularly. The department said there were "numerous arrests" related to the project. Locals had also complained about noise, drug use, and public urination from guests who came to ogle the "He Will Not Divide Us" painted on the museum's wall where the camera was mounted. In the space where the livestream used to be on the project's website, it now simply says, "THE MUSEUM HAS ABANDONED US." The next presidential inauguration occurs 1,440 days from today. (Click for a list of crazy things Shia has done.) |
Hachette Fed Up With Horror Mash-Up Writer
MANHATTAN (CN) - Blasting the author of "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" in a federal complaint, Hachette Book Group says Seth Grahame-Smith should fork over half-a-million dollars because his long-awaited next title is a dud.
Hachette paid the $500,000 in question, according to the Aug. 26 complaint, as part of a $2 million advance in 2010 for Smith's next two books.
Conceding that Smith fulfilled the first part of the deal, Hachette notes that it published "The Last American Vampire" last year as a sequel to Smith's hit 2010 novel "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter."
But Hachette says its contract also required Smith to submit another original work by June 2013.
Hachette says it gave Smith several extensions on his deadline, and that his final deadline was late June 2016.
When Smith finally delivered that month, however, Hachette says the manuscript was not the one it ordered.
As Hachette tells it, the specifications for the book were minimal.
The title had to be in the same style as "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter," but Smith's personal-services company Baby Gorilla could pick the novel's subject, according to the complaint.
Hachette maintains that it wanted to give written approval of the subject, however, and that the book had to be between 80,000 and 100,000 words.
But the manuscript Smith turned in "varied so materially and substantially from that described in the agreement," the complaint says.
Hachette says it never gave written approval of the subject Smith chose, and that the manuscript "materially varies from the 80,000-100,000 word limit."
Rather than an original work, moreover, Smith's offering "instead is in large part an appropriation of a 120-year-old public-domain work," the complaint says.
Worse yet, the publisher says Smith's new book "is not comparable in style and quality to Smith's wholly original bestseller 'Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.'"
Representatives for Smith have not returned a request for comment.
The writer's website notes that "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" singlehandedly birthed the "mash-up craze" in 2009.
Books in the mash-up genre reimagine classic literature with new material, such as zombies, vampires, werewolves and other horror tropes. While these novels tend to be inherently derivative, most authors avoid copyright issues by basing their books on texts that are in the public domain.
Though "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" book sold more than 2 million copies, with translations into more than 20 languages, its film adaptation was a dud.
Starring "Downton Abbey's" Lily James, "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" opened past February 2016 to mixed reviews and low box-office numbers.
Smith had not written the screenplay for that movie, however, as he had for the 2012 Tim Burton-produced adaptation of his "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter," which reportedly earning $137 million in the worldwide box office.
"The Last American Vampire," Smith's sequel to the book, follows Lincoln's vampire-hunting mentor Henry O. Sturges into the 20th century.
Hachette wants its $500,000 back. It is represented by Alexander Gigante with Cowan DeBaets Abrahams & Sheppard. ||||| Hatchette Book Group claims Seth Grahame-Smith's submitted novel is nothing more than an appropriation of a 120-year-old public-domain story.
The man behind Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is facing a lawsuit that can be summed up by a common four-word phrase: too little, too late.
Hachette Book Group is suing New York Times best-selling author Seth Grahame-Smith, and his company Baby Gorilla Inc., for breach of contract. The publisher claims he turned in a subpar project three years after it was contractually due, according to a complaint filed Friday in New York federal court.
Grahame-Smith was paid $1 million as a combined advance for two books due to Hachette, and now the publisher wants half of that back.
Hachette claims their 2010 deal specified that the first book would be "a sequel to or spinoff of" Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and the second would be on a topic to be determined by the author subject to Hachette's written approval. The deal also gave the publisher termination rights if any manuscript was delivered more than 60 days after it was due.
In 2015, Hachette published Grahame-Smith's The Last American Vampire, but the second promised novel proved to be problematic, according to the complaint.
"At the request of BGI and Smith, Hachette twice extended the delivery date for Book #2 from the original contractual date of June 3, 2013 ... totaling in all an extension of 34 months," writes Hachette's attorney Alexander Gigante.
After that, Hatchette claims, it terminated the agreement — starting the clock on a 60-day grace period in which Grahame-Smith could deliver the manuscript.
That manuscript, however, wasn't what Hatchette says it was promised. The publisher claims it was "in large part an appropriation of a 120-year-old public-domain work," materially varies from the agreed-upon word limit and is on a subject Hatchette never approved in writing.
Grahame-Smith has not yet commented on the lawsuit. | – When Seth Grahame-Smith published the hit novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies with Hachette Book Group in 2009, which sold more than 2 million copies and was translated into more than 20 languages, he was largely credited with "unleashing" zombie mashups on the world, as the Guardian reports. But the emerging literary mashup genre, which involves reinterpreting older classics with new thematic elements, such as zombies and werewolves, may invite some confusion as to how much of the content need be original, and Grahame-Smith's own narrative is a case in point: Hachette is now suing him for $500,000, a portion of the advance it paid him to write a sequel they are calling a dud, reports Courthouse News Service. The original agreement, according to court documents, specified that Grahame-Smith would write two more novels following his 2010 hit Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. He delivered on the first of the two, The Last American Vampire, which was published in 2015. But Hachette alleges that the other manuscript he delivered in June 2016—it was originally supposed to arrive in 2013—was never approved and "varied so materially and substantially from that described in the agreement" that the publishing house wants its advance back. It even alleges that Grahame-Smith didn't file an original work at all, but "an appropriation of a 120-year-old public-domain work." Grahame-Smith hasn't commented publicly on the lawsuit, notes the Hollywood Reporter. (See how Detroit toyed with zombies.) |
Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been “reminded” not to solicit votes near polling sites after President Bill Clinton ventured into a polling location in Boston on Tuesday, the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s office said.
Massachusetts election rules forbid the solicitation of a vote for or against a candidate, party, or position within 150 feet of a polling place.
Alongside Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, Clinton greeted election workers and voters on Tuesday at the Holy Name Parish School, a polling location in West Roxbury. The former president chatted up voters, kissed an old lady on the head, posed for photos, and bought a cup of coffee, MassLive reports.
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Former President Clinton, Mayor Marty Walsh greet kids at Holy Name Parish School in West Roxbury. @wbur pic.twitter.com/Q8dnfYCP2k — Daniel A. Guzman (@DGQuoVadimus) March 1, 2016
Brian McNiff, a spokesman for Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin, said he had heard about Bill Clinton’s presence. McNiff said that Hillary Clinton’s campaign “has been reminded” of the 150-foot rule.
Bonnie McGilpin, a spokeswoman for Walsh’s office, said Walsh joined Clinton to thank poll workers, but “they were not campaigning inside the polling location.”
McNiff was asked if Clinton’s presence would, on its own, constitute a solicitation.
“He’s a well known person. And he’s a spouse of a candidate,” McNiff said. “That should answer the question.”
He declined to further elaborate.
However, Galvin told The New York Times it was acceptable for Clinton to enter a polling place—so long as he did not solicit votes. He said he had to remind poll workers “that even a president can’t go inside and work a polling place.”
“He can go in, but he can’t approach voters,” Galvin said. “We just took the extra precaution of telling them because this is not a usual occurrence. You don’t usually get a president doing this.”
At one point during Clinton’s visit in West Roxbury, a woman asked to take a photo with Clinton.
“As long as we’re not violating any election laws,” he said, according to MassLive.
The visit to West Roxbury was the first of four planned stops Clinton made in Massachusetts on Tuesday to promote the candidacy of his wife Hillary.
Bill Clinton also stopped for photos and hand-shaking at the Free Library in Newton, where a crowd of about 200 people had assembled, The Boston Globe reports.
Clinton’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. ||||| Former President Bill Clinton greeted people inside the Newton Free Library, a polling place, during Tuesday’s primary election.
Bill Clinton’s presence inside a polling location in Boston on Super Tuesday raised concerns about whether the former president violated state rules on election campaigning.
While stumping for his wife, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton entered a polling station at the Holy Name Parish School’s gymnasium in West Roxbury early Tuesday.
It was there that he spoke with workers, bought a cup of coffee, and apparently took a photo with one woman, according to press pool reports.
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A video clip showing Bill Clinton shaking hands with election clerks at Holy Name, alongside Mayor Martin J. Walsh, had some people on Twitter questioning the former president’s appearance indoors.
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“Aren’t there rules about electioneering at the polling location?” one person wrote on Twitter, after seeing the video.
“How is this legal?” a second person asked on social media.
Secretary of State William F. Galvin told the New York Times that he had to remind election workers that “even a president can’t go inside and work a polling place.”
“He can go in, but he can’t approach voters,” Galvin said. “We just took the extra precaution of telling them because this is not a usual occurrence. You don’t usually get a president doing this.”
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According to the Election Day Legal Summary on Galvin’s website, certain activities on Election Day are prohibited within polling locations and within 150 feet of polling places, including the “solicitation of votes for or against, or any other form of promotion or opposition of, any person or political party.”
Bill Clinton had also been inside the Newton Free Library, a polling station in Newton, on Tuesday, after greeting supporters outside.
A spokesman from Galvin’s office said Hillary Clinton’s campaign had been “notified” of the state rules.
“We have heard about it, and the clerks have been instructed and the campaign has been instructed that 150 feet is the rule,” said Brian McNiff, a spokesman for Galvin’s office.
Bill Clinton seemed determined during his stop in Boston to stay in line.
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When one woman asked for a photo with him in West Roxbury, he replied, “As long as we’re not violating any election laws,” according to a pool report.
An official from Walsh’s office said the duo was not campaigning inside of the polling location, however.
“President Clinton joined Mayor Walsh to thank poll workers in West Roxbury this morning,” said spokeswoman Bonnie McGilpin.
Walsh has endorsed Hillary Clinton for president.
Bill Clinton also made a stop in New Bedford to greet a large crowd of voters Tuesday.
Steve Annear can be reached at [email protected] . Follow him on Twitter @steveannear ||||| BOSTON (CBS) – The Secretary of State’s office is looking into the actions of former President Bill Clinton, who was campaigning for his wife across Massachusetts on Super Tuesday.
Clinton stopped in several towns, but also inside a polling location that he wasn’t supposed to be in.
Alongside Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, the former president shook hands and took pictures with voters inside a polling location in West Roxbury Tuesday morning.
“He’s certainly free to visit polling places,” Secretary of State William Galvin said in an interview with WBZ NewsRadio 1030. “He cannot campaign though within 150 feet.”
Galvin said he gently reminded the Clinton campaign what the rules are.
“So we are being very clear with local election officials irrespective of his status, he cannot go inside a polling place and approach voters,” Galvin said.
Galvin said there is a penalty, but they only take action in cases of “absolute disobedience.”
“He was a good president so we just want to make sure that he knows the rules,” Galvin said. “He’s not from here so he may not know.” ||||| WEST ROXBURY - At 9:35 a.m., as a steady stream of voters headed into Holy Name Church gymnasium to vote, former President Bill Clinton arrived in an SUV.
He waved, he shook hands, he posed for pictures, he kissed an old lady on the top of her head.
One man was overheard exclaiming, "I just bumped into the president. It was awesome!"
Clinton, the former president and the husband of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, is spending Tuesday morning in Massachusetts, visiting four polling places in the eastern part of the state. He also held a late-night rally in Worcester on Monday.
Massachusetts is one of more than a dozen states holding a presidential primary or caucus on Super Tuesday, and it is home to one of the tightest contests on the Democratic side, where Hillary Clinton is running against Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders.
"It's great to see the attention here in Boston and Massachusetts," said Boston Mayor Marty Walsh. "I think that people aren't taking it for granted. Certainly, President Clinton being here today says a lot on Election Day. He could be in any state in the country, and he's here in Massachusetts."
Clinton spent 45 minutes at the polling place in West Roxbury, his first stop of the day. He did not take press questions, but spent the time shaking hands, chatting with voters and posing for pictures. He repeated over and over, ""Hi, How are you?" and "So glad to see you." He greeted a child with a, "Hi, beautiful," signed a voter's Hillary Clinton campaign sign, and said "thank you" and "bless you" to voters. He greeted a woman who he was told was 104 years old.
"Welcome to West Roxbury," a voter said. Another chimed in, "We'll make you an honorary citizen." Clinton said, "Thank you."
Clinton walked inside the polling place, escorted by Walsh and West Roxbury's unofficial mayor Richie Gormley. He stopped at a bake sale near the entrance and bought a cup of coffee.
When one woman asked for a photo inside the polling place, Clinton said, "As long as we're not violating any election laws," and posed. Clinton waved, saluted and gave thumbs up to voters and volunteers. As he left the polling place, a group of around 100 elementary school children were waiting outside. Clinton gave high fives to many of them, and posed with Walsh in front of the children.
Walsh said after Clinton left that one woman told the former president that she had voted for Republican Ted Cruz, but her 98-year-old mother voted for Hillary Clinton. "He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and wrote her a note for her mother," Walsh said.
Boston City Councilor Matt O'Malley, a supporter of former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley -- who started supporting Hillary Clinton when O'Malley dropped out of the presidential race -- called Clinton's visit "such an honor."
"President Bill Clinton was one of the greatest presidents certainly of my lifetime," O'Malley said. "You think of how the economy was so strong in the 90s, you think of the way he conducted foreign policy, he was terrific."
"It's an absolute honor for the neighborhood that a former president would come by and spend some time with us and meet the kids," O'Malley said.
As Clinton's vehicle drove away from the polling place, he stuck his head out of the SUV and waved.
Correction: Gormley is often referred to as West Roxbury's mayor, but that is not his formal title. | – Hours before his wife was named the Massachusetts primary winner on Super Tuesday, apparent political novice Bill Clinton strolled into a polling station in Boston. Standing with Mayor Marty Walsh at the Holy Name Parish School, Clinton greeted poll staff and voters and even kissed an elderly woman on the head, reports Boston.com. When one woman asked to take a photo with him, he responded, "as long as we're not violating any election laws," reports MassLive.com. He might have done just that. The office of Massachusetts' Secretary of State William Galvin notes Hillary Clinton's campaign had to be "reminded" that state election rules bar the solicitation of a vote within 150 feet of a polling location. The former president had also entered a polling station in Newton, reports the Boston Globe. When asked if his presence alone was a violation, a rep said, "He's a well-known person and he's a spouse of a candidate. That should answer the question." Galvin, however, says Clinton was permitted in polling stations as long as he didn't solicit votes. "We just took the extra precaution of telling them because this is not a usual occurrence," he tells the New York Times. Galvin adds Clinton is "not from here so he may not know" the rules, noting penalties are only dished out in cases of "absolute disobedience," per CBS Boston. A rep for Walsh says he and Clinton "were not campaigning inside the polling location." |
CLOSE On Wednesday, December 20, statues of Nathan Bedford Forrest and Jefferson Davis were removed from Memphis parks Wochit
Buy Photo December 20, 2017 - People gather to watch workers removing the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue from Health Sciences Park on Wednesday night. (Photo: Yalonda M. James / The Commercial Appeal)Buy Photo
The city of Memphis sold two public parks containing Confederate monuments to a nonprofit Wednesday in a massive, months-in-the-planning operation to take the statues down overnight.
The City Council unanimously approved the sale of Health Science Park, home of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, and its easement on Fourth Bluff Park, home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, for $1,000 each to Memphis Greenspace Inc. Fourth Bluff, or Memphis Park, is owned by a group called The Overton Heirs.
The sale — which is almost certain to result in a lawsuit from statue supporters — allows Greenspace to legally do what the city of Memphis cannot: Remove the statues from their visible perches in the parks, Chief Legal Officer Bruce McMullen said. He said they would be stored in an undisclosed location for security reasons.
CLOSE The statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis at Fourth Bluff Park in downtown Memphis was taken down Wednesday, Dec. 21. Video by Daniel Connolly/ The Commercial Appeal
"Health Sciences Park and Memphis Park have been sold," Mayor Jim Strickland said in a social media post soon after the vote. Operations on those sites tonight are being conducted by a private entity and are compliant with state law. We will have further updates later tonight."
More: Editorial: Memphis right to take down racist symbols
More: Mayor Strickland: Memphis Confederate statues are gone but challenges remain
More: Memphis Greenspace: Key player in removal of Confederate statues
The nonprofit, which is led by Shelby County Commissioner and attorney Van Turner, brought in a crane to remove the Forrest statue first at around 6 p.m.
Greenspace signed a contract with Strickland on Friday that requires them to continue operating the park as a park, McMullen confirmed Wednesday. He said he knew of no plans for the nonprofit to sell the parks back to the city.
After the vote, Memphis police quickly deployed from the riverfront area near the Interstate 40 welcome center in Downtown and cordoned off the parks with yellow crime scene tape. Crowds gathered at both locations as word spread via social media.
The statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest was lifted off its base at 9:01 p.m., suspended in the air and then settled on a truck. A chant of "the people united will never be defeated" spread through the crowd.
Buy Photo December 20, 2017 - Community organizer Tami Sawyer, #TakeEmDown901, raises her fist as workers remove the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue from Health Sciences Park on Wednesday night. (Photo: Yalonda M. James/The Commercial Appeal)
Council member Janis Fullilove, who voted for the ordinance, said it was a "crazy, crazy, crazy night."
"It's really going down in history that this is the night they are going to take the statues down," she said. "It's a historic moment.
City Council member Berlin Boyd came over and talked with reporters.
CLOSE A cement block is all that remains of where the Nathan Bedford Forrest was once located. Brad Vest / The Commercial Appeal
“We want to thank all of the business community,” he said at one point, and onlookers with grassroots activist group #TakeEmDown901 began taunting him for not acknowledging their efforts, which included several high-profile, well-attended protests. Some shouted insults and curses. Boyd finished talking and walked across the street.
More: The 9:01: The night the Memphis Confederate monuments came down
More: Memphis Confederate statues: Social media reaction
Tami Sawyer, a leader of #TakeEmDown901 and Democratic candidate for Shelby County Commission, credited the work of the activists who kept pressure on elected officials this year.
CLOSE Community organizer Tami Sawyer speaks about removal of Confederate monuments in Memphis. Yalonda M. James/The Commercial Appeal
"This is thousands of people who came together to put names on petitions, to donate money and time ... to get arrested, to get people out of jail ... so here we are today as the year draws to a close seeing justice and righteousness happen," she said. "It means that can be possible for any of us on any of these issues as we continue to fight for equality and equity in Memphis.
After the Forrest statue was removed, she said #TakeEmDown901 is now #TookEmDown901.
Buy Photo December 20, 2017 - (From left to right) Taniah Jackson, 12, stands with her mother Janet Jackson, and sister Tatiana Jackson, 14, as they observe the removal of Nathan Bedford Forrest's Confederate statue from Health Sciences Park on Wednesday night. (Photo: Yalonda M. James/The Commercial Appeal)
“This is a step in the right direction. I am not sure it’s time to take a victory lap quite yet but this is definitely something to celebrate,” said the Rev. Earle Fisher, pastor of Abyssinian Missionary Baptist Church in Memphis. “We fought long and hard. We salute Tami Sawyer for her wonderful leadership, all of the people who have been a part of #TakeEmDown901 over the past several months, and all of the forerunners that were fighting these statues before many of us graduated from college."
Fisher said the measures that were taken by the city in order to remove the statues were things activists were proposing months ago.
Tennessee state Rep. Raumesh Akbari couldn’t stay home and watch this moment unfold on social media or television.
“This is something that happens once in a lifetime. When I heard the news, I was like, I want to be a part of this. I want to see with my own eyes. I don’t want to see it on Facebook, I don’t want to see it on the news. I want to be able to tell this story, for myself and for future generations.”
CLOSE County Commissioner Walter Bailey shares his thoughts on the removal of Confederate monuments in Memphis. Yalonda M. James/The Commercial Appeal
She can’t predict how the legislature will react to Memphis finding a way around state law.
“I’m hoping that my colleagues in the state house respect the city and the decision it has made,” Arkbari said. “Honestly, each city needs to be able to do what’s best for themselves.”
U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, a Democrat from Memphis, released this statement, referencing the graves of Forrest and his wife currently resting under the statue:
“I commend Mayor Strickland and the City Council for finding a way to legally remove statues from an era that is not representative of Memphis today and have remained an affront to most of the citizens of Memphis,” Cohen said.
Moments ago, I signed the ordinance that completed our sale of the parks. pic.twitter.com/LZH00Pa6cv — Mayor Jim Strickland (@MayorMemphis) December 21, 2017
“As we approach the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, it’s important that these relics of the Confederacy and defenders of slavery don’t continue to be displayed in prominent places in our city. Hopefully, the Forrests will be returned to their rightful and preferred burial spot — Elmwood Cemetery.”
The city hopes to move the graves eventually as well, back to their original burial plot in Elmwood.
Buy Photo December 20, 2017 - Workers prepare to remove the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue from Health Sciences Park on Wednesday evening. (Photo: Yalonda M. James / The Commercial Appeal)
Strickland has long said he would consider any "legal" options for removing the statues, but wouldn't say whether he considered immediate removal an option.
The vote Wednesday followed months of frustration for city officials fighting against the state's reams of red tape that kept the statues in place despite a wave of public opposition. Council member Edmund Ford Jr. proposed a substitute ordinance that was approved without being read before or immediately after the vote, leaving the crowd in the dark about its contents or the impending police blitz around the statues.
The vote doesn't violate state sunshine laws or, because of Turner's involvement as executive director of Greenspace, state or local conflict of interest rules, McMullen said.
The Tennessee Historical Commission voted Oct. 13 to deny the city's application to remove the Forrest statue, prompting the administration to appeal the decision to Chancery Court and, separately, to argue before an administrative law judge that the city has the authority to remove the statue without a waiver. The city filed for a waiver before the state legislature expanded the scope of Tennessee Heritage Protection Act in 2016 to include monuments of historical figures.
The administration supports removing both the Forrest statue and a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
The removal of the Davis statue went faster than the Forrest statue. At about 10:45 p.m. it was dangling aloft by thick yellow straps from a crane, minutes later, the statue was settled onto the back of a truck.
The crowd of onlookers cheered and struck up songs, including “Na na na na / Na na na na / Hey hey / Goodbye!”
Workers attempting to remove at least one smaller monument inside the Riverside park where the Jefferson Davis statue stood.
With a misting rain falling, the evening’s drama appeared mostly over shortly after 11 p.m.
Buy Photo December 20, 2017 - Nathan Bedford Forrest's Confederate statue is removed from Health Sciences Park on Wednesday night. (Photo: Yalonda M. James/The Commercial Appeal)
The City Council, then-council member Strickland included, voted in 2015 to remove the Forrest statue and to move the graves of he and his wife back to their original burial plot in Elmwood Cemetery.
The Forrest statue, installed in 1904, has a long and controversial history in Memphis. Forrest was, in his later life, a pillar of Memphis society who helped steer the city toward its defining industry of shipping. But he was also a pre-war slave trader, alleged war criminal, and the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan — a group he later renounced.
Reporters Katie Fretland, Daniel Connolly and Linda Moore contributed to this report.
Reach Ryan Poe at [email protected] or on Twitter at @ryanpoe.
CLOSE Police activity at park where confederate monuments are coming down in Memphis Brad Vest / The Commercial Appeal
Read or Share this story: http://memne.ws/2BbH20U ||||| MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — A crew removed a Confederate statue from a Memphis park Wednesday night after the city sold it to a private entity.
The City Council had earlier voted unanimously to sell two parks where Confederate statues were located and crews began working right away to remove a statue of Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest.
The parks were sold to Greenspace Inc. for $1,000 each, The Commercial Appeal reported . Memphis Chief Legal Officer Bruce McMullen said Greenspace can legally remove the statues, which the city was unable to do.
Live video from Health Sciences Park captured cheers as the statue of Forrest was lifted off its marble base and placed on a flatbed truck late Wednesday. Police had cordoned off the area around the statue.
A statue of President Jefferson Davis is at Fourth Bluff Park, where police had blocked off surrounding streets.
McMullen said the statues would be stored in an undisclosed location.
Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland tweeted that the work underway in the parks complies with state law.
Earlier this month, the city filed a petition asking for judicial review of the Tennessee Historical Commission's denial of a request to remove the Forrest statue.
"I commend Mayor Strickland and the City Council for finding a way to legally remove statues from an era that is not representative of Memphis today and have remained an affront to most of the citizens of Memphis," U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, a Democrat from Memphis, said in a statement.
Cities have tried to remove Confederate monuments after the racially motivated massacre of nine people at a black church in South Carolina and a violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Protesters have called for the removal of the Forrest statue, saying it represents racism and bigotry. City leaders have discussed ways to relocate the statue and move his remains, which are buried under the monument.
Supporters of keeping the statue in place say it represents an important part of history. The Sons of Confederate Veterans in Memphis has said such monuments do not represent white supremacy and it would be a mistake to remove them.
"It is a deliberate attempt to avoid the state law and the city is breaking the law," Lee Millar with Sons of Confederate Veterans told WREG-TV on Wednesday.
Forrest was a slave trader, Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader who became influential in the city's growth after the Civil War.
___
Information from: The Commercial Appeal, http://www.commercialappeal.com ||||| MEMPHIS — The City Council here voted Wednesday to sell two city parks with Confederate monuments, clearing the way for two statues to be removed before the city commemorates the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Mayor Jim Strickland first announced the sales of Health Sciences Park and Memphis Park on Twitter.
“History is being made in Memphis tonight,” he said at a news conference later in the evening.
Health Sciences Park had a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and an early member of the Ku Klux Klan, which was removed around 9 p.m. local time.
By 10:30 p.m., cranes had maneuvered into Memphis Park and around a statue of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy during the Civil War. About 15 minutes later, a crane hoisted the statue onto a truck as a crowd cheered and struck up songs, including “Hit the road Jack.” | – Two Confederate statues came down in Memphis on a dramatic night that had been months in the planning. Statues of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest were removed from two parks Wednesday night after the city sold the parks to a nonprofit called Memphis Greenspace Inc. for $1,000 each, the Commercial Appeal reports. The City Council voted unanimously earlier Wednesday to sell the parks, a move that allowed the legal removal of the statues. The city had been barred from taking down the Confederate statues under the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act, which bans the removal or renaming of memorials on public land, the New York Times reports. In October, a state agency rejected the city's request to waive the heritage law and allow the removal of the two statues. The Greenspace nonprofit was incorporated the same month. Memphis Chief Legal Officer Bruce McMullen says the two statues will be stored in an undisclosed location, the AP reports. The Times reports that onlookers cheered as a crane lifted the statue of Forrest—a former slave trader, alleged war criminal, and early Ku Klux Klan member—from its pedestal, with some chanting "Hey hey! Ho ho! That racist statue has got to go." "History is being made tonight," said Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland in a long series of tweets explaining the move, which comes ahead of the 50th anniversary of the Memphis assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. |
Marshawn Lynch's mom, Delisa Lynch, clearly isn't afraid to voice her opinions on Donald Trump.
Early Monday morning, President Trump called for the Oakland Raiders running back to be suspended for kneeling during the American national anthem (as he has done all season) and standing for the Mexican national anthem during the Raiders' 33-8 loss to New England in Mexico City on Sunday. While Marshawn has yet to respond, his mother took to Twitter to take a shot at the President.
what NFL team do Trump own ? oh yeah they wouldnt let him have one ,!! LMAO https://t.co/1rPa5jfMjE — Delisa Lynch (@MommaLynch24) November 20, 2017
In 2014, Trump attempted to buy the Buffalo Bills franchise after Bills founder Ralph Wilson passed away at age 95. Alongside the likes of Jon Bon Jovi and natural-gas billionaire Terry Pegula, Trump entered a near six-month process to purchase the team. In the end, Pegula got the team. Trump told SI in September 2015, "I bid a billion dollars, all cash on the table. [Pegula] bought it for a billion-two, I believe, although they say it was a billion-four. I think he got it for a billion-two."
This isn't the first time Delisa Lynch has spoke about her son's decision to kneel for the anthem.
Last month, Lynch tweeted out that Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones was criticized for sitting during the national anthem at his first game as an owner.
At his first home game as owner, Jerry Jones was criticized for sitting during the anthemhttps://t.co/i9ezFc3uXW — Delisa Lynch (@MommaLynch24) October 22, 2017
Monday morning, Lynch retweeted her original tweet with the caption, what's "wrong with following the leader?"
Lynch's tweets as well as her son's actions represent the ongoing feud between NFL players and President Trump over the issue of standing for the national anthem.
And while the NFL playoffs are quickly approaching, this issue doesn't seem like it will slow down anytime soon. ||||| Oakland Raiders running back Marshawn Lynch, right, has protested during the national anthem during the 2017 NFL season. (Alex Brandon/Associated Press)
Delisa Lynch did what just about any mother would do if their son was confronted by a bully: She fought back.
Except in her case, that person was the president, and her son, no playground runt but 31-year-old NFL running back Marshawn Lynch, who Trump had lambasted in a tweet on Monday for not standing during the national anthem during a recent game in Mexico.
Delisa Lynch, who goes by @MommaLynch24 on Twitter, quickly jumped into the fray with a retort of her own.
“What NFL team do Trump own?” she fired off, citing the president’s tweet. “Oh yeah they wouldn’t let him have one!”
Lynch appeared to be referring to Trump’s long and stormy relationship with the NFL. The president bought a United State Football League team in 1983 for a fraction of the price of an NFL franchise, but never purchased an NFL team, getting outbid in 2014.
[Donald Trump’s long, stormy and unrequited romance with the NFL]
The fiery retort, which spread far and wide across the Internet, landed Lynch in a now growing group of people: the family members of people who have been targeted by Trump on Twitter, and instead of folding in resignation, have jumped in to join the fray.
Marshawn Lynch, who plays for the Oakland Raiders, is the latest athlete to draw a rebuke from the President, joining others, like former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick and Golden State Warriors star Steph Curry. Coincidentally or not, most have hailed from California, particularly the Bay Area, a reflection perhaps of how deep the state’s pockets of opposition to the president run.
Most if not all of the athletes Trump has attacked have been some other race than white, a point not lost on the president’s critics.
Perhaps it was just a matter of time before he went after Marshawn Lynch.
The subject of media fascination for years, the running back has earned notoriety as much for what he doesn’t say, as what he does. His unwillingness to feign interest in the media hoopla around the NFL has always made him stand out. But he is deeply beloved by fans, particularly in his hometown, Oakland, as well as those in other places he’s played, like Seattle.
[Marshawn Lynch and Oakland are ready for one last ride. And you’re not invited.]
“I’m just bout that action, boss,” he told Deion Sanders, who had found him wearing a hood and sunglasses during the media heavy lead up to the Super Bowl in 2014. “Want something you go get it; ain’t no need to talk about it.”
Still Lynch has found ways to communicate his feelings about Trump: Earlier this year, he wore a T-shirt that read, “Everybody vs. Trump,” to a game at the heights of the president’s inflammatory controversy over the national anthem.
But where he might be a sphinx, Delisa Lynch is a font of opinion, with 16,000 followers on Twitter. Long a fixture in the stands with her “Momma Lynch” jersey on, she has weighed in to support her son before. In the wake of the president’s tweet Monday, she came alive on Twitter, retweeting thank yous to the troops, pictures of American flags and words of support from fans.
In response to a harshly critical tweet by former Tea Party congressman Joe Walsh, she wrote: “Always the ones with their own issues to throw shade.”
Other people in the Raiders orbit fumed after the president’s statement as well.
“The bully-in-chief needs to worry about his own approval ratings and stop picking on people,” Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said in a video posted by ABC 7. “We are with you Marshawn.”
Linda Del Rio, the wife of Raiders Coach Jack Del Rio, said in a tweet that was later removed that she regretted her vote for Trump.
Lynch meanwhile, who gained 65 yards on 11 carries in the Raider’s defeat, stayed quiet on Twitter. The charity he co-founded handed out 500 turkeys to families in need in Oakland on Sunday, a spokeswoman said.
what NFL team do Trump own ? oh yeah they wouldnt let him have one ,!! LMAO https://t.co/1rPa5jfMjE — Delisa Lynch (@MommaLynch24) November 20, 2017
Read more:
For Trump, fighting with athletes is political sport
National anthem protests are becoming more popular. You can thank Donald Trump.
Did Trump’s tweet make it safer for NFL players to kneel for the anthem? ||||| (CNN) Justin Sipla hangs the certificate of the minority share he owns of the Green Bay Packers on the wall of his office instead of his Ph.D. in anatomical sciences.
"That's all the students need to know about me," quipped the neuroanatomist who teaches at the University of Iowa's medical school.
He took the job in 2010 largely because it was in driving distance to Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where his team plays.
All NFL teams have diehard fans, but the Packers faithful are unique: Fans own a stake in the team, though they don't have the same rights as the owners of other teams. More than 360,000 fans own more than 5 million shares in the Packers, the league's only publicly owned franchise, according to the team's website
Some minority shareholders praised the team for locking arms in unity last weekend but took offense to several players on other teams kneeling in response to President Donald Trump's criticism of players opting to protest during the National Anthem. Still, other shareholders said they will heed the call from quarterback Aaron Rodgers to lock arms with each other in unity during the National Anthem before Thursday's game against the Chicago Bears, a division rival.
"It will represent a coming together of players who want the same things that all of us do -- freedom, equality, tolerance, understanding, and justice for those who have been unjustly treated, discriminated against or otherwise treated unfairly," the team said in a statement
JUST WATCHED Trump responds after a day of NFL protests Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Trump responds after a day of NFL protests 01:02
Audrey Birnbaum Young, a shareholder from Atlanta, said while the President was not directly addressing Packers shareholders, she still felt offended as a fan and a part owner when Trump called on NFL owners to fire players who kneel during the National Anthem.
"It was absolutely ridiculous for him to insult the owners without considering the fact there are shareholders that are also fans," the 34-year-old said. "We don't have the power to be able to fire those players but even if we could, there is no way that we would listen to that."
Around the league, several players took a knee during games last weekend, including Baltimore Ravens' Terrell Suggs and Von Miller of the Denver Broncos.
But John Downs of Blue Point, New York, says he couldn't help but think about what soldiers felt when they watched players kneeling during highlights of the game between the Ravens and Jacksonville Jaguars in London.
The Packers minority owner said he grew aggravated at how disrespectful the protest was to soldiers watching from overseas.
"My thoughts were how were those soldiers feeling," said Downs, 47, who bought his share in 1997.
JUST WATCHED Sports journalist's take on Trump v. NFL Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Sports journalist's take on Trump v. NFL 10:34
'Building a football culture'
The Packers organization has offered fans the chance to buy stock five times since 1923, when the team became a publicly owned nonprofit corporation. The last stock offering in 2011 was to pay for renovations to storied Lambeau Field. More than 250,000 shareholders became owners then.
Packers stock is nothing like a real stock . The team has no obligation to buy it back. Shareholders should not expect to receive a profit. Nor do they get any protection from securities laws. Packers bylaws and the NFL also "severely restrict" any stock transfer. Shareholders do get voting privileges.
The stocks were initially sold to help the team in a small market survive and have become a source a pride for minority owners. Multiple family members own stock.
"There is something about the fans of the team coming together to keep this team afloat that has always been in the culture of the Green Bay Packers and their fans," Sipla said. "We still have that feeling ... of participating in something that is building a football culture that we think we sort of are a part of."
Sipla has only missed two games -- wins against the Houston Texans and Seattle Seahawks last December -- because he was hospitalized after a stroke.
Last Sunday, the diehard fan made the five-hour trek to the Packers game against the Cincinnati Bengals at Lambeau Field in Green Bay.
Members of the Green Bay Packers stand with arms locked as a sign of unity during the national anthem prior to their game against the Cincinnati Bengals at Lambeau Field on Sunday.
Sipla said he always stands for the National Anthem but isn't offended if someone does not "especially if the causes they say they're doing it for are for reasons of social injustice."
He was encouraged to see the team lock arms.
"The American flag to me is symbolic of the freedom that is provided to us by the Constitution of the United States of America," he said. "That means people who want to sit or stand or do something else during any kind of ceremony, as long as it's peaceful, we have that privilege."
Photos: NFL players protest during national anthem Colin Kaepernick (right) and Eric Reid of the San Francisco 49ers kneel in protest during the national anthem on September 12, 2016, in Santa Clara, California. Hide Caption 1 of 5 Photos: NFL players protest during national anthem Seattle Seahawks' Jeremy Lane sits as the national anthem plays before a preseason match against the Oakland Raiders on September 1, 2016, in Oakland. Hide Caption 2 of 5 Photos: NFL players protest during national anthem Kenny Britt and Robert Quinn of the Los Angeles Rams raise their fists prior to playing the San Francisco 49ers on September 12, 2016, in Santa Clara. Hide Caption 3 of 5 Photos: NFL players protest during national anthem Denver Broncos' Brandon Marshall kneels on the sideline during the national anthem before a game against the Carolina Panthers in Denver on September 8, 2016. Hide Caption 4 of 5 Photos: NFL players protest during national anthem From left, Miami Dolphins' Jelani Jenkins, Arian Foster, Michael Thomas and Kenny Stills kneel during the singing of the national anthem before a game against the Seattle Seahawks on September 11, 2016. Hide Caption 5 of 5
'This country needs to lock arms'
Former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began the anthem protests last year when he started kneeling during the National Anthem. Kaepernick has said he refused to honor a song or "show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color."
Kaepernick has cited the police shootings of black men as a reason for his silent protest.
Over the weekend, Trump called for NFL owners to fire any "son of a bitch" who "disrespects our flag."
Young, who organizes Packers games gatherings at an Atlanta bar, said: "There is no reason why the leader of our country should be able to get away with calling anyone a son of a bitch, let alone someone who is having a peaceful protest."
"Do I wish that there was a different way the police brutality protests had been brought out? Yes, I do. There's a lot of other ways [to protest] without offending the veterans of our country."
But Young, who has friends who played in the NFL and family members who served in the military, said she agreed with how Kaepernick protested.
She said she has "absolutely no problem with the players that took a knee and locked arms."
"If you ask any one of those players how they feel about the service men and women that have defended our country. I guarantee you not one of them would disrespect our service men and women," she said.
Kneeling is 'disrespectful' to flag, but...
Richard Schoenfeld, of Overland Park, Kansas, said he, too, believed taking a knee was "disrespectful of our flag and what our country stands for."
The minority shareholder said Packers' call for fans to lock arms "is an indication that everybody in this country needs to lock arms on a lot things. Not just football."
Schoenfeld plans to watch Thursday's game at a local bar with his usual crew of retirees.
They have a routine. A high five with one hand celebrates a field goal. A two-handed high five is like their own touchdown dance.
And if he was at Lambeau Field, Schoenfeld said he would even lock arms with Bear fans. ||||| If there's anyone who should stay far away from professional football, it's Donald Trump.
The last time he tried to tell franchise owners what to do with their football teams, he helped ruin an exciting and promising venture.
In 1985, as owner of the United States Football League's New Jersey Generals, Trump talked his fellow owners into a head-to-head battle with the NFL.
Picture Marshawn Lynch on one end, the goal line on the other and a scrawny kicker in the middle. It wasn't pretty.
NFL players across U.S. kneel during anthem to protest Trump
After a pair of successful seasons as a spring league, Trump pushed the USFL into a fall schedule, and got steamrolled by the NFL and its pulling guard called TV.
Players kneel during the national anthem
"I think it was a big mistake," Dr. Ted Diethrich, one of the league's original owners, told USA Today. "When that decision was made, the course for this was charted, and it was going to be a wreck."
The USFL folded a year later, and Trump, the future President of the United States, went back to the sidelines.
Now Trump is back on the football field, this time with advice for owners that would lead to moral bankruptcy.
Trump blasts NFL ratings on Twitter after day of protests
This time the issue involves a peaceful protest over basic civil rights, and the constitutionally protected decision by some players to take a knee during the national anthem.
Buffalo Bill players took a knee during the national anthem on Sunday in protest of President Trump. (Brett Carlsen/Getty Images)
It was a movement launched by quarterback Colin Kaepernick, whose stance has so far cost him a chance to continue his career in the NFL, where domestic violence and drug abusers have thrived.
But football fan Trump, who never said a public word about Ezekiel Elliott, Scott Brown or Ray Rice — all players caught up in domestic violence scandals — had plenty to say about Kaepernick and company.
"Wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, 'Get that son of a b---h off the field right now, out, he's fired!' " Trump said last week during a political rally in Alabama.
Donald Trump, not Colin Kaepernick, caused dip in NFL ratings
"You know, some owner is going to do that. He's gonna say, 'That guy disrespects our flag, he's fired.' And that owner, they don't know it. They don't know it. They're friends of mine, many of them. They don't know it. They'll be the most popular person, for a week. They'll be the most popular person in the country."
Baltimore Ravens were among the football players from teams across the U.S. that chose to kneel during the national anthem. (Matt Dunham/AP)
It is truly telling and sad, to use a favorite Trump expression, that the President has harsher language for these players than he did last month for the white supremacists in Charlottesville whose violent "Unite the Right" Nazi lovefest ended in the shameful death of a counter-protester.
Trump called them "very fine people."
Obviously pleased with the football fallout, Trump moved on to basketball, where he rescinded NBA all-star Stephen Curry's White House invitation after the scoring machine expressed misgivings about celebrating his NBA title with a man who scores points with bigots and racists.
3 dead, 34 injured in violent rally, crashes in Charlottesville
Trump's petty political play moved LeBron James to call the President a "bum" in a tweet, a statement far more righteous than anything Michael Jordan ever said.
But back to football, where Trump even went on to dismiss safety concerns about an obviously violent game. The more he talks, the more he sounds like someone who might have actually played the game — without a helmet.
Sign up for BREAKING NEWS Emails privacy policy Thanks for subscribing! | – Twitter user @MommaLynch24—also known as Delisa Lynch, mother of Oakland Raiders running back Marshawn Lynch—channeled her inner mama bear after President Trump attacked her son in a tweet Monday. "What NFL team do Trump own?" she asked. "Oh yeah they wouldn't let him have one!" She was apparently referring to Trump's failures to buy an NFL team, including in 2014, when he was outbid for the Buffalo Bills, Sports Illustrated reports. Lynch himself rarely makes public comments, though he had plenty of defenders after Trump called for him to be suspended for refusing to stand for the anthem, reports the Washington Post. Among them was Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, who said the "bully-in-chief" should worry about his approval ratings instead of "picking on people." |
News of the new titan spread quickly. Last January, a cast of the sauropod went on display at the American Museum of Natural History, while legendary naturalist David Attenborough released a documentary about its discovery. And now, Carballido and his team have finally published an official scientific description of the dinosaur. They’ve also given it a name—Patagotitan mayorum. The first half refers to the Patagonian region where the dinosaur was found. The second half honors the Mayo family who kindly welcomed the scientists onto their land and into their kitchen.
After careful analysis, the team think that Patagotitan is slightly smaller than they previously thought—69 tons or so. But even after that downsizing, it’s still twice as heavy as more familiar giants like Brachiosaurus and Apatosaurus, and 10 percent bigger than the previous record-holder—another Argentinian titanosaur called Argentinosaurus. For now, it’s the biggest dinosaur for which we have accurate measurements, and perhaps the biggest land animal that ever lived.
“We have a decent idea how well the various methods for estimating dinosaur body mass work, and they tend to agree well enough most of the time,” says John Hutchinson from the Royal Veterinary College. “Even taking into account the uncertainty of those methods, Patagotitan comes out as a 60- to 80-ton behemoth. And nothing else we know of yet comes very close.”
Patagotitan cast, in a hangar. D. Pol.
Patagotitan lived during the Cretaceous period around 101 million years ago. And for some reason, it frequented the area that eventually became the Mayo family’s farm. Carballido and Pol’s team returned to the site more than a dozen times, disinterring every fossil they could find. In the process, they built a road and partially removed a hill. Eventually, they recovered bones from at least six Patagotitan individuals. And their bones reveal that they were in their prime—young, still growing, and not yet at their full adult size.
Carballido thinks that these individuals all died at different times, but he has no idea why they all died in this one place. He found the teeth of many meat-eating dinosaurs around the site, but he doubts any predator could have tackled such gargantuan prey. “They were too strong,” he says. “It would have been too risky for a carnivore.” Whatever their reasons, their attraction to this one place meant that Carballido’s team eventually uncovered more than 200 Patagotitan bones, covering most of the animal’s skeleton. “The most amazing moment for us was realizing that the dinosaur is not only large, but also more complete than any other titanosaur,” Carballido says.
It’s ironic that scientists have found very little of the largest animals to have walked the land. We only know that Argentinosaurus existed based on a few handfuls of bones—some vertebrae, ribs, and leg bones, most of which are incomplete. Puertasaurus, another contender for the record books, is known from just four vertebrae. There are near-complete skeletons for some titanosaurs like Futalognkosaurus, but these were smaller species that weighed in at just 50 tons or so. The true colossi of the dinosaurs are hard to come by. ||||| Reconstruction of Patagotitan mayorum. Credit: Jorge Gonzalez A study proclaims a newly named species the heavyweight champion of all dinosaurs, making the scary Tyrannosaurus rex look like a munchkin.
At 76 tons (69 metric tons), the plant-eating behemoth was as heavy as a space shuttle.
The dinosaur's fossils were found in southern Argentina in 2012. Researchers who examined and dated them said the long-necked creature was the biggest of a group of large dinosaurs called titanosaurs.
"There was one small part of the family that went crazy on size," said Diego Pol of the Egidio Feruglio paleontology museum in Argentina, co-author of the study published Tuesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
The researchers named the dinosaur Patagotitan mayorum after the Patagonia region where it was found and the Greek word titan, which means large. The second name honors a ranch family that hosted the researchers.
Six fossils of the species were studied and dated to about 100 million years ago, based on ash found around them, Pol said. The dinosaur averaged 122 feet long (37 meters) and was nearly 20 feet high (6 meters) at the shoulder.
A cast of the dinosaur's skeleton is already on display at the American Museum of Natural History. It's so big that the dinosaur's head sticks out into a hallway at the New York museum .
Reconstruction of the dinosaur Patagotitan mayorum. Credit: Museum of Paleontology / Egidio Feruglio
Legendary T. rex and other meat-eaters "look like dwarfs when you put them against one of these giant titanosaurs," Pol said. "It's like when you put an elephant by a lion."
Scientists have known titanosaurs for a while, but this is a new species and even a new genus, which is a larger grouping, Pol said. Another titanosaur called Argentinosaurus was previously thought to be the largest.
"I don't think they were scary at all," Pol said. "They were probably massive big slow-moving animals."
"Getting up. Walking around. Trying to run. It's really challenging for large animals," he said.
The big question is how did these dinosaurs get so big, Pol said. Researchers are still studying it, but said it probably has to do with an explosion of flowering plants at the time. Along with a forest, it was like an all-you-can-eat buffet for these dinosaurs and they just got bigger.
"It's hard to argue this isn't a big deal when it concerns the (probable) largest land animal ever discovered," University of Maryland paleontologist Thomas Holtz, who wasn't part of the study, said in an email.
Kristi Curry Rodgers, a paleontologist at Macalester College who wasn't part of the study, praised the work as important. She said the fact that Patagotitan's bones show signs that they haven't completed their growth "means that there are even bigger dinosaurs out there to discover."
Explore further: Mammoth dinosaur cast goes on display in NY
More information: A new giant titanosaur sheds light on body mass evolution amongst sauropod dinosaurs, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, rspb.royalsocietypublishing.or … .1098/rspb.2017.1219 ||||| Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Fossilised bones from six dinosaurs may have belonged to the biggest animal ever to have walked the Earth.
The fossils, which include vertebrae and rib bones, are from six young adult dinosaurs, and were all found in the same Patagonian quarry in Argentina. The species, named Patagotitan mayorum, is thought to have weighed around 62 tonnes and measured more than 35 metres from nose to tail.
If you’re struggling to picture that, it’s about seven elephants, or more than two buses, or half the width of a football pitch, or somewhere between a standard swimming pool and an Olympic pool. That’s longer than Brachiosaurus was, and blue whales are today – both these species reach a maximum of about 30 metres.
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Patagotitan lived 100 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period, and was a sauropod – a huge plant-eater with a long tail and neck, that stood on four legs.
The species has competition for the crown of largest ever land animal. A similar dinosaur called Argentinosaurus has been calculated to have weighed more than 80 tonnes, but Jose Carballido, from the Museo Paleontologico Egido Feruglio, Argentina, says vertebrae fossils suggest this species was in fact 10 per cent smaller than Patagotitan.
Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2017.1219
Read more: Largest land dinosaur yet makes T. rex look tiny ||||| Researcher Pablo Puerta next to the titanosaur's femur. Image: José María Farfaglia and Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio
Paleontologists based out of Argentina's Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio have discovered what is quite possibly the largest known animal ever to walk the Earth. The new species of titanosaur, as yet unnamed, is estimated to have weighed 77 tons and measured 120 feet long, making it as tall as a seven-story building. You know you're dealing with a true giant when it makes other sauropods look small in comparison.
Even more exciting is the sheer number of specimens recovered from the dinosaurs' final resting place on the La Flecha farm in Patagonia. Over 200 fossils have been found on the farm, representing at least seven individuals from this record-breaking species. On top of that, only 20 percent of the quarry where the fossils were found has been excavated, and researchers expect to find many more specimens in the coming years.
“What they discovered is a cemetery of dinosaurs the likes of which we had never seen in the history of Argentine paleontology," said Ruben Cuneo, director of the Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio, to US News. “Given the length and magnitude this animal will bring along when it's reconstructed, there won't be a building that can contain it. I think we're going to need a new home.”
The dig team, led by paleontologists Diego Pol and Jose Luis Carballido, concluded that the titanosaur remains were probably not transported into the quarry by rivers or other natural forces. Instead, the sauropods may have selected an isolated Late Cretaceous flood plain for their last moments, in the same way that dying elephants occasionally seek out comforting grave sites.
There's also evidence that later on, the sauropods were pulled apart by marauding theropod dinosaurs. Over 50 teeth from the massive carnivore Tyrannotitan chubutensis were also discovered at the site, suggesting that some lucky scavengers had the feast of a lifetime 95-100 million years ago.
If new species has edged Argentinosaurus as the previous record holder for world's largest land animal, but both may have been dwarfed by the mysterious Amphicoelias fragillimus. Based on descriptions of a single fossil, Amphicoelias could have weighed 135 tons, almost twice as much as this freshly discovered sauropod.
The estimated size of Amphicoelias in red. Image via Matt Martyniuk.
But the story behind this animal is somewhat suspect. An Amphicoelias vertebrate and femur were discovered in 1877 at the height of the Bone Wars, but the specimens were somehow lost in the subsequent decades. All modern paleontologists have to go on are the notes of the legendary fossil hunter Edward Drinker Cope. Studying an animal secondhand is obviously not ideal, and Amphicoelias is usually excluded from the list of biggest dinosaurs based on lack of evidence.
Along those lines, some paleontologists think the new titanosaur needs to be subjected to more scrutiny before it is proclaimed the biggest land animal ever. "Whether or not the new animal really will be the largest sauropod we know remains to be seen," said Paul Upchurch, a paleontologist at the University College of London, to ABC News.
"Certainly the new animal appears to be at least as large as Argentinosaurus, and is a new species," he said. "Its real scientific value comes from the fact that it looks like this new form will be more complete than Argentinosaurus, so we'll get a better look at the anatomy of one of these super-giants."
And as Brian Switek explained, "Even sauropods known from a decent amount of material are still too incompletely known to get a direct idea of how long and heavy they were."
So while dinophiles around the world are right to celebrate this momentous find, it's important to always say “for now” with record-breaking dinosaurs. The new titanosaur may be the top dog in 2014, but no doubt there are plenty of mind-boggling species that have yet to be unearthed. | – One hundred million years ago, a sauropod that stretched more than 120 feet and weighed some 70 tons existed—perhaps the largest creature to ever roam the Earth. Over the past few years, researchers have excavated fossils from six young-adult dinosaurs from a Patagonian quarry, and New Scientist puts stats for Patagotitan mayorum in perspective: The creature would have been the length of about seven elephants. The AP estimates it would have been as heavy as a space shuttle, with team member Diego Pol noting that placing Patagotitan next to a T. rex would be like putting "an elephant by a lion." Per the Atlantic, that means the plant-eating Patagotitan was double the size of the already-huge brachiosaurus and apatosaurus, and about 10% larger than the reigning dinosaur giant, a titanosaur known as Argentinosaurus. As the study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B journal details, this find sheds more light on how sauropods in the 12- to 20-ton range saw their mass triple, evolving into lognkosaurs, of which Patagotitan is a member. Charlotte Brassey, a Manchester Metropolitan University researcher not tied to the study, speculates that this animal from the Cretaceous period ballooned in size perhaps due to increasingly diverse and abundant plants that were like an "all-you-can-eat buffet for these dinosaurs," the AP notes. Brassey notes that the Patagotitan's skeleton, metabolism, or behavior (or all of these things) could have changed and spurred the growth spurt. "Maybe someone can find a bigger [dinosaur], but I feel like maybe this is the limit," study co-author Jose Carballido says. (This dinosaur devoured sharks.) |
Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland speaks with reporters after meeting with the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, June 13, 2018. Freeland's... (Associated Press)
Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland speaks with reporters after meeting with the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, June 13, 2018. Freeland's visit comes after President Donald Trump insulted Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the... (Associated Press)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Senators from both parties sought to mend a frayed relationship with Canada during a closed-door meeting Wednesday with Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland.
The meeting involving members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee followed President Donald Trump calling Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau "dishonest" and "weak" after the Group of 7 summit in Quebec over the weekend.
Sen. Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the committee, said senators expressed concerns about the president's use of a national security waiver to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum from Canada. Corker said he believes it's an abuse of presidential authority.
Corker has sponsored legislation that would require Congress to sign off on such tariffs, called Section 232 tariffs, but he has struggled to get a vote. Many Republicans are reluctant to pick a fight with Trump over trade right now as he seeks better deals with China and a slew of U.S. allies.
Freeland said Canada values its relationship with the U.S. However, she called the administration's use of Section 232 tariffs "frankly absurd."
"The notion that Canadian steel and aluminum could pose a national security threat to the United States, I think Americans understand it's simply not the case," Freeland said.
She added that the action is illegal under World Trade Organization rules and the North American Free Trade Agreement, "and we have raised cases in both tribunals."
She said the answer to the dispute was simple: "The U.S. has to remove these unfair, illegal tariffs from Canada and from its allies."
Trump enraged U.S. allies Canada, Mexico and the European Union two weeks ago by slapping tariffs on their steel and aluminum shipments to the United States; most other countries have been paying the tariffs since March.
In a tough speech Wednesday night, Freeland criticized Trump, without mentioning him by name, for ignoring the "rules-based" trading system whose "principal architect" was the United States.
"You may feel today that your size allows you to go mano-a-mano with your traditional adversaries and be guaranteed to win," she said. "But if history tells us one thing, it is that no one nation's pre-eminence is eternal."
In her remarks at a dinner sponsored by Foreign Policy magazine, Freeland acknowledged that many Americans "are no longer certain that the rules-based international order ... still benefits them."
But as China and other nations become wealthier and more powerful, "now is the time, more than ever, that we must set aside the notion that 'might is right,' so that the rising powers are induced to play by these rules too," she said.
Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., said he told Freeland that Democrats cherish the relationship with Canada and don't agree with the Trump administration's claim of a national security threat when it comes to Canadian steel and aluminum. He said he made clear to Freeland that Democrats have a "totally different view than President Trump" about Trudeau.
"We applaud Prime Minister Trudeau's effort in helping us in the world," Menendez said he told the foreign minister. "We applaud Canada's engagement in the world for peace and stability." ||||| US President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Reuters/Carlos Barria
The US and Canada are embroiled in an escalating fight over trade policy, and the tensions between the close allies seemed evident in the readouts both countries released of a phone call on Tuesday between US President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Trudeau's office's readout of the call included several details of the conversation.
"The prime minister and the president reaffirmed the importance of the mutually beneficial Canada-US trade relationship," Canada's readout said. "On the issue of softwood lumber, the prime minister refuted the baseless allegations by the US Department of Commerce and the decision to impose unfair duties."
"Unfair duties" was a reference to Trump's decision on Tuesday to impose a 20% tariff on Canadian softwood lumber imports. Washington argued that Canada unfairly subsidized the sale of lumber exports to the US and that previous attempts at negotiation were unsuccessful.
Trudeau "stressed that the government of Canada will vigorously defend the interests of the Canadian softwood lumber industry, as we have successfully done in all past lumber disputes with the US," according to Canada's readout of the phone call.
The two leaders also discussed the dispute over the Canadian dairy industry that Trump has recently highlighted. He has accused Canada of taking advantage of US dairy farmers.
"The prime minister and the president also discussed Canada-US trade in dairy products, trade which heavily favours the US: Canada imports over $550 million of dairy products from the US, but exports just over $110 million to the US," Canada's readout of the call said.
"The prime minister reaffirmed that Canada upholds its international trade obligations, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, under which the US continues to have duty-free and quota-free access for milk protein substances ... and that Canada would continue to defend its interests," the statement continued. "The prime minister and the president agreed to continue their dialogue on these important bilateral issues."
The White House's readout of the same phone call was just four sentences.
"President Donald J. Trump and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke today," the White House's readout said. "The two leaders discussed the dairy trade in Wisconsin, New York state, and various other places. They also discussed lumber coming into the United States. It was a very amicable call." | – Senators from both parties sought to mend a frayed relationship with Canada during a closed-door meeting Wednesday with Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland. The meeting involving members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee followed President Donald Trump calling Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau "dishonest" and "weak" after the Group of 7 summit in Quebec over the weekend. Per the AP, Sen. Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the committee, said senators expressed concerns about the president's use of a national security waiver to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum from Canada. Corker said he believes it's an abuse of presidential authority. Corker has sponsored legislation that would require Congress to sign off on such tariffs, called Section 232 tariffs, but he has struggled to get a vote. Many Republicans are reluctant to pick a fight with Trump over trade right now as he seeks better deals with China and a slew of US allies. Freeland said Canada values its relationship with the US. However, she called the administration's use of Section 232 tariffs "frankly absurd." She added that the action is illegal under World Trade Organization rules and the North American Free Trade Agreement, "and we have raised cases in both tribunals." She said the answer to the dispute was simple: "The US has to remove these unfair, illegal tariffs from Canada and from its allies." Trump enraged US allies Canada, Mexico, and the European Union two weeks ago by slapping tariffs on their steel and aluminum shipments to the US; most other countries have been paying the tariffs since March. |
Image copyright AFP Image caption Mr Cameron has previously said there will be no second referendum
The House of Commons petitions committee is investigating allegations of fraud in connection with a petition calling for a second EU referendum.
Its inquiry is focused on the possibility that some names could be fraudulent - 77,000 signatures have already been removed.
More than 3.2 million signatures are on the petition, but PM David Cameron has said there will be no second vote.
The UK voted by 52% to 48% to leave the EU in Thursday's referendum.
Helen Jones, who chairs the cross-party petitions committee, said in a statement posted on Twitter that it was taking the allegations "very seriously".
'A range of views'
"People adding fraudulent signatures to this petition should know that they undermine the cause they pretend to support," she said.
The committee will consider the petition at its meeting next week and decide whether to schedule a debate on it, Ms Jones said.
"That doesn't mean that the committee will be deciding whether or not it agrees with the petition - just whether or not it should be debated.
"Any debate would allow a range of views to be expressed."
A number of people on Twitter have pointed out that some people appear to have signed the petition from outside the UK.
Only British citizens or UK residents are permitted to sign the petition, including Britons based abroad.
The House of Commons petitions committee said it will continue to monitor the petition for "suspicious activity".
The petition has more signatures than any other on the parliamentary website.
Image caption More than 3.1 million people had signed by Sunday lunchtime
A House of Commons spokeswoman said the petition was created on 24 May. There were 22 signatures on it at the time the referendum result was announced.
The petition's website states it was set up by an individual called William Oliver Healey, and says: "We the undersigned call upon HM Government to implement a rule that if the Remain or Leave vote is less than 60%, based [on] a turnout less than 75%, there should be another referendum."
Thursday saw a 72.2% turnout, significantly higher than the 66.1% turnout at last year's general election, but below the 75% mark suggested by Mr Healey as a threshold.
In a statement posted on Facebook, a campaigner for the English Democrats party identifying himself as Oliver Healey says he started the petition "when it was looking unlikely that 'leave' were going to win, with the intention of making it harder for 'remain' to further shackle us to the EU".
He says the petition has since been "hijacked by the remain campaign".
BBC political correspondent Iain Watson says the petition has attracted a lot of attention but has no chance of being enacted, because it is asking for retrospective legislation.
Our correspondent says some referendums do have thresholds but those clauses must be inserted in legislation before the vote so everyone is clear about the rules.
You cannot simply invent new hurdles if you are on the losing side, our correspondent says.
Mr Cameron said on Friday he would stand down as prime minister by October following the leave result. ||||| Image copyright EPA Image caption People gathered to protest outside the Houses of Parliament following the leave result
More than 2.5 million people have signed a petition calling for a second EU referendum, after the vote to leave.
It has more signatures than any other on the parliamentary website and as it has passed 100,000, Parliament will consider it for a debate.
Editor's note: The following day, the House of Commons petitions committee said it was investigating allegations of fraud in connection with the petition and had already removed 77,000 signatories - and was monitoring it for further suspicious activity.
The UK voted to leave the EU by 52% to 48% in Thursday's referendum but the majority of voters in London, Scotland and Northern Ireland backed Remain.
David Cameron has previously said there will be no second referendum.
On Friday he said he would stand down as prime minister by October following the leave result.
A House of Commons spokeswoman said the petition was created on 24 May. There were 22 signatures on it at the time the referendum result was announced.
She said the petition site had temporarily gone down at one point following "exceptionally high volumes of simultaneous users on a single petition, significantly higher than on any previous occasion".
Raise profile
The petition's website states it was set up by an individual called William Oliver Healey, and says: "We the undersigned call upon HM Government to implement a rule that if the Remain or Leave vote is less than 60%, based on a turnout less than 75%, there should be another referendum."
Thursday saw a 72.2% turnout, significantly higher than the 66.1% turnout at last year's general election, but below the 75% mark suggested by Mr Healey as a threshold.
The Scottish independence referendum in 2014 had a turnout of 84.6% - but there has not been a turnout above 75% at any general election since 1992.
A debate in Parliament is a good way to raise the profile of an issue with law makers but it does not automatically follow that there will be a change in the law.
Analysis
Image copyright UK Government
By Iain Watson, political correspondent
The fact that more than one and a half million people have signed a petition calling for a second EU referendum has attracted a lot of attention - but it has zero chance of being enacted.
The main reason is that it is asking for retrospective legislation. It suggests another referendum is required because the winning side got less than 60% of the vote, and there was less than a 75% turnout.
You can have thresholds in referendums.
The 1979 referendum to set up a Scottish parliament failed because a clause was inserted in to the legislation requiring more than 40% of all eligible voters - not just those taking part - to agree to devolution before it took place.
But that clause came in advance - everyone was clear about the rules. You can't simply invent new hurdles if you are on the losing side.
The other reason is that if a petition gets more than 100,000 signatures it can then - with the agreement of a committee of MPs - be debated in Parliament, but there is no legal obligation to act on it.
However, there is talk around Westminster- in the wake of a plunging currency and falling share prices - of whether any deal on Brexit negotiated with the EU should then be put to a referendum further down the line.
The UK will remain an EU member for the next two years at least - so it's not over until it's over.
Some would greet this with horror and cries of 'foul' - others with relief.
UKIP leader Nigel Farage, who has campaigned for the UK to leave the EU throughout his political career, said in May that a narrow win for Remain could cause unstoppable demand for a rerun of the referendum.
He said at the time that a result that saw Remain win by 52% to 48% would mean "unfinished business by a long way".
But Mr Cameron has said the referendum was a "once in a generation, once in a lifetime" decision, saying the UK had "referendums not neverendums".
Image copyright Reuters Image caption David Cameron said he would step down as prime minister after the UK voted to leave the EU
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has also rejected the idea of a second referendum, saying: "We have got to accept that decision."
Labour MP for Tottenham David Lammy later tweeted that people could "stop this madness through a vote in Parliament".
He said there should be a vote in the Commons next week on whether the UK goes forward with Brexit.
'Make divorce official'
The parliamentary petitions system is overseen by the Petitions Committee, which considers whether petitions that receive more than 100,000 signatures should be raised in the House of Commons and debated.
The committee is due to sit again on Tuesday.
In a separate petition more than 100,000 people have called on London Mayor Sadiq Khan to declare the English capital independent from the UK and apply to join the EU.
Across all 33 boroughs in London 59.9% of people voted to stay in the EU, with the Remain vote more than 70% in some boroughs.
The page, set up by James O'Malley, states: "London is an international city, and we want to remain at the heart of Europe. Let's face it - the rest of the country disagrees... let's make the divorce official and move in with our friends on the continent."
Mr Khan has said he has no doubt London will "continue to be the successful city" but called for the UK to remain part of the single market.
Former London Mayor Boris Johnson, one of the leading Leave campaigners and the bookmakers' odds-on favourite to succeed Mr Cameron, has insisted the UK is not "turning its back" on Europe.
He said the decision would not make the UK any less tolerant or outward looking and would not reduce opportunities for young people. ||||| The 48% of voters who wished to Remain in the European Union are so mortified by the Leave result that a parliamentary petition calling for a second referendum is swelling in signatures.
‘We the undersigned call upon HM Government to implement a rule that if the remain or leave vote is less than 60% based on a turnout less than 75% there should be another referendum,’ the petition, filed pre-referendum, reads.
At the time of writing, the petition is difficult to access, presumably due to a surge of traffic. The count is at 55,000 right now and climbing at roughly a thousand signatures a minute.
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All petitions to the site that receive over 100,000 signatures must be considered for debate in Parliament by law, as was the case with the cannabis legalisation one.
Update 9:04am: petition.parliament.uk completely inaccessible.
Update 11:54am: The 100,000 threshhold is passed, with 101,526 signees.
Update 5:12pm: 145,570 and climbing
*Live coverage of the EU referendum fallout and Prime Minister David Cameron's resignation*
Shape Created with Sketch. 6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you Show all 6 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. 6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you 1/6 More expensive foreign holidays The first practical effect of a vote to Leave is that the pound will be worth less abroad, meaning foreign holidays will cost us more nito100 2/6 No immediate change in immigration status The Prime Minister will have to address other immediate concerns. He is likely to reassure nationals of other EU countries living in the UK that their status is unchanged. That is what the Leave campaign has said, so, even after the Brexit negotiations are complete, those who are already in the UK would be allowed to stay Getty 3/6 Higher inflation A lower pound means that imports would become more expensive. This is likely to mean the return of inflation – a phenomenon with which many of us are unfamiliar because prices have been stable for so long, rising at no more than about 2 per cent a year. The effect may probably not be particularly noticeable in the first few months. At first price rises would be confined to imported goods – food and clothes being the most obvious – but inflation has a tendency to spread and to gain its own momentum AFP/Getty Images 4/6 Interest rates might rise The trouble with inflation is that the Bank of England has a legal obligation to keep it as close to 2 per cent a year as possible. If a fall in the pound threatens to push prices up faster than this, the Bank will raise interest rates. This acts against inflation in three ways. First, it makes the pound more attractive, because deposits in pounds will earn higher interest. Second, it reduces demand by putting up the cost of borrowing, and especially by taking larger mortgage payments out of the economy. Third, it makes it more expensive for businesses to borrow to expand output Getty 5/6 Did somebody say recession? Mr Carney, the Treasury and a range of international economists have warned about this. Many Leave voters appear not to have believed them, or to think that they are exaggerating small, long-term effects. But there is no doubt that the Leave vote is a negative shock to the economy. This is because it changes expectations about the economy’s future performance. Even though Britain is not actually be leaving the EU for at least two years, companies and investors will start to move money out of Britain, or to scale back plans for expansion, because they are less confident about what would happen after 2018 AFP/Getty Images 6/6 And we wouldn’t even get our money back All this will be happening while the Prime Minister, whoever he or she is, is negotiating the terms of our future access to the EU single market. In the meantime, our trade with the EU would be unaffected, except that companies elsewhere in the EU may be less interested in buying from us or selling to us, expecting tariff barriers to go up in two years’ time. Whoever the Chancellor is, he or she may feel the need to bring in a new Budget Getty Images 1/6 More expensive foreign holidays The first practical effect of a vote to Leave is that the pound will be worth less abroad, meaning foreign holidays will cost us more nito100 2/6 No immediate change in immigration status The Prime Minister will have to address other immediate concerns. He is likely to reassure nationals of other EU countries living in the UK that their status is unchanged. That is what the Leave campaign has said, so, even after the Brexit negotiations are complete, those who are already in the UK would be allowed to stay Getty 3/6 Higher inflation A lower pound means that imports would become more expensive. This is likely to mean the return of inflation – a phenomenon with which many of us are unfamiliar because prices have been stable for so long, rising at no more than about 2 per cent a year. The effect may probably not be particularly noticeable in the first few months. At first price rises would be confined to imported goods – food and clothes being the most obvious – but inflation has a tendency to spread and to gain its own momentum AFP/Getty Images 4/6 Interest rates might rise The trouble with inflation is that the Bank of England has a legal obligation to keep it as close to 2 per cent a year as possible. If a fall in the pound threatens to push prices up faster than this, the Bank will raise interest rates. This acts against inflation in three ways. First, it makes the pound more attractive, because deposits in pounds will earn higher interest. Second, it reduces demand by putting up the cost of borrowing, and especially by taking larger mortgage payments out of the economy. Third, it makes it more expensive for businesses to borrow to expand output Getty 5/6 Did somebody say recession? Mr Carney, the Treasury and a range of international economists have warned about this. Many Leave voters appear not to have believed them, or to think that they are exaggerating small, long-term effects. But there is no doubt that the Leave vote is a negative shock to the economy. This is because it changes expectations about the economy’s future performance. Even though Britain is not actually be leaving the EU for at least two years, companies and investors will start to move money out of Britain, or to scale back plans for expansion, because they are less confident about what would happen after 2018 AFP/Getty Images 6/6 And we wouldn’t even get our money back All this will be happening while the Prime Minister, whoever he or she is, is negotiating the terms of our future access to the EU single market. In the meantime, our trade with the EU would be unaffected, except that companies elsewhere in the EU may be less interested in buying from us or selling to us, expecting tariff barriers to go up in two years’ time. Whoever the Chancellor is, he or she may feel the need to bring in a new Budget Getty Images
Of course, a second referendum would almost certainly be rejected, as referenda are not the sort of thing you get a second crack at.
Britain voted to leave the European Union by a narrow margin yesterday, with a turnout of 72 per cent.
Leave won the referendum with 51.9 per cent (17,410,742 votes), while Remain finished on 48.1 per cent (16,141,241 votes).
David Cameron, who backed the Remain campaign, announced his resignation outside Downing Street this morning.
He said that it was “not right” for him to be “the captain that steers the country” in a new direction.
With his voice breaking, he continued: “I Iove this country and will do everything I can to serve it,” but added “the will of the British people is an instruction that must be delivered.”
Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London (which overwhelmingly voted Remain), insisted there is "no need to panic" in light of the Brexit, but said that "we all have a responsibility to now seek to heal the divisions that have emerged throughout this campaign - and to focus on that which unites us, rather than that which divides us." | – As for what the "EU Referendum Rules triggering a 2nd EU Referendum" petition has to say, you may have to take the Independent's word for it: The petition.parliament.uk site was mostly down this morning, ostensibly due to an inability to keep up with the flow of traffic to it. The Independent reports that the petition requests the "HM Government to implement a rule that if the remain or leave vote is less than 60% based on a turnout less than 75% there should be another referendum." Per the Guardian, turnout fell shy of that mark, at 72.16%; Leave captured 52% of the vote. Petitions that hit 100,000 signatures must be addressed by Parliament; after several tries, Newser accessed the petition, which was up to 104,029 signatures. |
The family of Toronto filmmaker Rob Stewart says his body was "found peacefully in the ocean" Friday after he disappeared Tuesday while diving in the Florida Keys.
"There are no words," says a Facebook post by Stewart's sister Alexandra.
"We are so deeply grateful to everyone who helped search, and happy that Rob passed while doing what he loved. We are working on how best to honour his incredible work."
His sister asks for privacy now in order for the family to grieve.
The U.S. Coast Guard said a body was found Friday about 90 metres from where the 37-year old Stewart surfaced from a dive on Tuesday and then disappeared.
This Jan. 25, 2013 photo shows Canadian filmmaker Rob Stewart at the Modern Master Award Ceremony at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in Santa Barbara, Calif. (Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP)
Stewart's diving partner lost consciousness as he got into the dive boat and Stewart's family believes he too may have lost consciousness.
Stewart was in Florida filming a follow up movie to his 2006 documentary Sharkwater, called Sharkwater Extinction.
A GoFundMe page that was set up to help the search for Rob Stewart has raised more than $189,000.
Stewart's family issued a brief written statement Friday evening in response to the announcement by the U.S. Coast Guard that it had found a body.
"Unfortunately it is with a heavy heart that I share Rob has been found. We are deeply saddened but take comfort that he passed while doing what he loved," family spokeswoman Victoria Gormley wrote.
Rob Stewart is seen free diving with Caribbean reef sharks near Freeport, Bahamas. (Veruschka Matchett/Sharkwater Productions)
The search for Stewart covered more than 14,000 square kilometres — an area the size of Connecticut, Coast Guard Capt. Jeffrey Janszen said Friday afternoon. Thirteen volunteer aircraft and 20 volunteer boats were part of the search, along with many volunteer divers.
Went missing on Tuesday
The Toronto filmmaker and conservationist went missing Tuesday evening during a dive off the Florida Keys.
A coast guard spokesperson said Stewart was "diving on a wreck off of Islamorada" with three other divers when he disappeared. The three others completed the dive safely.
Stewart resurfaced at the end of the dive, but as the boat was preparing to pick him up, he went back under and was not seen again.
While it wasn't clear what made Stewart go back underwater, his sister, Alexandra Stewart, told CBC Toronto earlier this week that it was a "particularly difficult" dive, going to a depth of nearly 70 metres.
The search for Stewart covered more than 14,000 square kilometres — an area the size of Connecticut. (U.S. Coast Guard Southeast/Twitter)
Won awards for his films
Stewart is best known for his 2006 documentary Sharkwater, an examination of global shark hunting and its impact on the ocean ecosystem. He was active in underwater filming.
Alexandra Stewart said her brother's latest dive was part of work for the film's upcoming sequel, Sharkwater: Extinction.
#RIP #RobStewart Thanks for inspiring divers and non divers alike to be agents of positive change for the ocean #TeamOceam #Legacy 🦈🌊🌎 pic.twitter.com/TvJibuJEgP — @projectaware
Sharkwater premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and has since won more than 40 awards at film festivals around the world.
Stewart's second film, Revolution, was the highest-grossing Canadian documentary in 2013 and won 19 awards from global film festivals.
Born and raised in Toronto, Stewart studied biology at Western University in London, Ont.
'Not the news we were hoping for'
Tributes have begun to pour in on Twitter for the filmmaker.
Toronto Mayor John Tory and the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, among others, have expressed condolences to Stewart's family.
Not the news we were hoping/praying for. My heartfelt sympathies go out to family & friends of #RobStewart. — @JohnTory
We're very sorry to have lost the talented filmmaker #RobStewart. Our thoughts are with his friends and family. https://t.co/jviy8OTOI0 — @TheCdnAcademy
RIP #RobStewart in the arms of the ocean you love and that loves you. A champion for sharks. My friend. #Sharkwater @teamsharkwater ....L pic.twitter.com/WzGjPe9QUN — @reallesstroud
Today we said goodbye to #RobStewart, a kind and gentle soul who worked tirelessly for justice under the sea. #RIP @teamsharkwater pic.twitter.com/hHvVZMf48c — @adriangrenier
Rob Stewart on The Hour on July 9, 2007 ||||| Image copyright Facebook Image caption Canadian film-maker Rob Stewart went missing after diving off the coast of Florida
The body of a Canadian film-maker who disappeared off the coast of Florida has reportedly been found.
Shortly after announcing that it would be suspending its search, the US Coast Guard tweeted that a body had been found at a depth of 220ft.
The 37-year-old from Toronto was known for his 2006 documentary Sharkwater.
Crews had been looking for him since 17:15 local time (22:15 GMT) on Tuesday evening, when he was reported missing while diving.
At about 15:00 on Friday, the Coast Guard announced it would suspend its search at sunset. Four hours later, it tweeted that his body had been reportedly found.
"We're confident that we've done everything we can," said a spokesperson for the US Coast Guard. "Our hearts go out to his family and friends."
Swimming with sharks - film-maker Rob Stewart
Born in Toronto in 1979, he began photographing under water at the age of 13 and became chief photographer for the Canadian Wildlife Federation
Made the documentary Sharkwater to highlight the illegal killing of sharks in a marine reserve. The film is credited with boosting shark conservation around the world
His second film Revolution suggested that environmental collapse could end human life. He has also written two books
Described by co-producer Tyler MacLeod as a "warrior for this planet and a warrior for what's right"
His family issued a statement after the announcement.
"Unfortunately it is with a heavy heart that I share Rob has been found. We are deeply saddened but take comfort that he passed while doing what he loved," family spokeswoman Victoria Gormley wrote, according to Canadian broadcaster CBC.
The Coast Guard says it searched a 5,500 sq mile area (14,244 sq km).
Mr Stewart briefly surfaced and then disappeared while diving with friends near the Florida Keys.
He was diving about six miles off the coast of Islamorada, according to his friends.
Crowdsourcing campaign
Mr Stewart's sister told CBC Toronto that he had been diving with three friends, who all made it back to the boat safely. She said that the dive was "particularly difficult".
The Coast Guard deployed a number of boats and an Air Station Miami MH-65 Dolphin helicopter to help with the rescue mission.
The Navy, local police and the Florida wildlife conservation commission also joined in the search.
Mr Stewart's friends fundraised and crowdsourced for volunteers to help with the search after he went missing.
Mr Stewart won national acclaim for Sharkwater, taking home more than a dozen awards.
He was in Florida filming its sequel, according to his social media accounts. ||||| Toronto filmmaker and conservationist Rob Stewart is missing after a Tuesday night dive off the coast of Florida.
The U.S. Coast Guard is on the scene Wednesday morning to search for Stewart, 37, who vanished while diving near Islamorada in the Florida Keys, a chain of islands between the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, located nearly 200 kilometres off the state's southern tip.
"We're in the critical window of daylight right after he's gone missing where, if we're going to find him on the surface — where we'd like to find him — it's going to be today," Stewart's sister, Alexandra Stewart, said in an emotional interview with CBC Toronto on Wednesday morning.
The family has also launched a GoFundMe campaign to mobilize more resources to help with the search, she said.
Stewart is best known for his 2006 documentary Sharkwater, an examination of global shark-hunting and its impact on the ocean ecosystem, and was active in underwater filming.
His sister said his latest dive was part of work on the film's upcoming sequel, Sharkwater: Extinction.
Jeremy Weaver, senior chief of the U.S. Coast Guard, told CBC Toronto that a helicopter from Miami, a boat and a team of divers are involved in this morning's search.
Weaver said Stewart was "diving on a wreck off of Islamorada" with three other divers when he went missing, but the three are safe.
Not clear why Stewart disappeared
Stewart "resurfaced at the end of the dive, and as the boat was turning around to pick him up, he went back under — and was not seen again," Weaver said.
It's not immediately clear what caused Stewart to go back under water, but his sister said it was a "particularly difficult" dive, going to a depth of nearly 70 metres.
She said her brother may have lost consciousness after doing a third dive that day.
Thank you for all your thoughts & prayers for Rob & family. The search & rescue continues today. We will share news as we have it. —@teamsharkwater
"It's extremely rare that even experienced divers are qualified to do that kind of dive," Stewart's sister said.
"The other fellow who was on the same final dive appears to have lost consciousness when he surfaced, so it might have been too much diving in a certain window. It's hard to speculate."
Weaver said weather conditions were good at the time of the dive early last night.
Stewart is shown during the Toronto International Film Festival in 2013, when his film Revolution was featured. (Canadian Press)
Michael Parfit, an environmental writer and filmmaker based in Vancouver, said Stewart routinely takes risks while diving because he has been "so driven to know these animals and transmit what he knows to the public."
A deep dive comes with potential dangers, said Parfit, but it's "nothing unusual."
Family in Florida as volunteer help sought
Stewart's sister, who is currently in Toronto, said the siblings' parents and her husband are in Florida right now and in constant contact with search teams.
"If there are other people out there, what we desperately need are more surface searchers," she said.
Canadian filmmaker Rob Stewart missing after Florida dive, sister says time is 'critical' 1:11
Stewart's sister stressed his love for the environment, something evident in his work as a filmmaker.
"He has a deep love for the ocean, and wildlife, and our planet and people, and trying to make the world a better place," she said, her voice breaking.
"And he really saw this as where he could make his unique mark, and I think we've seen that over his life. What he's done for shark finning and illegal fishing has been tremendous."
Dustin Titus, who has known Stewart for more than a decade, also praised his passion for conservation.
Stewart's work resonates "around the globe," said Titus, a member of the board of directors for the United Conservationists Society of Canada.
The conservation community is experiencing "a lot of nervousness" over Stewart's disappearance, he added. "Everyone's really scared."
Stewart's films have won dozens of awards
Sharkwater premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and has since won more than 40 awards at film festivals around the world.
Stewart's second film, Revolution, was the highest-grossing Canadian documentary in 2013 and won 19 awards from global film festivals.
Stewart was born and raised in Toronto, and studied biology at Western University in London, Ont.
He is also considered one of the "distinguished alumni" of Toronto's Crescent School, which he attended from grades 7 to 9, and where he has since returned to speak to students about his work in marine conservation.
"Our thoughts are with Rob's family and we share their hope for his safe return," the school said in a statement.
"We are looking forward to having him back because the world needs him," echoed Parfit.
"The sea, the oceans need him." | – The body of an award-winning Canadian filmmaker was found Friday, three days after he disappeared while diving in the Florida Keys, the BBC reports. Rob Stewart, 37, was diving at the site of a shipwreck Tuesday while filming a sequel to his 2006 documentary Sharkwater. He disappeared after surfacing following a dive, and his family believes he may have passed out. The US Coast Guard—and others—scoured 5,500 square miles for Stewart's body and had just announced it was calling off the search when Stewart's body was found. According to Variety, his body was discovered by a remote operated vehicle 220 feet underwater. It was only about 300 feet from where Stewart had surfaced and disappeared, CBC reports. Stewart's family describes him as being found "peacefully in the ocean." His sister says their family is "happy that Rob passed while doing what he loved." In addition to being a filmmaker, Stewart was a conservationist. Sharkwater, which won more than 40 awards, was instrumental in getting the practice of shark finning banned internationally. |
According to sources close to the situation, Uber’s full board will meet tomorrow (June 11) morning to consider a series of recommendations — which could include calling for the firing of some top managers — from an investigation that looked at the car-hailing company’s toxic culture.
Sources who have seen parts of it said the report chronicles an aggressive and fast-growing startup, resulting in a frequently chaotic and “hostile work environment” without adequate systems in place to ensure that violations such as sexual harassment and retaliatory behavior were dealt with professionally.
“It’s ugly,” said one person familiar with the findings. “A story of a workplace gone wrong in a lot of key ways.”
The report was conducted by Covington & Burling’s Eric Holder, who was the attorney general in the Obama administration, and Tammy Albarran. It was delivered to a special subcommittee of the board last week — Arianna Huffington, Bill Gurley and David Bonderman — which directed it.
The report has now been distributed to the entire board, which includes CEO Travis Kalanick, Uber co-founder Garrett Camp and top executive Ryan Graves.
The Holder investigation — as it has been called internally — was launched earlier this year, in the wake of an explosive blog post by former Uber engineer Susan Fowler about pervasive sexism, unchecked sexual harassment and a general state of corporate fuck-upery.
Another law firm, Perkins Coie, did a parallel and ongoing investigation into individual cases of misbehavior — including sexual harassment, bullying and bias — which resulted in 20 firings at Uber this week. But everyone has been awaiting the more sweeping Holder report, which sought to take a bigger picture of Uber’s management issues.
The result depicts a landscape of trouble, said sources, living within an exciting and promising business that is now valued at $70 billion.
“The report would be a bombshell, except that so many bombs have already dropped, it’s hard to know how it will be received by employees and the public,” said one person familiar with the report. “One thing is clear: Uber needs to get it all out and take serious action to be able to move on.”
You think?
In any case, Uber’s staff is expected to hear from Kalanick and some of the directors on Tuesday and it’s possible parts of the report will be released publicly. While much of the full report will not be unveiled for legal reasons, said sources, what will be released will be the list of recommendations.
That includes detailing what systems need attention — Uber is already working on overhauling its damaged human resources organization — and also identifying what top executives should be held responsible for the mess in the first place.
Among those at risk, as we reported earlier, are Graves, who oversaw HR, and CTO Thuan Pham, who Fowler alleged ignored her complaints about a variety of problematic issues. Also in the crosshairs, said sources, is SVP of business Emil Michael, who is perhaps Kalanick’s closest adviser and a sometimes polarizing figure at the company, although he has only a small number of employees reporting to him.
What will be interesting to see is how much blame the Holder report will assign to Kalanick, who has also had his share of missteps at Uber, in years past and recently too. He appears to still have the support of Huffington, who has publicly said his job was not at risk.
But it is not clear how others feel about his leadership given the recent series of mishaps and past problems. At this point, with Graves and Camp, he has effective voting control of the board, but that could certainly be challenged by major shareholders. A COO search is ongoing to aid Kalanick in running the company and major roles are unfilled, including for CMO, CFO, general counsel and engineering head.
The meeting comes at a terrible moment of personal tragedy for Kalanick — last month, his mother was killed in a boating accident, which also left his father gravely ill.
Because so few people have seen the larger Holder report, several sources familiar with it declined to give specific details, although they did note that some of the issues raised in it have already been in written about by the media. That includes a ribald memo written by Kalanick that offers sexual advice to employees and also information about how another top executive named Eric Alexander obtained a confidential medical record of a woman violently raped in India in 2014 by an Uber driver.
Uber declined to comment — and, frankly, I would do the same. ||||| In meeting on company culture, David Bonderman said there was ‘likely to be more talking’ when Arianna Huffington mentioned having more women onboard
The venture capitalist David Bonderman has resigned from Uber’s board of directors on Tuesday, after apologizing for making a sexist remark during an all-staff meeting earlier in the day about reforming the company’s culture.
The resignation comes at a critical time for the nearly $70bn ride-hail company. On Tuesday, the CEO, Travis Kalanick, announced that he would take an indefinite leave of absence and the company released the results of an investigation into allegations of sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and a toxic work environment.
Embattled Uber CEO Travis Kalanick takes indefinite leave of absence Read more
During the meeting presenting the report to Uber employees on Tuesday, Bonderman interrupted his fellow board member Arianna Huffington with a sexist remark, according to an audio recording of the meeting obtained by Yahoo Finance.
Huffington said that data showed that once a company had one woman on its board, it was more likely to have a second.
Then Bonderman interjected: “Actually, what it shows is that it’s much more likely to be more talking.” He subsequently sent an email to the staff apologizing for his “disrespectful comment”.
In a statement released on Tuesday evening, Bonderman called his comment “careless, inappropriate, and inexcusable” and said he understood “the destructive effect it had”.
“I do not want my comments to create distraction as Uber works to build a culture of which we can be proud,” he added. “I need to hold myself to the same standards that we’re asking Uber to adopt. Therefore, I have decided to resign from Uber’s board of directors, effective tomorrow morning.”
Bonderman’s comment came as Uber has tried to reform a corporate culture that has become an exemplar of boorish Silicon Valley behavior and disregard for basic ethical standards.
On Sunday, the board voted unanimously to approve the recommendations contained in the report, which was prepared by the law firm of the former US attorney Eric Holder. The report was commissioned after a former Uber engineer published a viral blogpost containing allegations of widespread sexual harassment and gender discrimination, as well as the institutional failures to handle such matters.
“I appreciate David doing the right thing for Uber at this time of critical cultural changes at the company,” Huffington said in a statement.
Earlier this week, Uber appointed the Nestlé executive Wan Ling Martello to the board. Martello is the second woman, after Huffington, to serve as an Uber director. ||||| SAN FRANCISCO — Facing accusations that Uber executives turned a blind eye to sexual harassment and other corporate misbehavior, the ride-hailing service’s board moved on Sunday to shake up the company’s leadership, ahead of the release this week of an investigation’s findings on its troubled culture.
Uber directors were weighing a three-month leave of absence for Travis Kalanick, the chief executive who built the start-up into a nearly $70 billion entity, according to three people with knowledge of the board’s agenda.
In addition, a representative for Uber’s board said the directors “unanimously voted” to adopt all of the recommendations made in a report by the former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr., who was retained to investigate the company’s culture. One of the recommendations included the departure of a top lieutenant to Mr. Kalanick, Emil Michael, said the people with knowledge of the board’s agenda, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions were confidential.
The moves would scale back the involvement of Mr. Kalanick and strip him of an ally, a turnabout for a chief executive who had been hailed as an innovator and a role model. The changes would also further destabilize the leadership at Uber, which has upended the transportation industry worldwide, at a time when rivals are trying to capitalize on the company’s woes. | – Privately valued at $70 billion and operating in 80 countries, Uber seems to have as much potential as it does scandal. And that’s precisely what its board members are meeting about Sunday, reports the New York Times, when they’re set to discuss a possible leave of absence of CEO and cofounder Travis Kalanick. During the meeting, the board will also review an exhaustive investigation into the company’s troubles led by former attorney general Eric Holder and his Covington & Burling colleague Tammy Albarran. The report, known as the "Holder Investigation" by insiders, seeks to shed light on the seemingly nonstop scandalous headlines that have painted Uber’s work culture as toxic. Among other things, the job of senior VP Emil Michael is reportedly in danger. Before Sunday’s meeting, few had seen the report, which was launched in February after a former engineer detailed alleged sexual harassment that resulted in workplace repercussions in a viral blog post. One source told Recode that its findings were “ugly” and “a story of a workplace gone wrong in a lot of key ways.” Though the months-long investigation involves hundreds of interviews, the Times points out that Kalanick and members close to him have more voting power than the rest of the board given their “founder-friendly” governing structure, essentially giving them the power to ignore its recommendations. But empty gestures from the top can backfire, warns attorney Stephen Hirschfeld: “It can have an even worse impact on company morale if people already know it’s a total joke.” |
One father's response to a tragic killing spree in Southern California that took seven lives has given an emotional spark to the nation's smoldering gun control debate.
Richard Martinez — the father of a 20-year-old victim of the rampage unleashed by Elliot Rodger near the University of California, Santa Barbara campus — read a statement announcing his son Christopher's death on Saturday but funneled his grief into an emotional speech about in the U.S.
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"Chris died because of craven, irresponsible politicians and the NRA (National Rifle Association)," Martinez passionately accused.
"They talk about gun rights but what about Chris' right to live? When will this insanity stop?"
FOR COMPLETE COVERAGE OF THE RAMPAGE IN ISLA VISTA VISIT NBC NEWS LOS ANGELES
Martinez told reporters that his son Christopher was an English major who wanted to go to law school.
"You don't think it will happen to your child until it does," Martinez said. "When will enough people say, stop this madness we don't have to live like this ... We should say to ourselves, 'not one more.'"
The Brady Campaign, one of the nation's foremost lobbying groups for gun-law reform tweeted Sunday morning with a link to Martinez's comments.
A very powerful statement from the father of one of the Santa Barbara victims. . http://t.co/73UNP34RJE — Brady Campaign (@bradybuzz) May 25, 2014
The NRA meanwhile seems to have remained silent so far, and did not respond to calls from NBC News for comment. The powerful organization has generally been critical of any efforts to curtail the right for citizens to own and carry firearms.
RICHARD MARTINEZ: "When will enough people say: 'Stop this madness! We don't have to live like this! Too many... http://t.co/P5KSx3hjXP — Protest Easy Guns (@ProtestEasyGuns) May 25, 2014
It's worth noting that police believe Rodger actually stabbed three people to death in his apartment on Friday before going on his public shooting spree, where three more victims were then gunned down in Isla Vista, near UCSB.
And Rodger, the son of a Hollywood director, had three previous run-ins with police, all within a year of his carefully planned massacre, Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said Saturday.
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In 2013, he claimed to be the victim of an assault, but investigators determined he was likely the aggressor. In the beginning of 2014, he called police on his roommate for stealing candles.
And in perhaps the most telling evidence of Rodger's state of mind, a family member called police to alert them of videos the had posted on YouTube "regarding suicide and the killing of people," according to a family attorney.
Officers who responded to the call found Rodger to be "polite and courteous," less than a month before he drove through the streets of Isla Vista shooting into seemingly random crowds of people, Brown said.
Rodger later took the videos down, out of fear that they would spark suspicions that would hamper his plan, according to a 141-page manifesto penned by Rodger.
Rodger posted one last video hours before the shootings in which he details his sinister plans, saying his murderous plot of "retribution" is largely because he felt rejected by women.
The Rodger family's attorney, Alan Shifman, told NBC News that Rodger was treated by "multiple" medical and psychiatric specialists.
Even so, Rodger legally purchased the three 9-millimeter semiautomatic handguns found in his car after an apparent self-inflicted gun wound following the spree, Brown said. Another 41 loaded 10-round magazines were found in the suspect's black BMW, Brown said.
"When will enough people say, stop this madness we don't have to live like this? We should say to ourselves, 'not one more.'"
Brown did not say when Rodger purchased the ammunition or guns, but the two SIG Sauer P226 pistols and one Glock 34 Longslide pistol were all purchased from federally licensed dealers in California and registered to Rodger, Brown said.
Santa Barbara’s mayor, Helene Schneider, said Sunday that California “has very strict laws.” She said lawmakers need to focus on “the national healthcare system in our country.”
The California Firearms Laws Summary addresses mental health, but only people who are voluntary patients in mental health facilities are barred from legally purchasing firearms.
Those who communicate a threat to a licensed psychotherapist, who chooses to reveal the threat to law enforcement, are prohibited from possessing a firearm for six months, the California law says.
Brown called the tragedy "the work of a madman," but defended officers who visited Rodger on April 30 and found him to be stable. "I'm not gonna second guess them at this point," Brown said.
The 22-year-old Rodger had also been diagnosed with Asperger's, but there has never been any scientific link between Asperger's and violent outbreaks. ||||| The father of a victim in a deadly rampage near the University of California, Santa Barbara, is blaming “craven, irresponsible politicians and the NRA” for his son’s death.
"Why did Chris die? Chris died because of craven, irresponsible politicians and the NRA. They talk about gun rights. What about Chris's right to live?" Richard Martinez asked reporters on Saturday.
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Richard Martinez said his son, Christopher, was "a really great kid," adding that his death “has left our family lost and broken.”
Christopher Martinez was one of six people who were killed by Elliot Rodger, 22, on Friday evening in the town of Isla Vista, officials said. Thirteen other people were injured before Rodger took his own life.
Rodger apparently announced his intent to commit mass murder at a sorority house at UCSB and railed against women in a video posted on YouTube.
"When will this insanity stop?" Richard Martinez asked. "When will enough people say, stop this madness, we don't have to live like this? Too many have died. We should say to ourselves -- not one more."
Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown told CNN on Sunday morning that Rodger purchased the weapons from licensed firearms dealers in Goleta, Oxnard and Burbank over the course of the year.
Deputies who interacted three times with Rodger didn’t feel he was a danger to himself of other people, Brown said, adding that Rodger was timid and quiet shy in those interactions, which included a “welfare check” requested by the county's mental health department.
The sheriff also called violent video games, which were referenced in Rodger's YouTube video, a “plague on our society.” | – Richard Martinez lost his son in Elliot Rodger's shooting spree, and yesterday publicly lashed out at those he holds responsible for Chris Martinez's murder: "Why did Chris die? Chris died because of craven, irresponsible politicians and the NRA. They talk about gun rights. What about Chris' right to live?" Martinez says his family is "lost and broken," and that Chris Martinez was "a really great kid." NBC reports that the NRA has thus far kept its silence on the shooting, and has not responded to requests for comment. Rodger obtained his guns legally. Continued Martinez, as per the Hill: "You don't think it will happen to your child until it does. When will this insanity stop? When will enough people say, stop this madness, we don't have to live like this? Too many have died. We should say to ourselves—not one more." |
4 years ago
(CNN) – John Sununu, a top surrogate for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, said Thursday that Colin Powell’s repeat endorsement of President Barack Obama could be explained partly by the two men’s shared race.
Speaking on CNN’s “Piers Morgan Tonight,” Sununu downplayed the importance of the former secretary of state’s endorsement, pointing to the support Romney’s received from former President George H.W. Bush. He went on to explain that Powell’s endorsement of Obama didn’t rely solely on the political issues at hand.
"When you take a look at Colin Powell, you have to look at whether that's an endorsement based on issues or he's got a slightly different reason for endorsing President Obama," Sununu said, adding: "I think when you have somebody of your own race that you're proud of being president of the United States, I applaud Colin for standing with him."
Later, Sununu released a statement saying "Colin Powell is a friend and I respect the endorsement decision he made and I do not doubt that it was based on anything but his support of the President's policies."
Sununu also pointed to Morgan's original question, which was whether Powell should leave the Republican Party.
"I don't think he should," Sununu wrote.
Powell, who served as the first African American secretary of state under President George W. Bush, made his endorsement earlier Thursday, citing a number of issues not related to race as reasons he was backing Obama for a second time.
The Republican said he believe the economy is "starting to pick up" and attributed the recovery to the president's polices, citing specifically the auto industry bailout and Obama's economic proposals. "Generally we've come out of the dive and we're starting to gain altitude," he said.
Powell said he was "uncomfortable" with Romney's tax plans and views on foreign policy. Pointing to Monday night's final presidential debate, Powell argued the GOP nominee had changed positions on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The former secretary of state said he was concerned with the advice Romney was getting from campaign staff.
"I think there are some very, very strong neo-conservative views that are presented by the governor that I have some trouble with," Powell said, though he did not elaborate on which views.
"I also saw the president get us out of one war, start to get us out of a second war and did not get us into any new wars," he said.
Powell made headlines when the former George W. Bush administration official, who also worked for President Ronald Reagan and President George H.W. Bush, crossed party lines and supported Obama last cycle.
CNN's Jim Acosta contributed to this report. ||||| Former White House Chief of Staff John Sununu, a co-chair of GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney's campaign, said in an interview Thursday night that retired Gen. Colin Powell's decision to endorse President Barack Obama's re-election bid appeared to have been driven by race.
However, Sununu later seemed to reverse himself.
"Frankly, when you take a look at Colin Powell, you have to wonder if that's an endorsement based on issues, or whether he's got a slightly different reason for preferring President Obama?" Sununu said on CNN's "Piers Morgan Tonight."
"What reason would that be?" a somewhat-perplexed sounding Morgan replied.
"Well, I think when you have somebody of your own race that you're proud of being President of the United States, I applaud Colin for standing with him," Sununu said.
(Also on POLITICO: Cory Booker: Sununu's comment "dumb")
A few hours after the CNN interview, Sununu issued a statement appearing to back away from the comment.
"Colin Powell is a friend and I respect the endorsement decision he made and I do not doubt that it was based on anything but his support of the president’s policies. Piers Morgan’s question was whether Colin Powell should leave the party, and I don’t think he should," Sununu said.
Powell, who like Obama is African American, made no mention of the president's race in announcing the endorsement on Thursday. Appearing on "CBS This Morning," Powell credited Obama with reversing the country's abrupt economic downturn and expressed general approval of the president's policies on issues ranging from national security to climate change to health care reform.
“I think, generally, we’ve come out of the [economic] dive and we’re starting to gain altitude,” said Powell, who served as George W. Bush’s secretary of state. “It doesn’t mean all our problems are solved....But I see that we are starting to rise up."
"I also saw the president get us out of one war, start to get us out of a second war, and did not get us into any new wars," Powell added. "The actions that he has taken with respect to protecting us from terrorism have been very, very solid."
Powell also suggested that the tax cuts Romney has touted could not be offset by reductions in spending.
In the CBS interview, Powell did express personal loyalty towards Obama. "I signed on for a long patrol with President Obama and I don't think this is the time to make such a sudden change," the retired general said.
Powell also accused Romney of changing his foreign policy positions in recent months. "This is quite a different set of foreign policy views than he had earlier in the campaign," Powell said. "Sometimes, I don't sense that he has thought through these issues as thoroughly as he should have."
"I think there are some very, very strong neoconservative views that are presented by the governor that I have some trouble with," Powell said.
Sununu, a regular surrogate for Romney's campaign, has made several provocative comments in recent months.
"I wish this president would learn how to be an American," Sununu said during a Romney campaign-organized conference call in July. He later apologized for the remark.
In an interview earlier this month, after the first presidential debate, Sununu called Obama "lazy and detached." The statement prompted MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell to suggest that Sununu might want to take his comments back, but the former White House chief of staff more or less repeated the statement. "He didn't want to prepare for this debate. He's lazy and disengaged," Sununu said.
Sununu served as governor of New Hampshire for about six years in the 1980s and was President George H.W. Bush's first chief of staff.
UPDATE (Friday, 12:33 A.M.): This post has been updated with Sununu's statement seeking to clarify his remarks about Powell.
Read more about: 2012 Presidential Campaign, Mitt Romney, Race, Colin Powell, Endorsements, John Sununu ||||| Sen. John McCain said on Thursday Gen. Colin Powell has “harmed” his “legacy even further” by endorsing President Barack Obama and defending his foreign policy.
“All I can say is: Gen. Powell, you disappoint us,” McCain said Thursday on Fox News Radio’s “Kilmeade and Friends.” “And you have harmed your legacy even further by defending what is clearly been the most feckless foreign policy in my lifetime.”
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reset Colin Powell endorses Obama Sununu: Powell's endorsement of Obama race-driven Colin Powell over the years Play Slideshow
Powell, a retired four-star general, had endorsed Obama over McCain in 2008.
(PHOTOS: Colin Powell over the years)
In an interview with CBS earlier Thursday, Powell criticized Mitt Romney’s foreign policy positions as a “moving target.”
Meanwhile, McCain also criticized Powell for his presentation to the United Nations in the 2003 run-up to the Iraq War. Powell, serving as George W. Bush’s secretary of State, focused on purported links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda — information that turned out to be based on a false report. Powell eventually apologized for the presentation earlier this year.
“I think one of the sad aspects of his career is going to the United Nations Security Council and telling them things about Iraq that were absolutely false,” McCain said, though he said he is an “admirer” of Powell’s.
McCain supported the invasion of Iraq. ||||| While continuing to identify as a Republican, former Secretary of State Colin Powell on Sunday criticized the GOP for a series of racist attacks against President Barack Obama.
(PHOTOS: Colin Powell over the years)
"There's also a dark vein of intolerance in some parts of the party," Powell said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is they still sort of look down on minorities."
Powell, who endorsed Obama, pointed to a number of statements that were directed at Obama as evidence that there is still racism within the party.
"When I see a former governor say that the president is 'shuckin' and jivin'.' That's a racial-era slave term," Powell said, referring to former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin using the term to describe Obama's response to the attacks in Libya.
Powell also pointed to former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu, who was an aggressive surrogate for Mitt Romney, for calling Obama "lazy" after the first debate during the campaign.
"He didn't say he was slow, he was tired, he didn't do well; he said he was 'lazy,'" Powell said "Now, it may not mean anything to most Americans, but to those of us who are African Americans, the second word is "shiftless," and then there's a third word that goes along with it."
Powell also eschewed the "birther movement."
"The whole birther movement: Why do senior Republican leaders tolerate this kind of discussion within the party?" Powell asked. "I think the party has to take a look at itself."
Powell said overall the Republican Party has been moving to the right, creating problems for the GOP.
"In recent years, there's been a significant shift to the right, and we have seen what that shift has produced: two losing presidential campaigns," Powell said. "I think what the Republican Party needs to do now is take a very hard look at itself and understand that the country has changed. The country is changing demographically. And if the Republican Party does not change along with that demographic, they're going to be in trouble."
Powell said the Republican Party in addition to being the party of lower taxes, has become cast at the party of the rich. He said that Republicans need to take up education, immigration and climate change policy before the next election.
"Everybody wants to talk about, 'Who's going to be the candidate?'" Powell said. "You've got to think first about what's the party actually going to represent? If it's just going to represent the far right wing of the political spectrum, I think the party is in difficulty. I'm a moderate, but I'm still a Republican."
Read more about: GOP, Republican Party, Colin Powell, Election, Minorities | – John Sununu is co-chair of Mitt Romney's campaign and thus not happy that Republican Colin Powell endorsed President Obama. But the former White House chief of staff raised eyebrows last night on CNN with how he dismissed its importance: "When you take a look at Colin Powell, you have to look at whether that's an endorsement based on issues or he's got a slightly different reason for endorsing President Obama," he told Piers Morgan. "I think when you have somebody of your own race that you're proud of being president of the United States, I applaud Colin for standing with him." That immediately roused the Twitters with accusations of the race card, and Sununu soon walked it back in a statement: "Colin Powell is a friend and I respect the endorsement decision he made and I do not doubt that it was based on anything but his support of the president's policies." John McCain also criticized the endorsement, notes Politico, but he kept race out of it: “All I can say is: Gen. Powell, you disappoint us,” McCain said on Fox News Radio. “And you have harmed your legacy even further by defending what has clearly been the most feckless foreign policy in my lifetime.” While he was on the subject, he blasted Powell's "absolutely false" presentation to the UN before the Iraq war in 2003. |
Vogue published kind of a tricky article in their April issue about a woman putting her seven-year-old daughter on a diet. The larger issue of child obesity is, as Weiss makes sure to point out, a real one, and Weiss' daughter was clinically obese and needed to lose weight for health reasons. The article's author, Dara-Lyn Weiss is faced with the complicated task of helping her daughter lose weight without giving her long-term body image issues. Any article on the subject--especially one written in Vogue by a socialite-y upper-class Manhattanite--is going to raise some eyebrows. This one in particular has inspired serious outrage.
For example, Jezebel calls it "the worst Vogue article ever" and Weiss "one of the most fucked up, selfish women to ever grace the magazine's pages." Indeed, some of the things Weiss did to keep her kid from breaking her diet are a little nuts. For example, the article began with the following interaction:
I stepped between my daughter and a bowl of salad nicoise my friend was handing her, raising my palm like a traffic cop. "Thanks," I said, "but she already ate dinner." "But she said she's still hungry," my friend replied, bewildered. I forced a smile. "Yeah, but it's got a lot of dressing on it and we're trying--" "Just olive oil!" my friend interrupted. "It's superhealthy!" My smile faded and my voice grew tense. "I know. She can't." My friend's eyes moved to my daughter, whose gaze held the dish in the crosshairs: a Frisbee-size bowl bursting with oil, tuna, eggs, potatoes, olives.
This may have not been the best way to set up the article if she wanted the reader to believe her to be a sane, reasonable person. Some other not-so-sane things she admitted to doing:
• Angrily throwing an untouched kid's sized hot chocolate in the trash and stormed out of a Starbucks because a barista didn't know exactly how many calories were in it. • Not letting Bea partake in "Pizza Fridays" at school • Making Bea go without dinner because she ate "nearly 800 calories of brie, filet mignon, baguette and chocolate" at school for French Heritage Day (I wish I went to that school)
Also a red flag: Weiss admits to having had issues with food her whole life, including obsessive dieting, fasting, using laxatives, etc. The thing is, she fully acknowledges that, stating, "Who was I to teach a little girl how to maintain a healthy weight and body image?"
Overall, Weiss comes across as obsessive and the fact that she made such an issue of her daughter's weight, both in public and in Vogue--seems wrong. Jezebel contacted Dr. Dolgoff, the founder of "Red Light, Green Light, Eat Right," the which is what Bea's diet was based on, who said she "wasn't thrilled" with the way Weiss interpreted her book. "The parents aren't supposed to react in public," she said. "They're supposed to be on their child's team. Another parent in [Weiss'] situation may have seen that, while weight loss was progressing, there were some emotional issues. But she chose to continue dieting in her own way. I believe that if she had continued coming, the end result would have been more than just weight loss: she'd have weight loss and a happy child."
To me, it's a tricky situation that's hard to criticize if you haven't been in it yourself. Most moms aren't perfect and don't a lot of them end up screwing their kids up one way or another?
What do you think? Was it irresponsible of Vogue to publish that article? ||||| An article by a woman who is "fighting" her 7-year-old daughter's "childhood obesity" at home—published in the April issue of Vogue—is causing a big backlash online among readers critical of the magazine and its author.
Dara-Lynn Weiss, the author, wrote about her response to a pediatrician who suggested that her daughter, Bea, should be put on a diet because—at 4 feet 4 inches and 93 pounds—she was clinically obese and could be at risk for high blood pressure, cholesterol and diabetes.
It wasn't the diagnosis that readers railed against, but Weiss' management of Bea's subsequent yearlong diet.
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"Sometimes Bea's after-school snack was a slice of pizza or a gyro from the snack vendor," Weiss wrote. "Other days I forced her to choose a low fat vegetable soup or a single hard-boiled egg. Occasionally I'd give in to her pleas for a square of coffee cake, mainly because I wanted to eat half of it. When she was given access to cupcakes at a party, I alternated between saying, 'Let's not eat that, it's not good for you'; 'Okay, fine, go ahead, but just one'; and 'Bea, you have to stop eating crap like that, you're getting too heavy,' depending on my mood. Then I'd secretly eat two when she wasn't looking."
Weiss continued:
I once reproachfully deprived Bea of her dinner after learning that her observation of French Heritage Day at school involved nearly 800 calories of Brie, filet mignon, baguette, and chocolate. I stopped letting her enjoy Pizza Fridays when she admitted to adding a corn salad as a side dish one week. I dressed down a Starbucks barista when he professed ignorance of the nutrition content of the kids' hot chocolate whose calories are listed as "120-210" on the menu board: Well, which is it? When he couldn't provide an answer, I dramatically grabbed the drink out of my daughter's hands, poured it into the garbage, and stormed out.
After Bea lost 16 pounds—meeting her mom's weight-loss goal for her before a Vogue photoshoot—Weiss wrote about her daughter's reaction:
"That's still me," she says of her former self. "I'm not a different person just because I lost 16 pounds." I protest that indeed she is different. At this moment, that fat girl is a thing of the past. A tear rolls down her beautiful cheek, past the glued-in feather. "Just because it's in the past," she says, "doesn't mean it didn't happen."
"I have not ingested any food, looked at a restaurant menu, or been sick to the point of vomiting without silently launching a complicated mental algorithm about how it will affect my weight," Weiss admitted. "Who was I to teach a little girl how to maintain a healthy weight and body image?"
"The socialites who write personal essays for Vogue aren't known for their kindness and humility," Katie Baker wrote on Jezebel.com. But Weiss "has to go down in history as the one of the most f---ed up, selfish women to ever grace the magazine's pages."
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Weiss "comes across as obsessive and the fact that she made such an issue of her daughter's weight, both in public and in Vogue—seems wrong," Dhani Mau wrote on Fashionista.com.
An anonymous blogger for New York magazine added: "I'm pretty sure Weiss just handed her daughter the road map to all her future eating disorders."
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I've never known Vogue's annual "Shape" issue to have a firm grasp on reality, but this month's article by Dara-Lynn Weiss on her struggle to cure her "obese" 7-year-old daughter, Bea, reached new levels of pathos. The heartbreaking chronicle of little Bea, subjected to public humiliation and the Red Light, Green Light, Eat Right diet (sort of a "kid-oriented" version of Weight Watchers), begins thus: As Bea grew I was relieved to cross several items off my mental checklist of possible issues she might develop. She was not colicky. She was not autistic. She was not dyslexic. No, it was far, far worse than any of those things: She was fat. And Weiss admits that she felt particularly ill-equipped to confront the problem because of her own struggle to control her weight over the years, which included subjecting herself to Weight Watchers, Atkins, juice fasts, laxatives, and even deadly appetite suppressants. So for several years, Weiss ignored her child's overeating, anxiously hoping it would just go away, even after Bea's 6-year-old check-up when the pediatrician suggested they address Bea's weight. But then it got serious.
One day Bea came home from school in tears, confessing that a boy at school had called her fat. The incident crushed me, but it was a wake-up call. Being overweight is not a private struggle. Everyone can see it.
A boy called her fat. Well, that certainly can't happen in a home ruled by the sort of social striving found in the pages of Vogue! We all know that the reasons we eat or deprive ourselves of food don't always coincide with appetite. But rather than identifying the cause of the overeating (maybe a mom so wrapped up in her own social standing that she was willing to put her daughter's well-being at stake?), Weiss chose to project her own self-loathing onto her daughter.
Full disclosure: I have three children, including a 7-year-old girl. I can attest to the ways in which children are a mirror for our worst fears about ourselves. I am sure I've made mistakes by voicing (however inadvertently) my own dissatisfactions with myself. And yet, I feel so fiercely protective of my children's future physical and mental well-being that I won't even use my real name for this piece. If my own daughter were to encounter a weight problem, I'd like to think I would approach it like Janell Hoffman did in her honest take "'Mom, I'm Fat:' One Mother's Inspired Response to Her 7 Year Old." If that wasn't enough, we would seek the help of professionals in a rational, loving manner. And if I were the root cause, I'd seek my own help too. Which is, of course, the opposite of Weiss's approach:
Sometimes Bea's after-school snack was a slice of pizza or a gyro from the snack vendor. Other days I forced her to choose a low fat vegetable soup or a single hard-boiled egg. Occasionally I'd give in to her pleas for a square of coffee cake, mainly because I wanted to eat half of it. When she was given access to cupcakes at a party, I alternated between saying, "Let's not eat that, it's not good for you"; "Okay, fine, go ahead, but just one"; "and "Bea, you have to stop eating crap like that, you're getting too heavy," depending on my mood. Then I'd secretly eat two when she wasn't looking.
But perhaps the most poignant part of the article comes at the end, when Bea meets her mother's deadline for Vogue's "Shape" issue and loses a total of sixteen pounds in time for them to be photographed together. For enduring her mother's obsessive narcissism, she receives many beautiful dresses and a feather hair extension as a reward. Seems like a fair trade-off for being in Vogue before second grade, right? But if Bea thought she could finally eat her coffee cake without being tormented, she'd better think again:
The struggle is obviously not over. I don't think it will ever be for either of us. Bea understands that, just as some kids have asthma, her weight is something she may always have to think about, unfair as it seems.
Unfair indeed. Weiss continues:
She will probably always want to eat more than she is supposed to. She will be tempted to make bad choices. But now she has the foundation to make these choices in an educated and conscious way. Only time will tell whether my early intervention saved her from a life of preoccupation with her weight, or drove her to it.
Um, really? I'm pretty sure Weiss just handed her daughter the road map to all her future eating disorders. But it gets even more tragic with Bea's tearful reproach:
"That's still me," she says of her former self. "I'm not a different person just because I lost sixteen pounds." I protest that indeed she is different. At this moment, that fat girl is a thing of the past. A tear rolls down her beautiful cheek, past the glued-in feather. "Just because it's in the past," she says, "doesn't mean it didn't happen." | – When Dara-Lynn Weiss wrote in Vogue about her yearlong struggle to help her clinically obese 7-year-old daughter lose 16 pounds, she probably wasn't expecting quite the level of backlash that has ensued. Yahoo has highlights from Weiss's article, including her admission that she herself has struggled with eating and body image issues her entire life. Among the tactics Weiss used with daughter Bea: depriving her of dinner because she ate 800 calories at school during "French Heritage Day," refusing to allow her to participate in "Pizza Fridays" because she once added a corn salad on the side, and angrily dumping out her Starbucks hot chocolate when the barista couldn't tell her exactly how many calories it contained. Yahoo rounds up some reactions: Katie Baker pulls no punches on Jezebel, writing that Weiss "has to go down in history as the one of the most fucked up, selfish women to ever grace the magazine's pages." Yes, Weiss found herself in a complicated and difficult situation, but "the obvious fact that Weiss was projecting her hatred of her own body onto her child throughout her yearlong diet" is "truly disgusting." On Fashionista.com, Dhani Mau notes an incident in which Weiss steps between her daughter and a salad nicoise, physically preventing her from eating it. "This may have not been the best way to set up the article if she wanted the reader to believe her to be a sane, reasonable person," Mau writes. "Weiss comes across as obsessive and the fact that she made such an issue of her daughter’s weight, both in public and in Vogue—seems wrong." "Rather than identifying the cause of the overeating … Weiss chose to project her own self-loathing onto her daughter," writes an anonymous blogger and mom in New York. "I'm pretty sure Weiss just handed her daughter the road map to all her future eating disorders." |
Thanking his volunteers in Cleveland a day after the Republican National Convention wrapped, GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump today slammed Ted Cruz's Wednesday night speech and said he “will not accept” if the Texas senator ever decides to endorse him.
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"Honestly, he may have ruined his political career. I feel so badly," Trump said this morning of Cruz, his former primary rival.
Cruz was booed off the stage on the third day of the convention for suggesting that people should “vote their conscience” in November. The Texas senator defended his speech the next morning at a Texas delegate breakfast, arguing he’s “not in the habit of supporting someone who attacks my wife and attacks my father.”
But Trump said this morning that Cruz will “come and endorse over the next little while. It's because he has no choice. But I don't want his endorsement. What difference does it make?"
"Ted, just stay home, relax, enjoy yourself," Trump said to laughter from the crowd of supporters and convention volunteers.
Trump said he reviewed a version of Cruz's speech, which included no endorsement, but allowed him to take the stage anyway Wednesday night.
“He got up and he added a sentence, which could have been viewed as a nasty thing in terms of what he said because he was implying something which is wrong. But that's OK,” Trump said, referring to Cruz’s “vote your conscience" line.
Trump also called Cruz “dishonorable” for not supporting him and thereby rejecting the pledge each GOP candidate signed during the primaries indicating they would support the eventual party nominee.
"I like Ted, he's fine. Again, don't want his endorsement," Trump said. "If he gives it, I will not accept it, just so you understand."
Although they started the primaries cordially, Trump and Cruz were engaged in some heavy mudslinging at the end. Cruz called Trump a “pathological liar” and “utterly amoral.”
Trump got into the habit of calling Cruz “Lyin’ Ted” and insinuated that Cruz’s father, Rafael, was a conspirator in President John Kennedy’s assassination. Trump even went as far as to share a tweet with an unflattering photo of Cruz’s wife, Heidi, alongside a photo of his ex-model wife Melania.
Trump defended himself today in circulating the tabloid story about Cruz’s father.
“All I did is point out the fact that on the cover of the National Enquirer there was a picture of [Rafael Cruz] and crazy Lee Harvey Oswald having breakfast,” Trump said of the unsubstantiated allegations, adding that Cruz’s father is a “lovely guy.”
On Heidi, Trump insisted, "I didn't do anything."
“I think Heidi Cruz is a great person. I think it's the best thing he's got going, and his kids, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said.
Today, alongside running mate Mike Pence, Trump spent equally as much time celebrating the four-day convention as he did attacking his former opponents.
“It was amazing. There was great love in that room,” Trump said.
He also thanked his team, called RNC Chairman Reince Priebus a "superstar," and congratulated his family on their speeches.
Trump also took the time to give himself a pat on the back for his speech on the final night of the convention. Trump said he didn't mean to make his speech long, but "what happened is the applause was so long and so crazy."
Trump also argued the TV ratings for the convention "were through the roof."
"We created one of the most successful conventions in the history of conventions," Trump boasted.
But Trump's message today was one directed at those who still are not aboard the "Trump train."
“No matter how much you like, or dislike, no matter what your feelings, whether you're the governor of Ohio, whether you're a senator from Texas,” Trump said, referring to Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who also hasn't endorsed Trump and skipped the convention.
“Or any of the other people that I beat so easily and so badly, you have no choice, you got to go for Trump.” ||||| Donald Trump hit back hard Tuesday at Ted Cruz’s father after he made an appeal to “every member of the body of Christ” to vote for his son, and not the “wicked” – calling the comments “disgraceful” and “horrible.”
In a sharp turn, the Republican presidential front-runner also abruptly invoked a tabloid story about Rafael Cruz’s supposed connection to John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.
The Cruz campaign already has rejected that National Enquirer report from last month as “garbage.”
But Trump unleashed on the Cuban-born Rafael Cruz, a pastor, after he made his religious appeal to Indiana and other voters to support his son in the Republican presidential nominating contest. Indiana is voting Tuesday.
“I think it’s a disgrace that he’s allowed to do it. I think it’s a disgrace that he’s allowed to say it,” Trump told Fox News.
Speaking with the head of the American Family Association of Indiana, the elder Cruz had warned of the “wicked electing the wicked” and urged fellow Christians to come out to vote.
“I implore, I exhort every member of the body of Christ to vote according to the word of God, and vote for the candidate that stands on the word of God and on the Constitution of the United States of America," Cruz said, as earlier reported by The Washington Examiner. "And I am convinced that man is my son, Ted Cruz. The alternative could be the destruction of America."
The Examiner reported that Rafael Cruz had been meeting for days with Indiana pastors, many of whom have since endorsed the Texas senator.
Trump, though, told Fox News he’s actually “winning the evangelical vote” and blasted Cruz’s father for his comments.
He went on to invoke the Enquirer story, which claimed Rafael Cruz was photographed next to Oswald in 1963 handing out pro-Castro literature.
“His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald being … shot,” Trump said Tuesday. “Nobody even brings it up.”
The Cruz campaign, though, has unequivocally rejected the Enquirer report as false. And on Tuesday, Cruz campaign spokeswoman Catherine Frazier said Trump’s comments show his desperation.
“Trump is detached from reality, and his false, cheap, meaningless comments every day indicate his desperation to get attention and willingness to say anything to do so. We are campaigning on jobs freedom and security while trump campaigns on false tabloid garbage. And the media is willfully enabling him to cheapen the value of our democratic process,” she said in a statement.
Ted Cruz himself called the claims "kooky."
The campaign previously told McClatchy when the Enquirer story appeared last month that "that is not Rafael in the picture."
While Cruz’s father was a Castro supporter as a young man, he later turned against him and became anti-communist.
Fox News' Dan Gallo contributed to this report. | – Ted Cruz believes an "utterly amoral" "serial philanderer" who's also an unprecedented "narcissist" and "arrogant buffoon" should be the next leader of the free world. That's right: Cruz has officially endorsed Donald Trump for president. In a Facebook post Friday, Cruz says he's decided to vote for Trump "after many months of careful consideration, of prayer, and searching my own conscience." He cites his own stance as "#NeverHillary" and Trump's positions on energy, immigration, national security, and more as reasons to vote for a man he once said some very negative things about. According to CNN, Cruz previously said he wouldn't endorse Trump after Trump implied Cruz's father may have been involved in the JFK assassination and insulted Cruz's wife's looks. While CNN calls it a "stunning" move, the BBC notes there are a few reasons Cruz may have changed his tune. One, Trump now appears to have a better shot at winning—or at least not embarrassing himself—lessening the chances Cruz can say "I told you so." It also now appears that "Trump-ism is the future of the Republican Party," and Cruz has to worry about facing a pro-Trump primary opponent in 2018. In a statement, Trump says he's "greatly honored by the endorsement." Trump had previously said he wouldn't accept an endorsement from "Lyin' Ted" Cruz. |
Media caption Gezi Park protester Yigit Aksakoglu: "We don't know how long we'll be in the park"
Turkish protesters have vowed to continue occupying Istanbul's Gezi Park.
Their defiant statement came despite the prime minister's promise to halt a redevelopment plan which sparked two weeks of anti-government unrest.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan's offer was presented as a major concession.
But after all-night discussions in Gezi Park, the protesters said their movement was bigger than a simple conservation protest.
"We will continue our resistance in the face of any injustice and unfairness taking place in our country," the Taksim Solidarity group, seen as most representative of the protesters, said. "This is only the beginning."
Protest timeline 31 May: Protests begin in Gezi Park over plans to redevelop one of Istanbul's few green spaces 3 June: Protesters establish camps with makeshift facilities from libraries to food centres 4-10 June: Protests widen into show of anti-government dissent in towns and cities across Turkey; clashes between police and demonstrators 11/12 June: Night of clashes see riot police disperse anti-government demonstrators in Taksim Square, which adjoins Gezi Park; camps in the park remain 13 June: Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan issues a "final warning" to protesters to leave Gezi Park 14 June: Government agrees to suspend Gezi Park redevelopment plans until a court rules on the issue, PM holds talks with members of a key protest group 15 June: Protesters vow to continue occupying Gezi Park Q&A: Protests in Turkey Why is Gezi Park so important? Turkey sails further into dangerous waters
Meanwhile, in the capital Ankara, riot police again used tear gas and water cannon to disperse demonstrators overnight. About 30 protesters were reported to have been arrested.
Mr Erdogan is addressing supporters of his Justice and Development Party (AKP) called to show support for the embattled premier.
The prime minister's offer to stop the Gezi Park redevelopment until a court ruled on its legality was his first conciliatory gesture since the challenge to his Islamist-backed government began.
He had previously taken a tough line on the protests, branding the demonstrators "extremists" and "looters". He said the unrest was being encouraged by foreign forces to undermine Turkey and its economy.
"Young people, you have remained there long enough and delivered your message.... Why are you staying?" Mr Erdogan said in a speech broadcast live on television in which he made his offer.
Ankara clashes
The contested park is a rare patch of green in Turkey's biggest city.
Last month, an Istanbul court issued an initial injunction against the plan to cut down trees in the park to make way for a shopping centre and replica 18th-Century military barracks. The government has appealed against the ruling.
The project was the initial spark for the protests, which then broadened into anti-government demonstrations in several cities which saw violent clashes between police and demonstrators.
Media caption Quentin Sommerville reports from Gezi Park: "The mood here in the park still remains defiant"
Five people have died and thousands have been injured since the protests began on 31 May, spreading to the adjacent Taksim Square a day later and then to other towns and cities across Turkey.
Protesters have accused Mr Erdogan's government of becoming increasingly authoritarian and of trying to impose conservative Islamic values on a secular state.
The police crackdown on protesters in Istanbul, Ankara, and other towns and cities has drawn international concern, especially from Europe.
And Turkish broadcasters have been heavily criticised for not covering the protests in their early days.
The BBC has suspended its partnership with Turkish broadcaster NTV following its decision not to transmit the BBC programme Dunya Gundemi (World Agenda).
BBC World Service director Peter Horrocks said: "Any interference in BBC broadcasting is totally unacceptable, and at a time of considerable international concern about the situation in Turkey the BBC's impartial service to audiences is vital."
The dropping of the programme came after NTV had apologised to its staff and viewers for not covering the protests when they first began. ||||| Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Debris is strewn across Taksim Square
There is an uneasy calm in central Istanbul after a night of clashes which saw Turkish riot police disperse anti-government demonstrators.
Taksim Square, the focus of days of protest, is now largely cleared.
But protesters have regrouped in nearby Gezi Park. Its proposed redevelopment sparked anger that has widened into nationwide anti-government unrest.
PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said there will be no tolerance of people he accuses of seeking to harm Turkey.
The demonstrators accuse Mr Erdogan of becoming increasingly authoritarian and trying to impose conservative Islamic values on a secular state.
Analysis It had been thought that the prime minister would meet protesters on Wednesday in an attempt at dialogue. But it's now clear that the talks will be with so-called mediators, including an actress and a columnist. The movement Taksim Solidarity, which most represents the protesters, has not been invited to join and says it doesn't recognise those chosen. So it's unlikely the talks will achieve much. The protest movement feels increasingly alienated by the prime minister as his rhetoric hardens and after yesterday's police operation. The chance of reconciliation is now increasingly slim. For now, Taksim Square feels eerily calm. Burnt-out shells of vehicles remain and the protesters have built a makeshift barricade in front of Gezi Park, where the unrest began. Water cannon trucks are poised, ready to spring into action. The demonstrators are off the square for now, but once the police retreat, it's likely this will once again become the front line. Turkey sails further into dangerous waters Turkish press split
Mr Erdogan is due to meet a group of 11 people - including artists, architects and a social media specialist - whom he hopes can mediate with the protesters.
It had been suggested he would hold talks with protest organisers, but they told the BBC that they had not been approached by the prime minister - and would refuse to meet him even if they were.
They added that they did not recognise any of the group that Mr Erdogan was due to meet as representatives of the protesters in the park.
In Istanbul and the capital, Ankara, thousands of lawyers turned out to protest against the detention on Tuesday of at least 40 of their colleagues who had gathered to express their opposition to the police action.
"Our friends who had been detained in Istanbul were taken under custody just because they were reading a press release," said one of the lawyers in Ankara, Mehmet Toker. "We are here to defend freedom of speech."
Taxis and commuters returned to Taksim Square on Wednesday, which a day earlier had been the scene of repeated, violent clashes between police and protesters - some of whom threw stones and firebombs. Many peaceful demonstrators were also caught in the clashes.
Thousands converged on the square as night fell and were repelled by water cannon, rubber bullets and tear gas.
Dispersed demonstrators sought shelter nearby, including in Gezi Park. Police said they did not plan to enter the park.
Volunteers set up makeshift clinics to treat the injured.
Security forces cleared the square, only for the demonstrators to return.
Twelve days in Taksim Square
Protests in Taksim Square since 1 June
Image caption 1 June: Taksim Square becomes focus for protests over the development of Gezi Park after clashes with police. Image caption 3 June: Protesters establish camps in Taksim Square with makeshift facilities, from libraries to food centres. Image caption 9 June: The protests continue for a 10th day, with thousands gathering in central Istanbul and other cities. Image caption 11 June: Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan warns he will not show any more tolerance. Image caption 11 June: Protesters clash with police, who use water cannon, tear gas and rubber bullets to clear the area. Image caption 12 June: Morning sees the square empty of protesters although some have regrouped near Gezi Park. previous slide next slide
Istanbul Governor Huseyin Avni Mutlu had earlier struck a conciliatory note, but he went on television on Tuesday night to declare: "We will continue our measures in an unremitting manner, whether day or night, until marginal elements are cleared and the square is open to the people."
'It's over'
Mr Erdogan has defended the police action, saying that an environmental movement against the demolition of the park had been hijacked.
"For those who want to continue with the incidents I say: 'It's over,' he said.
"As of now we have no tolerance for them."
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Jeremy Bowen saw the protesters clash with police
The protests began on 31 May.
The Turkish Human Rights Foundation says four people have been killed, including one policeman.
Some 5,000 protesters have been treated for injuries and the effects of tear gas, while officials say 600 police officers have also been injured.
Protests have also occurred in Ankara, with smaller demonstrations in many other cities.
European Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton said the unrest represented a "key moment" for Turkey, and a "chance for it to renew its commitment to European values".
Italian Foreign Minister Emma Bonino said the protests were the "first serious test for the endurance of democracy in Turkey and its accession to Europe", while German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle expressed his concern in a statement.
"We expect Prime Minister Erdogan to de-escalate the situation, in the spirit of European values, and to seek a constructive exchange and peaceful dialogue," he said.
The United States, a key ally of Turkey, has urged dialogue between government and protesters.
"We believe that Turkey's long-term stability, security and prosperity is best guaranteed by upholding the fundamental freedoms of expression, assembly and association, and a free independent media," White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said.
Meanwhile, Turkey's broadcasting regulator has fined four small Turkish TV channels over their coverage of anti-government protests, accusing them of "encouraging violence". | – Yesterday, Turkey's government offered to stop pushing the redevelopment of Istanbul's Gezi Park until after a court ruling; today, protesters say that's not enough. They plan to hold their ground, they say, per the BBC: "We will continue our resistance in the face of any injustice and unfairness taking place in our country," says the Taksim Solidarity Group of demonstrators. "This is only the beginning." The decision comes after Taksim Solidarity members discussed the government's offer with fellow protesters, prompting calls of "Cowards! Liars! Sheep!" the New York Times reports. "The government thinks the solidarity group represents all of us, and the rest are extremists and terrorists, but that is just not true," says a protester. "We do not have a representative." The stance could pave the way for new clashes with police, the Times notes. The capital, Ankara, saw just such action last night as police cleared protesters with tear gas and water cannons; some 30 protesters were reportedly arrested, the BBC notes. |
Image copyright SPL Image caption Leaves absorb significantly more CO2 than climate models have estimated
Global climate models have underestimated the amount of CO2 being absorbed by plants, according to new research.
Scientists say that between 1901 and 2010, living things absorbed 16% more of the gas than previously thought.
The authors say it explains why models consistently overestimated the growth rate of carbon in the atmosphere.
But experts believe the new calculation is unlikely to make a difference to global warming predictions.
The research has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Working out the amount of carbon dioxide that lingers in the atmosphere is critical to estimating the future impacts of global warming on temperatures.
About half the CO2 that's produced ends up in the oceans or is absorbed by living things.
But modelling the exact impacts on a global scale is a fiendishly complicated business.
In this new study, a team of scientists looked again at the way trees and other plants absorb carbon.
By analysing how CO2 spreads slowly inside leaves, a process called mesophyll diffusion, the authors conclude that more of the gas is absorbed than previously thought.
Between 1901 and 2100 the researchers believe that their new work increases the amount of carbon taken up through fertilisation from 915 billion tonnes to 1,057 billion, a 16% increase.
"There is a time lag between scientists who study fundamental processes and modellers who model those processes in a large scale model," explained one of the authors, Dr Lianhong Gu at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US.
"It takes time for the the two groups to understand each other."
Image copyright SPL Image caption Scientists monitor carbon dioxide levels near trees to work out how much is absorbed
The researchers believe that Earth system models have over-estimated the amount of carbon in the atmosphere by about 17%, and think their new evaluation of plant absorption explains the gap.
"The atmospheric CO2 concentration only started to accelerate rapidly after 1950," said Dr Gu.
"So the 17% bias was achieved during a period of about 50 years. If we are going to predict future CO2 concentration increases for hundreds of years, how big would that bias be?"
Model revamp
Other researchers believe the new work could help clarify our models but it may not mean any great delay in global warming as a result of increased concentrations of the gas.
"The paper provides great new insights into how the very intricacies of leaf structure and function can have a planetary scale impact," said Dr Pep Canadell from the Global Carbon Project at CSIRO Australia.
"It provides a potential explanation for why global earth system models cannot fully reproduce the observed atmospheric CO2 growth over the past 100 years and suggests that vegetation might be able to uptake more carbon dioxide in the future than is currently modelled.
"Having more carbon taken up by plants would slow down climate change but there are many other processes which lay in between this work and the ultimate capacity of terrestrial ecosystems to remove carbon dioxide and store it for long enough to make a difference to atmospheric CO2 trends."
Many experts agree that the effect is interesting and may require a recalibration of models - but it doesn't change the need for long-term emissions cuts to limit the impact of carbon dioxide.
"This new research implies it will be slightly easier to fulfil the target of keeping global warming below two degrees - but with a big emphasis on 'slightly'," said Dr Chris Huntingford, a climate modeller at the UK's Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.
"Overall, the cuts in CO2 emissions over the next few decades will still have to be very large if we want to keep warming below two degrees."
Follow Matt on Twitter @mattmcgrathbbc. ||||| We're used to hearing about how rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere are leading to things like higher temperatures and dangerous pollution, but there's another, less commonly understood consequence to today's era-defining CO2 peak.
An international team of scientists has studied 33 years of satellite data and found that Earth is actually getting significantly greener as a result of rising carbon dioxide levels, with greater carbon emissions over the past three decades leading to a huge increase in the amount of leaves on plants and trees.
"We were able to tie the greening largely to the fertilising effect of rising atmospheric CO2 concentration by tasking several computer models to mimic plant growth observed in the satellite data," said researcher Ranga Myneni from Boston University.
But how are airborne pollutants spurring vegetation growth? The process, called the carbon fertilisation effect, results from leaves absorbing CO2 from the air as part of photosynthesis. With greater levels of carbon in the atmosphere, plants and trees and even crops actually grow faster, particularly in warm climates.
And with the levels of carbon in the atmosphere as high as they are now, that's seen a massive increase in the amount of vegetation over the surface of the planet.
"The greening over the past 33 years reported in this study is equivalent to adding a green continent about two times the size of mainland USA (18 million km2), and has the ability to fundamentally change the cycling of water and carbon in the climate system," said one of the team, Zaichun Zhu from Peking University in China.
As a result of the growth in recent decades, vegetation now covers almost a third (32 percent) of the planet's total surface area, occupying about 85 percent of all ice-free land.
But while extra greenery – and its ability to absorb atmospheric carbon – sounds like a positive for the environment, the scientists warn that this side effect of high carbon levels will only be temporary, and won't ultimately help against other consequences of climate change, such as severe weather, and rising temperatures and sea levels.
"[S]tudies have shown that plants acclimatise, or adjust, to rising CO2 concentration and the fertilisation effect diminishes over time," said Philippe Ciais from the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences in France.
Nor is CO2 the only factor behind the current green trends. The scientists say nitrogen use in agricultural fertilisers, climate change generally, and land management also contribute to the phenomenon in lesser amounts.
The findings, reported in Nature Climate Change, will hopefully serve as another pressing reminder of the importance of lowering carbon emissions, in the same week that world leaders have come together to sign the Paris climate deal.
"This is a snapshot of humans' global influence on the functioning of the entire global biosphere," one of the team, Pep Canadell from the CSIRO in Australia, told Anna Salleh at the ABC. "The growth of CO2 in the atmosphere is almost exclusively due to fossil fuel burning and deforestation." | – Some rare good news in the fight against climate change: Plants are an even greater ally than we knew, absorbing around 16% more carbon than previously thought, according to new research. University of Texas researchers took a fresh look at climate models and at how CO2 is absorbed by plants, analyzing the way it spreads inside leaves, reports the BBC. "There is a time lag between scientists who study fundamental processes and modellers who model those processes in a large-scale model," says one of the authors of the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers say the findings could help clear up some discrepancies in current climate models. The findings suggest "it will be slightly easier to fulfill the target of keeping global warming below 2 degrees—but with a big emphasis on 'slightly,'" says a climate modeler at Britain's Center for Ecology and Hydrology, explaining that emission cuts in the next few decades "will still have to be very large" to hit that target. An energy systems analyst at Melbourne University agrees that cuts are still vital. A larger carbon turnover in plants doesn't necessarily mean greater carbon storage, he tells the Australian, "in the same way that larger cash turnover in a business does not necessarily result in larger profits." (Another recent study predicted that if CO2 levels continue to increase, we'll have "big plants but nothing to eat" by 2070.) |
Denver Post uncovers that Democratic Party told Hillary Clinton's campaign about caucus counting mistake, but kept public and Bernie Sanders camp in the dark
Bernie Sanders won one more delegate in Colorado than first projected after the Colorado Democratic Party admitted this week that it misreported the March 1 caucus results from 10 precinct locations.
The party discovered the discrepancy a week after the caucus but did not correct the public record.
Hillary Clinton's campaign discussed the error with state party officials last week, but the Sanders campaign apparently didn't realize the issue until being informed Monday evening by The Denver Post.
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks to supporters during a campaign rally Tuesday evening in the Arts and Sciences Auditorium at the University of Wyoming campus on April 5, 2016, in Laramie, Wyo. Sanders won the Democratic presidential primary in Wisconsin Tuesday. (Blaine McCartney, The Wyoming Tribune Eagle via AP)
The mistake is a minor shift with major implications. The new projection now shows the Vermont senator winning 39 delegates in Colorado, compared to 27 for Clinton.
Even if Clinton wins all 12 superdelegates in the state, Sanders can finish no worse than a split decision. The new count contrasts with prior projections from The Post, Bloomberg Politics and The Associated Press that indicated Clinton would probably win the majority of the 78 delegates in Colorado because of her support from party leaders with superdelegate status.
If Sanders lands one Colorado superdelegate — two are still undecided and others are facing significant pressure — he could win the state's delegation.
RELATED: Ted Cruz dominates Colorado GOP convention winning all 34 delegates
The revelation that the state party misreported the results to the public March 1 comes as Sanders seeks to convince Democrats that he can win the nomination.
And it arises a day after the Colorado Republican Party faced blistering criticism from Donald Trump and his supporters about how it awarded national delegates in what the candidate called a "rigged" system.
In this Feb. 29, 2016 file photo, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at a campaign rally in Norfolk, Va. (Gerald Herbert, Associated Press file)
The double-barrel controversies regarding Colorado's caucus system will only reinforce calls for the state to move to a primary vote that allows more transparency and participation among voters who felt left out of the complicated process.
RELATED: Trump escalates challenge, calls Colorado GOP vote "a crooked deal"
Democratic Party Chairman Rick Palacio said that all votes cast Super Tuesday counted — and dismissed suggestions about fraud amid calls for his resignation.
"It was basically a reporting error on caucus night," Palacio said in an interview Monday.
The problem, he said, occurred when a volunteer at Byers Middle School in Denver punched the wrong vote tallies from 10 precincts into the party's interactive voice response system for the presidential preference poll.
The state party's website reported March 1 that Sanders won 14,624 votes, or 54 percent, in Denver County and Clinton took 12,097 votes, or 45 percent.
But the corrected numbers for Denver County give Sanders 15,194 votes, or 56.5 percent, and Clinton with 11,527, or 43 percent, according to official party results.
The error low-balled Sanders' margin of victory in the county by nearly 4 percentage points — a boost that shifted how the delegates were projected for the 1st Congressional District.
The results reported on caucus night indicated that Sanders and Clinton would split the district's eight national delegates, 4-4. But the new numbers gave Sanders five delegates and Clinton three.
"It was an embarrassment on our part for sure," Palacio said.
Still, Palacio suggested the campaigns received the correct data just days after the caucus in an e-mail from party officials. "It was our assumption they were using that data," he said.
The Clinton campaign realized the discrepancy between the public data and the official results and discussed it with the party Friday, Palacio said.
But the first public indication of the mistake only became apparent at the 1st District convention straw poll Saturday, when Sanders took five delegates and Clinton three.
Sanders supporters initially thought the campaign picked up support in Colorado. But Palacio said Clinton didn't lose support — "we just misreported it."
"It was basically one (caucus) site," he added. "Whomever dialed the numbers in must have had a little weirdness happen. The official results were reported correctly, but when they dialed them in using the touch-tone, it looks like something got transposed."
Democratic Party officials did not acknowledge the mistake until Monday .
Palacio downplayed the discrepancy, saying the site with the results — coloradocaucus.org — "is only used for reporting to the press.
"It wasn't used in an official way," he added. "So we didn't go back and actually look at the website versus the math sheets."
Upon being told of the new delegate math Monday, Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver said "we are obviously pleased to essentially narrow the delegate lead by two delegates, one up and one down — it's a zero sum game."
As to whether Sanders can win a superdelegate and claim a majority of the state's delegation, Weaver said the campaign considers them separate tallies.
"Once we get to the convention, they'll have an opportunity to take a look at the two candidates and choose the candidate who is best able to defeat the Republicans in November," he said in an interview. "We are very gratified that we not only won the pledged delegates in Colorado, we apparently won them by a larger margin."
Still, Weaver expressed displeasure about how how the party reported the results. "It is certainly disturbing that the information gets sent to one campaign and not to another," he said.
Palacio said he didn't tell the Sanders camp about the divergent numbers "because it didn't necessarily affect (them). It was our mistake that ended up affecting the estimation of Hillary's campaign."
A Clinton campaign spokeswoman declined to comment.
Palacio said the party discovered no other errors and downplayed concerns about the tallies because the March 1 vote didn't apportion any actual delegates.
At each layer in the Democratic delegate process, the party takes a new straw poll — just as it will at the state convention Saturday in Loveland to award the final delegates. The precinct-level results merely inform the future votes and allow projections used by national news organizations to track delegate totals.
To match the results from caucus night, a campaign's supporters need to show up in the same proportions at the congressional district and state conventions.
Sanders won the state 60 percent to 40 percent in the popular vote and is expected to reap the benefits Saturday if his supporters turn out.
"It's not unusual for numbers to shift (loyalties) and that's why we have straw polls at each step of the way," Palacio said.
Palacio said the misreporting only reaffirms his push for a presidential vote run by the state. "I go back to my position on a presidential primary," he said. "I think caucuses are great for smaller races but Colorado has outgrown the caucus system in presidential years."
John Frank: 303-954-2409, [email protected] or @ByJohnFrank ||||| Senator Bernie Sanders on Sunday refused to entertain the idea that his presidential candidacy is drawing to a close, and swiped at the media for attempting to decide the Democratic primary based what he called on an unfair nominating process.
Trump: 'It's possible, absolutely' Muslim judges are also biased against me Read more
“I’m going to fight to become the nominee,” said Sanders, speaking to Jake Tapper on CNN’s State of the Union. “Let’s not forget, the Democratic convention is in July. That’s a long time from today.”
The Vermont senator was speaking two days before the last major contests of the Democratic nominating process, in which six states, including California and New Jersey, will apportion more than 700 delegates.
Hillary Clinton is projected to pass the delegate threshold she needs to capture the Democratic nomination and therefore, Tapper noted, declare victory.
In response, Sanders once again criticised the media for conflating delegates, who are apportioned based on the results of primary contests, with superdelegates: the party officials who are empowered by the Democratic National Committee to cast votes at the convention regardless of the electorate’s wishes.
“What she would be doing is combining pledged delegates – those are the real delegates that people vote for – with superdelegates … the media should not lump those two together,” Sanders said. “You don’t know what the world is going to be like four weeks from now, five weeks.”
Sanders hinted that Clinton may no longer lead him in pledged delegates after Tuesday.
“I don’t want to speculate about who will end up having more pledged delegates,” he said.
Clinton leads Sanders by 275 pledged delegates. Several hundred are up for grabs in contests in California, New Jersey, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and New Mexico. In California, which awards 475 delegates, Clinton has seen a significant polling lead over Sanders all but vanish. She is nevertheless projected to maintain her overall lead in pledged delegates.
For Sanders to capture the nomination in July, he would likely need the support of the very superdelegates he has criticized for orchestrating a “coronation” of Clinton. In recent weeks, he has swung between lambasting superdelegates’ power and suggesting that they support him for the ticket, believing that he polls better against presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Sanders’ criticism of the nomination process has become a familiar note in the waning weeks of the Democratic primary, prompting other senior party members to lob their own critiques. On Saturday, at a state party gathering, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts declared: “I’m a superdelegate, and I don’t believe in superdelegates.”
On Sunday, Sanders also criticized Clinton for the first time over the Clinton Foundation, an international charity that supports development projects around the world. In the past, Clinton has taken flak for the foundation’s ties to oppressive foreign governments.
Asked if it was fair to criticize Clinton for the charity’s willingness to accept funds from countries such as Saudi Arabia, Sanders was unequivocal.
“Yes, it is,” he said.
“Do I have a problem when a sitting secretary of state and a foundation run by her husband collects many millions of dollars from foreign governments which are dictatorships? You don’t have a lot of civil liberties or democratic rights in Saudi Arabia, you don’t have a lot of respect there for divergent, opposition points of view, for gay rights, for women’s rights. Do I have a problem with that? Yeah, I do.”
He added that such a relationship could be seen as a conflict of interest.
Sanders also reiterated his commitment to defeating Trump no matter who was on the Democratic ticket. But he stopped short of saying that he would encourage his supporters to vote for Clinton. And he rejected the idea that he had the power to sway those who say they are “Bernie or bust”.
“The idea that I can snap my fingers and have millions of supporters march in line, that’s not what our effort is about,” he said. If he is not the nominee, he added, “it is Secretary Clinton’s job to explain to those people why she should get their support.” | – Bernie Sanders was shorted a delegate in Colorado's March 1 caucus after—in the words of the state's Democratic Party chairman—"a little weirdness" happened when vote totals were punched in, the Denver Post reports. Chairman Rick Palacio says a "reporting error" by a volunteer resulted in Sanders getting 570 votes—nearly 4%—fewer than he should have. The Colorado Democratic Party realized the error a week after the caucus and corrected it but didn't publicly acknowledge it until the Post discovered it Monday. "It was an embarrassment on our part for sure," Palacio says. And while the party discussed the new results with the Clinton campaign last week, it didn't inform the Sanders campaign because, as Palacio puts it, "it didn't necessarily affect" them. The Sanders campaign found out about the situation from the Post on Monday. The shift of one delegate can have big ramifications for both campaigns in Colorado. The new tally gives Sanders 39 delegates to Clinton's 27 with 12 superdelegates in play. Clinton was expected to get the support of the superdelegates and end up taking a majority of Colorado's total delegates. Now the best she can do is tie Sanders. And if Sanders picks up even one of the two superdelegates who remain undecided, he takes the majority. This is undeniably good news for Sanders, but don't get too excited yet. The Washington Post reports Clinton still has a huge delegate lead over Sanders—even without taking superdelegates into consideration—and "will almost certainly be her party's nominee." |
At least 18 people were injured in an escalator accident in a bustling Mong Kok shopping mall on Saturday afternoon.
Rescue workers rushed to Langham Place on Argyle Street after the one of longest indoor escalators in Hong Kong suddenly stopped and reversed direction at around 4pm Saturday.
Video footage obtained by the Post showed the 45-metre-long escalator quickly changed directions at high speed, causing people to fall and pile up at the base of the escalator.
In another video, some people could be heard screaming as others tumbled down the escalator. Others managed to grab the handrail and steady themselves.
Eyewitnesses said the 14 women and three men lost their balance and rolled down the escalator. A police spokeswoman said one man suffered a head injury and was sent to Queen Elizabeth Hospital.
Langham Place is a HK$11 billion urban renewal project which was completed in 2004.
“I was going up the escalator, and it was like two times faster than normal,” a woman who injured her leg said at the scene.
I was going up the escalator, and it was like two times faster than normal
injured woman
Another woman said she saw the escalator increase speed during the accident, which lasted less than one minute.
“I heard people screaming...the escalator was going down but the speed accelerated,” the woman, who identified herself as Tina, said.
“People started to panic... and some fell down.”
She recalled that the same escalator had stopped for a few minutes earlier in the day, around noon.
Lau Kit-ying, who was eating at a nearby burger shop when the accident happened, said the speed of the escalator was around two or three times faster than normal.
“It was fast and people couldn’t respond immediately... more than 10 people piled up near the base of the escalator afterwards,” Lau said.
Broken chain may have caused Hong Kong mall escalator accident that injured almost 20 people
She said she saw a man laying on the floor, bleeding.
“I’m not sure if he was conscious, but a foreign man and a few mall staff helped stop his bleeding with a first aid kit,” she said.
“But most of the [injured] were young people and they stood up quickly afterwards... I’m glad that there wasn’t any elderly at that time,” she said.
Judy Chu, manager of a nearby dessert cafe, recalled the panic following the accident.
“Some people ran upwards. Some even jumped over to another escalator on the side,” Chu said.
Chung Chi-wai, assistant divisional officer of Tsim Sha Tsui fire station, said none of the injured had suffered broken bones and all were conscious.
“The escalator was moving up from the fourth floor to the eighth floor, but it suddenly moved backward and people lost balance,” Chung said.
A Langham Place spokeswoman said the escalator had passed a recent inspection on March 23, showing it was up to the safety standard. Annual inspections were carried out twice a year, while routine checks were done once every two weeks.
She said contractor Otis Elevator Company (HK) Limited had been asked to investigate the cause of accident, as the company was responsible for maintaining all the elevators in the shopping mall.
She added Langham Place was highly concerned about the accident and would offer assistance to victims and fully cooperate with any investigating government departments.
Redeveloped from what was known as the Mong Kok Six Streets, Langham Place stands as a flagship redevelopment project and a milestone in Hong Kong’s history of urban renewal. It boosts 1.8 million square feet of floor area comprising an intelligent office tower, a 665-room five-star hotel and a 15-level shopping mall, all held together by a glass atrium with a “digital sky roof.”
The project is a joint venture between the Urban Renewal Authority and local developer Great Eagle Holdings Limited.
The mall attracts more than 200,000 visitors each day. It has nearly 200 merchants. ||||| A woman was killed in central China when part of an escalator she was travelling on in a shopping centre collapsed under her feet and she fell through the gap.
The woman aged 30 managed to push her two-year-old boy to safety at the top of the escalator before she fell into the machinery, the Wuhan Evening News reported.
Surveillance video at the shopping mall in Jingzhou shows the woman holding her son as she prepares to get off the escalator when a footplate collapses under her feet.
Stuck in the hole and with only her upper body above the structure, she pushed her son forwards and he was caught by a shopping assistant standing near the top of the escalator.
The woman fell beneath the floor only a few seconds later after another shopping assistant tried to grab her arm and failed.
The South China Morning Post has not published the video as some readers might find it disturbing.
Relatives said the woman, who was only identified by her surname Xiang, was shopping with her husband on Sunday when the accident happened.
The husband was walking behind her wife and son and had yet to take the escalator from the fifth to the sixth floor, the newspaper reported.
An unnamed sourced was quoted as saying that the accident was probably caused by workers failing to tighten screws on a footplate in the escalator during maintenance.
The shopping mall has yet to make a formal statement about the accident.
It took rescuers nearly four hours to recover the body of the woman, according to the newspaper.
Twelve people were injured last year after an escalator on the subway in Shanghai started going backwards.
One boy was killed in a similar accident on Beijing’s subway in 2011 when an escalator went into reverse. | – At least 18-people were injured Saturday in Hong Kong when a 150-foot-long escalator suddenly stopped and reversed, speeding up as it sent shoppers tumbling, the South China Morning Post reports. The escalator travels between the fourth and eighth floors of the shopping mall at Langham Place; it's one of the longest escalators in Hong Kong. It was acting as an "up" escalator Saturday afternoon when what officials believe was a malfunction instantly turned it into a "down" escalator. Witnesses estimate it sped up to anywhere between twice and quadruple its normal speed. Shoppers lost their footing and fell, piling up at the bottom of the escalator. Others tried to run up it or jumped over the sides. "I heard screaming," one witness says. "People started to panic." Another witness says the escalator reversed "so sudden that people couldn't respond in time." One of the injured shoppers was in serious condition with a head injury. A spokesperson for Langham Place says the escalator passed its most recent inspection on Thursday. Officials are investigating the cause of the malfunction. Video of the scary scene can be seen here and here. |
CIA Insider Warns: "25-Year Great Depression is About to Strike America"
You will want to remember this date .
According to one of the top minds in the U.S. Intelligence Community, that is when the United States will enter the darkest economic period in our nation's history.
A 25-year Great Depression.
Does This Signal
the End of the Dollar?
An alarming pattern has caused many in the Intelligence Community to secretly prepare for a "worst-case scenario."
Click here to see it.... An alarming pattern has caused many in the Intelligence Community to secretly prepare for a "worst-case scenario."
And alarmingly, he and his colleagues believe the evidence they've uncovered proves this outcome is impossible to avoid.
In an exclusive interview with Money Morning, Jim Rickards, the CIA's Financial Threat and Asymmetric Warfare Advisor, has stepped forward to warn the American people that time is running out to prepare for this $100 trillion meltdown.
"Everybody knows we have a dangerous level of debt. Everybody knows the Fed has recklessly printed trillions of dollars. These are secrets to no one," he said.
"But all signs are now flashing bright red that our chickens are about to come home to roost."
During the discussion, Rickards shared a series of dangerous signals he fears reveals an economy that has reached a super critical state.
One of the signals the CIA is most concerned with is the Misery Index.
Decades back this unique warning sign was created for determining how close our country was to a social collapse. It simply adds the true inflation rate with the true unemployment rate.
However, the Federal Reserve has repeatedly changed the way the Misery Index has been calculated over the years. Which Rickards believes is now being used to cover up the true scope of the problem.
"Today you rarely hear the government talk about the Misery Index with the public," Rickards said. "The reason is they may not want you to know the truth. And the truth is, the Misery Index has reached more dangerous levels than we saw prior to the Great Depression. This is a signal of a complex system that's about to collapse."
Frightening: Single chart reveals which banks could collapse (and how soon). If your life savings is in a major bank, please look at this now.
During the shocking interview Rickards revealed the 5 dangerous "flashpoints" the Intelligence Community is closely monitoring that they believe will unleash this catastrophe.
And he also described how it would all unfold.
"I expect the first phase will appear as a nearly instantaneous 70% stock market crash. From the outside, nobody will see it coming." Rickards explained.
"Once it becomes clear that it's not a flash crash - it's a systemic meltdown in the economy itself, that's when the gravity of the situation will sink in. And there will be no digging out from it.
"$100 trillion is a conservative estimate for the damage. A lot can happen over 25-years as our country struggles to recover from this."
Editor's Note: Money Morning has released their exclusive interview with Jim Rickards to the public. And it's a must-see for every American who is concerned about our country and their financial security. Click here to view it.
Along with his CIA responsibilities, Jim Rickards has spent more than 3 decades on Wall Street as a leading international investment banker, hedge fund manager, and as the architect behind the technology nicknamed “the brains” of the NASDAQ.
This unique skillset has placed him at the center of some of the most important events in recent history.
For instance, Rickards helped negotiate an end to the Iranian Hostage Crisis in the early 1980s.
Then, in the late 1990s, despite being one of its most outspoken critics, the Federal Reserve called on him to step in to prevent a $1.25 trillion Wall Street meltdown during the Long Term Capital Management crisis.
And after 9-11, the CIA tasked him with tracking down potential terrorist insider trading that took place prior to the attacks.
Over 2X More Dangerous
Than The Great Depression
Does this chart prove a 70% stock market crash is imminent?
Click here to continue.... Does this chart prove a 70% stock market crash is imminent?
This led to him helping lead a sensitive operation called Project Prophecy.
The mission was to use the financial markets to predict pending national security threats from terrorists, rival nations, and from internal weaknesses lurking inside our economy.
The system he built through Project Prophecy proved its accuracy on August 7, 2006, when it detected the warning signs of an impending terrorist attack.
Three days later, in London, a plot to blow up 10 U.S. passenger jets was thwarted. And 24 Pakistani extremists were arrested.
However, Rickards now warns that the next attack is going to come from within. And he is not alone in his fears.
Recently, a sensitive report containing the consensus view of all 16 branches of the U.S. Intelligence Committee surfaced.
It revealed that these agencies have already begun to jointly estimate the impact of "The fall of the dollar as the global reserve currency."
Details of Government's
"Day After Plan" Emerge
Warning: Emergency measures have already been put "in play" for this 25-year Great Depression.
Click here to continue.... Emergency measures have already been put "in play" for this 25-year Great Depression.
And our reign as the leading superpower being annihilated in a way "equivalent to the end of the British Empire in the post-World War II period."
The nightmarish endgame presented in this report involved "a worldwide economic breakdown and an extended period of global anarchy."
And Jim Rickards believes we can no longer stop this, we can only prepare for it.
"Look at it this way. Americans are standing at the bottom of a very tall mountain - Mt. Everest, Mt. Kilimanjaro...they look up and see an avalanche barreling down.
Determining the one snowflake that started this chaos shouldn't be our focus. Recognizing the severity of the situation and moving to safety should be," Rickards explained.
The question we should all be asking ourselves now is "what if he's right?" ||||| Meet the Editor Jim Rickards is the editor of Jim Rickards’ Strategic Intelligence. He’s an American lawyer, economist, and investment banker with 35 years of experience working in capital markets on Wall Street. Rickards advised clients of the impending 2008 financial collapse, of a decline in the dollar and a sharp rise in the price of gold, all years in advance. Rickards is the author of The New York Times bestseller Currency Wars, published in 2011 and The Death of Money, published in 2014. View More Peter Coyne is the managing editor of the Daily Reckoning and Jim Rickards' Strategic Intelligence. He received his degree in economics and political science from Loyola University Maryland where he studied under the Austrian economist, Tom DiLorenzo. Before joining Agora Financial, Peter worked in Congress for Dr. Ron Paul until he retired in 2012. View More
Publication Schedule Published online during the third week of every month, issue mailed the fourth week of the month and via email on Fridays.
The goal of Jim Rickards’ Strategic Intelligence is simple — help you prepare and profit from the coming collapse of the dollar. Your editor will be Jim Rickards. According to him, “the end of the international monetary system is imminent and it will wipe out millions of unprepared Americans.”
He’s uniquely qualified to help you too — spending over 35 years in investment banking, international economics and politics and national intelligence advisory roles. His contacts and experience will allow you to hear the most crucial strategic market intelligence first, so you can profit before anyone else.
To safely guide your investments, Jim has developed a revolutionary way of looking at the financial system and stock markets. It’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen.
It gives him insight on exactly how the dollar’s collapse could play out, what stocks might fall, and what assets could rocket up in price. His predictive tool – something he calls “complexity theory” – will warn you well in advance of the coming collapse. In the financial world, this tool is entirely new and unparalleled.
Jim will use this theory to help you build safe investment positions in stocks, bonds, cash, art, land, precious metals and other hard assets.
In fact, it’s estimated there are less than 10 people in the entire world who know how to apply “complexity theory” to the financial markets. Jim is one of them… a recognized thought-leader who pioneers its’ use to help you profit ahead of turmoil.
In this monthly publication, Jim Rickards will be writing directly to you, keeping you up to date on how the dollar’s collapse and replacement is unfolding.
He’ll warn you about the potential triggers that may set off the coming crisis. And he’ll give you specific investment recommendations and wealth protection strategies that will help you grow your wealth even during the meltdown.
Until now, Rickards has only provided this kind of service to his high net-worth clients and members of the U.S. intelligence community.
But with Rickards’ Strategic Intelligence, you too will have the opportunity to hear his best ideas on an ongoing basis. ||||| -- Published: Sunday, 19 October 2014 | Print | Disqus
By Peter Cooper
In what pretends to be a history looking back from the future ‘Currency Wars’ author and fund manager Jim Rickards argues that by 2020 all the gold of the G-20 nations will be confiscated and buried in a former nuclear bunker under a mountain in Switzerland to take it out of the global financial system.
This is the conclusion to the astonishing tour de force article that kicks off his new monthly newsletter ‘Rickards’ Strategic Intelligence’ for Agora Financial, publisher of highly successful financial newsletters like Chris Mayers’ ‘Capital & Crisis’. Has the normally sober and thoughful Mr. Rickards lost his marbles?
Ad absurdum
I must confess to having my doubts on reading his first issue with one absurd conclusion leading to another and then to a totally unrealistic world gold confiscation scenario. How would that happen? The G-20 meetings struggle to agree on a final communique. How could they agree something like that?
Mr. Rickards does not stop there. In his world not only does money die and cease to exist but there is a sort of death of capitalism that Marx prescribed and Stalin tried to implement without notable success. There are no markets, bonds nor money by 2024 and equality rules.
Strangely the real survivors of this apocalypse to end all apocalypses are the investors who bought gold, fine art and land, and who cashed out of gold when Mr. Rickards’ newsletter told them. Somehow fine art and land still has a value in the future without money or markets, and illegal gold too. How would that work?
Indeed how seriously are we supposed to take Mr. Rickards’ vision of the future? His subsequent articles basically feed off its central insight and so you have to believe it is a scenario that he thinks not only has some weight but actually is very plausible. We preferred his ‘Currency Wars’ conclusion of a new dollar backed by gold in an economic reset.
Just too whacky
The next ArabianMoney monthly newsletter ( subscribe here ) will offer our detailed riposte. However, suffice to say we think Mr. Rickards is way off in his political if not economic analysis.
We note that governments would collapse and social unrest grow massively under such circumstances and that such coordinated central bank or G-20 responses would just not be politically possible. Nationalism not nationalization of assets would prevail.
Sadly chaos, anarchy, revolutions and wars are a more likely outcome, although we hope commonsense prevails and the world muddles through and yet another version of financial armageddon proves to be alarmist nonsense. However, within all these visionary tales there is usually more than a grain or truth, or a few grams of real gold. ||||| NEW YORK Ever wondered when the next financial crisis will be? Possibly in just a couple of years with the "coming collapse of the international monetary system."
That is the not-so-subtle subtitle of Jim Rickards' bestselling book, "The Death of Money". As you might gather, the portfolio manager at investment-management firm West Shore Group doesn't foresee a smooth ride ahead for investors. Think 2008, but worse.
Reuters sat down with Rickards recently, to chat about how much we should be trusting the numbers in our bank accounts.
Q: Most people assume that the money in their wallets is safe and secure. But is it really?
A: No, for two reasons. First, as we saw in the 1970s when we had a period of high inflation, the dollar's value was cut in half in only five years. So that can happen very, very quickly.
The second vulnerability is that the dollar is actually a digital currency. People look at Bitcoin and call it that, but so is the dollar. An overwhelming percentage of transactions these days are digital, starting with the trillions of dollars in the Treasury market. The last time people had actual paper bonds in safe deposit boxes was in the 1970s.
In the old days, the government had ways of shutting things down entirely in times of crisis, like arranging bank holidays or closing stock exchanges. With a digital currency, we could all be very vulnerable during the next financial panic.
Q: Your book is called "The Death of Money". What does that mean to you?
A: What that means is a potential loss of confidence. There is always going to be some kind of money in the world, whether it is clamshells or Bitcoins. Anything can be money as long as people have confidence in it. But the minute that confidence is lost, it ceases to function as money.
And once it is lost, it is very difficult to regain. Money is money up until the moment it isn't. So the real question is, what dynamics are at play that could cause people to lose confidence in the dollar? That's why when the Federal Reserve is printing money in order to stimulate the economy, it is playing a dangerous game.
Q: What kind of time frame are we looking at, for a potential loss of confidence in the dollar?
A: A lot of people are focused on the single snowflake that causes the avalanche. They want to know when it's going to happen and what it's going to look like. Of course, I don't know that any more than anybody else. But what you can be certain of, is that there is going to be an avalanche.
Another good metaphor is the earthquake. The other day I stood on the San Andreas Fault, and nothing was moving. That doesn't mean everything is stable; it is just a matter of time. That is what I believe about the financial system. I would say it is a matter of a couple of years [until a major crisis], not 10 years or more.
Q: And what will be the size of the next crisis, in your opinion?
A: The next financial panic will be the largest in history. I was involved in the Long-Term Capital Management affair, as a general counsel - and even then, we were hours away from taking down every market in the world. That time, Wall Street bailed out a hedge fund.
Fast forward to 2008, and this time it was the Feds who bailed out Wall Street. Each bailout is bigger than the last. When the next panic happens, it will be bigger than the Fed. And then what are we going to do? Just keep printing trillions of dollars?
Q: So what should individual investors do, as a result?
A: I would advise that people look at what Warren Buffett is doing. For one of his most recent deals, he went out and bought a railroad - a hard asset that makes money moving other hard assets, like coal and wheat.
Of course, individual investors can't go out and buy railroads, but they can invest in the same spirit, and look at hard assets. You can buy gold, maybe with a 10 percent portfolio allocation, which will give you some protection. You can buy land, or fine art, or stocks with a focus on energy, transportation, natural resources, water and agriculture. A portfolio like that will help preserve your wealth in this current climate.
Q: Where might the next panic begin?
A: It could begin in a lot of different places. But one place to keep a close eye on is China, which is on the verge of a major credit collapse. That could be the one snowflake that starts the global avalanche.
(Follow us @ReutersMoney or here Editing by Lauren Young and Andrew Hay) | – A CIA analyst known for his dire economic predictions is speaking up again, warning that the next Great Depression may be right around the corner. Jim Rickards, a "financial threat and asymmetric warfare adviser" for the CIA, tells Money Morning that Americans should be preparing for a $100 trillion financial catastrophe. "Everybody knows we have a dangerous level of debt," he says. "Everybody knows the Fed has recklessly printed trillions of dollars. ... But all signs are now flashing bright red that our chickens are about to come home to roost." Another reason for gloom: According to Rickards, the so-called Misery Index maintained by the Federal Reserve contains far worse data than most people believe. The Misery Index adds the true unemployment rate with the true inflation rate, but Rickards contends that the Fed has altered the index's calculations in order to hide the truth—that "the Misery Index has reached more dangerous levels than we saw prior to the Great Depression," he says. "This is a signal of a complex system that's about to collapse." His prediction? A "70% stock market crash" followed by a 25-year depression, possibly sparked by a "major credit collapse" in China, he tells Reuters. His advice? Invest in "hard assets" like railroads, coal, wheat, or gold. Again, he's not known for mild predictions: In a recent monthly newsletter, Rickards claimed that by 2020, all G-20 gold will be hidden under a Swiss mountain to keep it away from the world's economic system, Goldseek reports. |
A wide array of progressive groups drew tens of thousands of activists to the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday for a rally aimed at firing up their members and showcasing the diversity of their movement.
It was the left wing's first large gathering designed to counter the conservative tea party phenomenon, and many speakers warned that a Republican-controlled Congress would block or roll back progressive changes. Organizers said they also wanted to show that their supporters represent the majority of the nation.
"This march was inclusive," said NAACP President Benjamin Jealous, one of the lead organizers. "We have seen cabdrivers come down from New York, truck drivers from Oklahoma. This is about moving the country with the spirit of unity and hope, and getting the country beyond the divisiveness."
The gathering occurred about one month after conservatives met on the same spot to unite around television personality Glenn Beck's vision of a nation returned to more traditional and religious values.
Ed Schultz, the liberal host of MSNBC's "The Ed Show," served as one of the show's master of ceremonies and harshly criticized the tea party and conservatives. "They talk about the Constitution, but they don't want to live by it," he said to loud applause. "They talk about the forefathers, but they practice discrimination. They want to change this country."
Then, he led the crowd in a chant. "Are you America?" he yelled.
"Yes!" came the loud response.
Saturday's gathering featured many speakers; at times it appeared that organizers wanted to give everyone an opportunity to have their say. The rally lacked central charismatic speakers like Beck and former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, or the two men who will headline an Oct. 30 event on the Mall - Comedy Central television personalities Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Also unlike the Beck event, the progressive groups were explicit about their desire to reenergize their political base. Beck said his goal was to honor soldiers.
The more than four hours of speeches, poetry and music were buttressed with testimonials from out-of-work Americans, immigrants, veterans and Native Americans. They focused on jobs, education and human rights issues in particular.
Edrie Irvine, a laid-off legal secretary from Silver Spring, shared her story with a gathering of unemployed workers that fed into the larger rally. "The recession was caused by the banks, greed and deregulation," she said. "It didn't have anything to do with me, but I lost my job."
James Keane, who carried a sign that read "Jesus Christ is a Liberal," said he drove from New York City because he felt "it's about time the Democrats marched."
"We've stood by and watched the tea party people go crazy every couple of months," said Keane, who is unemployed. "It's time for Democrats to stand up and fight for what they believe in. Obama has been a great leader, but so many in the Democratic leadership have been playing the fence." ||||| Tapping into the same anger that fuels the conservative tea party movement, a coalition of progressive and civil rights groups marched Saturday on the Lincoln Memorial and pledged to support Democrats struggling to keep control of Congres.
Activists gather at the Lincoln Memorial to participate in the "One Nation Working Together" rally to promote job creation, diversity and tolerance, Saturday, Oct. 2, 2010, in Washington. (AP Photo/J.... (Associated Press)
Activists gather at the Lincoln Memorial to participate in the "One Nation Working Together" rally to promote job creation, diversity and tolerance, Saturday, Oct. 2, 2010, in Washington. (AP Photo/J.... (Associated Press)
Young singers with "Urban Nation" perform on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial as liberal activists gather to participate in the "One Nation Working Together" rally to promote job creation, diversity... (Associated Press)
Workers prepare the stage as activists gather at the Lincoln Memorial in the nation's capital to participate in the "One Nation Working Together" rally to promote job creation, diversity and tolerance,... (Associated Press)
Young singers perform on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial as liberal activists gather in the nation's capital to participate in the "One Nation Working Together" rally to promote job creation, diversity... (Associated Press)
Activists gather at the Lincoln Memorial to participate in the "One Nation Working Together" rally to promote job creation, diversity and tolerance, Saturday, Oct. 2, 2010, in Washington. (AP Photo/J.... (Associated Press)
Buttons for sale at the "One Nation Working Together" rally are displayed in Washington, Saturday, Oct. 2, 2010. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) (Associated Press)
People attend the "One Nation Working Together" rally near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, Saturday, Oct. 2, 2010. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) (Associated Press)
Claudia Hanes, right, of Bowling Green, Ky., attends the "One Nation Working Together" rally near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, Saturday, Oct. 2, 2010. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) (Associated Press)
Singers from the Mt. Zion Praise Team of Arlington, Va., perform on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial as liberal activists gather in the nation's capital to participate in the "One Nation Working Together"... (Associated Press)
Activists gather at the Lincoln Memorial to participate in the "One Nation Working Together" rally to promote job creation, diversity and tolerance, Saturday, Oct. 2, 2010, in Washington. (AP Photo/J.... (Associated Press)
With a month of campaigning to go and voter unhappiness over the economy high, the Democratic-leaning organizers hope the four-hour program of speeches and entertainment energizes activists who are crucial if Democrats are to retain their majorities in the House and Senate. The national mood suggests gains for the Republicans, who are hoping to ride voter anger to gain control of the House and possibly the Senate.
Organizers insist the rally is not partisan. They say the message is about job creation, quality education and justice. However, the largest organizations, such as the AFL-CIO labor federation and the Service Employees International Union, tend to back Democratic candidates.
But the first speakers hardly shied from criticizing Republicans.
In a fiery speech that opened the "One Nation Working Together" rally on the National Mall, MSNBC host Ed Schultz blamed Republicans for shipping jobs overseas and curtailing freedoms. He borrowed some of conservative commentator Glenn Beck's rhetoric and vowed to "take back our country."
"This is a defining moment in America. Are you American?" Schultz told the raucous crowd of thousands. "This is no time to back down. This is time to fight for America."
"We are together. This march is about the power to the people," said Schultz. "It is about the people standing up to the corporations. Are you ready to fight back?"
More than 400 organizations _ ranging from labor unions to faith, environmental and gay rights groups _ partnered for the event, which comes one month after Beck packed the same space with conservatives and tea party-style activists.
Beck and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin gathered near the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech to urge a vast crowd to embrace traditional values. Though also billed as nonpolitical, the rally was widely viewed as a protest against the policies of President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats.
One Nation organizers said they began planning their event before learning about Beck's rally, and said Saturday's march is not in reaction to that.
Obama was spending the weekend at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland.
___
Online:
Rally site: http://www.onenationworkingtogether.org | – Left-leaning supporters staged a rally of their own in Washington today. Tens of thousands of progressives gathered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial for the "One Nation Working Together" rally, reports the Washington Post. The goal of the event—organized by groups including the NAACP and the AFL-CIO—is to counter the rallies held by tea partiers of late and to gin up support among Democrats a month before the midterm elections, says the Post. "This is a defining moment in America," MSNBC host Ed Schultz told the crowd. "Are you American? This is no time to back down." He borrowed a sentiment from Glenn Beck, who conducted a DC rally of his own last month, and urged the crowd to "take back our country." Except Schultz blamed Republicans and big corporations, notes AP. |
British professor, who built original Star Wars droid, found dead in his home in Malta
Prof Tony Dyson, the British inventor who built the original Star Wars R2-D2 droid, has been found dead at his home in Malta.
Police on the island of Gozo discovered the 68-year-old’s body on Thursday morning after being called by a concerned neighbour.
A police spokesman, Kurt Bugeja Coster, said: “A neighbour realised the front door was open and called the police. Officers entered the apartment and he was found dead. Foul play has been excluded so far. An autopsy will be held to determine cause of death.”
Dyson – who also worked on Superman II, Moonraker and Dragonslayer – was nominated for an Emmy award for his film special effects supervision. ||||| Image Credit: Tony Dyson via Facebook.
One of the most iconic non-human characters in movie history, R2-D2, was the handiwork of many people. Beloved concept artist Ralph McQuarrie designed him, Kenny Baker helped bring him to life—but it was Tony Dyson, who passed away today at the age of 68, who had the daunting task of building Artoo as a real life droid.
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In the 1970s, Dyson owned the White Horse Toy Company in the UK, and had worked uncredited on films like Moonraker, Superman II, and Dragon Slayer as an effects supervisor. When George Lucas began production of Star Wars in the country, he tapped Dyson to bring McQuarrie’s artwork to life.
Dyson modeled the building process on the same technique his toy company used to mold rocking horses. He built eight droids for the franchise, including multiple remote-controlled versions, two versions that Kenny Baker could sit in and operate, and a throwaway model for Empire Strikes Back that was hurled into the swamps of Dagobah. Later on in his life, Dyson turned his focus to artificial intelligence and robotics, building bots for Sony, Toshiba, and other electronics companies.
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Dyson was immensely proud of his work on Star Wars, and even set up an R2-D2 builders club in the UK so fans could craft their own astromechs. (Although, the always litigious Lucasfilm mandated that he couldn’t build them to the exact specifications from his designs used in the films.) It’s the same club from which two designers were selected to build the R2-D2 prop for The Force Awakens, ensuring Tony’s legacy in the franchise will live on forever.
[BBC News via Mashable] ||||| (CNN) Kenny Baker, the British actor best known as R2-D2 in the "Star Wars" films, has died at the age of 81, according to his niece, Abigail Shield. Baker was being looked after by Shield's brother, who found him Saturday morning. Shield said Baker had been ill for years with a lung condition. She also said her uncle -- who was 3 feet, 8 inches tall -- did not expect to "live past his teenage years because he was a 'little person,' so it is pretty amazing he lived... | – The man who created Star Wars' most famous droid has died. Tony Dyson, the British inventor who built R2-D2, was found dead at his home in Malta, on the island of Gozo, the Guardian reports. He was 68. "A neighbor realized the front door was open and called the police," a police spokesman says. "Officers entered the apartment and he was found dead." Foul play is not suspected and an autopsy will be conducted. Gizmodo and the Telegraph note that R2-D2 was brought to life through a collaborative effort that included a designer, special effects and sound effects crew, and actor Kenny Baker, who donned the R2 costume. But it was Dyson who actually built the droid and "brought the blue and white astromech into beeping, whirring existence," per the Telegraph. (Check out the original R2-D2 blueprint Dyson tweeted out a couple of years ago.) |
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Looking for real-life anecdotes to make the case for the proposals in his State of the Union address, President Obama turned to his own mailbox.
Eight of the guests who will sit in the House chamber as guests of the White House during Tuesday’s prime-time speech wrote letters that made their way to Mr. Obama’s desk, making them living, breathing examples of the policies he will discuss.
There is Rebekah Erler, a 36-year-old working mother who wrote to the president last March about the financial challenges she was facing while raising her young family. Ms. Erler, who introduced the president when he visited her hometown, Minneapolis, last June, has a story tailor-made for Mr. Obama’s new economic initiatives, including proposals to make community college free and to provide larger tax credits for child care and education and a new credit for families with two working spouses.
Ana Zamora of Dallas, another letter-writer, is a so-called Dreamer – brought to the United States illegally as a child by her parents – allowed to stay in the country and work through Mr. Obama’s 2012 executive action. Ms. Zamora’s parents, who have other children born in the United States, will be eligible for the president’s more recent unilateral move in November to extend such benefits to the parents of American citizens.
Not all of the letter-writing guests wrote directly to the president. Malik Bryant, 13, meant his letter for Santa Claus, whom he asked to bring him “safety” as his holiday gift. But a nonprofit organization redirected the letter to the White House, where the president saw and responded to it.
The president receives 10 letters each day in his briefing materials, hand-selected by his staff from the tens of thousands that come to the White House daily on paper and by email and fax.
The eight letter-writers are among 22 guests the White House has announced will sit with Michelle Obama in her box during the speech. Others include Alan P. Gross, the American released last month after five years of captivity in Cuba, and Scott Kelly, an astronaut scheduled to leave soon for a year aboard the International Space Station.
— JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS ||||| First Lady Michelle Obama and guests applaud as President Barack Obama delivers his 2014 State of the Union address. | John Shinkle/POLITICO STATE OF THE UNION 2015 Who’s sitting with Michelle Obama at State of the Union
First lady Michelle Obama’s guests for Tuesday’s State of the Union address include the man who was jailed in Cuba, an astronaut and an immigration reform advocate, the White House said Monday.
The guests are often hints at big applause lines the White House has planned, for the president’s speech, and one of the most enthusiastic responses could come when the president mentions Alan Gross, the U.S. Agency for International Development subcontractor released by the Cuban government late last year amid a shift in the Obama administration’s Cuba policy. Gross spent nearly five years jailed in Cuba, and his wife, Judy, who advocated for his release, will also be seated near the first lady.
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Scott Kelly, who is preparing for a yearlong mission aboard the International Space Station, is another guest. Kelly’s twin brother is retired astronaut Mark Kelly, husband of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), and scientists aim to compare medical data between the two men during the trip. The research will help “support the next generation of space exploration and President [Barack] Obama’s goal of sending humans to Mars by the 2030s,” the White House said.
Also on the list are Ana Zamora, an immigration advocate and DREAMer from Dallas, Ebola aid worker Pranav Shetty and Larry Merlo, the CEO of CVS Health, which last year became the first major retail pharmacy to stop selling tobacco products.
The guest list
Rebekah Erler (Minneapolis) Letter writer
Rebekah Erler, 36, is a working mother from Minneapolis. When her husband Ben’s construction business dried up amid the recession, she enrolled in community college and got work as an accountant to help keep her family afloat.
Victor Fugate (Kansas City, Mo.) Letter writer
Fugate went back to school after losing his job as a financial counselor and now works at the Missouri Department of Mental Health, where he helps low-income people obtain health care.
Staff Sgt. Jason Gibson, U.S. Army, Ret. (Westerville, Ohio) Letter writer, wounded warrior
Gibson, a veteran of Afghanistan, lost both his legs in the line of duty, but has since taken up surfing, skiing and flying. He first met Obama in 2012 while a patient at Walter Reed.
Alan and Judy Gross (Washington, D.C.) USAID subcontractor
Gross was imprisoned in Cuba for five years for crimes against the Cuban state. His Dec. 17 release paved the way for the administration to move toward normal relations with the island nation.
Nicole Hernandez Hammer (Southeast Florida) Mother and sea level rise researcher
Hernandez is an immigrant from Guatemala who researches the consequences of rising sea levels. She’s raised awareness of climate change’s implications for children’s health and its disproportionate impact on American Hispanics.
Scott Kelly (Houston) American astronaut
Kelly will blast off in March to become the first American astronaut to complete a year-long mission on the International Space Station. He has already spent more than 180 days in space.
Anthony Mendez (Bronx, N.Y.) Student, “Reach Higher” Initiative
Mendez is a freshman at the University of Hartford. He overcame hardship growing up in the South Bronx, where he lived for a time in a homeless shelter, to become the first member of his family to graduate high school.
Larry Merlo (East Greenwich, R.I.) President and CEO, CVS Health
Merlo leads CVS Health, formerly CVS, which last year became the first major retail pharmacy to stop selling tobacco products as part of its pivot toward the health care sector.
Katrice Mubiru (Woodland Heights, Calif.) Letter writer, career technical education teacher
Astrid Muhammad (Charlotte, N.C.) Letter writer
Muhammad, a 39-year-old mother from North Carolina, wrote to Obama about her experience obtaining insurance through the Affordable Care Act. In August, she had life-saving surgery to remove a brain tumor, a preexisting condition that would not have been covered by insurance before the law’s passage.
Hover over the dots to learn more about Michelle Obama's guests. | Getty Image
Capt. Phillip C. Tingirides (Irvine, Calif.) Los Angeles Police Department
Tingirides, a 35-year veteran of the LAPD, leads the department’s Community Safety Partnership, which encourages dialogue between police and community members in the Watts neighborhoods. The program has contributed to a 50 percent reduction in violent crime in part of the neighborhood.
Catherine Pugh (Baltimore City, Md.) Maryland Senate majority leader
As a state senator, Pugh worked on passage of Maryland’s $10.10 minimum wage and recently introduced a bill that would grant workers paid sick leave.
Pranav Shetty (Washington, D.C.) International Medical Corps
Shetty is the Global Emergency Health Coordinator for International Medical Corps, which is working to contain the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. He has also worked on public health crises in Haiti, Libya, South Sudan, Jordan, Iraq, and the Philippines.
Ana Zamora (Dallas) Letter writer, student, DREAMer
Zamora, a DREAMer from Dallas, came to the United States as an infant and has gained work authorization through the administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. She has siblings who are citizens, making her parents eligible for the administration’s Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents program, announced in November.
Malik Bryant (Chicago) Letter writer
Chelsey Davis (Knoxville, Tenn.) Student, Pellissippi State Community College
William Elder Jr. (Englewood, Colo.) Medical school student
LeDaya Epps (Compton, Calif.) Laborer apprentice
Kathy Pham (Washington, D.C.) United States Digital Service
Carolyn Reed (Denver) Letter writer, small-business owner
Prophet Walker (Carson, Calif.) Watts United Weekend, co-founder
Tiairris Woodward (Warren, Mich.) Chrysler auto worker
— Provided by the White House ||||| White House announces State of the Union guests
Take a look back at President Obama's last five State of the Union speeches to see the similarities and differences. VPC
First lady Michelle Obama and guests at the 2012 State of the Union Address. (Photo: H. Darr Beiser, USA TODAY)
Former Cuba prisoner Alan Gross and astronaut Scott Kelly will be among first lady Michelle Obama's guests at Tuesday night's State of the Union Address, the White House announced Monday.
The 22 guests also include students and educators, health care officials and recipients, government officials, and a wounded veteran who fought in Afghanistan. Some of the guests wrote letters to Obama about various issues.
The invitees symbolize some of the themes of Obama's speech, such as his recent decision to normalize relations with Cuba following Gross' release.
The White House list, in alphabetical order:
Malik Bryant (Chicago), letter writer
The 13-year-old sent a letter to Santa over the holidays, but rather than request the usual gifts, Malik wrote: "All I ask for is for safety I just wanna be safe."
Chelsey Davis (Knoxville, Tenn.), student, Pellissippi State Community College
A native of Jefferson City, Davis decided that community college was the best path to re-enter her collegiate career with the ideal support and resources.
Chelsey Davis, a student at Pellissippi State Community College, will be a guest of the first lady for the State of the Union Address on Jan. 20, 2015. (Photo: Jessie Tipton, Pellissippie State Comm. College)
William Elder Jr. (Englewood, Colo), medical school student
Elder graduated from Stanford and is currently a third-year medical student at the Boonshoft School of Medicine at Wright State University in Ohio. He was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis when he was 8 years old, at a time when most cystic fibrosis patients were only expected to live to early adulthood.
LeDaya Epps (Compton, Calif.), laborer apprentice
Epps never had things handed to her. Born in Compton and raised in the Los Angeles foster care system until she was a teenager, Epps graduated high school but found it difficult to secure a stable job, bouncing from job to job as a medical assistant for years. That changed when she was afforded the opportunity to complete a union apprenticeship in construction.
Rebekah Erler (Minneapolis), letter writer
Erler is a 36-year-old working wife and mother of two preschool-aged boys. Her family was hit hard by the downturn in the housing market when her husband's construction business went under. After relocating from Seattle to Minneapolis and a number of difficult jobs, Erler's husband is now back in the re-modeling industry, gets home in time for dinner each night with their family, and is enjoying continued professional growth.
President Obama has lunch with Rebekah Erler at Matt's Bar in Minneapolis on June 26, 2014. (Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais, AP)
Victor Fugate (Kansas City, Mo.), letter writer
Fugate first wrote to the president three years ago, sharing how he went from being an unemployed new father continuing his education to obtaining his degree and working with low-income patients to obtain medical care.
Retired Army Staff Sgt. Jason Gibson (Westerville, Ohio), letter writer, wounded warrior
Gibson first met Obama in 2012 at Walter Reed while recovering from injuries he sustained serving his country in Afghanistan. In October, Gibson wrote a letter to thank the president for visiting him as he recuperated and to underscore that "there is life after a traumatic event and good can come of all things."
Alan and Judy Gross (Washington)
After five years of wrongful imprisonment in Cuba, USAID sub-contractor Alan Gross was reunited with his wife Judy and his family on Dec.17. That same day, Obama announced that the United States was changing its relationship with the people of Cuba.
Alan Gross holds his wife Judy's hand during a news conference at his lawyer's office in Washington, on Dec. 17, 2014. (Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais, AP)
Nicole Hernandez Hammer (Southeast Florida), mother and sea level rise researcher
Growing up in South Florida, Hammer knows firsthand the impacts of climate change and sea level rise and is raising awareness to the disproportionate effects felt along the coast and beyond. As a sea level researcher, she has studied how cities and regions most vulnerable to the effects of climate change also have large concentrations of Hispanics.
Scott Kelly (Houston), astronaut
This March, Kelly will launch to the International Space Station and become the first American to live and work aboard the orbiting laboratory for a year-long mission.
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly gives a press conference on Dec. 18, 2014, in Paris. (Photo: Patrick Kovarik, AFP/Getty Images)
Anthony Mendez (Bronx, N.Y.), student, "Reach Higher" Initiative
Growing up in the South Bronx with his mother and three siblings, Mendez names two experiences from his formative high school years. In ninth-grade, his best friend was murdered in his neighborhood, and the next year his family was evicted from their home and moved into a homeless shelter. Living two hours away from school, for six months Mendez had to wake up at 4:30 a.m. to continue his education. Overcoming these experiences, he became the first high school graduate in his family – his story of perseverance represents the core of first lady Michelle Obama's Reach Higher initiative.
Larry J. Merlo (East Greenwich, R.I), president and CEO, CVS Health
Merlo, 59, is president and chief executive officer of CVS Health, which serves 100 million people each year through its 7,800 retail pharmacies, 900 walk-in medical clinics, and a pharmacy benefits manager with nearly 65 million plan members.
Katrice Mubiru (Woodland Heights, Calif.), letter writer, career technical education teacher
In January 2012, Mubiru, a career-technical education teacher for the Los Angeles unified school district, sent a letter to the president encouraging him to support K-12, adult and career technical education.
Astrid Muhammad (Charlotte, N.C.), letter writer
Muhammad, a wife and mother of 6- and 10-year-olds, was diagnosed with a brain tumor in May 2013, but at the time she didn't have health insurance and delayed treatment. Last year, she enrolled in the Marketplace and obtained health insurance. Prior to the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies could have refused treatment for her pre-existing tumor, but on Aug. 28 — now fully insured — she had surgery to remove the tumor.
Kathy Pham (Washington), United States Digital Service
Pham is a computer scientist with a passion for public service. Throughout her career, she has used technology to tackle pressing challenges. From Google to IBM to Harris Healthcare Solutions, she has designed health care interoperability software, studied disease trends with data analytics, and built data warehouses for hospitals.
Capt. Phillip C. Tingirides (Irvine, Calif.), Los Angeles Police Department
The south Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts has seen dramatic improvement in the crime rate since the area was tied to the eponymous race riots of 1965 and a spate of gang violence in the '90s — and Tingirides has worked toward and seen a continued decrease in crime since the start of the Community Safety Partnership program in late 2011.
Catherine Pugh (Baltimore City, Md.), Maryland Senate majority leader
State Sen. Pugh is a small-business owner who currently serves as the Maryland Senate majority leader and is also president-elect of the National Black Caucus of State Legislators.
Carolyn Reed (Denver), letter writer, small-business owner
Reed wrote to the president about how she was able to expand her small business and open an additional Silver Mine Subs shop in Denver thanks to a loan from the Small Business Administration.
Dr. Pranav Shetty (Washington), International Medical Corps
Dr. Shetty is the global emergency health coordinator for International Medical Corps, a critical partner in the U.S.-supported effort to bring the Ebola epidemic under control in West Africa.
Prophet Walker (Carson, Calif.), Watts United Weekend, co-founder
While serving a six-year prison sentence for robbery, Walker, now 27, vowed never to get caught in the revolving door of a life of crime and continued incarceration. He turned his focus to education, starting a program in prison that provides fellow inmates a chance to complete a two-year degree.
Prophet Walker, 27, is the co-founder of Watts United Weekend. (Photo: Donato Sardella, Getty Images for Coalition for E)
Tiairris Woodward (Warren, Mich.), Chrysler auto worker
Working for the local school system, Woodward, 43, wasn't making enough money to support herself and her three children, the youngest of whom has special needs. She started working for Chrysler in 2010 on the assembly line, and after doing both jobs full time, working 17 hours a day, Tiairris was in a position to move solely to Chrysler — a union job that makes her a member of United Auto Workers Local 7.
Ana Zamora (Dallas), letter writer, student, DREAMer
Zamora wrote to the president in September, "as with any other dreamer, my parents came to this country with a dream of a better future for their children." And through the Administration's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, Zamora is closer than ever to fulfilling those dreams.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1Bt58kS | – President Obama goes into tomorrow's State of the Union address with some momentum: A Washington Post-ABC News poll finds his approval rating now stands at 50%, which is the highest since spring 2013; improving views on the economy are a big factor, the Post reports. Meanwhile, the White House has released a list of Michelle Obama's guests for the event—a list that likely offers a preview of some of the issues the president will address. Among those guests, per Politico and USA Today: Alan Gross, a US subcontractor, was recently freed from five years of detention in Cuba; he rejoined his wife, Judy, the day President Obama announced warming relations with Cuba. Larry Merlo is CEO of CVS Health, which recently stopped selling tobacco products. Pranav Shetty led a pair of Ebola treatment units in Liberia, the White House says. Ana Zamora is one of a number of guests who caught the president's attention through letters. She's a student who has benefited from Obama administration programs to ease restrictions on migrants who arrived in the US as kids. Scott Kelly is an astronaut who's about to spend a year aboard the International Space Station; the work is aimed at helping send people to Mars "by the 2030s," per the White House. Malik Bryant is another letter writer. For Christmas, the boy from Chicago wrote to Santa Claus: "All I ask for is for safety I just wanna be safe." His letter made it to the president. Click for the full list. |
Modern scientific texts are more impenetrable than they were over a century ago, suggests a team of researchers in Sweden. It’s easy to believe that.
You can be confident, for example, that if you pick up a random copy of Nature (which has long prided itself on the relative accessibility of its papers), you may find sentences like this in the abstracts:
Here we show that in mice DND1 binds a UU(A/U) trinucleotide motif predominantly in the 3' untranslated regions of mRNA, and destabilizes target mRNAs through direct recruitment of the CCR4-NOT deadenylase complex.
But this type of jargon-heavy phrasing is not the only problem that neuroscientist William Hedley Thompson and his colleagues at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm are tackling in their analysis. They scoured more than 700,000 English-language abstracts published between 1881 and 2015 in 122 leading biomedical journals. Their study1, posted on the preprint server bioRxiv on 28 March, suggests that it’s not just the technical jargon that has been on the rise.
There has also, the authors say, been an increase in “general scientific jargon”: that is, multisyllable words that have non-technical meanings but have become part of the standard lexicon of the science paper. These words include ‘robust’, ‘significant’, ‘furthermore’ and ‘underlying’ — all familiar enough in daily use, but markedly more prevalent in the scientific literature. The words aren’t inherently opaque, but their accumulation adds to the mental effort involved in reading the text.
Fourth-grade readers
Thompson and his colleagues examined the texts using standard indicators of reading ease, which measure factors such as the number of syllables per word, the number of words in a sentence and the number of words in the paper not included in a predefined list of common words (the New Dale–Chall, or NDC, list). By these measures, the trends seem very clear: a steady and marked decline in readability since 1881.
You could argue over the technicalities of the study. The list of common words is measured against the comprehension skills of US fourth-graders — children aged nine and ten — and its applicability to the scientific literature is not clear, points out Yellowlees Douglas at the University of Florida in Gainesville, author of The Reader’s Brain (Cambridge University Press, 2015), a writing manual that bases its advice on neuroscience. More problematically, metrics such as syllable-counting are too simplistic: for example, they rate words such as ‘orange’ and ‘praxis’ as equivalent.
What’s more, says physicist Luís Amaral of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who has studied trends in scientific publications, the data from before 1960 are too sparse and variable to be very reliable, and the trends in the data from after 1960 are less clear.
Besides, Amaral says, distinguishing between technical and general jargon isn’t easy. And an increase in technical jargon is not wholly a bad thing: it can reflect the appearance of useful concepts and techniques in science. ‘Sequencing’ was probably not part of the scientific vocabulary before 1980, he says, but who would complain about its presence now?
However, the need for specialized terms cannot completely explain the increased impenetrability of modern scientific literature.
Thompson and his colleagues are probably right to pin some of that opacity on a habitual, almost ritualistic use of ‘power words’ such as ‘distinct’ and ‘novel’. But a focus on word-counting risks distracting from what really matters about good writing.
Tangled sentences
Short, common words can be used to write sentences that are awfully hard to understand, simply because of poor grammatical construction. This is the point of Douglas’s book: the reader expects to encounter concepts in a particular order, without having to search back for the right noun to go with a verb, or having to untangle intervening information-filled clauses. You can always look up jargon, but with a poorly constructed sentence you’re on your own.
And comprehensibility isn’t just about what a paper says, but also about what it leaves out. As a regular reader of research papers, I am often staggered by their leaps of reasoning or omission of key details, especially when I discover that these gaps are no less real to experts.
So how could the readability of scientific papers be improved? First, by recognizing that good writing doesn’t happen by magic. It can be taught — but rarely is. Douglas suspects that many first drafts of papers are written by junior members of a research team who, lacking any model for what good writing looks like, take their lead from what is already in the journals. And there “they see the jargon and complexity as markers of what passes as scientific writing”, she adds. Such self-reinforcing mimicry could certainly account for the trends highlighted by Thompson and his colleagues.
So where do you find good models of writing? Obviously, from good writers — not necessarily in the sciences, but anywhere2. There is hard evidence that sophisticated readers make sophisticated writers3. Why not encourage students to put down Nature and pick up Darwin, Dawkins or Dickens? ||||| If you've been keeping up with the latest in science news, you might have read a few weeks ago that gene and seizure interactions in something called VTA glutamatergic neurons impair sociability by downregulating Cbln1 - a key node in the expanding protein interaction network of autism genes.
Have we lost you? Don't feel too bad. Unless you're well-versed in genetics and neurology, you probably re-read that sentence a few times before moving on - a feature of science papers that, according to new research, has been slowly getting worse.
It's not just jargon that has become increasingly dense over the past century, according to a team of neuroscientists from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, but the language of science itself has also become more taxing to decipher.
To test whether published research has become harder to read over time, the researchers downloaded 707,452 biomedical articles from 122 journals in the science database PubMed, all produced between 1881 and 2015.
The papers' abstracts were then analysed according to two measures of readability:
the Flesch Reading Ease, which provides a score based largely on things like sentence length and the number of syllables per word
the New Dale-Chall Readability Formulae, which analyses text based on a general familiarity of words.
Readability tests such as these are often used to determine whether a text is appropriate for children and young adults at a particular stage of learning, with levels fine-tuned to match a grade or year level in the US.
Based on an average of annual scores, the researchers identified a steady decline in the readability of the abstracts in scientific papers over the past century, finding that more than 26 percent of the texts they analysed required a college graduate (tertiary) level of English to comprehend, up from about 16 percent in 1960.
This rise represented not only more field-specific jargon, such as the aforementioned "VTA glutamatergic neurons", but an increase in what the researchers called in-group scientific language, or 'science-ese' - words such as "robust", "underlying", or "furthermore".
Of course, one explanation for why science is getting harder to read could be that science itself is becoming more complex, requiring new words to describe more specific concepts.
But if that were that simple, the researchers would expect the jargon and science-ese to be more diverse than what they found, which suggests something else is going on.
The research has so far only analysed one field – biomedicine – and the results have yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, so we can't read too much into them just yet. But if they can be replicated with further research, the study could hint at an underlying 'tribalism' that is making science less accessible to the wider community.
On its own, jargon and 'in-group' language can be useful, speeding up communication and reducing the risk of misunderstanding.
But jargon can also have a habit of making it harder for outsiders to understand a piece of writing, and also act as a way to identify and control who is part of a community and who is not.
Not that it's the general public alone or those outside of a field who could benefit from more plain-speaking science – the researchers point out that scientists who rewrite their abstracts for a lay audience are better able to comprehend their own work.
They also suggest that writing more plainly could help address science's reproducibility crisis by improving the communication of the methods of previous studies.
As science writer Philip Ball points out in a column in Nature, one thing to keep in mind here is that tests designed to evaluate the reading levels of pre-teen US school children might not clearly lend themselves to testing scientific literature.
But he added his own observation – not only is readability about the words in the story; it's about the words that are missing.
"As a regular reader of research papers, I am often staggered by their leaps of reasoning or omission of key details, especially when I discover that these gaps are no less real to experts," Ball writes.
He also suggests that papers could be improved by scientists learning to look outside of their field to find good role models.
"Why not encourage students to put down Nature and pick up Darwin, Dawkins or Dickens?" suggests Ball.
Good science can be held back without good communication, so taking a page from their favourite writer's book is something all scientists – and science writers – could certainly benefit from.
This research was published on the pre-print website bioRxiv. ||||| “The goal is to give an 8-year-old the ability to browse cultural trends throughout history, as recorded in books,” said Erez Lieberman Aiden, a junior fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard. Mr. Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, assembled the data set with Google and spearheaded a research project to demonstrate how vast digital databases can transform our understanding of language, culture and the flow of ideas.
Their study, to be published in the journal Science on Friday, offers a tantalizing taste of the rich buffet of research opportunities now open to literature, history and other liberal arts professors who may have previously avoided quantitative analysis. Science is taking the unusual step of making the paper available online to nonsubscribers.
“We wanted to show what becomes possible when you apply very high-turbo data analysis to questions in the humanities,” said Mr. Lieberman Aiden, whose expertise is in applied mathematics and genomics. He called the method “culturomics.”
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The data set can be downloaded, and users can build their own search tools.
Working with a version of the data set that included Hebrew and started in 1800, the researchers measured the endurance of fame, finding that written references to celebrities faded twice as quickly in the mid-20th century as they did in the early 19th. “In the future everyone will be famous for 7.5 minutes,” they write.
Looking at inventions, they found technological advances took, on average, 66 years to be adopted by the larger culture in the early 1800s and only 27 years between 1880 and 1920.
They tracked the way eccentric English verbs that did not add “ed” at the end for past tense (i.e., “learnt”) evolved to conform to the common pattern (“learned”). They figured that the English lexicon has grown by 70 percent to more than a million words in the last 50 years and they demonstrated how dictionaries could be updated more rapidly by pinpointing newly popular words and obsolete ones.
Steven Pinker, a linguist at Harvard who collaborated on the Science paper’s section about language evolution, has been studying changes in grammar and past tense forms for 20 years.
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“When I saw they had this database, I was quite energized,” he said. “There is so much ignorance. We’ve had to speculate what might have happened to the language.”
The information about verb changes “makes the results more convincing and more complete,” Mr. Pinker added. “What we report in this paper is just the beginning.”
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Despite the frequent resistance to quantitative analysis in some corners of the humanities, Mr. Pinker said he was confident that the use of this and similar tools would “become universal.”
Reactions from humanities scholars who quickly reviewed the article were more muted. “In general it’s a great thing to have,” Louis Menand, an English professor at Harvard, said, particularly for linguists. But he warned that in the realm of cultural history, “obviously some of the claims are a little exaggerated.” He was also troubled that, among the paper’s 13 named authors, there was not a single humanist involved.
“There’s not even a historian of the book connected to the project,” Mr. Menand noted.
Alan Brinkley, the former provost at Columbia and a professor of American history, said it was too early to tell what the impact of word and phrase searches would be. “I could imagine lots of interesting uses, I just don’t know enough about what they’re trying to do statistically,” he said.
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Aware of concerns raised by humanists that the essence of their art is a search for meaning, Mr. Michel and Mr. Lieberman Aiden emphasized that culturomics simply provided information. Interpretation remains essential.
“I don’t want humanists to accept any specific claims — we’re just throwing a lot of interesting pieces on the table,” Mr. Lieberman Aiden said. “The question is: Are you willing to examine this data?”
Mr. Michel and Mr. Lieberman Aiden first started their research in 2004 on irregular verbs. Google Books did not exist then, and they had to scrutinize stacks of Anglo-Saxon texts page by page. The process took 18 months.
“We were exhausted,” Mr. Lieberman Aiden said. That painstaking work “was a total Hail Mary pass; we could have collected this data set and proved nothing.”
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Then they read about Google’s plan to create a digital library and store of every book ever published and recognized that it could revolutionize their research. They approached Peter Norvig, the director of research at Google, about using the collection to do statistical analyses.
“He realized this was a great opportunity for science and for Google,” Mr. Michel said. “We spent the next four years dealing with the many, many complicated issues that arose,” including legal complications and computational constraints. (A proposed class-action settlement pertaining to copyright and compensation brought by writers and publishers as a result of Google’s digitization plans is pending in the courts.) Google says the culturomics project raises no copyright issue because the books themselves, or even sections of them, cannot be read.
So far, Google has scanned more than 11 percent of the entire corpus of published books, about two trillion words. The data analyzed in the paper contains about 4 percent of the corpus.
The warehouse of words makes it possible to analyze cultural influences statistically in a way previously not possible. Cultural references tend to appear in print much less frequently than everyday words, said Mr. Michel, whose expertise is in applied math and systems biology. An accurate picture needs a huge sample. Checking if “sasquatch” has infiltrated the culture requires a supply of at least a billion words a year, he said.
As for culturomics? In 20 years, type the word into an updated version of the database and see what happens. | – Put off by the high-level mumbo-jumbo that proliferates in science journals? You're not alone, Swedish researchers have found. In a study published in the preprint server bioRxiv, William Hedley Thompson and his Karolinska Institute team checked out more than 700,000 English-language abstracts from nearly 125 biomedical journals from 1881 to 2015 and discovered technical jargon has been on the upswing—but it's not just profession-tied vernacular sneaking into the text. The researchers also found an uptick in "general scientific jargon," or longer words that aren't necessarily of scientific origin (e.g., "furthermore") that keep turning up in science papers and muddling comprehension. Per Science Alert, the researchers held the abstracts up to two readability yardsticks that looked at how many syllables words had, sentence length, and reader familiarity with the language. What they found, from 1881 onward, is that readability has declined steadily over the years, results they call "concerning" considering it means scientific findings are less accessible. But Philip Ball, writing for Nature, points out issues with the study, noting that the readability gauges used common words measured against US fourth-graders' comprehension, not that of adults; that some of the earlier data (pre-1960) may not have been terribly reliable; and that technical jargon isn't inherently bad if it eventually places more scientific words in our everyday vocabulary. What Ball thinks could help: researchers being exposed to more good writing that would inform their own documentation and make it clearer for readers. "Why not encourage students to put down Nature and pick up Darwin, Dawkins, or Dickens?" he asks. (UK bureaucrats were told to drop the jargon a few years back.) |
(CNN) Rep. Maxine Waters pushed back against President Donald Trump on Monday, saying she wasn't calling for people to "harm" his supporters, as he tweeted earlier in the day, but to publicly protest his Cabinet members.
"I believe in peaceful, very peaceful protests," she told reporters on Capitol Hill. "I have not called for the harm of anybody. This President has lied again when he's saying that I've called for harm."
The Democratic congresswoman from California returned to Washington on Monday amid a heated debate over her comments from the weekend, when she encouraged people to keep pushing back on members of Trump's administration in public spaces, like restaurants, department stores and gas stations.
Her comments, fueled by frustration over migrant families separated at the border, came at the end of a week when Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was heckled by activists at a restaurant in Washington, DC, and White House press secretary Sarah Sanders was asked to leave a restaurant in Virginia
"Congresswoman Maxine Waters, an extraordinarily low IQ person, has become, together with Nancy Pelosi, the Face of the Democrat Party. She has just called for harm to supporters, of which there are many, of the Make America Great Again movement. Be careful what you wish for Max!" Trump tweeted earlier on Monday
Waters' remarks prompted criticism from Democratic leaders Monday, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who tweeted an article about Waters and wrote that Trump's "daily lack of civility has provoked responses that are predictable but unacceptable."
"As we go forward, we must conduct elections in a way that achieves unity from sea to shining sea," Pelosi's tweet said.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, in a speech on the Senate floor, said, "I strongly disagree with those who advocate harassing folks if they don't agree with you."
"If you disagree with a politician, organize your fellow citizens to action and vote them out of office," he added. "But no one should call for the harassment of political opponents. That's not right. That's not American."
Waters, however, rejected the notion that Democrats have been critical of her comments. "They have not been," she flatly told reporters when asked about the criticism.
"Don't put this on Nancy Pelosi," she continued. "Don't put this on anybody. Put it on Trump. Trump is the one who's creating lies, trying to have people believe that I talked about harming people. There is nowhere in my statement -- any time, any place -- that I talked about harm."
Rather, she argued, "our members of the Democratic caucus are talking about civility."
"But protest is civility," she added. "Protest is about peaceful resistance to the kind of actions that we are experiencing."
Pressed on whether she supported the idea of kicking someone like Sanders out of a restaurant, Waters said she supports "their right to protest."
"I have nothing to do with the way people decide to protest," she said. "I have no way of telling people how to protest, what they should protest. Again, it started with the restauranteur, it started with people in a restaurant. I did not create that, I did not design that, but I support their right to protest."
Waters described the attention around her comments as a distraction designed by the President. "Let's not get diverted as the president is capable of doing, of diverting us from the real issue. This issue is not Maxine Waters. This issue is the children."
She predicted the protests would stop when families were swiftly reunited at the border.
"I stand by my speech in saying that the protests have already started, they're probably going to continue, but the way to deal with all of this is simply to come up with a credible plan."
The President signed an executive order last week aimed at keeping families together after outrage over his administration's new policy of referring all adults caught crossing the border illegally for prosecution -- a decision that resulted in more 2,500 children being separated from their parents while the adults were detained. ||||| Rep. Maxine Waters Maxine Moore WatersMaxine Waters cancels events over 'very serious death threat' Is civility in America really dead? Hannity links Maxine Waters's rhetoric to Annapolis shooting MORE (D-Calif.) on Monday defended her calls for supporters to confront Trump administration officials in public places, but emphasized that she believes in peaceful protests.
Waters took questions on Monday hours after President Trump Donald John TrumpCanadian prime minister commemorates victims of Maryland newspaper shooting Trump suggested to Macron that France should leave the EU: report Maryland newspaper writer in emotional interview: 'We need more than prayers' MORE attacked her on Twitter, calling her “low IQ” and insinuating that she could face harassment for her remarks.
“I have nothing to do with the way people decide to protest. Protest is the democratic way as long as it is peaceful,” Waters said.
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“I believe in peaceful protest. It is guaranteed to you in a democracy,” she added.
Waters said her remarks, made Saturday at a Los Angeles rally, stemmed from frustration over the Trump administration’s practice of separating families at the southern border.
“For these members of his Cabinet who remain and try to defend him, they're not going to be able to go to a restaurant, they're not going to be able to stop at a gas station, they're not going to be able to shop at a department store, the people are going to turn on them, they're going to protest, they're going to absolutely harass them until they decide that they're going to tell the president ‘No, I can't hang with you, this is wrong, this is unconscionable and we can't keep doing this to children,’ ” she said.
Her comments came one day after White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was refused service at a Virginia restaurant. The owner cited Sanders’s support for Trump’s policies in asking her to leave.
“I did not create that, I did not design that, but I support their right to protest,” Waters said of the incident.
Trump took aim at Waters early Monday, tweeting that she “has just called for harm to supporters, of which there are many, of the Make America Great Again movement,” Trump tweeted. “Be careful what you wish for Max!”
Waters disputed that she talked about physically harming his supporters.
“Trump is the one who is creating lies, trying to have people believe that I talked about harming people. There’s nowhere in my statement anytime, any place that we talked about harm,” she said.
“Protest is about peaceful resistance to the kind of actions that we are experiencing from this president,” she added.
Democrats on Monday largely sought to tamp down the furor over Waters’s remarks.
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer Charles (Chuck) Ellis SchumerOvernight Health Care: Amazon enters the pharmacy business | Two Republicans to play pivotal role in Supreme Court abortion fight | Senate panel approves medical research boost Lewandowski: Pelosi is not the leader of the Democratic Party Perez: 'Time will tell' if Ocasio-Cortez win signals need for new Dem leadership MORE (D-N.Y.) called it “not American” to harass political opponents. And House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi Nancy Patricia D'Alesandro PelosiGillibrand calls to eliminate ICE: 'Get rid of it, start over' Maxine Waters cancels events over 'very serious death threat' Dem senator: Congress's inaction on gun laws is 'green light for would-be shooters' MORE (D-Calif.) said tit-for-tat responses to Trump’s attacks are “unacceptable,” and called for unity. ||||| House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi seemingly rebuked Rep. Maxine Waters’ call for the president's opponents to confront members of the administration wherever they may be. | Alex Wong/Getty Images Pelosi appears to chide Waters over her call to confront Trump officials
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi wrote online Monday that elections should be conducted in a way that "achieves unity" despite President Donald Trump's "lack of civility," in what appeared to be a gentle rebuke of Rep. Maxine Waters’ call for Trump opponents to confront members of the administration wherever they may be.
“In the crucial months ahead, we must strive to make America beautiful again. Trump’s daily lack of civility has provoked responses that are predictable but unacceptable,” Pelosi (D-Calif.) wrote on Twitter. “As we go forward, we must conduct elections in a way that achieves unity from sea to shining sea.”
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Attached to Pelosi’s post was a link to a CNN article detailing Waters’ remarks, made over the weekend in a TV interview and at a rally in Los Angeles. Addressing the Trump administration policy that led to the separation of families who illegally enter the U.S., Waters said those who oppose the practice should give no quarter to the president’s Cabinet.
"Let's make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd,” Waters (D-Calif.), who was among the earliest lawmakers to call for the president's impeachment, said Saturday. “And you push back on them. And you tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere.”
Waters’ remarks, along with a Virginia restaurant’s unwillingness over the weekend to serve White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, prompted criticism from Trump allies that opposition to the president had devolved from political discourse to personal attacks.
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The Los Angeles congresswoman’s remarks came days after protesters chanted “shame” and “end family separation” at Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen as she ate dinner at a Mexican restaurant near the White House last week. A day earlier, Nielsen had publicly defended the administration’s family separation practice.
A spokesman for Nielsen later characterized the protesters as sharing “her concern with our current immigration laws that have created a crisis on our southern border” and said the secretary “encourages all — including this group — who want to see an immigration system that works … to reach out to members of Congress and seek their support to close the terrible immigration loopholes that have made our system a mess.” | – Rep. Maxine Waters fired back at President Trump on on Monday, saying the president "lied again" when he claimed she called for harm to his supporters. Waters said that when she called for the public to confront members of the Trump administration, she was calling for peaceful protests, CNN reports. "I believe in peaceful, very peaceful protests," the Democrat said. "I have not called for the harm of anybody." In a tweet earlier Monday, Trump slammed Waters as an "extraordinarily low IQ person" and told her to be careful what she wished for. She was more gently admonished by leading Democrats, with Nancy Pelosi calling for people to act in a way that promotes unity and Chuck Schumer saying it was wrong to call for the "harassment of political opponents." Waters said her remarks at a rally in California on Saturday came from anger at the policy of separating families at the border, the Hill reports. She said fellow Democrats had been talking about civility, not directly criticizing her. "Don't put this on Nancy Pelosi," Waters said. "Put it on Trump. Trump is the one who's creating lies, trying to have people believe that I talked about harming people. There is nowhere in my statement—any time, any place—that I talked about harm." She added: "Protest is civility. Protest is about peaceful resistance to the kind of actions that we are experiencing." (On Monday, Trump also strongly criticized the "filthy" Virginia restaurant that refused to serve White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.) |
President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office of the White House, Monday, March 5, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) (Associated Press)
President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office of the White House, Monday, March 5, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) (Associated Press)
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump insisted Monday that he's "not backing down" on his plan to impose stiff tariffs on imported steel and aluminum despite anxious warnings from House Speaker Paul Ryan and other congressional Republicans of a possible trade war.
The president said that North American neighbors Canada and Mexico would not get any relief from his plan to place the tariffs on the imports but suggested he might be willing to exempt the two longstanding allies if they agreed to better terms for the North American Free Trade Agreement.
"No, we're not backing down," Trump said in the Oval Office, seated with visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "We've had a very bad deal with Mexico, we've had a very bad deal with Canada — it's called NAFTA," Trump said.
The president opened the door to exempting the two countries from the planned tariffs, telling reporters, "that would be, I would imagine, one of the points that we'll negotiate." But he added, "If they aren't going to make a fair NAFTA deal, we're just going to leave it this way."
Trump spoke shortly after a spokeswoman for House Speaker Ryan said the GOP leader was "extremely worried" about the tariffs setting off a trade war and had urged the White House "to not advance with this plan." Republican leaders of the House Ways and Means Committee, meanwhile, circulated a letter opposing Trump's tariff plan.
The administration says the tariffs are necessary to preserve the American industries — and that imposing them is a national security imperative. But Trump's comments and tweets earlier in the day suggested he was also using them as leverage in the current talks to revise NAFTA. The latest round of a nearly yearlong renegotiation effort is concluding this week in Mexico City.
He tweeted, "Tariffs on Steel and Aluminum will only come off if new & fair NAFTA agreement is signed. Also, Canada must treat our farmers much better. Highly restrictive. Mexico must do much more on stopping drugs from pouring into the U.S."
In the meantime, Trump's tariff plan has been branded "absolutely unacceptable" by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, and Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission has said the European Union could respond by taxing American goods including Bourbon, blue jeans and Harley Davidson motorcycles.
The tariffs will be made official in the next two weeks, White House officials said Monday, as the administration defended the protectionist decision from critics in Washington and overseas.
Speaking on "Fox and Friends," White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said: "25 percent on steel, and the 10 percent on aluminum, no country exclusions — firm line in the sand."
Trump's pronouncement last week that he would impose the tariffs roiled markets and rankled allies.
The across-the-board action would break with the recommendation of the Pentagon, which pushed for more targeted tariffs on metals imports from countries like China and warned that a wide-ranging move would jeopardize national security partnerships. But Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, whose agency oversaw reviews of the industries that recommended the tariffs, said Sunday on ABC's "This Week" that Trump is "talking about a fairly broad brush."
Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said the sweeping action would let China "off the hook," adding the tariffs would drive a wedge between the U.S. and its allies.
"China wins when we fight with Europe," he said on CBS's "Face the Nation." ''China wins when the American consumer has higher prices because of tariffs that don't affect Chinese behavior."
Trump has threatened to tax European cars if the EU boosts tariffs on American products in response to the president's plan to increase duties on steel and aluminum.
British Prime Minister Theresa May raised her "deep concern" at the tariff announcement in a phone call with Trump Sunday. May's office says she noted that multilateral action was the only way to resolve the problem of global overcapacity."
But Ross rejected threats of retaliation from American allies as "pretty trivial" and not much more than a "rounding error."
And Navarro argued Monday that "there are virtually no costs here."
"If you put a 10 percent tariff on aluminum, it's a cent and a half on a six pack of beer and it's $25,000 on a $330 million (Boeing 777)," Navarro said.
Trade politics often cut along regional, rather than ideological, lines, as politicians reflect the interests of the hometown industries and workers. But rarely does a debate open so wide a rift between a president and his party — leaving him almost exclusively with support from his ideological opposites.
Labor unions and liberal Democrats are in the unusual position of applauding Trump's approach on grounds it will bolster jobs in a depleted industry, while Republicans and an array of business groups are warning of dire economic and political consequences.
In the 2016 election, Trump's criticism of trade agreements and China's trade policies found support with working-class Americans whose wages had stagnated over the years. Victories in big steel-producing states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana demonstrated that his tough trade talk had a receptive audience.
Both House candidates in next week's special election in Pennsylvania have embraced the president's plans for tariffs. They addressed the topic Saturday in a debate that aired on WTAE in Pittsburgh.
"For too long, China has been making cheap steel and they've been flooding the market with it. It's not fair and it's not right. So I actually think this is long overdue," said Democratic candidate Conor Lamb.
"Unfortunately, many of our competitors around the world have slanted the playing field, and their thumb has been on the scale, and I think President Trump is trying to even that scale back out," said Republican candidate Rick Saccone.
But Trump's GOP allies on Capitol Hill have little use for the tariff approach. They argue that other industries that rely on steel and aluminum products will suffer. The cost of new appliances, cars and buildings will rise if the president follows through, they warn, and other nations could retaliate. The end result could erode the president's base of support with rural America and even the blue-collar workers the president says he trying to help.
"There is always retaliation, and typically a lot of these countries single out agriculture when they do that. So, we're very concerned," said Sen. John Thune, R-S.D.
Gov. Scott Walker, R-Wis., asked the administration to reconsider its stance. He said American companies could move their operations abroad and not face retaliatory tariffs.
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Follow Zeke Miller on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ZekeJMiller and Kevin Freking at https://twitter.com/APkfreking ||||| It was not clear whether the president would still sign an executive action to authorize renegotiation of Nafta, which he once called the worst trade deal ever signed by the United States. Washington must give Canada and Mexico six months’ notice before exiting the trade agreement, which came into force in 1994. Any action to that effect would start the clock.
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But the prospect of the United States’ pulling out obviously alarmed the Canadian and Mexican leaders and prompted their calls to the White House.
The Mexican peso plummeted in trading after news broke at midday on Wednesday that the White House had drafted an executive order withdrawing the United States from Nafta. Mr. Trudeau called Mr. Trump twice, on Tuesday and Wednesday, to discuss the sudden rupture in the trade relationship between the United States and Canada.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration announced that it would impose a tariff on Canadian softwood lumber, in retaliation for what it said was unfair treatment of American dairy farmers.
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The president has repeatedly derided Nafta, describing it last week as “very, very bad” for the country, companies and workers, and he promised during his campaign that he would remove the United States from it if he could not negotiate improvements.
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The White House wants Congress to authorize those negotiations under legislation that would allow expedited approval of the reworked agreement, but talks between administration officials and congressional Republicans have moved slowly.
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While some of Mr. Trump’s senior advisers, notably Stephen K. Bannon and the economist Peter Navarro, are eager to take strong steps on trade policy, another group — which includes Gary D. Cohn, the head of the National Economic Council — has argued for a more cautious approach, concerned that larger steps could cause economic disruptions.
Lately, Mr. Trump has taken the stronger line, moving to reshape America’s economic relationships with foreign nations. The Nafta order would come on the heels of the announcement of the new tariffs on Canadian lumber and reviews of whether steel and aluminum imports are undermining national security.
“Nafta’s been very, very bad for our country,” Mr. Trump said last week. “It’s been very, very bad for our companies and for our workers, and we’re going to make some very big changes, or we are going to get rid of Nafta once and for all.”
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Walking away from Nafta would disrupt the economies of the United States, Canada and Mexico, and strain broader relations among the countries. Over the last two decades, their economies have become increasingly intertwined. The volume of trade has multiplied, and the manufacture of many goods, notably cars, involves multiple border crossings and factories in all three nations.
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If the United States actually pulled out, experts said, trade with Canada would probably still be subject to a similar agreement between the two countries that took effect in the late 1980s and served as a model for Nafta. The Trump administration, however, could seek to withdraw from that agreement as well.
The shift in the rules governing trade with Mexico would be more significant. The two countries both take part in the World Trade Organization, but that allows much higher tariffs. Mexico, for instance, could impose a 37 percent tariff on American corn. The disruptions to manufacturing could also come at a hefty cost to consumers: Caroline Freund, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, has estimated that the cost of a pickup truck might increase by $3,000.
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Monica de Bolle, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, said: “It would be a very disruptive shock that would impact everybody. It would impact growth; it would impact companies and supply chains; it would impact workers; it would impact voters in Trump states. It’s just crazy to imagine that they would go that route.”
The suggestion of withdrawal, reported by Politico on Wednesday, raised anxieties in financial markets. The peso fell more than 2 percent against the dollar, and the Canadian dollar fell about 0.3 percent.
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“Scrapping Nafta would be a disastrously bad idea,” Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, said in a statement. “Yes, there are places where our agreements could be modernized, but here’s the bottom line: Trade lowers prices for American consumers, and it expands markets for American goods. Risking trade wars is reckless, not wise.”
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Both Mexican and Canadian officials have said repeatedly that they are ready to negotiate changes to the trade agreement. Written in the early 1990s, it is outdated in key respects: Its drafters, for example, did not foresee the rise of the internet.
“Canada is ready to come to the table at any time,” Alex Lawrence, a spokesman for the Canadian foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland, told Reuters on Wednesday.
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In fact, the Obama administration negotiated changes to the deal as part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a broader agreement that would have supplanted Nafta. Mr. Trump withdrew from that agreement as one of his first official acts.
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The Trump administration provided an indication of its own priorities in a letter circulated among members of Congress last month. While proposing some significant changes, such as strengthening the available penalties for breaches of the rules, it suggested that the administration was not seeking to alter the basic structure of the agreement, prompting relief both north and south of the United States.
The administration must send a final version of that letter to Congress to start another clock: a 90-day waiting period before negotiations. Starting both clocks would allow the White House to begin negotiations with Mexico and Canada while holding in hand the threat of walking away from the table.
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It is not clear whom that would hurt most. Mr. Trump has repeatedly denounced trade deficits as a major contributor to what he sees as the nation’s broken economy.
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But trade among the three North American nations is relatively balanced, particularly in comparison with trade between the United States and China.
The United States actually ran a trade surplus with Canada in 2015 and during the first three quarters of 2016, according to the most recent data available from the Commerce Department. American sales of goods and services to Canada exceeded purchases of goods and services from Canada, on average, by $1 billion a month.
The United States does run a monthly deficit of about $4 billion with Mexico, but even that is a small fraction of the roughly $28 billion monthly deficit with China. | – President Trump has a notable new critic of his plan to impose big tariffs on steel and aluminum: House Speaker Paul Ryan. “We are extremely worried about the consequences of a trade war and are urging the White House to not advance with this plan,” says a spokesperson for Ryan. “The new tax reform law has boosted the economy and we certainly don’t want to jeopardize those gains.” In fact, congressional GOP leaders have not ruled out the idea of taking some kind of legislative action to block any such tariffs, assuming Trump makes them official as promised in the coming week or two, reports the Wall Street Journal. Members of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee also oppose the tariffs, as do various Senate Republicans, notes the Washington Post. Trump, for his part, sounded unfazed by the pushback. "No, we're not backing down," Trump said in the Oval Office, while with visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, per the AP. Earlier Monday, Trump said Mexico and Canada might be able to avoid the tariffs, but only if they agreed to better terms on NAFTA. Trump reaffirmed the point with reporters. "We've had a very bad deal with Mexico, we've had a very bad deal with Canada—it's called NAFTA," Trump said. |
After a bout of Jeb Bush 2016 speculation a few months ago, chatter has died down — intentionally so, I am led to believe. Bush’s team knows full well that the higher your profile and the more definitive your decision to run seems, the more fire you will draw. (Just ask New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie or Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.) But now Bush’s supporters are reportedly telling donors to keep their powder dry. Even more intriguing, “Mr. Bush is also planning to attend fundraisers for Illinois gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner on Sept. 18 in Chicago and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in Coral Gables on Sept. 19. He has already helped raise money for a number of GOP candidates, many of them in states crucial to winning the 2016 nomination. They have included Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval and Florida Gov. Rick Scott.”
Former Florida governor Jeb Bush speaks at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research Alexander Hamilton Award Dinner in May in New York. (John Minchillo/Associated Press)
If he does decide to run, Christie may find a dearth of big-money donors. Bush is better known, is more popular with this group and doesn’t have the bridge scandal hanging over his head. I don’t see how Christie, who has not rolled out a 2016 agenda or impressed many with policy prowess (although he did go to Mexico for the first time), remains viable if Bush runs.
Likewise, a Bush run makes Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) less likely to take the plunge. He wasn’t sold on running to begin with, and the loss of potential donors and a popular competitor who shares his reform agenda may convince Ryan (if he hadn’t been already) that he doesn’t need to run. And with Ryan, it really is about the ideas and policy. If another messenger comes along ready, willing and funded, he may very well be content to be in essence the policy shop for the campaign. (He is already expected to begin rolling out legislative initiatives from his Ways and Means chairmanship in 2015.)
And finally, a Bush run makes it less likely that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) will run, or run successfully. Rubio may not want to challenge his mentor and, like Christie, could well find the establishment money scarce after the Bush money operation revs up. Rubio was already having problems, getting hit from the right on immigration and from the mainstreamers for the government shutdown. His gravitas problem becomes stark if he is standing next to Bush. And like Ryan, he is so young that he has decades ahead in which he could make a presidential run.
It is therefore possible that if Bush takes the plunge, he may clear out a number of so-called establishment candidates. Like Mitt Romney in 2012 and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in 2008, he would then benefit from a divided field on the right.
A Jeb Bush presidential campaign has become more feasible as President Obama’s foreign policy has collapsed and as Hillary Clinton becomes the default nominee for the Democrats. Suddenly a grown-up who knows his way around the White House, has traveled overseas and has deep connections to South and Central America becomes more appealing to a lot of voters. His brother’s reputation has rebounded substantially, and the Bush name need not be toxic, as was once thought. In any event, like Clinton, Jeb Bush can argue that all candidates deserve to be judged on their own merits and not on their family’s. The “dynasty” problem obviously becomes less of an issue running against Clinton. The GOP, to be sure, with Jeb Bush as the standard bearer, would not have such a vivid contrast between old and new, but Bush is entirely capable of fighting the election on the basis of new conservative reform vs. the old liberal welfare state and foreign policy untrustworthiness.
Bush will face great skepticism on the right, but so did Romney. He will need to present a compelling agenda, but so does every candidate. The question remains, as it has since the beginning of the Bush boomlet, whether he has the fire in the belly for a run. If so, he instantly becomes a formidable candidate. ||||| A week after Election Day, three Republican governors mentioned as 2016 presidential candidates — Bobby Jindal, John Kasich and Bob McDonnell — each stopped by the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino to meet privately with its owner Sheldon Adelson, a man who could single-handedly underwrite their White House ambitions.
Planning a presidential campaign used to mean having coffee with county party chairs in their Iowa or New Hampshire living rooms. The courting of Adelson, a full four years out from 2016, demonstrates how super PAC sugar daddies have become the new must-have feature for White House wannabes.
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reset Allen on 2016, donors Video: POLITICO on Super PACs
(Also on POLITICO: Megadonors seek low profiles)
And prospective candidates from both parties are wasting little time schmoozing potential super PAC funders.
Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley is meeting with big donors in Los Angeles this week and has a fundraiser scheduled for next Monday in the Washington suburbs. Vice President Joe Biden, Republican Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) have been meeting with big donors, leaving the impression that they’re ready to run.
“A group of five people could contribute $10 million each and finance a substantial primary campaign for a candidate,” said former South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges. “So there is probably more of an effort right now focused on trying to look at those people who are capable of being very large donors, rather than soliciting or developing the network of bundlers that were out there in the past.”
(PHOTOS: Republicans, 2016: In full swing)
Hodges, a Democrat, is co-hosting the fundraiser for O’Malley’s leadership PAC in Chevy Chase, Md., on Monday. He also raised money earlier this year for the PAC fronted by Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, and said he’d probably help other Democrats “who want to get out there and test the waters” by meeting with donors. “It’s an important part of a process.”
And it’s becoming more important, as demonstrated by the 2012 Republican primaries — the first since federal court decisions allowed super PACs to accept unlimited cash — which proved that a single super-rich supporter can essentially float an entire campaign. While the GOP establishment desperately tried to rally around eventual nominee Mitt Romney, super PACs funded by Adelson, Foster Friess and Jon Huntsman Sr. extended the challenges of Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Jon Huntsman Jr. respectively, before a pro-Romney super PAC obliterated the field.
And in 2016 — with open primaries in both parties and the power of super PACs firmly established — the biggest donors are being courted earlier than ever. Not only are entreaties coming before most of the donors are anywhere close to choosing sides, none of the suitors are willing to discuss their plans publicly.
(See also: Dem super PACs jump on 2014, 2016)
Santorum is privately telling friends that he’s running again, POLITICO has learned. Friess, a retired mutual fund guru who donated $2.2 million to a pair of super PACs credited with helping lift Santorum to a surprise win over Romney in the Iowa caucuses, said, “Right now, I’m certainly still in his camp, but four years is a long way away.”
Adelson — a Las Vegas casino billionaire whose family donated a record $84 million or more to GOP outside groups, including $20 million each to the super PACs devoted to Romney and Gingrich — has signaled that he is undeterred from his weak 2012 return on investment and plans to continue giving big. | – If you had to name the Democratic candidate in 2016, one name that ends in Clinton quickly comes to mind. But for Republicans? The Washington Post recently counted up no fewer than 23 potential candidates. Which might explain why the New York Times reports that the GOP's top donors have been meeting in private to get behind a single candidate and avoid a brutal primary. The newspaper says the talks revolve around Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, and, yes, Mitt Romney. For example, the story says that previous Romney backer Woody Johnson, a billionaire who owns the New York Jets, has met with both Bush and Christie but won't commit to either until Romney decides whether he's in or out, which might not be until summer. Rand Paul and Rick Perry are mentioned later in the story. "Talk of an establishment coronation is likely to incur the wrath of party activists and outside groups seeking a more conservative nominee," writes Nicholas Confessore. A separate Post article today report that an "invisible primary" is well underway as candidates vie to lock down the support of wealthy donors, but it adds that these donors are unusually wary about committing early. The result "could stall the GOP race for months." For the record, the Post's predicted winner at this point is Paul, followed by Christie, Bush, Marco Rubio, and Scott Walker. |
Photo by Peggy Sirota
Brad Pitt opens up about family and finding time for what's important in life in this Sunday’s PARADE with Dotson Rader. The 47-year-old star shares his thoughts on Angie, the kids, his private pain, and what he lives for now.Be sure to check out this weekend's issue of PARADE magazine in your local newspaper for the full interview with Brad Pitt.“I put much more emphasis on being a satisfied man. I’m satisfied with making true choices and finding the woman I love, Angie, and building a family that I love so much. A family is a risky venture, because the greater the love, the greater the loss. … That’s the trade-off. But I’ll take it all.”“I spent the ‘90s trying to hide out, trying to duck the full celebrity cacophony. I started to get sick of myself sitting on a couch, holding a joint, hiding out. It started feeling pathetic. It became very clear to me that I was intent on trying to find a movie about an interesting life, but I wasn’t living an interesting life myself. I think that my marriage [to actress Jennifer Aniston] had something to do with it. Trying to pretend the marriage was something that it wasn’t."“One of the greatest, smartest things I ever did was give my kids Angie as their mom. She is such a great mom. Oh, man, I’m so happy to have her.”"I was surprised at how automatic it is, how much of it is instinctual. And now I have a great confidence and trust in those instincts. I mean, one sound at night and you’re awake and up because they may need you. Or when they start to have a tantrum, you know to divert them from spinning out by helping them focus on something. It just goes on and on. I tell them, “You can make a mess, but you’ve got to clean it up.”"I mean, how many stories have you read that aren’t true, stories about me and Angie being married or fighting or splitting up? And when we don’t split up, there’s a whole new round that we’ve made up and we’re back together again! We’ll get married when everyone can. We’re not splitting up. And we don’t have a seventh child yet."Pitt, whose new movie Moneyball opens September 23, also discusses why he adopted foreign-born children, lessons he learned from his father, and how he got that scar on his cheekbone. Check out PARADE this Sunday. ||||| Things had been going really well for Brad Pitt this fall, with glamorous film festival appearances, Oscar buzz and even some real-life heroics in Scotland. So, leave it to that never-ending thorn in his side -- his former marriage to Jennifer Aniston -- to complicate things.
Appearing on the cover of the upcoming Parade Magazine, he seems less than positive about his ex-wife in a number of quotes made available ahead of time from the article.
“I spent the ‘90s trying to hide out, trying to duck the full celebrity cacophony. I started to get sick of myself sitting on a couch, holding a joint, hiding out," he tells the magazine. "It started feeling pathetic. It became very clear to me that I was intent on trying to find a movie about an interesting life, but I wasn’t living an interesting life myself. I think that my marriage [to Aniston] had something to do with it. Trying to pretend the marriage was something that it wasn’t."
Before the magazine even hits newsstands, Pitt has released a statement to try to pre-empt the controversy, saying that he was taken out of context, and that his career was truly the issue.
“It grieves me that this was interpreted this way," he says. "Jen is an incredibly giving, loving, and hilarious woman who remains my friend. It is an important relationship I value greatly. The point I was trying to make is not that Jen was dull, but that I was becoming dull to myself – and that, I am responsible for.”
Pitt discussed his past unhappiness with Entertainment Weekly in their latest cover story, too, though he was speaking about his career with that magazine.
“I am miserable. Six months in the f*cking dark. Contact lenses, makeup, I’m playing the bitch role…” he said about the "Interview with a Vampire" shoot. “One day, it broke me… I called David Geffen, who was a producer… I said, ‘David, I can’t do this anymore. I can’t do it. How much will it take to get me out?’ And he goes, very calmly, ‘Forty million dollars.’”
In happier remarks, Pitt glows about his current partner and the mother of his children, Angelina Jolie.
“I put much more emphasis on being a satisfied man," he tells Parade. "I’m satisfied with making true choices and finding the woman I love, Angie, and building a family that I love so much. A family is a risky venture, because the greater the love, the greater the loss. … That’s the trade-off. But I’ll take it all.”
Pitt stars in the upcoming "Moneyball," the critical darling that is earning raves from baseball fans -- it's about Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane -- and film reviewers alike.
For more, click over to Parade.
PHOTOS: | – In a new interview with the AP, Brad Pitt acknowledges he's been in some dark places lately—of his drinking problem, he says, "I've got no secrets. I've got nothing to hide"—but he insists things aren't that dark. "I'm not suicidal or something," he says, per Rolling Stone. "There's still much beauty in the world and a lot of love. And a lot of love to be given. It's all right. It's just life." He adds that his children help to keep depression at bay: "Kids are everything. Kids are your life. They're taking all the focus, as they should anyway." |
Some drivers end up losing money after insurance, maintenance and other costs, according to study raising concerns over labor standards
Uber and Lyft drivers in the US make a median profit of as little as $8.55 per hour before taxes, according to a new report that suggests a majority of ride-share workers make below minimum wage and that some actually lose money.
Researchers did an analysis of vehicle cost data and a survey of more than 1,100 drivers for the ride-hailing companies for the paper, published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research. The first draft of the paper, released last month, said the median profit was $3.37 an hour, but the author released a new analysis on Monday following criticism from Uber.
In the new analysis, the researcher reported the higher median profit of $8.55 an hour. The study, which factored in insurance, maintenance, repairs, fuel and other costs, also said that for 54% of drivers, the profit is less than the minimum wage in their states and that 8% of drivers are losing money on the job.
The findings have raised fresh concerns about labor standards in the booming sharing economy as companies such as Uber and Lyft continue to face scrutiny over their treatment of drivers, who are classified as independent contractors and have few rights or protections.
“This business model is not currently sustainable,” said Stephen Zoepf, executive director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford University and co-author of the paper. “The companies are losing money. The businesses are being subsidized by [venture capital] money … And the drivers are essentially subsidizing it by working for very low wages.”
All workers need unions – including those in Silicon Valley | Chi Onwurah Read more
While most drivers employ vehicles for personal use and ride-hailing services, the bulk of the miles they drive are for work, which can lead to significant short-term and long-term costs, the paper said.
Given inevitable costs of maintenance, repair and depreciation, “effectively what you’re doing as a driver is borrowing against the value of your car,” Zoepf said, adding: “It’s quite possible that drivers don’t realize quite how much they are spending.”
After the Guardian first published a story on the research last week, Uber’s CEO slammed the paper and published a rebuttal from the company’s chief economist alleging a “major error” in Zoepf’s study. Echoing some criticisms from other academics, Uber’s response argued that survey respondents probably misunderstood key questions, leading to “deeply flawed” conclusions and “eye-poppingly low earnings numbers”.
On Monday, Zoepf issued a response, saying the criticism was “valid” and that the questions “should have been worded more clearly”. He said he subsequently used two additional methods to analyze the data, leading to new figures. One methodology found $8.55 per hour, and another relying on different metrics found a median hourly profit of $10 per hour, with 41% making below minimum wage and 4% losing money.
Other studies and surveys have found higher hourly earnings for Uber drivers, in part because there are numerous ways to report income and to calculate costs and time and miles spent on the job.
Zoepf, who said he would conduct a “thorough revision” of the paper in the coming weeks, has not responded to requests for comment about his latest analysis.
Other academics and commentators who expressed skepticism about the initial finding said the new numbers seemed more appropriate.
Harry Campbell, founder of the Rideshare Guy, a website that conducts surveys of drivers and had partnered with Zoepf on this research, told the Guardian last week that he thought the $3.37 figure seemed too low. On Monday, he said the new numbers “definitely seem in the right ballpark”.
“The most common feedback we hear from drivers is they end up earning a lot less than they expected,” Campbell added. “There is a lot of turnover in the industry, and that’s the No 1 reason I hear from drivers why they are quitting – they are not making enough.”
Campbell pointed out that Uber itself had struggled to properly consider vehicle costs. Last year, the company shut down its US auto-leasing business after discovering it was losing 18 times more money per vehicle than it had previously understood. Some drivers claimed that the leasing program trapped them in debt.
Judith Chevalier, a Yale professor who has studied Uber wage data and criticized the initial report as “way off”, said of the revised analysis: “It’s definitely closer to the zone.” She urged Zoepf to publish a more detailed explanation of his calculations.
Alex Tabarrok, a George Mason University professor who called the paper’s findings “dubious” last week, said he still had concerns about the researcher’s reliance on questionable survey data and that he believed the average hourly profit of Uber drivers was closer to $13 an hour (similar to figures the company has cited).
In an email to the Guardian on Monday, an Uber spokesperson did not address the new numbers but said: “We thank Professor Zoepf for acknowledging a major shortcoming of his methodology and support his decision to conduct a thorough revision of the paper over the coming weeks.”
A Lyft spokesperson said in an email last week: “We have not yet reviewed this study in detail, but an initial review shows some questionable assumptions.” ||||| Ride-hailing giants Uber and Lyft are delivering pitiful levels of take-home pay to the hundreds of thousands of US independent contractors providing their own vehicles and driving skills to deliver the core service, according to an MIT CEEPR study examining the economics of the two app platforms.
The report catalyses the debate about conditions for workers on gig economy platforms, and raises serious questions about the wider societal impacts of tax avoiding, VC-funded tech giants.
The study, entitled The Economics of Ride-Hailing: Driver Revenue, Expenses and Taxes, and which was carried out by the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, surveyed more than 1,100 Uber and Lyft ride-hailing drivers combined with detailed vehicle cost information — factoring in costs such as fuel, insurance, maintenance and repairs — to come up with a median profit per hour worked.
The upshot? The researchers found profit from ride-hail driving to be “very low”. On an hourly basis, the median profit was $3.37 per hour, with 74% of drivers earning less than the minimum wage in the state where they operate.
They also found a median driver generates $0.59 per mile of driving but incurs costs of $0.30 per mile; and almost a third (30 per cent) of drivers were found to incur expenses exceeding their revenue or to be losing money for every mile they drive.
The research also looked at how ride-hailing profits are taxed, and suggests that in the US a majority of driver profits are going untaxed owing to how mileage deduction is handled for tax purposes — suggesting Uber and Lyft’s business are denuding the public purse too.
From the study:
On a monthly basis, mean profit is $661/month (median $310). Drivers are eligible to use a Standard Mileage Deduction for tax purposes ($0.54/mile in 2016) which far exceeds median costs per mile of $0.30/mile. Because of this deduction, most ridehailing drivers are able to declare profits that are substantially lower. Mean drivers who use a Standard Mileage Deduction would declare taxable profit of $175 rather than the $661 earned. These numbers suggest that approximately 74% of driver profit is untaxed.
The authors add that if their $661/month mean profit is representative then the US’ Standard Mileage Deduction facilitates “several billion in untaxed income for hundreds of thousands of ride-hailing drivers nationwide”.
So what does the study tell us about the ride-hailing business model? “It tells us that it’s a shitty place to work,” says Mark Tluszcz, co-founder and CEO of Mangrove Capital Partners who has described the gig economy model as the modern day sweatshop, and says his VC firm made a conscious decision not to invest in gig economy companies because the model is exploitative.
“It tells you that it’s a great place if you’re a company. It’s really a poor place to be an employee or be a worker.”
The exploitative asymmetry of ride-hailing platforms comes because workers have a certain amount of fixed costs but the platform intermediary can just hike its commission at will and lower the service cost to the end user whenever it wants to increase competitiveness vs a rival business.
“At the end of the day there are a certain amount of fixed costs [for drivers],” says Tluszcz. “You have to buy a car, you have to get insurance, you have to pay for gas… And if you as an intermediary, which those platforms are, are taking an increasing amount of commission — 10%, 15%, now 20 in most of their markets — and then you’re using the price of the trip as a way of beating your competitor… then you as a driver are sitting there with basically all of your fixed costs and your income is going down and frankly the only way to cover your costs is to spend more hours in the car.
“Which is frankly what’s clearly illustrated by this study. These people have to spend so much time to cover their costs when you break it down to an hourly revenue, it’s a pitiful amount. And by the way you have no social coverage because you’ve got to take care of that yourself.”
At the time of writing neither Uber not Lyft had responded to a request for comment on the MIT study. But an Uber spokesperson told The Guardian the company believes the research methodology and findings are “deeply flawed”, adding: “We’ve reached out to the paper’s authors to share our concerns and suggest ways we might work together to refine their approach.”
Tluszcz was quick to dispatch that critique. “MIT is not some second tier organization that did this study,” he points out. “For me that’s a reference moment when MIT says look, there’s an issue here… There’s something wrong in the model and we can tolerate it for a period of time but ultimately we’re creating this lost generation of people.”
“These business are built on situations in the market that are not realistic,” he tells TechCrunch. “They took advantage of a hole in legislation… Governments let that happen. And it made all of sudden services cheaper. But people have to eat. People have to live. And ultimately there’s only 100% of a cake.
“Cabbies in the UK are not millionaires; they make a decent living. But they make a decent living because there’s a certain price-point to offer the service. And in every industry you have that. There is a certain fair price point to be able to live in that industry… And clearly right now, in the ride-sharing businesses, you don’t have it.”
In Europe, where Uber’s business has faced a series of legal challenges, the company has begun offering some subsidized insurance products for platform workers — including one for Uber Eats couriers across Europe and a personal injury and insurance product for drivers in the UK.
In January in the UK it also announced a safety cap on the number of consecutive hours drivers on its platform can accept trips, after coming under rising political and legal pressure on safety and working conditions.
Last year Uber also lost its first appeal against an employment tribunal that judged a group of Uber drivers to be workers, not self-employed contractors as it had claimed — meaning they are entitled to workers rights such as holiday and sick pay.
Uber also had its license to operate in London withdrawn last fall, with the local transport regulator citing concerns about safety and corporate responsibility as key considerations for not renewing the company’s private hire vehicle license.
Tluszcz’s view is that such moves prefigure a more major shift incoming in Europe that could cement permanent roadblocks to business models that function via intentional worker exploitation.
“The flaw in the [gig economy] model as a worker is so big that it seems to be quite clear that European governments are going to be looking at this and saying this is just not the European ethos. It’s just not,” he argues. “There’s going to be a moment when all these things are clashing. And I think it’s a cultural clash that we have really, between European values of equity and American values of just pure market capitalism.
“You can’t expect somebody making $3.37 an hour to take a part of that to contribute to retirement and social coverage. What the hell do you live on?” he adds.
“We’re creating the next lost generation of people who simply don’t have enough money to live and those companies are fundamentally enabling it under the premise that they’re offering a cheaper service to consumers… And I just don’t think Europe will put up with this.”
Last month the UK government confirmed its intent to act on this area by announcing a package of labor market reforms intended to respond to changes driven by the rise of gig economy platforms. It dubbed the strategy a ‘Good Work Plan’ — billing it as an expansion of workers rights and saying “millions” more workers would get new day-one rights, coupled with a tighter enforcement regime on platforms and companies to ensure they are providing sick and holiday pay rights.
“We are proud to have record levels of employment in this country but we must also ensure that workers’ rights are always upheld,” said the UK prime minister, also emphasizing that her goal was to build “an economy that works for everyone”.
It’s likely to publish more detail on the employment law reform later this year. But the direction of travel for gig economy platforms in Europe looks clear: Away from being freely able to exploit legal loopholes and towards a much more tightly managed framework of employment and workforce welfare regulations to ensure that underlying support structures (such as the UK’s national minimum wage) aren’t just being circumvented by clever engineering and legal positioning.
“This for me is an inherent dilemma one has between capitalism and some level of socialism which we have in Europe,” adds Tluszcz. “This is a clash of two fundamentally different views of the world and ultimately as a company you have to be a company that views your role in society as one of being a contributor — and tech companies can’t hide behind the fact; they must do the same.
“And unfortunately all these ride-sharing businesses, and including most of these gig economy companies, are just trying to take advantage of holes and frankly I don’t see them at all looking at their reason to be as at least having a component of ‘I’m good for the society in which I operate’. They don’t. They just simply don’t care.
“That’s a dilemma we have as consumers, because on the one hand we like the fact that it’s cheap. But we wish that people could all have a decent living.”
Whether US companies will be forced into a less exploitative relationship with their US workers remains to be seen.
Tluszcz’s view is that it will need some kind of government intervention for these types of companies to rethink how their models operate and who they are impacting.
“Tech companies frankly have an equal amount of responsibility to be great corporate citizens. And right now it feels — particularly because many of these tech companies are born in the US — it almost feels like this Americanism about them says I don’t have to be a good corporate citizen. I’m going to take advantage of the world for me and my shareholders,” he says.
“I’m a capitalist but I do think there’s some moral guidance you have to have about the business you’re building. And the US tech companies, around the world — certainly in Europe — are being highly criticized… Where is your moral compass? And unfortunately, today, sitting here, you have to say they lost it.”
Update: A Lyft spokesperson has now emailed the following statement in response to our request for comment: “Drivers are an integral part of Lyft’s success. An ever-growing number of individuals around the country are using Lyft as a flexible way to earn income, and we will continue to engage with our driver community to help them succeed. We have not yet reviewed this study in detail, but an initial review shows some questionable assumptions.” | – A new report from the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research found a full 30% of Uber and Lyft drivers are actually losing money while working due to costs associated with the job. The Guardian reports the situation isn't much better for the other 70%, as the median profit for drivers for the two ride-share companies is just $3.37 per hour before taxes. In fact, researchers found 74% of drivers are earning less than their state's minimum wage. “This business model is not currently sustainable,” says Stephen Zoepf, co-author of report. "And the drivers are essentially subsidizing it by working for very low wages.” Researchers surveyed over 1,100 drivers and analyzed vehicle cost data, including insurance, repairs, and fuel. “It tells you that it’s a great place if you’re a company," the CEO of Mangrove Capital Partners, which has compared the gig economy to sweatshops, tells TechCruch. "It’s really a poor place to be an employee or be a worker.” A report last year found just 4% of Uber drivers last longer than a year, NPR reports. The current report found a median earning for drivers of 59 cents per mile and median cost of 30 cents per mile resulting in an average driver profit of $661 per month. “It’s quite possible that drivers don’t realize quite how much they are spending," Zoepf tells the Guardian. While the report raises further concerns about labor standards and the rights of ride-share drivers, Uber calls it "deeply flawed," and Lyft says it made "some questionable assumptions." |
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer Charles (Chuck) Ellis SchumerJim Jordan dismissive of GOP compromise immigration bill Schumer calls for Trump administration to appoint 'czar' to oversee family reunification Donald Trump Jr. headlines Montana Republican convention MORE (D-N.Y.) says he told President Trump that his decision to fire FBI Director James Comey was a "big mistake."
"Earlier this afternoon President Trump called me and informed me he was firing Director Comey," Schumer told reporters on Tuesday. "I told the president, 'Mr. President, with all due respect, you are making a big mistake.’ ”
He added that Trump didn't "really respond" to his comment.
Trump fired Comey on Tuesday based on the recommendation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions Jefferson (Jeff) Beauregard SessionsHillicon Valley: Justices uphold Trump travel ban | Tech's response | Accused NSA leaker enters guilty plea | Dems press for more info on OPM breach | Senators press Trump to uphold ZTE ban | New hacking threat to satellites Chelsea Clinton knocks Sessions over remark on child separations Sessions quips about family separation during speech to conservative group MORE and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters.
Trump wrote in a letter to Comey that the FBI has to restore "public trust and confidence."
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Republican senators largely defended Comey's termination . Senate Majority Whip(R-Texas) pointed out the FBI director "serves at the pleasure of the president."
Schumer said that the "first question" for the Trump administration is why the president decided to fire Comey now. The FBI is investigating Russia's meddling in the 2016 White House race, as well as any connections between Trump's campaign and Moscow.
"Were these investigations getting too close to home for the president?" Schumer asked during his quickly scheduled press conference.
Schumer also linked Comey's firing to the ouster of former acting Attorney General Sally Yates and reiterated his call for the Department of Justice to appoint a special prosecutor for the probe into the 2016 election.
"This is part of a deeply troubling pattern from the Trump administration," Schumer said. "This does not seem to be a coincidence."
Democrats have called for months for the Department of Justice to appoint a special counsel, arguing someone appointed by the president would face political pressure.
Schumer added that if Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, refuses to appoint a special prosecutor, "every American will rightly suspect that the decision to fire Director Comey was part of a coverup."
"This investigation must be run as far away as possible from this White House," he said. ||||| "Today we'll no doubt hear calls for a new investigation, which could only serve to impede the current work being done," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says. | Getty McConnell rejects calls for special prosecutor Most Republicans give President Donald Trump a pass for the sudden firing of the FBI director.
Republicans are giving President Donald Trump a pass for his surprise decision to fire FBI Director James Comey, even though a number of GOP senators appeared uncomfortable defending the president’s timing amid a brewing investigation into his administration’s ties to Russia.
After a flurry of GOP statements Tuesday night criticizing Trump for axing Comey so suddenly, there were no new Republican calls on Wednesday for a special prosecutor or select committee to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential elections or possible collusion with the Trump campaign. In fact, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) on Wednesday forcefully rejected calls for an independent prosecutor or commission.
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Though senators did ask for a fuller accounting of why Comey was fired, Republicans by and large defended Trump against a Democratic firestorm of criticism.
"Today we'll no doubt hear calls for a new investigation, which could only serve to impede the current work being done," McConnell said on the Senate floor, referring to the Senate Intelligence Committee's probe of Russia's election meddling.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, meanwhile, has been silent about thee firing since news of it broke. On Wednesday afternoon, his office was still refusing to provide comment, though Ryan is expected to address the matter during a Fox News interview at 6 p.m.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer led the Democratic Party's calls for a special prosecutor calls and demanded that McConnell call an all-senators closed briefing with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, reacts to the firing of FBI Director James Comey by President Donald Trump on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 10, 2017. | AP Photo
But Republicans GOP are putting their faith in the Senate Intelligence Committee and career FBI investigators to conduct investigations that they say will not be partisan in nature. Comey's sudden dismissal, they said, should not affect the work of the Senate intelligence panel or the FBI.
“How a special prosecutor is selected, no one is going to be content with that process either,” said Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, in an interview. “The career folks in the FBI are still the ones running the investigation. Let’s not besmirch all the career folks in the FBI for a transition that’s happening at the top.”
Senators said the Intelligence Committee would begin to produce results more quickly to reassure the public. Numerous reports have suggested that the panel is moving slowly and is understaffed for an investigation of this magnitude, but Republicans say the committee’s progress will soon be apparent.
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“The Intelligence Committee is at a critical stage in our investigation. We’ve made a great deal of progress in the last month. I'm encouraging the chairman to have more public hearings so that that would be evident to the public,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). "The public will realize that we truly are following the evidence wherever it may lead.”
The biggest exception to Republicans’ defense of the current investigatory trajectory came from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who testily repeated the need for a “special committee” when asked about Comey. Asked in an interview why no new Republicans were joining him, McCain replied: “I neither know nor care.”
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, reacts to President Donald Trump's decision to fire FBI Director James Comey on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 10, 2017. | AP Photo
“I’ve seen special prosecutors succeed and I’ve seen them fail. I prefer a select committee. I don't know how many times I’ve had to say it and I’m sorry if I’m a little abrupt with you. I believe we need a select committee. I believe we need a select committee,” McCain said.
McCain wasn't alone. Two vulnerable House Republicans from swing districts, Reps. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.) and Barbara Comstock (R-Va.), joined McCain's call for a special committee. Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), a fierce critic of the president, also tweeted that he was "reviewing legislation to establish an independent commission on Russia."
Centrist Republican leader Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.) also suggested he was open to a select panel.
“Director Comey always struck me as a decent and honorable man who was put in an extremely difficult situation," Dent said. "His firing by President Trump is both confounding and troubling, and it is now harder to resist calls for an independent investigation or select committee."
Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and John Thune (R-S.D.) all expressed alarm at the sudden dismissal of Comey, which blindsided almost everyone in the Capitol. But most Republicans emphatically rejected Schumer’s suggestion that the Trump administration could be trying to cover up damning results of the Russia investigation.
"It's a phony narrative that [Trump] did this somehow to squelch the investigation into Russia,” said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas). “If you assume that, this strikes me as a lousy way to do it. All it does is heighten the attention given to the issue.”
Most Republicans joined the White House in blaming Democrats for crying foul after piling on Comey for his handling of the 2016 election and probes into Hillary Clinton’s emails. They said it was Trump's prerogative to fire Comey and praised him for doing so given the bipartisan criticism of the former director.
Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) said Comey's "days were numbered," while Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) praised Trump for acting "decisively."
“He’s said in order to maintain confidence in the FBI, we needed a new director. And I would say that would be as nonpolitical of a decision you can make,” Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa.) said of Trump.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., quickly reacts to questions about FBI Director James Comey's firing by President Donald Trump early Wednesday on May 10, 2017. | AP Photo
Democrats started to retaliate to the firing on Wednesday. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said Democrats would invoke an obscure rule that bans committees from meeting for more than two hours after the Senate goes into session, though the hearing adjourned before she could do so.
Republicans said Democrats were contradicting their own previous criticisms of Comey by lighting into Trump and inhibiting the Senate's work.
“We can argue about when it should or shouldn’t have happened, but clearly there was bipartisan support for it. We have Democrats in the past who have called for this,” Thune said.
But some Republicans admitted that they probably would be reacting far differently manner had President Barack Obama sacked Comey under similar circumstances.
“That might be true,” said Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.).
“Role reversal is a way of life around here,” conceded Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.)
Rachael Bade, John Bresnahan and Elana Schor contributed to this report. ||||| President Trump early Wednesday said the new FBI director will do a better job than former Director James Comey, whom the president fired a day earlier.
"James Comey will be replaced by someone who will do a far better job, bringing back the spirit and prestige of the FBI," the president tweeted Wednesday.
James Comey will be replaced by someone who will do a far better job, bringing back the spirit and prestige of the FBI. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 10, 2017
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The president also said the former FBI director had lost the "confidence" of nearly everyone in Washington and predicted people would be "thanking" him for his decision.
"Comey lost the confidence of almost everyone in Washington, Republican and Democrat alike," Trump tweeted. "When things calm down, they will be thanking me!"
Comey lost the confidence of almost everyone in Washington, Republican and Democrat alike. When things calm down, they will be thanking me! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 10, 2017
The president on Tuesday fired Comey, who had been leading the investigation into potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, which is suspected of having played a role in influencing the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
The dismissal came in a signed letter from Trump to Comey that said it was time for a "new beginning" at the nation's "crown jewel of law enforcement."
The move shocked Washington and sparked outrage from Democrats, who said the president was trying to shut down the FBI's investigation.
Trump has in the past offered praise for Comey's actions.
He said in the fall that it "took a lot of guts" for Comey to send the Oct. 28 letter to Congress regarding Hillary Clinton Hillary Rodham ClintonMcAuliffe touts buildup of cyber defenses in the states Senate GOP shifts focus to Lynch Biden on current political climate: 'We are better than this' MORE's use of a private email server "in light of the kind of opposition he had where they're trying to protect her from criminal prosecution." | – The critics have weighed in on President Trump's firing of the FBI chief, generally with unflattering comparisons to Richard Nixon. But what does Trump himself say? "James Comey will be replaced by someone who will do a far better job, bringing back the spirit and prestige of the FBI," he tweeted Wednesday morning. And he predicted the move will be validated: "Comey lost the confidence of almost everyone in Washington, Republican and Democrat alike," he wrote. "When things calm down, they will be thanking me!" The president also cast Democrats as hypocrites for suddenly having Comey's back. They've said "some of the worst things" about him, "but now they play so sad!" he tweeted. Trump struck a similar theme in a tweet Tuesday night, in which he seems to have christened a new nickname for the Senate minority leader. "Cryin' Chuck Schumer stated recently, 'I do not have confidence in him (James Comey) any longer.' Then acts so indignant." Schumer, for his part, said the firing makes it all the more important to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Russian interference in the election. And he told Trump the move was a "big mistake," per the Hill. |
In business, the cloud model is rapidly gaining popularity as a way for companies to outsource computing chores to avoid the costs and headaches of running their own data centers — simply tap in, over the Web, to computer processing and storage without owning the machines or operating software.
Amazon has thousands of corporate customers, from Pfizer and Netflix to legions of start-ups, whose businesses often live on Amazon Web Services. Those reporting service troubles included Foursquare, a location-based social networking site; Quora, a question-and-answer service; Reddit, a news-sharing site; and BigDoor, which makes game tools for Web publishers.
The problems companies reported varied, but included being unable to access data, service interruptions and sites being shut down.
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Amazon has data centers around the world, but the current problems have come from its big center in Northern Virginia, near Dulles airport. Amazon’s Web page on the status of its cloud services said on Friday that matters were improving but were still not resolved. A company spokeswoman said the updates would be Amazon’s only comment for now.
Big companies, that have decided to put crucial operations on Amazon computers are apt to pay up for the equivalent of computing insurance, analysts say. Netflix, the movie rental site, has become a large customer of the Amazon cloud. Most of its Web technology — customer movie queues, search tools and the like — runs in Amazon data centers.
Netflix said it had sailed through the last couple of days unscathed. “That’s because Netflix has taken full advantage of Amazon Web Services’ redundant cloud architecture,” which insures against technical malfunctions in any one location, said Steve Swasey, a Netflix spokesman.
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BigDoor, a 20-employee start-up in Seattle, was knocked down by Amazon’s travails. It had backup and recovery services with Amazon, said Keith Smith, the chief executive, but only at Amazon’s data center in Virginia. “There’s always a trade-off,” Mr. Smith said, noting the expenses and developer time that would have been required to do more.
By Friday evening, most services at BigDoor, which makes game and rewards features for online publishers, were back up, but its Web site was still down.
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The long-term toll to cloud computing, if any, is uncertain. Corporate cloud computing is expected to grow rapidly, by more than 25 percent a year, to $55.5 billion by 2014, IDC estimates.
Major technology suppliers are aggressively promoting different cloud offerings — some emphasizing a utility-style service, like Amazon, and others focusing more on selling big companies the hardware and software to more efficiently juggle computing workloads. The latter use the cloud technology, but companies own and control them — so-called private clouds.
The Amazon interruption, said Lew Moorman, chief strategy officer of Rackspace, a specialist in data center services, was the computing equivalent of an airplane crash. It is a major episode with widespread damage. But airline travel, he noted, is still safer than traveling in a car — analogous to cloud computing being safer than data centers run by individual companies.
“Every day, inside companies all over the world, there are technology outages,” Mr. Moorman said. “Each episode is smaller, but they add up to far more lost time, money and business.”
The Amazon setback, he said, should prove to be a learning experience. “We all have an interest in Amazon handling this well,” said Mr. Moorman, whose company is a competitor in the cloud business. ||||| Written By Mark Hinkle
To the tune of American Pie, with apologies to Don McLean…
I can still remember
How that cloud used to make me smile.
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people dance
And, maybe, they’d be happy for a while.
But April 21st made me shiver
With every Tweet the Clouderati did deliver.
Bad news on the doorstep;
I couldn’t take one more step.
I can’t remember if I cried
When I read about when the data center died,
But something touched me deep inside
The day the cloud died.
After all the ballyhoo about cloud computing delivered by Amazon (New York Times, Netflix and countless others) it sent ripples through the tech community to see favorite tech sites Reddit, Quora, and FourSquare offline on Thursday, due to an outage for the Amazon EC2 service at the company’s Northern Virginia data center. It’s doubtful that Amazon Web Services CTO Werner Vogels was pleased to see his IT prognosis, “everything fails all the time. We lose whole datacenters!” proven right.
You might think the private cloud computing community would get a little bit of satisfaction out of seeing the Amazon outage, and admittedly, it’s not the worst thing that happened for those of us that develop cloud computing software. However, we believe that the success of the public cloud will help will drive private cloud adoption. Though the outage probably did little to help the cloud computing industry as a whole, it’s our sincere hope that it in the long term it illustrates the need for proper planning and design, not a condemnation of cloud computing in general.
The problem that was brought to light by the Amazon outages wasn’t that public clouds are unreliable, but rather that cloud computing isn’t a proxy for good architecture and planning. One factor needed for good design is an understanding of how that cloud is implemented, so you can address failures in your cloud strategy. Having some control of your infrastructure and design can help insure you understand your cloud architecture completely.
George Reese from enStratus astutely points out in this tweet that there are four levels of cloud redundancy: virtual resource, availability zone, region, and cloud. If your cloud fails it’s not solely the fault of your cloud provider or software.
Scott Sanchez also notes in his CloudNod blog that some cloud users were affected because they chose not to utilize the resources needed for managing a cloud for high availability:
As I blogged yesterday, many of the higher profile sites that were down yesterday simply chose to ignore the options available to them today and instead chose to point the finger at Amazon instead of looking in the mirror. Lots of reasons why they prefer finger to mirror… cost, time, skill, or all of the above.
BigDoor CEO, Keith Smith voiced his criticism for Amazon and faulted them for a lack of transparency.
We’ve managed to find workarounds to the technical challenges. But it was disconcerting to us that Amazon’s otherwise stellar system was being marred. Not so much by a temporary technical issue, rather by what seemed like an unwillingness to embrace transparency.
That’s brings me to the second takeaway from the Amazon outage: it’s not just about better planning and architecture but about transparency in the services in software you use to manage the cloud.
As you start planning for your cloud computing infrastructure it is important that you consider not only public cloud providers but also cloud computing infrastructure built on transparently developed open source software that you implement with the best practices.
Mark Hinkle is VP of Community for Cloud.com, a provider of cloud software for the data center. | – Amazon still hasn't fully resolved the massive computer glitch that has brought down or slowed websites large and small, but one thing is clear: “This is a wake-up call for cloud computing,” an industry analyst tells the New York Times. “It will force a conversation in the industry.” With cloud computing, companies pay to use the huge computer servers of others, and Amazon has emerged as a leader in a field expected to grow to $55.5 billion by 2014. But this week's problems at Amazon's northern Virginia data center highlight the risks. Specifically, companies will need to more carefully assess which information goes to the clouds and which stays in the home office. They also may need to pony up more money for what amounts to cloud insurance by having data spread out over different sites. In a Forbes blog post headlined "The Day the Cloud Died," Eric Savitz hopes Amazon's mess "illustrates the need for proper planning and design, not a condemnation of cloud computing in general." |
Couple with Down syndrome fights for parenting dream
Updated
A young couple with Down syndrome say they are ready for babies and marriage, despite the pleas from their concerned parents, who doubt their children are emotionally and physically ready.
All parents want to see their children marry happily and start a family. But when the couple has Down syndrome, the situation is profoundly complex.
Michael Cox and Taylor Anderton have been dating for almost two years and engaged for one.
The Queensland couple burst into the national spotlight in May when an ABC news video about their romance was viewed online more than 13 million times.
Michael and Taylor's parents have recognised the pair are happy together, but said they cannot support their dream of starting a family.
"Taylor and Michael want to get married and have children and that makes me feel very worried, apprehensive and concerned," Taylor's mother, Catherine Musk, told Australian Story.
"It's not going to happen; it can't happen."
The parents have raised their children to believe they can achieve their dreams, but now they worry they have fostered unrealistic expectations.
"I don't see parenthood being something that they're going to achieve, or really they probably should achieve," Michael's father Simon Cox said.
"It would be very difficult being a child whose parents both had Down syndrome and couldn't have a job and couldn't drive a car and couldn't understand maths homework and those sorts of things."
Michael and Taylor have agreed to delay their wedding, but remain determined to eventually have children.
"We want to have four kids," Michael said.
"We're going to have three daughters and one son.
"It's not that hard to have a kid. I know that some people say it's all about hard work but it's not — it's all about love and compassion that you have for your child."
'Their bodies, their choice'
Disability advocates said the decision on parenthood should rest with the couple.
Queensland Advocacy Incorporated director Michelle O'Flynn said people with disabilities were entitled to "bodily integrity".
Down syndrome Q and A
What is Down syndrome?
People with Down syndrome have 47 chromosomes in their cells instead of 46. They have an extra chromosome 21, which is why Down syndrome is also sometimes known as trisomy 21. It is unknown why this happens and it can occur across all ethnic and social groups.
How many people have Down syndrome?
One of every 700 to 900 babies born worldwide will have Down syndrome, although this number is lower in Australia with about 270 babies born each year with Down syndrome. About 70 per cent of babies with Down syndrome are born to mothers under 35.
What are the health issues?
Often lower general immunity which makes them more susceptible to infections and common illnesses. They also have a higher than average incidence of heart and respiratory conditions.
Can a couple with Down syndrome have children?
It is often difficult for a couple with Down syndrome to conceive a child due to low fertility in the male and lack of ovulation in the female and the likelihood of entering menopause early.
Will a couple with Down syndrome have a baby with Down syndrome?
If a woman with Down syndrome does fall pregnant, the chance of her having a child with Down syndrome or trisomy 21 is about 50-50. Data on instances is rare.
Source: Down Syndrome Australia, Down Syndrome Association Queensland and medical geneticist Dr Michael Gattas from Brisbane Genetics
"People … like Michael and Taylor are certainly entitled to the freedom to do with their bodies as they wish and that includes reproduction," she said.
"They have the same rights as everybody else. The fact that they have a disability doesn't diminish that."
Ms O'Flynn said rather than stand in the couple's way, it would be better to direct energy and resources into helping them fulfil their goal.
"We don't ask other parents in the community: 'are you good enough to raise your child?', and this shouldn't be prejudging how a person with an intellectual impairment parents their children," she said.
Feeling out of their depth, Michael and Taylor's families sought professional guidance on how to manage their fears and the couple's expectations.
"How can I stop it?" Ms Musk said.
"Do I go talk to a specialist, do I talk to a GP and see what the options are? I don't know — I don't know what our rights are and what her rights are."
Ms O'Flynn said the parents could attempt to secure an order for sterilisation.
"It is really something completely abhorrent to most of us," she said.
"I would say that they would have no chance of winning that because it's quite likely that Michael and Taylor would be proven to have capacity."
Medical geneticist Michael Gattas from Brisbane Genetics said the chances of a couple with Down syndrome falling pregnant were rare and he had never seen a case at his practice.
He said if a couple with Down syndrome were to fall pregnant, they would have about a 50-50 chance of having a child with Down syndrome.
Dr Gattas said data on the number of Down syndrome children born from parents who have the condition was slim.
Genetic Health Queensland director Julie McGaughran said if both parents had Down syndrome, there was a "high chance" in each pregnancy that a child will have Down syndrome.
Parents left to 'pick up the pieces'
Michael and Taylor said they were confident they would make great parents.
But their parents said they worried about the responsibility that would fall on them if Taylor and Michael did start a family.
"The advocates will tell us that we should just allow Michael and Taylor to have the same rights as their siblings and we just don't agree," Mr Cox said.
"They're not the ones picking up the pieces."
Taylor's stepfather Gavin Musk said it was likely he and the other parents would become the "grandparents playing a major role in the upbringing of that child".
"Then we've got to say: 'do we want to be in a position to do that?', because we are not going to be around forever to make those decisions," he said.
Michael and Taylor's parents said they did not want to force their children to change their plans.
"It's really important we don't get too panicky because I get frightened that the kids are going to feel like we're sitting on the other side of the fence," Michael's mother, Nikki Cox, said.
"I'm hoping that as they grow and as they learn they come to understand some of the things that we understand about the issue."
"Rather than be the ones to tell them: 'this is what's best for you', bring them along with us and see if we can get them to come to that same conclusion. So that decision is theirs — they own that then."
Never giving up on the dream
Michael's father said the families chose to talk to Australian Story as they confronted their dilemma to help others facing the same complex issues.
"If by telling the story we can, as the six of us, uncover things that we need to learn and if one other family can benefit from this experience it's going to be fabulous," Mr Cox said.
Michael and Taylor, however, are not ready to give up their dream.
"I know that their heart is in the right place, but being over-protective is strictly not on with your child, even if they have a disability or not," Michael said.
"I know that me and Taylor have the skills to be married and to start our own family."
Watch Australian Story's "Tough Love".
Topics: disabilities, human-interest, relationships, family-and-children, marriage, brisbane-4000
First posted ||||| Gammy, a baby born with Down's Syndrome, is held by his surrogate mother Pattaramon Janbua at a hospital in Chonburi province August 3, 2014.
SYDNEY (Reuters) - The Australian biological parents of twins caught up in a surrogacy scandal in Thailand wanted both babies but the surrogate mother threatened to involve the police and they feared she would keep both children, they said on Sunday.
David and Wendy Farnell were speaking publicly for the first time since the story broke more than a week ago of 7-month-old baby Gammy, who has Down's syndrome and is being cared for by his surrogate mother in Thailand.
The couple told Australian television they felt they had little choice but to leave Thailand with Gammy's healthy sister.
"We wanted to bring him with us," David Farnell, 56, told the Nine Network’s 60 Minutes program.
They returned to Australia with Gammy’s sister Pipah as the surrogate mother Pattaramon Janbua had told them “if we try to take our little boy, she’s going to get the police and she’s going to come and take our little girl… and she’s going to keep both of the babies,” he said.
The couple have been criticized for apparently rejecting the boy, who also has a hole in his heart and is being treated for a lung infection in a Thai hospital.
60 Minutes said the couple were not paid for the interview.
Pattaramon said doctors, the surrogate agency and the baby’s parents had known that Gammy was disabled when she was four months pregnant but had not told her until the seventh month.
She said she had feared she would be asked to abort him but would have refused due to her Buddhist beliefs.
The Farnells said they were angry that the agency had not told them about the boy's condition until too late in the pregnancy to safely abort.
They said they want the baby.
The case has drawn international attention to the lack of regulation of international surrogacy and sparked calls in Australia for an overhaul of laws to cut the number of couples traveling abroad for surrogates.
Public outrage intensified last week when it became known that David Farnell was jailed in 1997 for sex offences involving three girls aged under 13.
"I have been convicted of child sex offences and I hang my head in shame for that," he told 60 Minutes, adding that he had reformed and was no longer a risk to children.
As commercial surrogacy is outlawed in Australia many couples turn to clinics in Thailand and India.
Thailand has no clear legal framework for surrogacy. Commercial surrogacy is barred by the Medical Council of Thailand but non-profit surrogacy is permitted for blood relatives, and exceptions are permitted on a case-by-case basis.
A draft law banning commercial surrogacy in Thailand has been submitted to the military government, an official of the Social Development and Human Security Ministry said on Thursday.
The Australian government has asked the Thai authorities to allow for the completion of any current commercial surrogate arrangements before introducing changes.
Hands Across the Water, an Australian-run children's charity based in Thailand, will administer the more than A$241,000 ($224,000) raised so far in an online public appeal for Gammy’s medical treatment and care.
(Reporting by Lincoln Feast in Sydney and Morag McKinnon in Perth; Editing by Lynne O'Donnell) | – Michael Cox and Taylor Anderton just want to tie the knot, have four kids, and enjoy the rest of their lives together, but their families are balking at the second part of the young Australian couple's plan. Not because they're in a Montague-and-Capulet-style feud, but because they worry Cox and Anderton—dating for nearly two years, engaged for almost one—won't be able to handle parental responsibilities, since they both have Down syndrome, Australia Story reports. "That makes me feel very worried, apprehensive, and concerned," Anderton's mom says, and Cox's dad agrees: "I don't see parenthood being something that they're going to achieve, or really they probably should achieve." He notes it would be "very difficult" for the couple to handle not only day-to-day activities such as having jobs and driving, but also parenting skills such as helping out with homework and dealing with adolescent issues. The couple gained recognition in May when a clip about them aired on ABC Australia. A geneticist tells Australia Story a couple with Down syndrome becoming pregnant is a rarity, and that if they did conceive, chances would be about 50-50 they'd have a child with Down syndrome. Michelle O'Flynn, director of Queensland Advocacy Inc., notes the couple's parents could try to block a pregnancy by getting a sterilization order, though she says they'd probably fail and that that option is "abhorrent." Disability advocates like O'Flynn say it's Cox and Anderton's right to retain "bodily integrity" and reproduce if they want. But Cox's dad dismisses that, noting, "[The advocates are] not the ones picking up the pieces." Michael Cox understands their parents' concern, noting, "Their heart is in the right place," but he says they're "overprotective." (A Nova Scotia dad calls his son's Down syndrome "beautiful.") |