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pavspatch · 1 year

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Selling to the "real fans" would be my Utopia — Gorski

ALL those fans who wanted owner Rob Gorski to leave Bower Fold have got their way. He has resigned as chairman and Stalybridge Celtic is up for sale.

The question now, is who will buy? Is anyone able to put their money where their mouth is?

In the midst of an unprecedented cost-of-living crisis, who has the funds to buy the controlling interest in a Northern Premier League club that is bound to come with an expensive price tag?

Will it prove possible to put together a supporters' co-operative? As you'll see below, that would be Rob Gorski's preferred option, but could it happen. My own experience suggests that while many people might be prepared to buy a single share for £10 or £20, far fewer would be willing to invest the kind of much sums needed for a realistic bid.

So what does the future hold? What are Rob Gorski's plans? What does he think of Celtic's current situation? Below, is a series of questions I asked him and the replies I received.

If someone wants to buy Stalybridge Celtic, how do they register an interest?

I haven't started to officially market the club externally, yet I’ve already had three parties showing an interest. I'll be asking all parties to submit their formal bids via the club’s accountants, David Lever at Warr and Co of Denton*. If they can't find his details they can also contact me directly.

In the past you've said you were prepared to consider selling Stalybridge Celtic but only to someone with the club's best interests at heart. Do you have some sort of fit-and-proper persons test lined up?

I'll perform my own due diligence on each interested party.

Most fans won't be aware of this, but I had a potential buyer from Singapore express interest about a year ago. For Rob Gorski personally, it was potentially a very tempting financial option. However, my research uncovered someone who had his own pure financial gain as his motive and he had taken over two other football clubs before only for him to close them both and capitalise on the land.

As a Celtic fan, notwithstanding potential large sums of money, I simply could not have lived with myself and so I closed that particular door.

I'll be vetting all potential new buyers to ascertain what they can bring to the club and what their motives and goals are. I'll then balance that with their financial proposal.

Do you have a price in mind? Are you looking to recoup what you've put in over the last 20 years or just a "serious" amount?

I do have figures in mind. However, I’ve already alluded to the fact that it will be an overall “package" and the intentions of the buyer that will also play a major role.

With national government changing housing legislation on building developments, I need to ensure that a potential buyer is not just going to take a 970-year lease on land worth maybe £7 to 8 million, and leave the club hoping to ground share with a Tameside neighbour.

I'll ensure there are some guarantees with regard to Celtic’s future. That will be written in to any legal document. 

While you look for a buyer, will you remain in charge or day-to-day affairs or have you stepped down and passed on the baton? If so to whom? A person, the board as a whole?

I have stepped down due to ill health. I need to have more tests and then maybe medical procedures, and that's why I stepped down, with immediate effect, a fortnight ago.

In fact, I have not been at a game for over two months now. I miss it terribly, but I have to look after myself.

Keith Smart has been taking care of everything in my absence and will continue to drive the club forward. Keith is simply an outstanding man. Professional, diligent and utterly honest.

Fans have no idea how difficult it is to run, (practically as well as financially), a non-league, part-time, football club. People like Keith and Gordon Greenwood are worth their weight in gold. I hope that other directors, who have been "less visible" step up to help them and others.

Has there been any sign of the much-talked-about fans' co-operative?

Not a word. Conceptually, that would be my Utopia — that the fans, the real fans, own Stalybridge Celtic. However, back on planet earth, Stalybridge, the town I love, is truthfully a town entering a depression that would be socially graded as D or E. Sadly, I suspect I won’t be hearing much back on that.

In your time as chairman/owner you put a lot of blood and treasure into the club and appointed a string of managers who came with an impressive pedigree. Why do think you were never able to achieve any success?

That's a question I've asked myself many times.

Jim Harvey’s kids were technically outstanding, but sadly lacking in physicality. Liam Watson was a major disappointment — his football was 20 years out of date — and Simon Haworth was shockingly negative.

So really, only Steve Burr brought good times the first time he was at Bower Fold in 2007-2011. The quality of football was a real joy with Dave Hankin burning down one wing and Steve Torpey down the other, with a really strong 16-man squad. It very nearly got us back up punching above our weight in National League North.

However, we’ve seen more and more clubs come through the pyramid with money I simply couldn't compete with. Not just Salford, Harrogate, Fylde and Fleetwood, but ones that came and went like Shaw Lane Aquaforce. All paying simply stupid money.

Stalybridge Celtic does not have an asset like Ashton United’s Cross Bar Club, which is effectively one of Hurst's pubs, or Hyde United’s 3G pitch, so the club relied on directors putting their hand in their pocket or an ever diminishing fanbase that was no longer attending due to Premier League lunchtime/early evening screenings.

Then there was covid, and of course the lack of a challenging team, which brings us back to the fact we simply couldn’t compete financially.  

Will you remain a fan or are you stepping away from football for good?

I will always remain a Stalybridge Celtic fan. I was a fan in the Seventies, I was when I lived in London and abroad, and I shall be until I die.

I remember telling Pete Dennerly, my predecessor as chairman, that I had some bad news for him back around 2007 when Ken Bates had invited me to join the Leeds United board. Pete fell silent, only for me to tell him the bad news was that I would only ever be a Celtic director and that he was stuck with me.

I respect other people who have been a director at different clubs. However, personally, I could never relate to that. It was Celtic or nobody for me. I need to look after my health first and foremost, but nothing will give me greater pleasure than buying Chris Willcock (a top man by the way) or Keith Smart, a beer after a great win on a Saturday afternoon next year.

Will Celtic avoid relegation?

I desperately hope so. When you see or hear about wages up and down the Northern Premier League, it makes you wonder how clubs stay afloat.

Without an asset to milk, or hugely disproportionate fan bases, clubs rely on directors and fans to cover ever-increasing costs and because Celtic have struggled financially off the field, it makes achieving success on it, much more difficult.

I think Chris Willcock has now got a much better quality squad than he had early doors. He effectively had to build it from scratch and he quickly realised he’d have to make a number of changes to ensure we could compete.

I’ve not been well enough to attend of late, so I've missed recent performances. However, I gather they are much improved and I sincerely hope and believe the lads can continue to improve and that they'll get that little rub of the green that will see them start to climb the table. 

*Warr and Co, 76 Manchester Road, Denton, M34 3PS — 0161 336 2222 — https://warr.co.uk

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beardedmrbean · 1 year

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Helsingin Sanomat political reporter Teemu Muhonen writes that Tuesday was a turning point in the four-party negotiations on forming a new government in Finland, when the Finns Party got through its demand that talks now focus on immigration and climate issues for the time being.

The view of the Finns Party leader Riikka Purra is that too little progress has been made on these matters and, according to the HS reporter this delay is seen within the Finns Party as a conscious choice by the National Coalition Party.

The NCP is trying to leave the most difficult disputes to the final stages of the government negotiations. Once all other issues have already been resolved, the threshold for the Finns Party or the Swedish People's Party to walk out of the talks would be very high.

The Finns Party still remembers government negotiations in 2015, when in the opinion of some party members, the Centre Party and the NCP led the party around like a puppy on a leash. On Tuesday, Purra made it clear that this time, the Finns Party will not play a mere supporting role.

HS also sees a great deal of frustration within the Swedish People's Party with the way the NCP has been handling the talks. In background briefings with Helsingin Sanomat, SPP members say that the NCP itself does not want to fight for its immigration and climate views but want to leave that battle to the Swedish People's Party.

If progress on the most difficult and controversial issues is not achieved this week, pressure on PM-designate Petteri Orpo (NCP) will naturally increase. However, he has quite safely set midsummer as the deadline for the completion of a government programme. According to Helsingin Sanomat political reporter Teemu Muhonen there is still plenty of time to make that happen.

Russia-Finland agreement terminated

Ilta-Sanomat reports a notice from the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs saying that Russia has announced termination of a bilateral agreement between Finland and Russia on military inspections.

According to a release from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Finland was informed of Russia's decision on Tuesday. The agreement is to be terminated as of 1 June.

The agreement provided for one annual Russian military assessment visit to Finland and one Finnish assessment visit to Russia in the area of the Leningrad Military District.

The agreement supplemented the Vienna Document adopted by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and was signed in 2000.

The last military inspections carried out by Russian representatives in Finland were in 2019–2021. Finland's last inspection in Russia under the terms on the agreement was in 2019.

Finland has a similar agreement with Sweden. According to Ilta-Sanomat, Russia has had no other bilateral agreements of this type.

Gifts for teachers?

Celebrations marking the end of the school year are again around the corner, and the Joensuu daily Karjalainen writes that many families are now thinking about whether or not they should get a gift for a teacher.

Ira Hietanen-Tanskanen, a lawyer at the teachers' union OAJ, told the paper that there is no rule about this, official nor unofficial.

"Under no circumstances does one have to give a gift and there is no need to stress about it," she says.

Hietanen-Tanskanen adds that many teachers are happy to just get wishes for a good summer.

"However, if you want to remember a teacher with a gift, then homemade cards are a good way to do that," she advises.

Other typical gifts are, for example, flowers, chocolate and small gift cards.

"Teachers are subject to the same rules as other civil servants, that means ordinary gifts can be accepted. On the other hand, particularly valuable gifts must be refused. It is everyone's own responsibility to judge what can be considered normal," Hietanen-Tanskanen notes.

Most of the teachers who responded to a survey on the subject by Karjalainen have a neutral or positive attitude towards the gift tradition. However, a small minority took the view that the custom of giving gifts should be stopped.

"Gifts easily put teachers and students and families in an unequal position. Children compare the gifts they have given, "compete" for the teacher's favour, even though this should not be the case," responded one teacher.

"For many children, it is a really important occasion when they have made a card themselves and excitedly give it to their teacher," another pointed out.

Cold snap

The weather forecast in Iltalehti shows plenty of warm and sunny weather around Finland on Wednesday.

Southern and central parts of the country can expect pleasant 20C–24C degree temperatures, with mostly 15C–20C in the north.

However, weather will cool on Thursday with temperatures topping at no more than 20C even in sunny parts of southern Finland.

According to the forecast, by the end of the week, daytime temperatures may to drop by as much as 10–15 degrees from the readings seen over the past few days.

#nunyas news #updates from up north

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jordanianroyals · 3 years

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The plot against Jordan's King Abdullah

By David Hearst. 14 April 2021 08:15 UTC

Abdullah fell foul of the axis of Mohammed bin Salman and Benjamin Netanyahu after refusing to go along with the Trump plan to push West Bank Palestinians into Jordan

For once, just for once, US President Joe Biden got something right in the Middle East, and I say this conscious of his abysmal record in the region.

In accepting the intelligence he was passed by the Jordanians that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was up to his ears in a plot to destabilise the rule of King Abdullah, Biden brought the scheme to a premature halt. Biden did well to do so.

His statement that the US was behind Abdullah had immediate consequences for the other partner in this scheme, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel.

While bin Salman was starving Jordan of funds (according to former Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher, the Saudis have not provided any direct bilateral assistance since 2014), Netanyahu was starving the kingdom of water.

This is water that Israel siphons off the River Jordan. Under past agreements, Israel has supplied Jordan with water, and when Jordan asks for an additional amount, Israel normally agrees without delay. Not this year: Netanyahu refused, allegedly in retaliation for an incident in which his helicopter was refused Jordanian airspace. He quickly changed his mind after a call from US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to his counterpart, Gabi Ashkenazi.

Had former US President Donald Trump still been in power, it is doubtful whether any of this would have happened.

Without Washington’s overt support, King Abdullah would now be in serious trouble: the victim of a two-pronged offensive from Saudi Arabia and Israel, his population seething with discontent, and his younger half-brother counting the days until he could take over.

The problem with Abdullah

But why were bin Salman and Netanyahu keen to put the skids under an ally like Abdullah?

Abdullah, a career soldier, is not exactly an opposition figure in the region. He of all people is not a Bashar al-Assad, Recep Tayyip Erdogan or Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Abdullah was fully signed up to the counter-revolution against the Arab Spring. Jordan joined the Saudi-led anti-Islamic State coalition, deployed aircraft to target the Houthis in Yemen, and withdrew its ambassador from Iran after the Saudi embassy in Tehran and consul in Mashhad were sacked and Saudi Arabia consequently cut diplomatic relations.

He attended the informal summit on a yacht in the Red Sea, convened to organise the fight against the influence of Turkey and Iran in the Middle East. That was in late 2015.

In January 2016, Abdullah told US congressmen in a private briefing that Turkey was exporting terrorists to Syria, a statement he denied making afterwards. But the remarks were documented in a Jordanian foreign ministry readout passed to MEE.

Jordan’s special forces trained men that Libyan general Khalifa Haftar used in his failed attempt to take Tripoli. This was the pet project of the UAE.

Abdullah also agreed with the Saudis and Emiratis on a plan to replace Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas with Mohammed Dahlan, the Emirati- and Israeli-preferred choice of successor.

Why then, should this stalwart of the cause now be considered by his Arab allies, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, an inconvenience that needs to be dealt with?

Insufficiently loyal

The answer partly lies in the psychology of bin Salman. It is not good enough to be partially signed up to his agenda. As far as he is concerned, you are either in or out.

Under Abdullah, Jordan never quite managed to be fully in. As one former Jordanian government minister told me: “Politically, Mohammed bin Salman and his father were never very close to the Hashemites. King Salman does not have any affinity to the Hashemites that his other brothers might have had. So on the political front, there is no affinity, no empathy.

“But there is also a feeling [in Riyadh] that Jordan and others should be with us or against us. So we were not completely with them on Iran. We were not completely with them on Qatar. We were not completely with them on Syria. We did what we could and I don’t think we should have gone further, but to them, that was not enough.”

Abdullah’s equivocation certainly was not enough for the intended centrepiece of the new era, Saudi Arabia's normalisation of relations with Israel.

Here, Jordan would have been directly involved and King Abdullah was having none of it. Had he gone along with the Trump plan, his kingdom - a careful balance between Jordanians and Palestinians - would have been in a state of insurrection.

In addition, Abdullah could not escape the fact that he was a Hashemite, whose legitimacy stems in part from Jordan’s role as custodian of Al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy sites in Jerusalem. This, too, was being threatened by the Al Sauds.

The importance of Aqaba

But the plan itself was regarded by both bin Salman and Netanyahu as too big to stop. I personalise this, because in both Saudi Arabia and Israel, there are experienced foreign policy and intelligence hands who appreciate how quickly this plan would have destabilised Jordan and Israel’s vulnerable eastern border.

The plan has been years in the preparation and the subject of clandestine meetings between the Saudi prince and the Israeli leader. At the centre of it lies Jordan’s sole access to the Red Sea, the strategic port of Aqaba.

The two cities of Aqaba and Ma’an were part of the kingdom of Hejaz from 1916 to 1925. In May 1925, Ibn Saud surrendered Aqaba and Ma’an and they became part of the British Emirate of Transjordan.

It would be another 40 years before the two independent countries would agree on a Jordan-Saudi border. Jordan got 19 kilometres of coastline on the Gulf of Aqaba and 6,000 square kilometres inland, while Saudi Arabia got 7,000 square kilometres of land.

For the new kid on the block, bin Salman, a prince who was always sensitive about his legitimacy, reclaiming Saudi influence over Aqaba in a big trade deal with Israel would be a big part of his claim to restoring Saudi dominance over its hinterland.

And the trade with Israel would be big. Bin Salman is spending $500bn constructing the city of Neom, which is eventually supposed to straddle Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt. Sitting at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba, the Jordanian port would be firmly in Saudi sights.

This is where Bassem Awadallah, the former chief of Jordan's royal court, comes in. Two years before he definitively broke with King Abdullah, and while he was still Jordan’s envoy to Riyadh, Awadallah negotiated the launch of something called the Saudi-Jordanian Coordination Council, a vehicle that Jordanian officials at the time said would “unblock billions of dollars” for the cash-starved Hashemite kingdom.

Awadallah promised that the council would invest billions of Saudi dollars in Jordan’s leading economic sectors, focusing on the Aqaba Special Economic Zone.

Awadallah was also close to the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohammed bin Zayed, who had his own agenda in Jordan. He wanted to ensure that the Muslim Brotherhood and the forces of political Islam were permanently eradicated from the country, something Abdullah has refused to do, although he is no supporter.

The money, of course, never materialised. Saudi support for the kingdom diminished to a trickle, and according to an informed source, Muasher, Saudi funds stopped almost completely after 2014.

The price for turning on the tap of Saudi finance was too high for Abdullah to pay. It was total subservience to Riyadh. Under this plan, Jordan would have become a satellite of Riyadh, much as Bahrain has become.

Netanyahu had his own sub-agenda in the huge trade that would flow from Neom once Saudi Arabia had formally recognised Israel.

A confirmed enemy of the Oslo plan to set up a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, Netanyahu and the Israeli right have always eyed annexation of Area C and the Jordan Valley, which comprises 60 percent of the West Bank. Under this new Nakba, the Palestinians living there, denied Israeli citizenship, would be slowly forced to move to Jordan. This could only happen under a Saudi-oriented plan, in which Jordanian workers could travel freely and work in Saudi Arabia. As it is, remittances from the Jordanian workforce in Saudi Arabia are an economic lifeblood to the bankrupt kingdom.

The money pouring into Jordan, accompanied by an essentially stateless workforce of Jordanians and Palestinians, would finally put to bed grandiose visions of a Palestinian state, and with it the two-state solution. On this, Netanyahu and bin Salman are as one: treat them as a mobile workforce, not citizens of a future state.

Hussein's favoured son

That Prince Hamzah should be seen as the means by which Jordan is enlisted to this plan represents the final irony of this bizarre tale.

If the Hashemite blood runs deep in any veins, it is surely in his. He was King Hussein’s favoured son. In a letter sent to his brother Prince Hassan in 1999, King Hussein wrote: “Hamzeh, may God give him long life, has been envied since childhood because he was close to me, and because he wanted to know all matters large and small, and all details of the history of his family. He wanted to know about the struggle of his brothers and of his countrymen. I have been touched by his devotion to his country and by his integrity and magnanimity as he stayed beside me, not moving unless I forced him from time to time to carry out some duty on occasions that did not exceed the fingers on one hand.”

Abdullah broke the agreement he made with his father on his death bed when he replaced his half-brother with his son, Hussein, as crown prince in 2004.

But if Hashemite pride in and knowledge of Jordan’s history runs deep in Hamzah, he of all princes would have soon realised the cost to Jordan of accepting bin Salman’s billions and Netanyahu’s tacit encouragement, just as his father did.

Hamzah’s friends ardently dispute they are part of this plot and downplay connections with Awadallah. Hamzah only owns up to one thing: that he is immensely concerned at how low Jordan has fallen under years of misrule. In this, Hamzah is 100 percent right.

It is clear what has to happen now. King Abdullah should finally see that he must completely overhaul the Jordanian political system, by calling for free and fair elections and abiding by their result. Only that will unite the country around him.

This is what King Hussein did when he faced challenge and revolt by Jordanian tribes in the south of the kingdom; in 1989, Hussein overhauled the political system and held the freest elections in the history of the kingdom.

The government that emerged from this process led the country safely out of one of the most difficult moments for Jordan: Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent Gulf War.

The real villains

Biden, meanwhile, should realise that letting bin Salman get away with the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has a cost.

Bin Salman did not learn anything from the episode and carried on in exactly the same way, reckless and swift, against an Arab neighbour and ally, with potentially disastrous consequences.

The new foreign policy establishment in Washington should wean itself off the notion that US allies are its friends. It should learn once and for all that the active destabilisers of the Middle East are not the cartoon villains of Iran and Turkey.

Rather, they are the closest US allies, where US forces and military technology are either based, or as in the case of Israel, inextricably intertwined: Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Israel.

Jordan, the classic buffer state, is a case in point.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

David Hearst is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He is a commentator and speaker on the region and analyst on Saudi Arabia. He was The Guardian's foreign leader writer, and was correspondent in Russia, Europe, and Belfast. He joined the Guardian from The Scotsman, where he was education correspondent.

#King Abdullah II #prince hamzah #article

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sandalaris · 4 years

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The Leverage!Community AU that I will probably never write and nobody asked for.

Let’s go steal an AU.

Under the cut because it is long

Jeff Winger

Jeff was a damn good lawyer, with just the right amount of flexible morality that let him bend the law to his whim while not being the kind of a amoral asshole that people avoided (*cough*Alan*cough*). He took white collar civil cases, the kind where the defendant was greedy or lazy or just plain stupid, and the fatalities financial in nature, all designed to keeping Jeff in the expensive life he’d become accustomed to. He was on the fast track to make junior partner when out of nowhere evidence surfaced claiming Jeff falsified his credentials. He soon finds himself disbarred and blacklisted, without even getting a chance to plead his case. Determined to get back to his old life as quickly as possible, Jeff sets off to find the culprit and hires a crew to help him. It was only supposed to be one job, no encores. No repeats... well, maybe just one more.

Britta Perry

The only thing Britta loves more than her cats is a noble cause, but there’s only so much a person can do with a picket sign and a catchy chant. She refused to give up though, going out and fighting the good fight, until she discovered she could do more behind a computer screen than she ever could on the streets. A self-proclaimed hactivist, Britta fights for the underdog even as it lands her on government wanted lists. And if she’s entirely honest, she’s more than a little proud of make such lists. She has a hard drive with the copies of each of her arrest warrants, kept like badges of honor even as she goes through and deletes them from local systems. She doesn’t have time to spend the night in jail when there’s some many other, digital places she’s needed.

She only agreed to take the Winger job because she needed the money after a hack went wrong the Croatian government seized her bank accounts and then went the extra dick mile and sent her address to the feds. She just needs to lay low, do the job, and get paid (she’ll be fine, but her cat needs his eye drops). She has no plans to form a crew, not after last time. But someone’s gotta tell this group of miss-matched criminals what’s really going on in the world.

And then later, when the number of people they keep helping continues to grow, she realizes that maybe not all causes have to be large in scale to be worth fighting for.

Abed Nadir

Abed has always related to the world best through TV, defining the people around him by roles and tropes until they fell into place. For years he dreamed of being a writer and director, but making films aren’t cheap, and Abed learns very quickly that if he wants to follow his dream he needs more than the ideas in head. People aren’t going to just see his vision when he places it in front of them, they need to be convinced, persuaded, need to like the guy selling his stories, and people don’t always like Abed. He can pretend though, pluck a character from thin air, custom made to manipulate people into giving him what he wants, opening doors and wallets. It’s a great way to make a living, addictive and exhausting at the same time, and more than enough to keep him making small indie films in his spare time. He dons new names, new people, at every turn, drawing others to him like a moth to flame. Even if he doesn’t always understand the why of people, he at least gets the how, and that’s enough to get by.

He played witness to one of Jeff’s cases, needed the inside information for a script that never got off the ground. He slipped though, started talking about film and shows and forgot to be George Carmicheal from Long Island and became Abed Nadir, failed movie producer and college drop out. And the thing is, Jeff still liked him, maybe even liked him better as Abed than he did as George. Maybe that’s why he showed up at Jeff’s doorstep, uninvited and unannounced, after hearing about his disbarment. Maybe that’s why he volunteered his real name and didn’t pretend to smile or nod or do any of the things he knows he needs to do to make people like him. Even with the others showed up and he placed them in their likely roles, he didn’t don a mask. For the first time in a long time, he was just Abed, and that wasn’t just enough for them, it was preferred.

Annie Edison

Annie had a plan. Perfect grades leading to the perfect school leading to the perfect life. Her extracurricular were carefully selected, the exact balance of brainy and physical to appeal to the Ivy League schools the Edisions’ had their eye on, all mulled over and weighed to give her the best advantage. Annie was a junior in high school when she OD’d on the little “helper” pills her mom and dad had talked her doctor into prescribing her. Her parents refused to send her to rehab, citing the shame it would bring to their family and dismissing her claims of addiction as attention seeking behavior. She begged and pleaded and bargained and finally they caved on lessening her ridged schedule, making time for her to “destress” in between padding her college applications. Meditation didn’t work, but flipping grown men over her shoulder did and her self-defense class was augmented with MMA and kickboxing. And when the acceptance letters started pouring in Annie let out a sigh of relief, thinking it was over now that she reached the goal. She was wrong.

The pressure didn’t stop so Annie upped her training, which lead to her showing her dormmate a few moves, which lead to helping out a classmate with a stalker problem, which turned into a couple of private security gigs, which got her noticed by a man looking for someone to help retrieve some property that may not have been his, and he passed on her name to someone who offered a lot of money for... well, she’s not really at liberty to say. Annie likes being the best, likes the praise and the testing of her carefully honed skills. But the drive to be the very best at what she does led her to taking more and more questionable jobs and fewer and fewer classes, making up excuses about why she doesn’t come home anymore until she stops all together, and before she realizes it she’s got a very specific skill set and rather impressive, yet bloody, resume that only certain kinds of people would be interested in seeing and all those carefully laid plans from all those years ago have long been flushed down the drain.

Troy Barnes

Troy likes to drive, likes the escape of it and the way no one’s around to tell him what he’s doing wrong with his life or “real men" don’t do those things. Likes the thrill of going fast when night has fallen and the streets are bare of regular people, pitting himself against another person who’s like him, trying to outrun that gnawing pit in their stomach that’s constantly telling them they can’t cut it.

Troy’s not made for crime, not the real kind. Doesn’t think he’d make a very good criminal with his hidden soft heart and lack of long-term planning skills. But when Nana Barnes gets sick, driving is what puts food on table and covers the hospital bills. Its what gets him contacted by a down-on-his-luck lawyer looking a guy to provide a quick get away.

He’s not needed at every job in the beginning, but they make roles for him anyways and he finds his own ways to help. He’s always been good with his hands, mending the broken equipment around him and making improvements to his car beyond what the original designs intended. Passing the time creating small, playful gadgets that the others oo and ahh over. He likes to be useful, sewing FBI jackets and making the crew a meal after a long job, creating for Jeff his fake miracle and putting together an EMP spur of the moment when they realize they need one.

“You’re a regular renaissance man,” they tell him, and they don’t comment when he cries at meeting the clients or mentions how he always wanted to learn to dance, and Troy that it must be a good thing because he’s never felt so comfortable staying put before.

Shirley Bennet

Shirley is retired. She found the Lord and put her sinful past firmly behind her. She doesn’t even miss it. Really. Not one bit. No one would suspect that the sweet little housewife with a penchant for baking can crack a safe in under a minute or that she’s intimately familiar with the security systems employed by the most secure museums. People don’t know how her fingers itch in crowds for the fat wallets and shiny valuables that keep catching her eye, or see the frown of disapproval that crosses her face every time some half-brained car chase ends with the perp getting caught. She’s a good wife and mother, and doesn’t entertain such ideas anymore.

She met Jeffery once before, when he was trying to build a plausible alternate for the prosecution’s case and accidentally stumbled across what Shirley had thought was one of her better heists. She never did figure out how he put the pieces together so quickly and he never put her name on an official documents (she checked. Courthouses really should invest in better security), but after that they kept on eye on each other. And when he comes to her with a job offer, well, she tried to tell him she was out of the game, but that boy can just be so darn convincing when he wants to be and its not like its hurting anybody.

Pierce Hawthorne

Pierce has a lot of money, a lot of ex-wives, and next to zero friends. He’s fairly certain he doesn’t need them, after all he’s made it this long without any, no matter how many times Winger argues on the stand that his loneliness and maladjusted psyche due to a “traumatic childhood” are what causes him to make such poor decisions that lead to such expensive lawsuits. He still manages to get him a Not Guilty verdict or argues with him into settling out of court, and no matter how many times Winger swears this is the last time he’s going to defend him, he still answers when Pierce calls. So when Jeff says he needs money to pay a group of criminals to break into his old work building and find out who got him disbarred, Pierce offers without even stopping to think about it. Doesn’t even call it loan and just hands over the cash like he’s passing the salt.

Breaking the law isn’t cheap, apparently. Although the payouts make up for it most of the time. But the set up, the equipment and the materials, all those upfront costs that someone needs to front, are enough to make most people squirm and Pierce covers them without comment. They always pay him back anyways, and after a couple months, they’ve made enough that they don’t need him anymore. They still invite him though, to the meetings and the plans, making room for him in their little group and giving him a place at the table.

They aren’t his friends, can’t be because Pierce doesn’t need any, but he think he might want some anyways.

#Community #the greendale seven #Jeff Winger #Britta Perry #Abed Nadir #Annie Edison #Troy Barnes #Shirley Bennet #Pierce Hawthorne #Leverage AU #I'd gone back and forth on switching Shirley and Abed's roles #but Abed fits grifter better than Shirley does #even if I think she'd be good at it #and I love the idea of Shirley knowing just how to flirt to knock men and women off their game #but the idea of using Abed's skills at playing roles and him not really being accepted as himself until the team won out in the end

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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Leaked documents reveal Huawei’s secret operations to build North Korea’s wireless network

https://wapo.st/2JLjoPz

Leaked documents reveal Huawei’s secret operations to build North Korea’s wireless network

By Ellen Nakashima, Gerry Shih and John Hudson | Published July 22 at 6:54 AM ET | Washington Post | Posted July 22, 2019 |

Huawei Technologies Co., the Chinese tech giant embroiled in President Trump’s trade war with China and blacklisted as a national security threat, secretly helped the North Korean government build and maintain the country’s commercial wireless network, according to internal documents obtained by The Washington Post and people familiar with the arrangement.

Huawei partnered with a Chinese state-owned firm, Panda International Information Technology Co. Ltd., on a variety of projects there spanning at least eight years, according to past work orders, contracts and detailed spreadsheets taken from a database that charts the company’s telecom operations worldwide. The arrangement made it difficult to discern Huawei’s involvement.

The spreadsheets were provided to The Post by a former Huawei employee who considered the information to be of public interest. The former employee spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing a fear of retribution. Two additional sets of documents were shared by others with a desire to see the material made public. They also spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Taken together, the revelations raise questions about whether Huawei, which has used American technology in its components, violated U.S. export controls to furnish equipment to North Korea, where the isolated regime has faced extensive international sanctions over its nuclear weapons program and human rights abuses.

The Commerce Department, which declined to comment, has investigated alleged links between Huawei and North Korea since 2016 but has never publicly connected the two. Its probe remains active, however. Separately, the Justice Department has charged Huawei with bank fraud and violations of U.S. sanctions on Iran. The company has pleaded not guilty.

In a statement, Huawei said it “has no business presence” in North Korea. Spokesman Joe Kelly declined, however, to address detailed questions, including whether Huawei had conducted business there in the past, either directly or indirectly. He did not dispute the authenticity of documents shared with the company, though he also declined to verify them.

“Huawei is fully committed to comply with all applicable laws and regulations in the countries and regions where we operate, including all export control and sanction laws and regulations” of the United Nations, United States and European Union, the statement says.

A spokeswoman for Panda Group, the state-owned parent company for Panda International, declined to comment.

Discovery of a link between North Korea and Huawei, whose activities, ambitions and suspected ties to the Chinese government have alarmed U.S. and European security officials, is likely to fuel even deeper suspicion among Western nations contemplating whether to ban the company, in full or in part, from their next-generation 5G wireless networks. It comes, too, at a particularly vulnerable moment for the Trump administration, which remains at odds with Beijing over trade, and as the president seeks to restart nuclear negotiations with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

“Just the fact that you’ve got a Huawei-North Korea connection is bound to raise political and diplomatic hackles in Washington, if nothing else,” said Evans J.R. Revere, a former State Department official focused on East Asia. “Just when you thought the U.S.-China relationship couldn’t get more complicated, and the U.S.-North Korea relationship couldn’t get more complicated, you have this instance of China and North Korea working together to enable Korea to make strides in an area of potentially sensitive technology.”

A current senior State Department official, who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information, summarized the administration’s frustration.

“All of this fits into a general concern we have about corporate responsibility and a company like Huawei that is not trustworthy because of its company culture and numerous incidents indicating a willingness to evade or outright violate laws,” the official said. “Working with regimes like North Korea, who deprive individuals on a regular basis of their basic human rights, raises concern.”

SECRET VISIT TO CHINA

Since its founding in 1987 by a former engineer with the People’s Liberation Army, Huawei has grown from a humble phone switch maker into an icon of China’s technological prowess — the world’s largest telecom equipment manufacturer. Today, it is a “national champion” promoted by Beijing and does business in more than 170 countries.

Before 2008, North Korea struggled to find multinational companies willing to build a 3G network in such a risky business environment. That ended with the creation of the wireless provider Koryolink, which emerged from a secret visit in 2006 by Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il, to Huawei’s headquarters in Shenzhen, China.

“This was the time that confirmed not only the top leadership’s interest in dealing with Huawei but pretty much revealed a choice of Huawei as the primary supplier of technology,” said Alexandre Mansourov, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, who in 2011 wrote about North Korea’s digital transformation. “They decided to work with Huawei from that time on.”

Koryolink was built through a 2008 joint venture of Orascom Telecom Holding, an Egyptian firm, and the state-owned Korea Post and Telecommunications Corp. Together, they were called CHEO Technology. Attempts to reach CHEO were unsuccessful.

A key player was Panda International, part of the storied electronics conglomerate Panda Group that has sometimes served China’s foreign policy. In 2001, for instance, during a visit to Havana, China’s president at the time, Jiang Zemin, gave Cuba 1 million Panda-made TV sets and introduced a company representative to Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who “excitedly shook hands and embraced” him, the firm recounts on its website.

Huawei worked closely with Panda, using it as the conduit to provide North Korea with base stations, antennas and other equipment needed to launch Koryolink, internal documents show. For years, Huawei and Panda employees worked out of an inexpensive hotel near Kim Il Sung Square in Pyongyang, according to a person familiar with the arrangement.

Huawei was involved in “network integration” and “software” services as well as at least one “expansion” project for Koryolink, the documents show. It also provided “managed service” and “network assurance” services. One current Huawei employee reached by The Post, Yin Chao, said he worked in 2012 and 2013 on Koryolink’s automated callback system, one of several improvements the company offered the North Koreans.

According to a 2008 contract, Panda would transport Huawei equipment to Dandong, a town in northeastern China known for cross-border trade. From there, it would be taken by rail into Pyongyang.

Internal documents show that Huawei has done business with a separate Chinese company, Dandong Kehua, which in November 2017 was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for exporting and importing goods to and from North Korea — trade seen by U.S. officials as financing Pyongyang’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs. Dandong Kehua has not publicly addressed the sanctions.

It is unclear what role, if any, Dandong Kehua played in Huawei’s dealings with North Korea and whether Huawei has done business with the company since it was sanctioned. Attempts to contact the firm were unsuccessful.

COUNTRY ‘A9 ’

In internal company documents and among employees, Huawei referred to certain countries, such as North Korea, Iran and Syria, by code. North Korea, for instance, was listed as A9 in the project database.

“You’d run a query on the projects and you’d see Germany, United States, Mexico. Then instead of a country name, you’d see A5, A7, A9, and you’d say, ‘What’s that?’ ” said the former employee. “I assume it’s because they didn’t want to say ‘Iran’ or ‘Syria.’ ”

In a semiprivate online forum used by Huawei employees, one man reminisced last year about how he helped launch Koryolink in “A9” during the summer of 2008, before rushing back to China to offer tech support for the Beijing Olympics. In parentheses, the man wrote “chaoxian,” which means North Korea, in Roman letters — an apparent effort to avoid mentioning the country by name using Chinese characters.

Documents obtained by The Post also illustrate the North Koreans’ concern with foreign spying on regime officials and their family members who would be using Koryolink. In spring 2008, Orascom and Korea Post tasked Huawei with developing an encryption protocol for the network, noting that the government would create its own encryption algorithm, according to the documents.

“Both sides had common agreement that the ordinary people will use the international standard mobile phones and special users will use different mobile phones which will contain locally developed encrypted algorithm,” state the minutes of a 2008 meeting, a document signed by Korea Post’s chief engineer and an Orascom board member.

An encryption “test bed” was built by Huawei in Shenzhen, the documents show. According to two individuals familiar with the system, North Korea also intercepted and monitored all domestic and international calls.

The website 38 North, which closely tracks activity in and involving North Korea, detailed the arrangement in a post published Monday.

NORTH KOREA: ‘RADIOACTIVE ’

Orascom was bought in 2011 by a Russian company, Vimpelcom, which spun off Koryolink to a newly created subsidiary. That firm is now called Orascom Investment Holding, which did not respond to requests for comment.

The original joint venture agreement gave Orascom exclusive license to operate the mobile network through 2015, according to media reports, but the North Korean government launched a rival network, Kang Song, in 2013 using another Chinese telecom equipment supplier, ZTE. Kang Song quickly supplanted Koryolink as the dominant wireless provider in North Korea.

In 2014, the Commerce Department banned the export of U.S.-origin components to Panda, alleging it had furnished such parts to the Chinese military “and/or” to countries under U.S. sanctions. Since then, any company to provide Panda with telecom items intended for North Korea and containing at least 10 percent U.S.-origin content without a license would be in violation of the export ban.

Several experts, including the supply-chain analysis firm Interos, consider it to be likely that Huawei’s 3G equipment contained American components, though it is difficult to know whether it surpassed the 10-percent threshold outlined in export regulations.

Huawei was placed on the same Commerce Department blacklist in May, with officials citing the company’s alleged violations of U.S. sanctions on Iran. Huawei has denied violating export controls with regards to Iran or that it poses a security threat, saying that the Trump administration is targeting it for political reasons.

Huawei and Panda vacated their offices in Pyongyang during the first half of 2016, according to people familiar with the matter. In that period, efforts to impose more stringent U.S. and U.N. sanctions against North Korea were gaining momentum. Orascom obtained a U.N. waiver to operate the Koryolink joint venture in September 2018. Koryolink, according to a person familiar with the matter, operates today on aging equipment as Huawei no longer provides upgrades and maintenance.

U.S. officials served Huawei with a subpoena in 2016, demanding information on the export of American technology to sanctioned countries, including North Korea. If Huawei was found to have violated U.S. sanctions against North Korea, it could face additional export-control sanctions, civil penalties, forfeitures or criminal prosecution.

“North Korea is radioactive in the proliferation world because of international sanctions,” said James Mulvenon, an expert on Chinese economic espionage and general manager at the defense contractor SOS International. “Huawei wouldn’t want to be caught dealing directly with North Korea, so they work through other companies like Panda.”

The website for Panda International boasts of the company’s long-standing partnership with Huawei, collaboration that dates to 2007, it says — around the time of the Koryolink launch — spanning “various countries and product sectors.” Panda also notes that it is licensed by the Chinese government to “distribute foreign aid.”

A mobile telephone number listed on Panda’s website as its sales hotline was connected to a WeChat social media account selling Huawei products. The executive running the account, Andy Wang, declined to answer questions about its work in North Korea.

Panda’s headquarters in Beijing appears to be a bare-bones operation based out of a dingy commercial tower with a basement karaoke bar and a low-end nightclub. When a Post reporter visited one afternoon in July, the office was largely empty.

A Panda executive, who another employee said was responsible for media inquiries, refused to meet with the reporter and instead locked the office doors.

Shih reported from Beijing. Yuan Wang in Beijing, Heba Mahfouz in Cairo, Reed Albergotti in San Francisco and Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.

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pulitzerpanther · 6 years

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Miss Grant...why did you become a reporter?

This question and Cat Grant’s answer were taken from the monthly-quarterly ‘Nine Lives Left’ column featuring CEO Cat Grant and editor of ‘The Trib’ Lucas ‘Snapper’ Carr. The column features questions towards both regarding journalism, ethics in the news industry, and–from Cat–fashion advice for the wilting middle-age ‘walking bearclaw’ editor taking said questions.

While originally edited in format and featured in the article, the below blurb was taken from the podcast posted on CatCo-.Co with the title of the same name.

So, Cat, everyone always wonders–I know, I know, we get asked this often–and I know we’ve discussed it over the years.

“Oh, of course, I love repetitive questions. If I hear it enough, it’s like the dulcet, soothing tones of Donald Trump.”

Why did you become a reporter?

“Hmm, yes, well–I’m sure you expect a wholly different answer, given the fact that I technically started in gossip.

Is there more to Cat Grant than high heels?

“If there wasn’t, you wouldn’t work here. Fine. A similar answer was in my excellently-written memoir, Cat Got Your Tongue released in 2002, but, in order to take you on a journey of me, Snapper, we’d either have to get you a fashion sense, or gussy up a handy little time machine and skip that awful hair-teasing, leopard print phase of the 90′s to go back to the book-worm days of my youth and, namely, the news as an influence–or lack thereof–of my formative years.

Below is the excerpt written by Cat Grant for the ‘editorial’ column, read and featured on both podcast and Trib header.

My father was a particularly knowledgeable man–a great man who had this air of regal mystique about him, or so it might seem to a young girl who had a habit of tiptoeing around the corners of an old, two-bedroom apartment in the bustling playground of Metropolis, before skyscrapers built like towering trees in the ground would become a far more commonplace playroom than my father’s study. But when I was a little girl, I enjoyed that air of ‘fine things’ that he seemed to carry–suits and cigars; mystical brief cases with work-related things in them. It’s all very fantastical to play make-believe with, if you’re ambitious, and while my age is a carefully-kept secret (soon to be given away by this article like an old CIA agent in a bar) there was a time when I did enjoy that long-forgotten art of playing.

As I tell my son, creativity is important–creating a rocket ship out of a box is the fundamental mind-set that will, one day, create a company out of thin air. It should never be repressed in a child, and I often found myself tempted by the utter adulthood of my father’s study like a creativity landmine.

The door was always locked save for Sunday mornings, his coffee creating a fine brown ring along whatever ever-present newspaper had found its way to mahogany that morning–the business and politics sections the first read and neatly folded to the side. Saturday morning cartoons were not something my radical mother appreciated in the mornings, but both of them could be seen feverishly discussing current events over the sounds of a crackling, small television in the corner. Only on Sundays, of course, they were feverishly discussing far less important things every where else at much louder–far more grating–volumes everywhen else.

It wasn’t uncommon to hear the soothing sounds of Walter Cronkite (prior to Dan Rather and Connie Chung’s overruling domain in my mother’s household) in my youth and this particular day, there was one singular, titular program on the television.

Fortunately–as is an American right–the magnitude of war was lost on me at such a young age, and I had the benefit of merely being fascinated by war like it was some distant, fantastical teleproduction. Like H.G Wells was narrating events, materialized with sensationalism and haunting faux-realism–like I was always one step removed from its horror, because I was.I wasn’t aware of this at the time–what little girl would be?–but Nixon and Johnson ordered the bombing of the Eastern Cambodian line in order to usurp the then-communist Vietnamese strongholds. I wasn’t aware of the impact this would have, ultimately, on the American population–peace signs and drugs and love not war notwithstanding–but also on the Cambodian people.

For four years, with as many visits as an estranged aunt appearing solely for family functions that no one particularly wanted to invite her to, but she just obnoxiously showed up anyways–similar to Joan Crawford, the later years, at a party or Joan Rivers at your wedding (three times)–only to make one small, forgettable appearance, I learned of my first taste of media’s role in education the masses–

By learning that media was not educating the masses.

From the time I was nine to the time I was thirteen, the Khmer Rouge regime, under the daunting, fanatical leadership of Pol Kot, committed the systematic genocide and elimination of approximately three million Cambodian people under the name of Democratic enstatement in the country. I heard the word Kampuchea (the government created by this regime after the slaughter) feverishly whispered around my father’s coffee mug like a dirty word–like that salacious affair my mother heard about the neighbor having with his nanny–and never understood the impact of it. It wasn’t discussed in my school and, save for a quickly-buried news report every week or two, it was lost, like some lack-luster movie hitting the box office, watched by a hundred thousand people never to be heard of again.

It was a transient sensationalist story. I didn’t understand the gravity of what occurred until college and the magnitude of such a death toll never truly touched Western newspapers save for blurbs. Not even in 1999, when Nate Thayer and Nic Dunlop interviewed a member of the regime’s command still awaiting trial. The story was picked up, ran once, and everyone’s fickle minds forgot about it come Monday, while the weight of the death toll was still being felt by the country to this day.

It was a systematic oppression of the people–a slaughter of a race and religion–and in my twenties, when someone mentioned it, as historical fact, an event that cost the lives of millions, I furrowed my brows like it was a word I couldn’t quite remember on the tip of my tongue.

Lost.

In the 90′s, I was far more educated and politically forward–I was nicknamed Hanoi Cat by a few particularly close friends (one of whom is on the ballot for president this year and should think wisely about the things that a girl might remember to blackmail her with)–and it wasn’t uncommon for me to be enraged by the cruel, cruel state of the world.

Oh, I taped myself to trees in political outcry, usually hungover and in fabulous heels on a budget, before my palette for social change and fashion had both fully refined. I screamed at rallies and bemoaned the effect of war on the world while sleeping in my thin dormitory mattress that I thought toughed my spine into steel. I was war-torn and affected by the weight of the world’s decisions, unlike my unassuming friends and colleagues.

I’ve since grappled and come to terms with the fact that complacency within a world is a fallacy: ignorance of people assuming the blame doesn’t lie on their shoulders; ignorance of people assuming the blame solely does. Change is not as simple as strapping yourself to a tree and screaming about indignancies.

I’ve also since made it a point to buy better mattresses. A girl needs her beauty sleep to change the world, after all.

The Rwandan massacre was far more documented, at the time, than the Cambodian massacre was in the 70′s. But To some of you, who are about to swiftly make my own point about a disassociation of connection and responsibility for me, you might have furrowed your brows and wrinkled your nose at this very paper.

I’m sure it’s a fabulous look on you.

Perhaps you saw the movie with Don Cheadle in the early thousands–Hotel Rwanda–where the gripping dramaticism of it all might have dampened the weight of the events with Hollywood flare–provided a sense of detachment that comes with all things sensationalized. After all, how do we, as a society, come to terms with the deaths of a million people? Another genocide and, though the emergence of electronic media made it far more televised, this one became just as forgotten.

For a minor history lesson–don’t worry, I’m sure many of you have that hot for teacher fetish–let’s recap the events of the Rwandan conflict in a short, small, haunting blurb that does nothing of justice to the weight or impact of what occurred: in 1994, due to the loss of a political leader, over one hundred days, an approximate million Rwandans were killed by militias and the military under order of the interim Rwandan government.

The coverage of the event was minimal, at best, and the focus of most media outlets–save for a steadfast Perry White who I will credit with having a great focus on human rights, even if the Planet is a subpar paper in every way to ours thanks to one Lois Lane’s lackluster writing–was more on evacuating government officials than on the genocide.

Questionably as appalling as the genocide–in a moral way that, to a journalist, rivals the death of a people–was the treatment of the genocide after the fact. The Rwandan Patriotic Front followed the interahamwe and the Hutu-dominated military into Zaire (what is now called The Democratic Republic of the Congo) and pillaged–that’s slaughtered and raped for those unfamiliar with coy terminology–their way across the eastern part of the Congo. Two years later, Zaire was once again invaded and a puppet government was installed. When that government crumbled, the government once again ransacked the country like some sadistic Santa Claus stumbling in through your fireplace to devour all of your cookies. With a hint of a Krumpus flair.

These actions caused a total death-count of around five-million congolese people.

None of these actions were adequately covered in the news.

So what does all of this have to do with me being a journalist? Oh, I have a point–trust me, I always have a point. Maybe I’m still a writer, through and through and it might be lost in the superfluous overzealousness of my ideas, but there’s always a point.

I became a reporter for one simple reason: to find truth.

Were there news stories surrounding these events? Of course. Coverage might have been ill-focused during the time–far more for the Rwandan genocide than the Cambodian, though that could be attributed to the times and the lack of such a fine political conscience that Americans carry with them, today–but it was covered. But these moments are forgotten.

Lost in history.

A girl with knit eyebrows, forgetting the effect of war and conflict in a country so far away from my own.

Not only were these events transient in the media–not only did I watch them fade underneath the fickle eye of the current press with no lasting coverage or true understanding of the events that took place–I watched the media effectively suppress information.

Stories need to be told and information cannot be suppressed. What do both the Cambodian massacre and the Rwandan genocide have in common? The same thing any government needs in order to systematically commit atrocities against the Geneva Convention–the same thing anyone needs to commit a crime against humanity, big or small: silence.

Cooperated silence.

These governments silenced the media within their countries. They controlled the information flow so tightly that there was only one story that was ever told and a lasting embargo was placed worldwide over these events to not endanger the lives of any officials left in the war zone.

No one was talking about it.

The moment a government starts oppressing speech–the moment the government takes away a people’s voice is the same moment they ultimately take away their humanity.

Their tie to the world is cut.

How would you feel? In the land of the Great, if we were slowly starting to be distorted–cut off from news, from information flow. If stories of truth turned to ‘stories that the government told us’ which, ultimately, lead to global news of stories of what the government said, since there’s no other form of information available…would you feel safe? Would you feel safe being involved in a ‘He Said’ ‘He said’ with Big Brother?

Oh, I can hear the rackling shackles of Republicans even while I’m writing this, but it’s not political–it’s human.

What would have happened if one voice in a sea of millions fought for their right to be heard–fought for their right to exist? Is it likely that millions of people might be alive, due to one voice? Oftentimes, political stressors are overwhelming–we’re led to believe that we’re cogs in a system, barreling out of control.

No. Oh, no–no. Fake. News.

I’m one woman and I have, a will continue to make a difference, and so can you.

That is why it is so important that we have not only a global conscience–but a global presence in the world–humanity is not just a contained problem that happens on the other side of the globe. It is not just a number on a scale of millions dead. It is a problem that could someday affect us and already should simply from the ethical position of allowing it to happen, in the first place.

I don’t say all of this to endlessly guilt you. I believe there’s nothing wrong with taking joy in the finer things in life–in indulging in the good things, instead of just entrenching yourself in the bad–and, like I’d earlier informed you, I do have a nice mattress. I’m not a pauper constantly toiling away underneath the stress of the hedonism of humanity.

But I do stay informed–I think it is my duty to stay informed, just as I think it’s yours–and, furthermore, it’s my duty to inform you. To tell you the truth with integrity and steadfast objectivity.

It is my job to ensure that you cannot be blinded by the ‘fake news’ of the world.

Perhaps I don’t tie myself to trees anymore, and my heels are far more upclass, but there’s still a fire of injustice within me. I think there is for anyone who’s masochistic enough to persue the truth of the world because, oh, it can be cruel. And it can be abhorrent. And human nature can be so bone-crushingly haunting that it aches–it leaves a hole within you where humanity used to be–but there’s a brightness to it, as well.

There will always be people who fight, if you give them a cause–there will always be hope to survive; to push past; to assist those who have been faced with atrocities–and that’s why I became a journalist. To give them a voice. To give them a light.

To give them a choice to fight.

I became a reporter to give a voice to places that no longer have a voice–to make these stories have a lasting impact of relevance and to question not only my own complacency with silence, but to challenge the world’s. It is far easier to ignore the atrocities of the world. It’s far easier to pretend that war is non-existent and that we hold no part in it, if it’s not on our soil we don’t have to handle the short and long-term effects as someone in the country might.

But humans haven’t survived because we’ve had it easy–we’ve survived by building communities. Fostering innovation and pushing together, ultimately, as a society.

Any cruelty the world faces, I will do my best to ensure that people don’t furrow their brows in forget a few years later–instead, we can all rise up against them, history that steel in our spine molded by information, not a rusty old college dormitory bed, and proudly proclaim:

Not again.

This article was published and hosted by CatCo Worldwide Media; edit et al: Lucas Carr; feat: Cat Grant; CatCo WW M - 2015.

#about cat #questions #tw: long post #tw: genocide #tw: news #tw: fake news #//I have a lot of feelings about burgeoning 80's 90's cat grant the reporter #//the woman who went to Kahndaq and helped found a media empire in order to showcase the global atrocities and goodness of the world #//thank you so much for this question I'm so sorry it took me so long to answer

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vvvveta · 3 years

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WHO LOST AFGHANISTAN?

IN THE IMMEDIATE aftermath of 9/11, Americans were braying for war. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found that 90 percent of Americans approved of the United States attacking Afghanistan, while 65 percent of the public was comfortable with the prospect of Afghan civilians being killed. Only 22 percent thought that the war would last more than two years.

Americans wanted blood, and they got it. The United States invaded Afghanistan and spent the next 20 years making war there and beyond: in Burkina Faso; Cameroon; Iraq; Libya; Niger; the Philippines; Somalia; Syria; Tunisia; and Yemen, among other places. More than 770,000 people have since died violent deaths in America’s wars and interventions, including more than 312,000 civilians, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

Of the 10 percent of Americans who thought that war was not the answer, a small number demonstrated against the impending conflict. They marched in Austin, Texas; New York City; San Francisco; Washington, D.C.; and elsewhere. It took courage to speak out against “indiscriminate retribution,” to assert that it was ludicrous to attack a country for a crime carried out by a small group of terrorists, and to suggest that the repercussions might echo for decades. They were mocked, screamed at, called scum and traitors, and worse.

Those who got it right in September 2001 have long since been forgotten. The White House, the Pentagon, and the media never sought the dissenters out for advice, comment, or counsel as the war in Afghanistan went off the rails, ending with the chaotic collapse of the U.S.-backed Afghan government on Sunday. Instead, those who got it wrong have consistently held sway in the halls of power. “This did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated,” President Joe Biden, who voted for military action in 2001, admitted yesterday. “[Former Afghan President Ashraf] Ghani insisted the Afghan forces would fight, but obviously he was wrong.” Ghani was hardly alone. Biden and countless other Americans played key roles in a 20-year road to defeat that began with the United States toppling the Taliban from power in 2001 and ended with the Taliban installing themselves in the presidential palace in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, this week.

Journalist Craig Whitlock’s new book, “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War,” will help ensure that no one forgets the harm America’s civilian and military leaders did, the lies they told, and the war they lost.

Synthesizing more than 1,000 interviews and 10,000 pages of documents, Whitlock provides a stunning study of failure and mendacity, an irrefutable account of the U.S.’s ignoble defeat in the words of those who — from the battlefield to NATO headquarters in Kabul and from the Pentagon to the White House — got it so wrong for so long, papered their failures over with falsehoods, and sought to avoid even an ounce of accountability.

“People often ask me, ‘How long will this last?’” President George W. Bush said on October 11, 2001, a few days after the United States started bombing Afghanistan. “This particular battlefront will last as long as it takes to bring Al Qaeda to justice. It may happen tomorrow, it may happen a month from now, it may take a year or two. But we will prevail.”

More than a decade later, the U.S. still hadn’t won the war, and an obscure government agency, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, sought to figure out why. The result was more than 400 “Lessons Learned” interviews conducted with mostly American (but also Afghan and NATO) officials as well as other experts, aid workers, and consultants. Their assessments were candid, often damning, and the government sought to keep them under wraps.

But the indefatigable Whitlock and his employer, the Washington Post, via two Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, forced the government to turn over the files. These records became the foundation of an award-winning series for the Post; now, combined with several troves of documents from various public collections, these files make “The Afghanistan Papers” the most comprehensive American accounting of the conflict and help explain, better than any book yet, why so many of those who planned, guided, and fought the war failed so spectacularly.

Deftly assembling accounts thematically and chronologically, Whitlock allows America’s war managers to hang themselves with their own quotes, offering an encyclopedic catalogue of lies and ineptitude, delusion and denial, incompetence and corruption, and, most of all, rank cowardice. Again and again, Whitlock presents the pessimistic assessments and harsh judgments of officials who believed that their remarks would never become public — war makers who could have spoken out publicly but too often kept their appraisals under wraps or voiced them when it was too late to matter.

“We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking,” recalled Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the White House war czar under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

“We did not know what we were doing,” said Richard Boucher, the Bush administration’s top diplomat for South and Central Asia.

“There was a tremendous … dysfunctionality in unity of command inside of Afghanistan, inside the military,” recalled Army Lt. Gen. David Barno, an early Afghanistan War commander.

“There was no campaign plan,” confessed Army Gen. Dan McNeill, who twice served as the top commander in Afghanistan under Bush. “I tried to get someone to define for me what winning meant, even before I went over, and nobody could.”

These and hundreds of other officials, military officers, diplomats, and analysts could have leveled with the American people immediately or at any time in the last 20 years. Had they done so, perhaps the war in Afghanistan could have been shortened by a decade or more; perhaps following conflicts wouldn’t have been so easy to start or proved so difficult to end; perhaps more than 770,000 people wouldn’t be dead and up to 59 million forced from their homes by America’s post-9/11 wars.

Instead, Americans muddled through the conflict in Afghanistan, unsure what they were there to accomplish, why they were doing it, who they were fighting, and what they were fighting for. “What were we actually doing in that country?” asked a U.S. official who served with the NATO senior civilian representative to Afghanistan. “We went in after 9/11 to defeat Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but the mission became blurred.”

To call it confusion is the kindest possible assessment. Another is that, as Whitlock writes, the government was peddling pablum “so unwarranted and baseless that their statements amounted to a disinformation campaign.”

WHITLOCK DOES A masterful job of mining the hard-won SIGAR synopses and archived interviews to juxtapose private judgments with public comments. Bush’s first secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, recently died of multiple myeloma, but Whitlock ably demonstrates that shame ought to have taken him years earlier. Of all the craven war managers who take their star turn in “The Afghanistan Papers,” Rumsfeld may come off worst. “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are,” the late defense secretary wrote in an internal memo almost two years into the war. “We are woefully deficient in human intelligence.”

Rumsfeld never shared his pessimism with the American public. Instead, for years, he took the press to task for pushback while publicly crowing about signs of progress and corners turned. In 2003, Rumsfeld announced that the Taliban was finished. “To the extent that they assemble in anything more than ones and twos … they’ll be killed or captured,” he boasted. If there��s any justice, Rumsfeld is currently being grilled in the afterlife about whether it’s one or two Taliban fighters who are now overrunning cities and districts across Afghanistan.

So much in “The Afghanistan Papers” reads like an unsettling echo of the American war in Vietnam. During that conflict, the South Vietnamese military that was built, trained, armed, and funded by Americans was regularly (and not always unfairly) disparaged for its cowardice and incompetence. In the end, U.S. officials couldn’t understand how a 1 million-person army with billions of dollars’ worth of American weapons and equipment collapsed in 1975. In “The Afghanistan Papers,” Americans similarly disparage the Afghan military they built or make excuses for its weakness and ineptitude. How could the U.S. be at fault when its Afghan charges couldn’t read, write, or identify colors; mistook urinals for drinking fountains; couldn’t learn basic tactics or manage to shoot straight; and were both lazy and corrupt? Left unexamined is just why a rag-tag, under-armed, underfunded insurgency drawn from the same population, without an air force or superpower backing, was able to exist, much less make consistent progress, over 20 years, ending with a blitzkrieg that took one major city after another, including Kabul, in a matter of days.

Opium is another key overlap. During the Vietnam War, as heroin use among U.S. troops soared, Air America, a company run by the CIA, transported opium harvested by farmers in Laos who were also serving as soldiers in the agency’s secret army. Following its defeat in Southeast Asia, the United States sought to entangle the Soviet Union in its own “Vietnam” in Afghanistan, where, as the New York Times reported, “opium production flourished … with the involvement of some of the mujahedeen, rebels who were supported by the Central Intelligence Agency.” By the time Americans were fighting against some of those same mujahideen and their sons in the 2000s, the United States had turned against drug production and devoted billions to eradicating poppies, but Afghanistan nonetheless became the world’s top narco-state.

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xtruss · 3 years

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Why Taliban Should Thank US Not Only for Billions’ Worth of Weapons, But Also for Nuclear Pakistan

— Ekaterina Blinova | Sputnik | September 8, 2021

The Taliban* have managed to lay their hands on billions’ worth of sophisticated Western-made weapons amid the hurried retreat of the Afghan National Army. However, a broader problem cited by American and European military specialists and policymakers is that the Afghan insurgent group may also gain access to military nuclear technologies.

Col. Richard Kemp, a former British commander, on 16 August raised the red flag over the possibility of Taliban elements one day seizing nuclear materials and technology from Pakistan. These concerns were also shared by former National Security Adviser John Bolton in his 23 August op-ed for The Washington Post. The next day, a group of American lawmakers sent a letter to Joe Biden asking the president: "Do you have a plan to ensure that Afghanistan, under Taliban occupation, will never acquire a nuclear weapon?"

How US Turned Blind Eye to Pakistan's Nuclear Arms Programme

While the possibility that the Taliban could get access to Pakistani nukes has triggered serious concerns in the US and Europe, American politicians have shied away from discussing how Islamabad emerged as a nuclear power. While Bolton has specifically lambasted Pakistan for "recklessly" pursuing nuclear weapons for decades, newly released documents suggest Washington knew about Islamabad's nuclear bid, but did nothing to stop it.

In mid-August 2021, Pakistani President Arif Alvi revealed that the country had developed a "nuclear deterrent" by 1981, long before its 1998 underground atomic tests. In the aftermath of Alvi's remarks, the National Security Archive, a Washington-based non-profit archival institution, released a series of documents shedding light on the US handling of the Pakistan nuclear problem.

A Pakistani-made Shaheen-III missile, that is capable of carrying nuclear warheads, is on display during a military parade in Islamabad, Pakistan, Friday, March 23, 2018. AP Photo / Anjum Naveed

A US memo dated 28 March 1978 provides the earliest known indication of Washington's recognition of Pakistan's uranium enrichment programme. In June 1978, the CIA document suggested that Pakistan would "probably… be capable of assembling a nuclear device in the early 1980s", adding that the country "will not have a credible nuclear weapons option until at least the mid-1980s".

However, in January 1979, US State Department officials admitted that Islamabad was “moving more rapidly toward acquisition of nuclear capability than we had earlier estimated", having learned that Pakistan had initiated a uranium enrichment programme using gas centrifuge technology.

The 18 January 1979 State Department memo specifically cited the 1976 Symington Amendment which banned US economic and military assistance to countries illegally transferring or acquiring nuclear enrichment technology. While the memo highlighted that Washington must persuade Pakistan to nix its enrichment and reprocessing programme, it noted that "termination of aid [to Pakistan] would further complicate our position in the turbulent Persian Gulf region" and "would not contribute to achievement of our non-proliferation objectives". As a result, the Jimmy Carter administration turned a blind eye to Pakistan's nuclear development as well as transfer of materials and technologies to Pakistanis by other state and non-state players. I

President Jimmy Carter, claiming success for his human rights policies, is applauded by aides Zbigniew Brzezinski and Anne Wexler in Washington, Dec. 6, 1978. AP Photo / Harvey Georges

The reason behind Washington's unusually soft approach to Islamabad at the time was because the Cold War-era US leadership regarded Pakistan as a bulwark against the Soviet Union and India, the USSR's regional ally, says Bharat Karnad, a national security expert and emeritus professor of National Security Studies at New Delhi's Centre for Policy Research.

"In 1979, Pakistan gained significance as a frontline state, and permitted the US Central Intelligence Agency to join with Pakistan army’s Inter-Services Intelligence to fund and mobilise the Afghan Mujahideen against the Soviet occupation troops in Afghanistan", remarks Karnad.”

It is unclear when the CIA actually learned about Islamabad's nuclear programme. However, the first signs of Islamabad's bid to build atomic weapons emerged in the mid-1960s, when Prime Minister of Pakistan Zulfikar Ali Bhutto pledged that the nation would prefer "to eat grass and leaves for a thousand years" in order to create its own nuclear bomb rather than see neighbouring India get one. India's subsequent decision to kick off a nuclear project in 1967 and Islamabad's loss of East Pakistan in 1971's Bangladesh Liberation War prompted Pakistan to accelerate its efforts.

Afghan mujahideen prepare a rocket attack on the government troops in Shaga, Eastern Nangarhar province, on January 15, 1989 during the Afghan Civil War opposing the Islamic Unity of Afghanistan Mujahideen and the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA) supported by Soviet Union. AFP 2021

The National Security Archive notes that it was Abdul Qadeer Khan, a Belgian-educated metallurgist, who played a crucial role in building Pakistan's enrichment facilities. The engineer had stolen major elements of gas centrifuge technology when he worked in the Netherlands at the uranium firm Urenco in the 1970s. However, the CIA asked the Netherlands in 1975 not to prosecute Khan when he came under suspicion, according to ex-Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers. The intelligence agency explained that they wanted "to follow and watch Khan to get more information", according to Lubbers. Still, there are still many unknowns with regard to the CIA's efforts to trace Khan's activities, since the intelligence "has declassified next to nothing" concerning the issue, according to the National Security Archive. When the non-profit filed a FOIA for documents from 1978 concerning A. Q. Khan and Pakistani nuclear enrichment activities, the agency took "a neither confirm-nor-deny position that it had any such records".

Karnad does not rule out that the CIA was aware of Islamabad's secret nuclear weapons programme. According to him, the US did not prevent the transfer of atomic technologies to Pakistan because they apparently sought to reshuffle "a military balance on the subcontinent" vis-à-vis the USSR and pro-Soviet India, which conducted its first nuclear weapons test in 1974.

"America’s longstanding nonproliferation ideals were consigned to the dust heap", Karnad notes. "When international affairs are conducted without moral or policy scruples or inhibitions of any kind, then this is the kind of 'end of the world' scenario the world has to end up reasonably contemplating.”

Could Taliban Get Access to Pakistan's Nukes?

Meanwhile, the probability of the Taliban getting access to Islamabad's nuclear secrets and stockpiles has prompted a heated debate among international observers.

"For me that is absolutely out of the question for many solid reasons that Taliban get hold of Pakistan's nuclear material", argues Abdullah Khan, director of the Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies. "For what reason would they need nuclear weapons? At the moment for the Taliban the major issue is governance.”

However, one cannot be one hundred percent sure that the Taliban would never get access to Pakistani nuclear weapons technologies, believes Dr Michele Groppi, teaching fellow of Challenges to the International Order at the Defence Studies Department, King's College London.

"We have to keep an eye on it", he says. "But I don't think this prospect is particularly worrisome in the short run. In the longer term, however, we have to see".

But if the Taliban were to gain access to nuclear arms, this could "really angered China", Groppi believes. According to him, the Afghan insurgents are not interested in upsetting Beijing, at least for now, since they expect that the People's Republic will invest in Afghanistan. Furthermore, the Taliban leadership has already signalled its willingness to participate in the China-led Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Listen to this by birth “Boak Bollocks, Braindead, Disgraced and World’s Deadliest War Monger John Bolton” in this video clip. He thinks that Pakistan’s ‘Nuclear Weapons’ are scattered on the streets and TALIBAN will get them freely and they destroy the whole World. WTF? This idiot definitely carries his brain in his “Incurable Cancerous Swelled Scrotums.”

"Vis-à-vis Pakistan, the issue is not about the weapons but the increasing radicalisation of the society", deems Shreyas Deshmukh, research associate with the National Security Program at the Delhi Policy Group, a think tank in New Delhi, India. "Today we can see there is major support coming from lower and middle class of the Pakistani society for the Taliban, and it was there in the late 1990s as well. Therefore the fear of not only the Taliban but any extremist elements getting their hands on nuclear material from Pakistan is real." Here ‘Hypocrite Shreyas Deshmukh’ didn’t talk about the Saffron terrorism of Hindutva, RSS and so many others Hindu Terrorist Groups in India who are actively overwhelmed extremist Indian government and terrorizes the neighboring countries. Uranium was stolen and security of nuclear sites were breached many times.

Here is another idiot on Twitter: John Sipher@john_sipher! While I want to say “you reap what you sow,” a radical takeover in Pakistan (like in Afghanistan) would be a disaster that would draw us in completely. It’s six times the size, has a massive army and nuclear weapons. We cannot turn away. This idiot needs to put attention to his own filthy backyard. He should put his efforts to stop those fascists who are destroying America and America has more than 5000 Nuclear Weapons in his backyard. Pakistan is much more smarter than the United States who smartly kicked US ass in Afghanistan. He should ask current and past ‘Generals and Presidents’ as well.

Deshmukh notes that Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP)*, a terrorist group located on the Afghan-Pakistan border which helped the Taliban to fight against Afghan government forces, carried out several attacks between 2008 and 2015, targeting Pakistani security infrastructures "including a major attack on Mehran Naval Air Base which also holds nuclear assets". Here again ‘Hypocrite Deshmukh’ didn’t want to open his bloody diarrheal mouth about “FASCIST HINDU EXTREMISTS: RSS, SANKPARIVAR, VISHVA HINDU PARISATH, SHIVE SHENA AND THE WORLD’S MOST WANTED FASCIST CRIMINAL PRIME MINISTER NARENDRA MODI.”

"Nuclear deterrence in general is holding not because of the number of weapons but fear of the escalation ladder which cannot be controlled and end up in unimaginable consequences", he says. "Therefore, lone terrorist attacks like on Mehran base also increase the probability of nuclear terrorism".

In addition to this, Afghanistan lies between four declared nuclear states, the Indian scholar emphasises, suggesting that "if the instability persists in [the Central Asian state] it can be a hub for the black market for nuclear materials". NOPE! It wouldn’t be “THE CENTRAL ASIAN STATE,” it would be the “INDIA, THE RAPES CAPITAL OF THE WORLD” whose nuclear sites were breached many times in the past and URANIUM was stolen. Therefore “RANDIAN Shreyas Deshmukh” needs to STFO.

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newstfionline · 3 years

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Friday, May 21, 2021

Record 55 million people internally displaced worldwide, NGOs report (AFP) Conflicts and natural disasters forced someone to flee within their own country every second of last year, pushing the number of people living in internal displacement to a record high, monitors said Thursday. This came despite strict restrictions on movement imposed around the globe in efforts to halt the spread of Covid-19, which observers had expected to push down displacement numbers last year. But 2020 was also marked by intense storms, persistent conflicts and explosions of violence, forcing 40.5 million people to become newly displaced within their countries, according to a joint report by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) and the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC). That is the highest number of newly displaced reported in 10 years, and brings the total number of people living in internal displacement around the world to a record 55 million, the report showed. “Both numbers this year were unusually high,” IDMC director Alexandra Bilak told AFP, saying the surge in internal displacement was “unprecedented”.

Ring (Guardian) Amazon’s Ring “smart doorbell” is the largest civilian-surveillance network the US has ever seen, writes Lauren Bridges, a PhD candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. One out of every 10 US police departments can access videos from millions of home-security cameras without getting a warrant, Bridges says. “In a 2020 letter to management, Max Eliaser, an Amazon software engineer, said Ring is ‘simply not compatible with a free society’ [and] we should take his claim seriously.” Ring is effectively building the largest corporate-owned, civilian-installed surveillance network that the US has ever seen. An estimated 400,000 Ring devices were sold in December 2019 alone, and that was before the across-the-board boom in online retail sales during the pandemic.

Is Competition With China the New Pork Barrel? (Foreign Policy) A bill that aims to counter the fear that China is overtaking the United States technologically passed the U.S. Senate by 86 to 11 on Monday, heralding the start of a new era of strategic competition—and businesses and special interest groups are getting in on the game. The Endless Frontier Act, which has backing from both parties and the White House, would allocate $120 billion to funding new technologies, focusing on artificial intelligence, superconductors, and robotics. It would also support new hubs to geographically diversify the U.S. technology industry, which is heavily concentrated in Silicon Valley. Competition with China will be the foreign-policy priority for this and future administrations, and special interest groups see attaching their causes to the so-called new cold war as a way into U.S. government support. This in a way mirrors the Chinese political economy, where companies leap on slogans such as “Belt and Road” to win government favor. Expect a lot more rhetoric suggesting that since China is supposedly doing X, the United States must also do X to compete—or it must instead do Y in order not to be like the Chinese Communist Party.

The Gaza Conflict Is Stoking an ‘Identity Crisis’ for Some Young American Jews (NYT) Dan Kleinman does not know quite how to feel. As a child in Brooklyn he was taught to revere Israel as the protector of Jews everywhere, the “Jewish superman who would come out of the sky to save us” when things got bad, he said. But his feelings have grown muddier as he has gotten older, especially now as he watches violence unfold in Israel and Gaza. His moral compass tells him to help the Palestinians, but he cannot shake an ingrained paranoia every time he hears someone make anti-Israel statements. “It is an identity crisis,” Mr. Kleinman, 33, said. “Very small in comparison to what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank, but it is still something very strange and weird.” As the violence escalates in the Middle East, turmoil of a different kind is growing across the Atlantic. Many young American Jews are confronting the region’s longstanding strife in a very different context, with very different pressures, from their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. The Israel of their lifetime has been powerful, no longer appearing to some to be under constant existential threat. The violence comes after a year when mass protests across the United States have changed how many Americans see issues of racial and social justice. Many Jews in America remain unreservedly supportive of Israel and its government. Still, the events of recent weeks have left some families struggling to navigate both the crisis abroad and the wide-ranging response from American Jews at home.

Cleared For Take-Off? (Washington Post) After more than a year of travel into the bloc being severely restricted, the EU council is recommending member states begin opening their borders to Americans and others who have been “vaccinated with an E.U.-authorized vaccine.” Specifically, that means all the coronavirus vaccines available in the U.S. would be greenlighted, but vaccines manufactured in Russia and China would not be. Officials said the reopening could take effect within days of final approval, which should happen this week or next since E.U. ambassadors signed off on the plan on Wednesday. The guidance is not binding, however, so some countries could choose to be more or less restrictive than the bloc as a whole. Some E.U. countries require quarantines of all new arrivals, regardless of vaccination status. And Britain, which is no longer a member of the bloc, has its own separate set of rules, which as of now includes no special treatment for vaccinated travelers.

Mexico’s coronavirus deaths are plummeting (Washington Post) After suffering one of the world’s deadliest coronavirus outbreaks, Mexico is witnessing a significant decrease in cases. Confirmed deaths from covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, have tumbled more than 85 percent since January, when a brutal second wave swept the country. Mexico City, the epicenter of the country’s outbreak, went off high alert this month for the first time in a year. Officials say the capital’s coronavirus alert could soon turn from yellow to green—that is, from medium risk to low. The abrupt decline in cases has brought relief to exhausted hospital workers and some sense of normalcy to a battered nation. During the weekend, the capital’s massive Azteca Stadium opened to fans for the first time in 14 months. Thousands turned out for a pair of quarterfinal matches in the Liga MX soccer league. Scientists and government officials say the pandemic seems to be abating—at least temporarily—because of increasing levels of immunity on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. As much as half the Mexican population has developed antibodies because the coronavirus circulated so widely over the past year. In addition, U.S. vaccinations appear to be blocking the southward spread of the virus.

As India sets a record for covid-19 deaths, variant worries grow globally (Washington Post) India set another coronavirus milestone this week. On Wednesday, authorities announced the country had recorded more than 4,500 deaths from covid-19 for the prior 24 hours, setting a world record. Despite the record number of deaths, there are some positive signs that India’s surge may be slowing, with less than 300,000 new daily cases this week. Other countries are expressing new concern over the variant that is widespread in India. On Tuesday, British scientists said that the variant, known as B.1.617.2, could quickly become the dominant strain in the United Kingdom if it is allowed to spread. In recent days, U.S. health experts have raised their concerns about the variant spreading here, while there have been documented cases in Germany, Singapore and elsewhere. “It’s outcompeting the other viruses,” Jeremy Luban of the University of Massachusetts Medical School told NPR this week. “It’s replacing whatever variants were there before. And it’s always a concern when something like this changes because we don’t know what will happen.”

Netanyahu’s prospects bolstered amid Israel-Hamas fighting (AP) Israel is at war with Hamas, Jewish-Arab mob violence has erupted inside Israel, and the West Bank is experiencing its deadliest unrest in years. Yet this may all bolster Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Just over a week ago, the longtime Israeli leader’s political career seemed all but over. He had failed to form a coalition government following an indecisive parliamentary election, and his political rivals were on the cusp of pushing him out of office. Now, as Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers wage their fourth war in just over a decade, Netanyahu’s fortunes have changed dramatically. His rivals’ prospects have crumbled, Netanyahu is back in his comfortable role as Mr. Security, and the country could soon be headed for yet another election campaign that would guarantee him at least several more months in office. The stunning turn of events has raised questions about whether Netanyahu’s desperation to survive may have pushed the country into its current predicament. While opponents have stopped short of accusing him of hatching just such a conspiracy, they say the fact that these questions are being asked is disturbing enough.

Perspectives on war (CJR) Ariana Pekary, CJR’s public editor for CNN, writes about the network’s coverage of the violence between Israel and Palestine, and how it seems to give a lot more time and space to the Israeli government’s position than to that of the Palestinians who are being shelled and fired upon by the Israeli military. “CNN aired a two-hour special on the brewing crisis from 3pm to 5pm Eastern Time without explaining why it was happening,” Pekary writes. “Almost every guest was located in Israel; the network didn’t feature a single person in a Palestinian territory or neighborhood.”

Gaza’s health system buckling under repeated wars, blockade (AP) The Gaza Strip’s already feeble health system is being brought to its knees by the fourth war in just over a decade. Hospitals have been overwhelmed with waves of dead and wounded from Israel’s bombardment. Many vital medicines are rapidly running out in the tiny, blockaded coastal territory, as is fuel to keep electricity going. Just as Gaza was climbing out of a second wave of coronavirus infections, its only virus testing lab was damaged by an airstrike and has been shut. Health officials fear further outbreaks among tens of thousands of displaced residents crowded into makeshift shelters after fleeing massive barrages. The Gaza Strip’s health infrastructure was already collapsing before this latest war, said Adnan Abu Hasna, a spokesman for UNRWA, the U.N. agency that provides vital assistance to the 75% of the enclave’s population who are refugees. “It’s frightening,” he said.

Parenting under fire (Washington Post) Ayman Mghames couldn’t stop the nightly Israeli bombing that was making his 7-year-old daughter, Joury, cry. But just maybe he could turn the volume down. Just after midnight on the fourth evening of the bombardment, the Palestinian musician and rapper retrieved a pair of noise-canceling headphones. He fit them over the little ears, dialed up a YouTube video of “The Smurfs” and hit play. Mghames, 36, whose father was killed when an Israeli missile struck their house in 2009, knows well that headphones won’t protect his children from the bombs that have already killed more than 200 Gazans in the past 10 days, including more than 60 children. But like countless parents, Palestinian and Israeli, cowering in homes, shelters and stairwells under the air war raging between Israel and the Hamas militant group, he is doing anything he can to shield them from the trauma of being under fire. Dads and moms on both sides of the border have put aside their own terror to launch indoor soccer games, dance parties and cooking contests as distractions.

Israel, Hamas agree to cease-fire to end bloody 11-day war (AP) Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire Thursday, halting a bruising 11-day war that caused widespread destruction in the Gaza Strip, brought life in much of Israel to a standstill and left more than 200 people dead. Like the three previous wars between the bitter enemies, the latest round of fighting ended inconclusively. Israel claimed to inflict heavy damage on Hamas but once again was unable to halt the Islamic militant group’s nonstop rocket barrages. Almost immediately, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faced angry accusations from his hard-line, right-wing base that he stopped the operation too soon. Hamas, the Islamic militant group sworn to Israel’s destruction, also claimed victory. But it now faces the daunting challenge of rebuilding in a territory already suffering from poverty, widespread unemployment and a raging coronavirus outbreak. At least 230 Palestinians were killed, including 65 children and 39 women, with 1,710 people wounded, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not break the numbers down into fighters and civilians. Twelve people in Israel, including a 5-year-old boy and 16-year-old girl, were killed.

#headlines #news

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brajeshupadhyay · 4 years

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Increase In U.S. Coronavirus Deaths Reveals Outsized Toll On People Of Color

As many as 215,000 more people than usual died in the U.S. during the first seven months of 2020, suggesting that the number of lives lost to the coronavirus is significantly higher than the official toll. And half the dead were people of color — Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans and, to a marked degree unrecognized until now, Asian Americans.

The new figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention highlight a stark disparity: Deaths among minorities during the crisis have risen far more than they have among whites.

As of the end of July, the official death toll in the U.S. from COVID-19 was about 150,000. It has since grown to over 170,000.

But public health authorities have long known that some coronavirus deaths, especially early on, were mistakenly attributed to other causes, and that the crisis may have led indirectly to the loss of many other lives by preventing or discouraging people with other serious ailments from seeking treatment.

A count of deaths from all causes during the seven-month period yields what experts believe is a fuller — and more alarming — picture of the disaster and its racial dimensions.

People of color make up just under 40% of the U.S. population but accounted for approximately 52% of all the “excess deaths” above normal through July, according to an analysis by The Associated Press and The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the criminal justice system.

“The toll of the pandemic shows just how pervasive structural racism is,” said Olugbenga Ajilore, senior economist at the Center for American Progress, a public policy organization in Washington.

Earlier data on cases, hospitalizations and deaths revealed the especially heavy toll on Black, Hispanic and Native Americans, a disparity attributed to unequal access to health care and economic opportunities. But the increases in total deaths by race were not reported until now; nor was the disproportionate burden on Asian Americans.

With this new data, Asian Americans join Blacks and Hispanics among the hardest-hit communities, with deaths in each group up at least 30% this year compared with the average over the last five years, the analysis found. Deaths among Native Americans rose more than 20%, though that is probably a severe undercount because of a lack of data. Deaths among whites were up 9%.

The toll on Asian Americans has received far less attention, perhaps in part because the numbers who have died ― about 14,000 more than normal this year ― have been far lower than among several other groups. Still, the 35% increase in Asian American deaths is the second-highest, behind Hispanic Americans.

In an average year, somewhere around 1.7 million people die in the United States between January and the end of July. This year the figure was about 1.9 million, according to the CDC.

Of the possible 215,000 additional deaths above normal through July ― a total that has since risen to as many as 235,000 —- most were officially attributed to coronavirus infections. The rest were blamed on other causes, including heart disease, high blood pressure and other types of respiratory diseases.

The CDC has not yet provided a breakdown by race and ethnicity of the deaths from other causes. The newly released data is considered provisional and subject to change as more information comes in. Certain categories of deaths — suicides or drug overdoses, for example — often involve lengthy investigations before a cause is assigned.

The outbreak’s disproportionate effect on communities of color is not limited to a specific region of the country.

The virus first hit urban areas on the East and West coasts. But according to University of Minnesota researcher Carrie Henning-Smith, disparities have also been seen as the disease spread across the country to Southern and Western states with large rural populations.

For example, Arizona reported almost 60% more Native American deaths so far this year compared with previous years, and New Mexico recorded over 40% more. Between the two states, over 1,100 more Native Americans have died than normal.

Another surprise: Only about half of the Asian American deaths have been officially linked to COVID-19, lower than for all other groups. Jarvis Chen, a lecturer at Harvard University’s public health school, said Asian Americans may not be getting tested at the same rate as other groups, for reasons that are unclear, and that could result in some virus deaths being attributed to something else.

Dr. Namratha Kandula of Northwestern University echoed that theory. She also cautioned against generalizing about the underlying health of Asian Americans as a whole, noting that they are a diverse group from many different nations and cultures.

“It’s not enough to clump them all together because it does not tell the whole story,” she said.

Charlton Rhee, whose parents came to the U.S. from South Korea, lost both of them to COVID-19 this spring as the virus surged in New York City.

His mother, Eulja Rhee, went out one day, and when she returned, “she told me someone had coughed in her face” as she was getting off a bus, said Rhee, a nursing home administrator in Queens. “She was wearing a mask, but it got into her eyes.”

She died in the hospital, just shy of her 75th birthday.

Rhee found out a day later that his father, Man Joon Rhee, had tested positive. “He had caught it from my mother,” he said. “His heart was broken. And he said to me that he wanted to know if it was OK to be with Mom.”

He stayed home, receiving hospice care, and died at 83.

“The Asian American community has suffered greatly during this,” and government officials provided little help, especially initially, Rhee said. Community associations had to step in with food drives, personal protective equipment and other help.

Racial disparities in deaths predate COVID-19, and many forces combine to produce them:

— Some communities of color are more likely to have lower incomes and to share living space with larger families, increasing the risk of transmission.

— They have higher rates of health problems, including diabetes, obesity and lung ailments, the result of living in places where healthier foods are harder to get and the environment is polluted. Those same factors can make them more likely to become severely ill or die from the coronavirus.

— They are more often uninsured and tend to live farther from hospitals.

— They are disproportionately incarcerated, which has been linked to long-term effects on health.

— Experts point to a long history of discrimination that causes distrust of the health care system.

— And people of color are more likely to fill essential roles that require them to keep going to work during the pandemic.

Dr. Sobiya Ansari, who works predominantly with Black immigrant cancer patients in New York City, worries when they miss or postpone radiation or screenings. Already, the city has seen double the number of Black deaths this year compared with previous years.

“If a storm hits and you’re safe inside your house, you’re safe,” she said. “Then there is a population of people that don’t even have umbrellas. The storm hits, and they’re just really swept away.”

AP video journalist Marshall Ritzel contributed to this story.

This story is a collaboration between The Associated Press and The Marshall Project that explores the true toll of the coronavirus pandemic on communities of color. Anna Flagg and Damini Sharma reported for The Marshall Project.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Calling all HuffPost superfans!

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jobsearchtips02 · 4 years

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Trading Sportsbooks for Brokerages, Bored Bettors Wager on Stocks

When Russian table tennis or Korean baseball won’t scratch the itch, some are trying their hand at trading equities. It’s enough to move the market, analysts say.

When the pandemic shuttered sports, Steven Young switched from online sports betting to online stock trading. He’s invested about $2,500.Credit…Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times

June 14, 2020, 12: 06 p.m. ET

When he wasn’t coaching sports, he was playing them or watching them. And if he was watching — well, a little skin in the game always made it more interesting for Steven Young, a teacher outside Philadelphia. Just small-dollar bets, mixed in with shuffling the rosters of his fantasy teams.

But when the coronavirus pandemic hit, all the games he cared about sputtered to a stop. So he turned to one of the last places in town for reliable action: the stock market.

Mr. Young withdrew all the money from his sportsbook accounts and deposited it into Robinhood, the free stock-trading platform. When his federal stimulus check arrived, he put money from that in, too.

Forced into online lessons when his school district shut its doors, the health and physical education teacher had everything he needed to get into the market. “Having the time and the flexibility and the opportunity — it being as low as it was — I just kind of felt it was a good time,” he said.

Mr. Young, 30, has only about $2,500 invested, making him a guppy among whales. But some Wall Street analysts see people who used to bet on sports as playing a big role in the market’s recent surge, which has largely erased its losses for the year.

“There’s zero doubt in my mind that it is a factor,” said Julian Emanuel, chief equity and derivatives strategist at the brokerage firm BTIG. “Zero doubt.”

Millions of small-time investors have opened trading accounts in recent months, a flood of new buyers unlike anything the market had seen in years, just as lockdown orders halted entire sectors of the economy and sent unemployment soaring.

It’s not clear how many of the new arrivals are sports bettors, but some are behaving like aggressive gamblers. There has been a jump in small bets in the stock options market, where wagers on the direction of share prices can produce thrilling scores and gut-wrenching losses. And transactions that make little economic sense, like buying up the nearly valueless shares of bankrupt companies, are off the charts.

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Mr. Young, a teacher outside Philadelphia, wearing socks with the Eagles logo.Credit…Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times

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The Eagles fan emptied his sportsbook accounts and deposited the money into Robinhood.Credit…Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times

Even with modest investments, these newcomers can move stock prices, which are typically set by just a sliver of shareholders. On most days, the overwhelming majority of stock investors do nothing, while the buyers and sellers establish the prices. So even a small influx of hyperactive speculators can have a significant effect.

“Investors are increasingly asking us about the participation of individual investors in the shares and options market,” analysts from Goldman Sachs wrote in a note published late last month. “Our data suggests that individual investors are indeed a significant proportion of daily volume.”

Jim Bianco, president of Bianco Research, a financial market research firm, said gamblers were a small but important segment of those new arrivals, along with video game aficionados.

“Is it as big as what would we refer to as the institutional community?” Mr. Bianco asked, referring to mutual funds, exchange-traded funds and professional investors. “Probably not.”

But, he added, “it is big enough to matter.”

Stymied sports bettors are sitting on a substantial amount of money. Gamblers legally wagered more than $13 billion on sports last year, according to Eilers & Krejcik Gaming, a research and consulting firm, and estimates suggest illegal wagering is 10 times that figure. But betting has collapsed since the outbreak shut down the major sports leagues. Sports betting revenues in March dropped some 60 percent from February, the firm said. They may have fallen as much as 80 percent more in April.

“Basically, I needed something to try to gamble on or to try to make some money on,” said Sean Moore, a 23-year-old aircraft electrician living in Suisun City, Calif. With an initial investment of about $1,000, he has experienced all the highs and lows of playing the market in just a few weeks.

Mr. Moore’s bets on airlines and casino companies surged roughly 60 percent in about a week. “I was telling everybody: ‘You got to do stocks. Sign up — it’s easy money right now,” he said.

But then a bet he made on the casino company MGM — premised on the reopening of Las Vegas after coronavirus restrictions were lifted — went south.

“It did not go positive like I thought it would,” he said. “I thought that was going to be huge with them reopening.”

Mr. Moore got into stock trading after watching Dave Portnoy, the president of the raunchy, irreverently juvenile — and wildly popular — sports and gambling website Barstool Sports.

When the coronavirus shuttered Barstool’s Manhattan offices, Mr. Portnoy — who had almost no stock trading experience — reinvented himself as “Davey Day Trader.” With an initial outlay of $3 million, he started buying and selling from his apartment and streaming the results to his loyal readers.

“I have a pretty good feel for when something is entertaining content for them,” said Mr. Portnoy, whose streaming sessions mix confident pronouncements with colorful profanity.

It didn’t start out so well: Mr. Portnoy lost more than $1.5 million on repeated bets that the market would fall. He put in more than $2 million more and turned into a raging stock market bull, clawing his way back to positive territory.

The short-term swings make betting on stocks no different from betting on a game: “Same rush,” he said.

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In this in-camera double exposure, a scene at the New York Stock Exchange can be seen around opening bell time around the start of the global coronavirus pandemic.Credit…Mark Abramson for The New York Times

While Mr. Portnoy has been a considerable influence on Mr. Moore, Seth Serrano was tipped off by someone close to him: his brother. Stocks have replaced sports as their main topic of conversation. They keep one eye on market movements, and fire text messages back and forth.

“It’s funny — we talk about it like we talk about the betting,” said Mr. Serrano, 39, who lives in Edison, N.J.

Updated June 12, 2020

What’s the risk of catching coronavirus from a surface?

Touching contaminated objects and then infecting ourselves with the germs is not typically how the virus spreads. But it can happen. A number of studies of flu, rhinovirus, coronavirus and other microbes have shown that respiratory illnesses, including the new coronavirus, can spread by touching contaminated surfaces, particularly in places like day care centers, offices and hospitals. But a long chain of events has to happen for the disease to spread that way. The best way to protect yourself from coronavirus — whether it’s surface transmission or close human contact — is still social distancing, washing your hands, not touching your face and wearing masks.

Does asymptomatic transmission of Covid-19 happen?

So far, the evidence seems to show it does. A widely cited paper published in April suggests that people are most infectious about two days before the onset of coronavirus symptoms and estimated that 44 percent of new infections were a result of transmission from people who were not yet showing symptoms. Recently, a top expert at the World Health Organization stated that transmission of the coronavirus by people who did not have symptoms was “very rare,” but she later walked back that statement.

How does blood type influence coronavirus?

A study by European scientists is the first to document a strong statistical link between genetic variations and Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. Having Type A blood was linked to a 50 percent increase in the likelihood that a patient would need to get oxygen or to go on a ventilator, according to the new study.

How many people have lost their jobs due to coronavirus in the U.S.?

The unemployment rate fell to 13.3 percent in May, the Labor Department said on June 5, an unexpected improvement in the nation’s job market as hiring rebounded faster than economists expected. Economists had forecast the unemployment rate to increase to as much as 20 percent, after it hit 14.7 percent in April, which was the highest since the government began keeping official statistics after World War II. But the unemployment rate dipped instead, with employers adding 2.5 million jobs, after more than 20 million jobs were lost in April.

Will protests set off a second viral wave of coronavirus?

Mass protests against police brutality that have brought thousands of people onto the streets in cities across America are raising the specter of new coronavirus outbreaks, prompting political leaders, physicians and public health experts to warn that the crowds could cause a surge in cases. While many political leaders affirmed the right of protesters to express themselves, they urged the demonstrators to wear face masks and maintain social distancing, both to protect themselves and to prevent further community spread of the virus. Some infectious disease experts were reassured by the fact that the protests were held outdoors, saying the open air settings could mitigate the risk of transmission.

How do we start exercising again without hurting ourselves after months of lockdown?

Exercise researchers and physicians have some blunt advice for those of us aiming to return to regular exercise now: Start slowly and then rev up your workouts, also slowly. American adults tended to be about 12 percent less active after the stay-at-home mandates began in March than they were in January. But there are steps you can take to ease your way back into regular exercise safely. First, “start at no more than 50 percent of the exercise you were doing before Covid,” says Dr. Monica Rho, the chief of musculoskeletal medicine at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in Chicago. Thread in some preparatory squats, too, she advises. “When you haven’t been exercising, you lose muscle mass.” Expect some muscle twinges after these preliminary, post-lockdown sessions, especially a day or two later. But sudden or increasing pain during exercise is a clarion call to stop and return home.

My state is reopening. Is it safe to go out?

States are reopening bit by bit. This means that more public spaces are available for use and more and more businesses are being allowed to open again. The federal government is largely leaving the decision up to states, and some state leaders are leaving the decision up to local authorities. Even if you aren’t being told to stay at home, it’s still a good idea to limit trips outside and your interaction with other people.

What are the symptoms of coronavirus?

Common symptoms include fever, a dry cough, fatigue and difficulty breathing or shortness of breath. Some of these symptoms overlap with those of the flu, making detection difficult, but runny noses and stuffy sinuses are less common. The C.D.C. has also added chills, muscle pain, sore throat, headache and a new loss of the sense of taste or smell as symptoms to look out for. Most people fall ill five to seven days after exposure, but symptoms may appear in as few as two days or as many as 14 days.

How can I protect myself while flying?

If air travel is unavoidable, there are some steps you can take to protect yourself. Most important: Wash your hands often, and stop touching your face. If possible, choose a window seat. A study from Emory University found that during flu season, the safest place to sit on a plane is by a window, as people sitting in window seats had less contact with potentially sick people. Disinfect hard surfaces. When you get to your seat and your hands are clean, use disinfecting wipes to clean the hard surfaces at your seat like the head and arm rest, the seatbelt buckle, the remote, screen, seat back pocket and the tray table. If the seat is hard and nonporous or leather or pleather, you can wipe that down, too. (Using wipes on upholstered seats could lead to a wet seat and spreading of germs rather than killing them.)

How do I take my temperature?

Taking one’s temperature to look for signs of fever is not as easy as it sounds, as “normal” temperature numbers can vary, but generally, keep an eye out for a temperature of 100.5 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. If you don’t have a thermometer (they can be pricey these days), there are other ways to figure out if you have a fever, or are at risk of Covid-19 complications.

Should I wear a mask?

The C.D.C. has recommended that all Americans wear cloth masks if they go out in public. This is a shift in federal guidance reflecting new concerns that the coronavirus is being spread by infected people who have no symptoms. Until now, the C.D.C., like the W.H.O., has advised that ordinary people don’t need to wear masks unless they are sick and coughing. Part of the reason was to preserve medical-grade masks for health care workers who desperately need them at a time when they are in continuously short supply. Masks don’t replace hand washing and social distancing.

What should I do if I feel sick?

If you’ve been exposed to the coronavirus or think you have, and have a fever or symptoms like a cough or difficulty breathing, call a doctor. They should give you advice on whether you should be tested, how to get tested, and how to seek medical treatment without potentially infecting or exposing others.

How do I get tested?

If you’re sick and you think you’ve been exposed to the new coronavirus, the C.D.C. recommends that you call your healthcare provider and explain your symptoms and fears. They will decide if you need to be tested. Keep in mind that there’s a chance — because of a lack of testing kits or because you’re asymptomatic, for instance — you won’t be able to get tested.

A modest bettor — only a dollar or two on a game — he keeps a portfolio worth only about $200. He freely admits he started out with little idea of what he was doing, but he naturally gravitated to a classic stock-market strategy: Purchase stocks that have fallen and hope to sell them on the rebound — “buying the dip” in trader parlance.

“I don’t know what half this stuff is,” Mr. Serrano said as he scrolled through his portfolio, reviewing holdings that included Ford Motor, some pharmaceutical shares and a somewhat obscure E.T.F. that tracks the price of the fertilizer potash.

He also has a stake in a business he knows well: DraftKings, the gambling service he formerly used. The company went public in April, and Mr. Serrano figured its shares would spike once games restarted. He didn’t have to wait that long: DraftKings is up some 245 percent this year, even without games to wager on.

“Basically I’m, like, gambling on my gambling,” Mr. Serrano said.

The last time Americans showed any serious appetite for stock-market speculation was the tech-stock frenzy of the late 1990s. Since then, investors have embraced safer options, like set-it-and-forget-it index funds based on the premise that trying to beat the market is a waste of time.

That started to change in earnest last year when a brokerage price war kicked into high gear. Robinhood, fueled by hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital, had long been offering commission-free online trades. Its established competitors were forced to lower their prices until finally, in October, the giant brokerages — Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade, E-Trade, Fidelity and Vanguard — started eliminating fees, too.

When share prices plummeted in the pandemic, would-be investors rushed in.

TD Ameritrade reported a record 608,000 new funded accounts during the first quarter, more than triple last year’s pace. Schwab set a record, too, with 609,000 — including 280,000 in March alone. E-Trade had 363,000 new accounts, more than double the same period last year and another record. And in early May, Robinhood said it had added more than three million accounts this year.

There has been a surge in small investors using option trades to make pure win-or-lose bets on where stock prices will be at a specific time, said Matt Maley, chief market strategist at Miller Tabak, an asset management firm.

“That’s another sign that it’s these gamblers,” he said.

Jonny Tran, a lawyer in Fort Collins, Colo., has embraced options and scored some wins, including a $400 put option — a bet that a share price will fall — that ballooned into $7,000 after shares of the chip-maker Broadcom plunged.

“It was just a hunch,” said Mr. Tran, 31, who had tried to scratch his gambling itch with games overseas, putting money on South Korean baseball and Russian table tennis.

During Thursday’s brutal sell-off, which sent the S&P 500 down 5.9 percent, Mr. Tran made out just fine, thanks to put options on Snapchat and the overall index.

“I made like 600 bucks yesterday, which is kind of cool,” he said Friday. But the sharp pullback got his attention, and he thinks he might cool it with the bets for a while.

As of Friday he was out of the market. “I’m going to sit this out for a little bit,” Mr. Tran said.

The bettors stress that they play the market as entertainment. Many have 401(k) plans filled with the plain-vanilla index funds that are the bedrock of retirement planning, and they put down only what they’re willing to lose.

“They’re not expecting to retire off of trading stocks,” said Josh Brown, chief executive of Ritholtz Wealth Management, who has been following the growth of retail activity this year. “They’re having fun and they’re learning the market, and I think it’s great.”

Mr. Young started out buying index funds, but he has grown more adventurous as he has picked up more knowledge. He’s subscribing to investing channels on YouTube, and finds himself reading financial news in Barron’s and The Wall Street Journal.

“It’ll be interesting,” he said, “when sports come back, how invested I am in sports.”

from Job Search Tips https://jobsearchtips.net/trading-sportsbooks-for-brokerages-bored-bettors-wager-on-stocks/

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keywestlou · 4 years

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NATIONAL MARGARITA DAY / JIMMY BUFFETT / MARGARITAVILLE

Tomorrow is National Margarita Day. Of special importance to Key West.

Many Key West tourists order margaritas. Drinking enough makes for a well lubricated holiday.

Jimmy Buffett and margaritas go hand in hand. The song Margaritaville. Followed in due course by the Key West restaurant bearing the same name.

Recall Margaritaville. Jimmy Buffett singing I “blew out my flip flop.”

The world famous song begins: “Nibblin’ on a sponge cake / Watchin’ the sun bake / All of those tourists covered with oil / Strummin’ my six strings on my front porch swing….. / Wasting away again in Margaritaville.”

Buffett wrote the song in 1977. One of Key West’s craziest times. The entire song was not written in Key West. Two places. Begun in Austin, Texas and finished in Key West.

It started with the drink. Buffett discovered the drink which was known as a “margaritas” at Lung’s Cocina del Sur Restaurant in Austin. The song followed.

Enjoy a margarita tomorrow! Thinking of Buffett and the song at the same time will not be difficult. He and his song will be heard all over town.

A slow Louis day yesterday.

Spent a couple of hours at the outdoor pool bar at the Doubletree Hotel. A couple of diet Pepsi’s, read several chapters of Her Soldier of the Queen, and watched the bikini clad ladies pass by. Some wearing thongs.

Dinner last night at Shana Key. I have come to like the place. Food hearty. Customers locals. Chatting easy.

It amazes me how many different roles Tino gets to play as an extra.

Three photos today.

One shown last week. Tino dressed as a bum. From the CHI TV series which portrayed south Chicago.

The other two of Tino sitting next to a Cardinal in a gold decorated dining room in Chicago’s Drake Hotel. If my recollection is correct, they are from an Exorcist movie. Tino sits on the left side of the table next to a Cardinal in one and two seats away in the other.

I fear confrontation is breeding.

Trump does not give up. He keeps pushing and pushing. Relentlessly. Especially since his impeachment acquittal. He is emboldened. It is his country. He is God. He can do anything.

The most recent episode occurred yesterday in California.

California is a sanctuary state and many of it cities have so identified themselves.

California passed a law last year that courthouse arrests of immigrants were prohibited unless a judicial warrant had first been obtained. ICE and other immigration officials were going into courthouses arresting illegal immigrants who were in court facing non-immigrant charges.

Two years ago, the Trump administration announced a “policy” allowing federal arrests of illegal immigrants in local courthouses.

The confrontation between state law and federal policy finally occurred yesterday. Two illegal immigrants were in local courts facing local minor criminal charges. ICE officers arrived in civilian clothes (sneaks) and made the arrests.

ICE claims it has the right to do so because federal law supersedes state law. Not always, however.

California’s prohibition is based on a “law.” ICE’s actions on “federal policy.” Birds of a different feather. A “policy” is not a “law.”

Also, it is basic to the law in all fifty states that public health, safety and morals are the responsibility of the state. Generally interpreted to mean criminal matters. There are federal exceptions.

Another high appellate court case in the making!

People are becoming frustrated with court cases involving Trump’s missteps. They take too long. If the frustration builds, resolution may come in the streets.

Now for Afghanistan.

What follows reminds me of Chamberlain’s return from a conference with Hitler in Munich. Getting off the plane returning him to London, Chamberlain waived a document and shouted: Peace in our time!

It did not happen. Chamberlain had been bullshitted by Hitler.

Now the team of Trump and Pompeo are telling us they are about to achieve peace in Afghanistan. Thus ending a 20 year war.

Good fodder for the election. Trump will love to go before the American people and say he ended the war.

Just as he got the North Koreans to agree to give up nuclear weapons.

The American people are about to be deceived. Or at the very least, an attempt to deceive them is in the works.

There is a first step. A 7 day “reduction” in violence. Not a 7 day “cease fire.” Such would be impossible to achieve. So merely a 7 day “reduction.”

If the “reduction” is successful, no later than February 29 a Peace Agreement will be signed by the Taliban and the U.S.

In the 24 hours following the announcement, the Taliban are talking “withdrawal of all foreign forces.” The U.S. a “reduction” of troops from 12,000-13,000 to 8,600.

The two sides are not even in accord on the first step leading to a Peace Agreement.

Also, I do not understand how the Taliban alone can make a peace agreement binding on Afghanistan. Though in power at the moment, there are many factions/tribes who are anti-Taliban and will not be part of any Peace Agreement.

I am not sure where al-Qaeda stands, but it still is a viable though significantly weakened force.

I close with a question. Will our government survive till election day with Trump leading in the fashion he has been?

Trump is moving fast making all kinds of changes he wants. Most radical. Neither U.S. nor democratic in nature.

The election is less than 8 months away. A lifetime!

Trump’s most recent error is his appointment of his loyal friend Richard Grenell as Acting Director of National Intelligence. Grenell has neither the intelligence nor experience to have such a sensitive and important position.

He is merely a “shill” for the President. One of many.

Enjoy your day!

NATIONAL MARGARITA DAY / JIMMY BUFFETT / MARGARITAVILLE was originally published on Key West Lou

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greatawakeningreport · 4 years

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WEEKLY REPORT: A Christmas Carol /// Constitutional Threats /// Financial System Update

Published Date: December 23rd, 2019

WEEKLY REPORT

TRUTH///AWAKENING///DISCLOSURE

A CHRISTMAS CAROL, SSP UNVEILING BEGINS, FAKE NEWS CONSTITUTIONAL THREAT, FINANCIAL SYSTEM UPDATE

Secondary Headlines, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_0gdtxSk-8

Is Tom Hardy In 'A Christmas Carol,' The Adaptation Coming To BBC One & FX?

While Christmas parties are great, one of my favorite things about this time of the year is staying in with all the amazing TV. Between comedy panel show festive specials and re-runs of your favorite movies, you’re positively spoilt for choice. And BBC One has recently announced it’ll be airing a festive favorite of a classic Christmas tale. But people have been wondering, is Tom Hardy in the BBC’s A Christmas Carol adaptation? If you’re a fan of Scrooge and his nightmarish night with the Ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future then you’re in for a treat. This Hollywood actor has had a massive hand in adapting it for the small screen this December. Not that there wasn’t already call for Christmas cheer, but when BBC One announced it would be adapting A Christmas Carol for December 2019, everything got a little bit more exciting. With an all-star cast and super accomplished team behind it you, know it’s going to be good. inRead invented by Teads Hardy has played a massive part in bringing the three-part series to life, but not in the way you’re used to seeing him. Hardy is listed as an executive producer on the show and it must have been a star-filled editing suite. He worked alongside director Steven Knight (who also worked on Taboo and Peaky Blinders with Hardy) and fellow executive producers Ridley Scott, Dean Baker, David W. Zucker, Kate Crowe, and Mona Qureshi. A Christmas Carol may be one of the most famous festive tales of all time but it sounds like it was in very safe hands. BBC on YouTube Although rumors have been flying around that Hardy would be appearing on screen in the adaptation, nothing has been confirmed on that front by the BBC and right now all signs point towards that not being the case, sadly. While Hardy may have had a leading role behind the camera, the onscreen cast is super star-studded. Mary Queen of Scots star Guy Pearce will take on the lead as Ebenezer Scrooge. Andy Serkis is the Ghost of Christmas past and Charlotte Riley is Lottie. Joe Alwyn plays Bob Cratchit and Lenny Rush is Tim Cratchit. Speaking about the highly anticipated adaptation Hardy told the BBC: “It’s extremely exciting to have the opportunity to team up with Ridley Scott, Steven Knight and our partners at the BBC with this rare and wonderful opportunity to revisit and interpret Dickens’ classic works. A Christmas Carol is a fabulous magical piece of theatre and an embarrassment of riches for our creative team — from character all the way through to design. Here’s to having a lot of intricate and wonderful fun. We feel very lucky.” Antarctica is Under Lockdown as Secret Space Program Unveiling Begins By Benjamin Fulford Weekly Reports An unusual flurry of events and press announcements makes it clear the U.S. government is unveiling its secret space program, multiple sources agree. We are also hearing of a Chinese secret space program, a Nazi secret space program, and a Russian secret space program. All of these revelations are being accompanied by unusual movements of gold and other financial anomalies. The recent trade agreement between the U.S. and China is also linked to these secret space programs, Chinese and Pentagon sources agree. These are all signs that some sort of mind-boggling planetary event may be coming soon. Typically this writer does not tread lightly into the UFO world and believes extraordinary quick claims require extraordinary proof. However, such proof is now undeniable. The biggest evidence is a series of public announcements by multiple government officials, including U.S. President Donald Trump. The official launching of a U.S. Space Force by Trump is just the start of a gradual process of disclosure, Pentagon officials say. https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2019/12/10/defense-policy-deal-creates-space-force-sidesteps-border-wall-controversy/ The media is now being filled with stories about UFOs and secret U.S. military technology as part of this process. As we have previously reported, the U.S. Navy has released patents for anti-gravity flying saucers and compact nuclear fusion. Now we have a recently retired Air Force general talking about already existing technology that can take us “from one part of the planet to any other part within an hour.” https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/31445/recently-retired-usaf-general-makes-eyebrow-raising-claims-about-advanced-space-technology https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/weird-news/navy-covered-up-new-technology-21066844 Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala. and Air Force Secretary Barbara Barrett both called publicly this month for the declassification of “a large amount of information about America’s military space programs.” https://www.defensenews.com/smr/reagan-defense-forum/2019/12/08/barrett-rogers-plan-to-declassify-black-space-programs/ The $21 trillion missing from the U.S. government budget since 1998, as documented by Catherine Austin Fitts and others, was spent on the secret space program, Pentagon officials confirm. Much of this technology is now being released to the general public, they say. https://missingmoney.solari.com/dod-and-hud-missing-money-supporting-documentation/ We are also getting far more UFO sightings around the world that are being recorded on high-quality video. If you get into the habit of looking at the sky as I have, it won’t be long before you can see for yourself with your own naked eyes. https://nypost.com/2019/12/14/2019-was-banner-year-for-credible-ufo-sightings/ https://sputniknews.com/science/201912141077575518-nasa-astronaut-shockingly-hints-at-aliens-in-tweet-about-life-forms/ Now that the Antarctic summer has begun, we are again getting multiple reports of strange goings-on there, too. On December 10th, a Chilean military plane carrying 38 people vanished in good weather on its way to Antarctica. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-50723907?fbclid=IwAR2LrWVvPxHJ-P0B5_6RjNeb8tFXixUnYi9xdTegoWs1liAaDLrw1fu8Lh0 A senior CIA officer, and relative of Admiral Richard Byrd of Antarctic exploration fame, told us: “The Chilean military were ordered by their controllers not to go near Antarctica. They thought they were smarter and knew more than their masters. The C-130 has been removed. It wasn’t who was on the plane, it was what they were carrying that resulted in ‘the disappearance.’ At this stage, there are no entries and exits taking place on Antarctica. The Southernmost continent is on lockdown until further notice (not due to this incident).” A member of the “Cobra resistance” who has recently returned from Antarctica provided us with the photograph below.

They claim it is a photograph of a cloud ship or a large alien vessel using cloud-type camouflage. However, what interests us more is the faint picture of what looks like large buildings on the distant coastline. Whatever is going on there, it is clearly more than just a few scientists studying penguins. “Many Russian and American scientists have been killed in Antarctica,” says a senior P2 Freemason source, citing Russian FSB and CIA reports. “I know for sure there are ancient alien bases,” he adds. This is why Antarctica is closed off, he says. Fake News Represents a Clear and Present Danger to the Constitutional Republic of the USA What happens when 90% of the media is controlled/owned by (6) corporations? What happens when those same corporations are operated and controlled by political ideology? What happens when the news is no longer free from bias? What happens when the news is no longer reliable and independent? What happens when the news is no longer trustworthy? What happens when the news simply becomes an extension/arm of a political party? Does fact become fiction? Does fiction become fact? When does news become propaganda? Identity creation? How does the average person, who is under constant financial stress (by design), find time to research and discern fact v fiction? Majority of people more prone to believe someone in power sitting behind a big brand ‘news’ name? Do people tend to follow the ‘majority/mainstream viewpoint’ in fear of being isolated and/or shunned? ‘Mainstream’ is used for a reason . Why do ‘mainstream’ media heads, within different orgs, always use the same keywords and/or catchphrases? Coordinated? By who? The outside entity providing instructions? Do they count on the fact that people are more prone to believe something if heard over-and-over again by different ‘trusted’ sources? Do ‘echo chamber’ tactics provide validation/credibility to the topic/point being discussed? A threat to intellectual freedom? Would control over these institutions/organizations allow for the mass control of a population's viewpoint re: a desired topic? Read again – digest. Would control over these institutions/organizations allow for the mass control of a population's viewpoint re: a desired topic? Logical thinking. Why, after the election of 2016, did ’s and media corps jumpstart a divisive blitz intended to create falsehoods re: the illegitimacy of election, character assassination of POTUS through sexism, racism, every other ‘ism’? Pre/post-2016 election? Why were violent terror orgs such as Antifa immediately created/funded? Why were these orgs tasked w/ immediate intimidation/shut down of any pro-POTUS rally and/or events? Why were marches immediately organized to counter and silence pro-POTUS rally and/or events? Why were marches immediately organized which divided people into sex/gender, race, ? When you control the levers of news dissemination, you control the narrative. Control of the narrative = power When you are blind, what do you see? They want you divided. Divided by religion. Divided by sex. Divided by political affiliation. Divided by class. When you are divided, and angry, and controlled, you target those ‘different’ from you, not those responsible . Divided you are weak. Divided you pose no threat to their control. When ‘non-dogmatic’ information becomes FREE & TRANSPARENT it becomes a threat to those who attempt to control the narrative and/or stable . When you are awake, you stand on the outside of the stable (‘group-think’ collective), and have ‘free thought’. "Free thought" is a philosophical viewpoint which holds that positions regarding truth should be formed on the basis of logic, reason, and empiricism, rather than authority, tradition, revelation, or dogma. THIS REPRESENTS A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER TO THE CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Q Financial System Update There is a lot going on behind the scenes in the financial system. There is a split inside Black Nobility about how to proceed with their plans. One Black Nobility faction wants to crash the current system through repo market as soon as possible and replace it with IMF centralized crypto financial system where people would pay with their smartphones and their behavior would be monitored and evaluated with a social score credit system. JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank are both major players in the coming financial crisis and are both backed by this Black Nobility faction. This faction is also backing IMF and the policy of ECB, and Christine Lagarde is one of their main players: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Lagarde On September 16th, Deutsche Bank has joined a global blockchain network, led by JP Morgan: https://www.financemagnates.com/fintech/payments/deutsche-bank-joins-blockchain-network-led-by-jpmorgan/ At that moment this faction felt it is ready for the next move and on the very same day, they triggered a huge anomaly in the repo market that was further expanded by JP Morgan withholding liquidity from other banks: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4303050-was-september-repo-spike-anomaly From September to December, this faction was proceeding with their plans: https://www.jpmorgan.com/global/treasury-services/IIN Beta testing of their system was about to start this month in China: https://cointelegraph.com/news/chinas-central-bank-to-lead-real-world-pilot-of-digital-yuan-report https://www.scmp.com/business/banking-finance/article/3036543/chinas-digital-currency-tsar-says-e-payment-platforms-may Their plan was to crash the current financial system through the repo market and then implement the new system by this New Year: https://pro.paradigm-press.info/p/awn_sdrblockchainv2_0418/EAWNV509/Full Their plans started to collapse last week when the other Black Nobility faction sprung into action.

This other faction supports the current central banking debt slavery system, does not want the system to crash and is backing the Fed. This other faction has released the following article: https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/its-about-get-very-bad-repo-market-legend-predicts-market-crash-days That article has brought the situation in the repo market into public awareness and the Fed realized the system could crash for the New Year if they would not intervene. Their response was massive and quick, they are planning to pump 500 billion dollars of liquidity into the system in the next few weeks: https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/avoid-repo-crisis-fed-will-flood-market-gargantuan-365-billion-year-end-liquidity This has calmed the situation and the first Black Nobility faction which wants to hard crash the system is now losing power. Beta testing of the blockchain system in China is fizzling out: https://www.ledgerinsights.com/china-central-bank-digital-currency-dc-ep-pilot-renminbi/ There will be no global financial crash for the New Year, but without the intervention of the Fed, we were closer to the total crash than at any point in history. The Light Forces do NOT want a hard crash of the system, they want a gradual and balanced meltdown of the system combined with the increased awareness which would lead to the positive financial Reset. For this reason, they are asking as many people as possible to join the following meditation: https://www.welovemassmeditation.com/2019/12/urgent-meditation-to-stabilize-the-financial-system-every-4-hours.html?m=1 We will be doing this mediation until the actual Age of Aquarius activation itself. The trading week between January 13th and January 17th is the time of greatest probability that the situation in the financial markets will burst into a full crisis which will lead towards the meltdown of the current financial system. Some people are expecting the collapse of Deutsche Bank around January 15th: https://hksar.org/5-signs-of-deutsche-bank-collapse Financial analyst Martin Armstrong is studying market cycles and his conclusion is that economic confidence cycle will reach its lowest point around January 18th/19th Two independent sources have communicated that European institutions will not allow Deutsche Bank to collapse, and they will save it at the last moment, similar to this: https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-2415003/ALISTAIR-DARLING-INTERVIEW-Britain-hours-away-total-social-collapse--Former-Chancellor-crisis-erupted-FIVE-years-ago-week.html Anyway, the current debt-based financial system can not be sustained for much longer, and European central banks are already preparing for collapse: https://www.voimagold.com/insight/german-central-bank-gold-is-the-bedrock-of-stability-for-the-international-monetary-system How the coming crisis that will lead to financial Reset will play out is not known, but here are possible scenarios: https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/products_services/products/the-truth-behind-the-repo-crisis/ http://gnseconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Q-review-2_2016.pdf This Week's Report At a Glance The trove of U.S. “Lessons Learned” documents on Afghanistan published by the Washington Post portrays, in excruciating detail, the anatomy of a failed policy, scandalously hidden from the public for 18 years. Soft Disclosure: At least one hundred mysterious red objects in the sky have vanished inexplicably over the past 70 years, claims a group of scientists, as they suggest that alien technology could be one possible explanation for their disappearance. The team published the results of their study in The Astronomical Journal on 12 December. The personal data of 2,400 Singapore’s Ministry of Defence and Armed Forces personnel may be affected by a potential personal data breach. The potential breach was a result of a recent series of email phishing activities involving malicious malware sent to its employees’ email accounts. Last year, 1.26 million electric and plug-in hybrid cars were sold in mainland China, accounting for about 60% of the global total. Wawa, the Philadelphia-based gas and convenience store chain, disclosed a data breach incident that may have exposed payment card information of thousands of customers who used their cards at about any of its 850 stores since March 2019. Attackers managed to install malware on its point-of-sale servers used to process customers’ payments and by the time it was discovered on 10th December, the malware had already infected in-store payment processing systems at “potentially all Wawa locations.” A Chinese national who acted as a property agent for criminal gangs in Britain, renting hundreds of houses to be used as brothels and cannabis farms, was jailed on Friday for seven years and four months by a court in Birmingham. Feng Xu amassed around 5,500 forged documents to secure tenancy agreements on at least 446 properties. China in recent years has built artificial islands to house military facilities at seven geographical features across the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea and encouraged fishing in the waters. Other Southeast Asian nations have made similar moves but on a smaller scale. The corals are dying. Three members of an international organized cybercrime group that was behind a multi-million dollar theft primarily against U.S. businesses and financial institutions have been sentenced to prison, the U.S. Justice Department announced. The criminals used the GozNym banking Trojan to break into more than 4,000 victim computers globally, primarily in the United States and Europe, between 2015 and 2016, and fraudulently steal nearly $100 million from their banking accounts. For the past three months, thick crude oil blobs have washed up on beaches along more than 4,400 kilometers (2,700 miles) of Brazil’s coastline, mangroves, and reefs in the worst oil spill in the country’s history. The exact date the oil first reached Brazil’s shores is unclear, but government reports point to August 30. As of December 18, the oil had polluted more than 950 beaches. Twitter shared over a terabyte of information on 5,929 accounts they say belonged “to a significant state-backed information operation on Twitter originating in Saudi Arabia, which was “amplifying messages favorable to Saudi authorities.” Disclosed is a Friday blog post, the state-linked accounts represented the “core portion of a larger network of more than 88,000 accounts engaged in spammy behavior across a wide range of topics.” On Monday a key initiative undertaken by the Russian government for over the past year to establish a ‘sovereign internet’ will face a major test. That’s when the country and its information systems will be intentionally disconnected from the worldwide web, according to Russia’s communications ministry. Russia aims to ready its own web to both to survive a global internet shutdown and defend against foreign cyber-attacks and intrusion on its data infrastructure. Desert locusts are destroying tens of thousands of acres of crops and grazing land in Somalia in the worst invasion in 25 years, the United Nations food agency said on Wednesday, and the infestation is likely to spread further. The locusts have damaged about 173,000 acres of land in Somalia and neighboring Ethiopia, threatening food supplies in both countries and the livelihoods of farming communities. Standard contracts used by Facebook and many other firms to send users’ data to third countries are valid, a legal adviser to the EU said on Thursday, but he left scope for such transfers to be blocked if EU data protection standards are not met in those states. Internet and text messaging services were suspended by Indian government order in parts of India’s capital Delhi on Thursday, mobile carriers said, widening a communications clampdown in restive areas stretching from disputed Kashmir to the northeast. Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro said that a bill authorizing mining on protected indigenous reserves was ready and only needed to be sent to Congress for consideration. Bolsonaro told supporters that indigenous people should also be allowed to commercially farm on reserves, a practice currently prohibited, and those native populations should be involved in a drive to expand the country’s beef production. Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the impeachment of Donald Trump was based on “made-up” grounds, adding he did not believe it marked the end of the US president. “It still needs to go through the Senate, where the Republicans have a majority,” Putin said after the House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump for abuse of power. “And it is hardly likely that they are going to push out of the office a representative of their own party, on grounds that are absolutely made-up,” he added. The world’s first floating nuclear power plant (FNPP), the Akademik Lomonosov, began supplying electricity on Thursday to a remote town in the far eastern region of Chukotka, Russia’s nuclear agency Rosatom has announced. Img James Comey’s claim that the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation was run “seven layers” below him is a total lie according to Attorney General William Barr, who said that the FBI’s probe was actually handled by a “very small group of very high-level officials.” In the latest Zogby Analytics survey, 53% of Democrats said that they “believe the Democrats (them) are more interested in impeaching the president as opposed to passing legislation that will help Americans.” Shooting Outside Federal Security Service HQ, Lubianka. The shooting started at the reception area with three suspected gunmen then fleeing and barricading themselves in a nearby building. The FSS confirmed that one of the suspected gunmen who opened fire had been eliminated. Scotland’s first minister and SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon said that the UK government has a “democratic duty” to allow Scotland to vote for its independence for a second time, otherwise “all options” will be considered. On May 23, 2019, a record 344 summits Mount Everest. This number constitutes a 40% increase on the previous record of 245 summits set on May 19, 2012. The former CEO of the Israel-based company Yukom Communications, a purported sales, and marketing company, was sentenced to 22 years in prison today for orchestrating a scheme to defraud investors who had purchased more than $100 million in financial instruments known as ‘binary options. Notable Resignations Worldwide Dec. 20, 2019 – Bill Bozeman – CEO PSA Security Network USA – Resigned Dec. 20, 2019 – Rosemary Collyer – Judge Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court USA – Resigned Dec. 20, 2019 – Kelly Harder – Head Dakota County Community Services – Resigned Dec. 20, 2019 – Juan Perez – Director Miami-Dade Police Department USA – Retired Dec. 20, 2019 – Rustom Jilla – CFO & VP MSC Industrial Direct Co. Inc. USA – Resigned Dec. 19, 2019 – James Mackey – CFO Freddie Mac USA – Resigned Dec. 19, 2019 – Tina Kaidanow – Advisorx U.S. Department of Defense USA – Resigned Dec. 18, 2019 – Lady Hale – President Supreme Court UK – Retired Dec. 18, 2019 – Kari Bingen – Principal Deputy Undersecretary – USA – Resigned Active Weather Tropical Depression Thirty 30 kts ↑ 1002 hPa ↓ North of Solomon Island – Moving WMW 14 kts Strongest EQ in Europe M4.7 Albania Strongest EQ in US M4.1 California Strongest EQ on the Planet M5.9 Guatemala Deepest EQ M5.5 623 km South of Fiji Islands Strongest EQ in Europe M3.7 Greece Strongest EQ in US M4.6 Alaska Strongest EQ on the Planet M5.2 Ushuaia, Argentina Deepest EQ M3.3 202 km Celebes Sea Thank you to our readers and subscribers for your continued support. If you would like to further help the Great Awakening Team and our efforts, you can donate, sign up for a paid subscription, or purchase something from the GAR shop. - The Great Awakening Team FEATURE DOCUMENTARIES DOCUMENTARY LIBRARY / 32 UNIQUE CATEGORIES / 300 DOCUMENTARIES https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=5z5IFzEEmwc&feature=emb_logo CHRISTMAS SPECIAL The Journey of Awakening The Great Awakening Map User Guide Menu User Guide /// Our Positive Outlook /// The Big Picture /// Overview - Summary /// Topic Descriptions /// Great Awakening Map /// Deep State Map /// Programming /// Article Classification

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Global Awakening

SpyGate, FISA Report, IG Report & Durham Investigations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJrBdF4LZWw&feature=emb_logo House Articles of Impeachment & Senate Trial Global Sex, Drug, Pedophilia & Trafficking Geopolitical / Deep State The Deep State Map https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgPZ59xs138 Global Geophysical https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QOIrwy7nRg Global Weather Health Watch The Healing Web https://stillnessinthestorm.com/2019/12/marine-phytoplankton-benefits-the-ultimate-superfood-and-ability-to-raise-consciousness-2/

True History https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzjzUwewN6o

Cosmic Disclosure

Hidden Truths https://worldnewsdailyreport.com/nasa-administrator-suspended-after-claims-of-imminent-alien-invasion/?fbclid=IwAR0lQN-sBOmgeu9uZLobmvbri_q_9A1v_t-LuDiOLKyPTloWtjvyyc3hexI The Event https://humansarefree.com/2019/04/wikileaks-document-exposes-a-secret-us-base-on-the-moon.html Spirituality https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=35n9Ujk9cQY&feature=emb_logo Path of Awakening https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_kSBfP6eKo WATCH LIST October Global Crisis; the bankruptcy of Goldman Sachs/Deutsche's Bank, Global Debt Bubble Crash, US Dollar Currency Gold Standard Reset, Partial Disclosure Fake Alien Invasion / Draco Reptilians, the introduction of AI Cryptocurrency controls. Impeachment Inquiry, US House of Representatives skips the Vote on procedural articles of Impeachment moving forward with an Inquiry only? The House Committee chairmen have changed the rules regarding whistleblower testimony to include "hearsay" and the exclusion/barring of any Republican Congressional questioning of all witness subpoena to testify before all committees regarding Presidential Impeachment Inquiries. Congressmen Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler a stone-cold traitor guilty of spearheading a highly organized conspiracy to commit treason and overthrow the POTUS, Schiff is also guilty of lying testimony in front of Congress with regards to Trump's phone call with Ukraine's President and fomenting war with Russia based on a patently false pretext and bogus allegations. The Mueller Report exposes Adam Schiff who "Knowingly" leaked and reported false information to the press. Global Trade Wars are a cover for neutralizing all tariffs in order to usher in new global currencies backed by gold. The Global Reserve Banking System will be dismantled and the SWIFT Global Trading platform will be replaced with GESARA. Internet and Social Media Alternative News Censorship lockdown continues across all platforms. Google, FB, and Twitter. Look for President Trump, the DOJ and 30 plus US State AG's to file class-action and anti-trust lawsuits in Federal Courts. New Earthquake swarms in northern CA increase predictions for the Cascadia Subduction Zone and New Madrid Fault Line. New Government Reports on the increase in midwest earthquakes and oil fracking effects. A Russian scientist has issued a new prediction for the US to experience a 9.0 earthquake in 2019. UFO Disclosure is heating up, as daily sightings are being reported by US Navy and Airforce pilots. There is insider talk of a Fake Alien Invasion set for October? Timing is tied to change the MSM narrative upon negative breaking events; FISA Declass, Clinton Foundation, Comey IG Report, etc. Nick Pope reviews all the evidence. Antarctica continues to reveal anomalies and evidence of advanced civilizations. Disclosure of Pre-adamites going back 55,000 to 65,000 years ago. Testimony suggests well-preserved cities and advanced technologies. China Lake earthquakes to reveal the destruction of a large underground city. Run by the Deep State using the cover story of a secret Navy Weapons Military Base. New testimony will reveal a secret MK-Ultra mind-control training lab for 10s of 1,000s of kids held in cages. Facebook whistleblower blows the lid-off in a newly released Mark Zuckerberg Dossier. Sighting abuse of the child prodigy using MK-Ultra techniques, and a controlled asset of Larry Summers President of Harvard, Financial Advisor to President Clinton, connected to DARPA and CIA programs. Sheryl Sandberg assistant to Summers, COO of FB and Mark's direct handler inside FB. IG Report on James Comey, Comey got a pass from AG Barr on leaking classified information to the press but will be indicted and prosecuted for multiple criminal violations dealing with his signing off on 4 FISA requests. This will begin the process of disclosing Spygate, and all its conspirators. The Structure Change / Alliance Exposure Mass Corruption Now Ready to be Revealed to the General Public, starting with economy crisis looming, closing the Federal Reserve/Central Banking System, voter fraud in key Congressional & Senate seats, FBI & DOJ false Russian collusion, and the release of 300 pages of the Carter Page FISA redactions will lead to the much greater exposure of the Obama Administration's corruption, treason, and evil practices from the Deep State/Shadow Government. As of 4 Quarter 2019, the IG and DOJ Investigations have been completed by John Huber/IG/Horowitz/AG Barr on the Clinton Emails Scandal & Foundation Violations, FISA Abuse, and Spygate/Obama Administration Collusion. FISA Report Presidential Order to release 300 supplemental pages of redactions to AG Barr, said to be released in the Fall of 2019. Mass Arrests total 121,848 + Sealed Indictments, 35 US Judicial Districts (increases in indictments averaging 5,000 a month) Continued Mass Global Resignations 9,334; Government Senators & Congressmen, Fortune 500 CEO's, and Banking Execs. Global Peace Initiatives vs War Threats: North Korea, Venezuela, Ukraine, Iran, Syria, and Israel/Saudi Arabia signs of the total collapse in Deep State controlling influence in 3rd world governments. Exposure & Defeat of The Deep State/Shadow Government/Cabal/Illuminati/Syndicate Global Deflationary Markets Crisis / Global Currency Reset/return to the Gold Backed Standard Currency / RV / Replacement of NESARA/GESARA for SWIFT Trading System / Global Debt Jubilee / Refund of 21 to 71 trillion in confiscated Deep State/Cabal funds Global Trade Agreements Naturalized tariffs with EU, Stalled Talks with China, Russian, Canada, and Mexico agree to neutralize all trade in a new agreement. Trade War with China exposing more than just Trade, global naturalized tariffs, Technology Thefts, Political Tampering with US Elections and US Congressmen and Senator's payoffs. Congress Approves Legislation to release sealed 911 documents, exposing the Deep State inside job. Remaining Sealed CIA Kennedy Assassination Papers to be released, along with 911 Saudi Arabia collusion docs & Pearl Harbor papers from WWII Rouge Planetary System moving through our Solar System, bringing CME's, Planet X Solar System, Nibiru, Meteorite Showers, EMP, Alien SpaceCraft Sighting, Closings of Planetary Observatories, questions regarding New Mexico's Observatory Increasing Global Geophysical Volcanic & Earthquake Activity, Hawaii, Pacific Rim, Latin, and South American, Antarctica (Galactic Energy Waves increasing Sun's activity) Global Geomagnetic Storms increase in larger magnitude CME's from Sun (The 1000x Galactic Flash in the nearest star system Alpha Centauri was recorded by NASA) Global Weather: 2019 escalating Droughts, Hurricanes, Sahara Sand Storm, Heat Waves, Rising Oceans Levels, Flooding, Solar System Planetary Climate Change, Chemtrails / Terraforming, HAARP Weather Wars. Health & Wellness: Truth About Cancer, The Plant Paradox, Truth About Vaccines, Big Pharma Industrial Complex. Earth History: 3,000 Global Pyramids, the cover-up of Ancient Giant skeletons by the Smithsonian Institute, Ancient Civilizations Ruins discovered between 1,000 to 6,000 feet below Sea Level. Disclosure: Secret Space Programs, 10 Programs, DOD $6.5 - $21 trillion missing. Partial vs Full Disclosure, Alliance agreement as to Solar Warden partial disclosure. Science/Technology: Department of Defense suppression of 6,000 patents, reversed technology, antigravity, warp drive, zero-point energy, cures for all diseases, age regression, replicators (all foods/clothing/metals, etc.) NASA: Plasma Energy Cloud, Energy Waves, Galactic Flash, 26,000 Year Grand Cycle The Path of Awakening: Global Mass Meditation, Jared Rand participant count now over 500,000 worldwide. DISCLAIMER: All statements, claims, views and opinions that appear anywhere on this site, whether stated as theories or absolute facts, are always presented by The Great Awakening Report (GAR) as unverified—and should be personally fact checked and discerned by you, the reader. Any opinions or statements herein presented are not necessarily promoted, endorsed, or agreed to by GAR, those who work with GAR, or those who read or subscribe to GAR. Any belief or conclusion gleaned from content on this site is solely the responsibility of you the reader to substantiate. Any actions taken by those who read material on this site are solely the responsibility of the acting party. You are encouraged to think for yourself and do your own research. Nothing on this site is meant to be believed without question or personal appraisal.

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i'm very confused about your halcyon muse. can you go into further detail about her so i can understand?

you want to understand… my crazy… born out of wedlock… daughter of a duchess.. sarcastic little fuck… halcyon???????? well, you asked for the details so i hope everything here is what you’re asking for. also i love this bitch so much and i probably went overboard. like there’s more information on here than in her bio tbh. but also shoutout to bryanna for helping me develop this bitch over the last few months with our hal x harley verses and brotps with hal x andi, even dimitri x harley. she’s the mvp for putting up with me and all of my hal/dani headcanons.

main verse (highly developed):

who is she?halcyon is technically two people in one. her full birth name is danielle andree-lucie giselle du quenoy-sault and she is considered as the duchess of auvergne and lady of magenta. now, since halcyon was born out of wedlock between two people who are of noble blood (her mother is the duchess and her father is a lord), they were forced to give her up by her mother’s husband. truthfully, i don’t have her mother’s husband very developed but his overall information is that he’s a very powerful duke with ties to government and even the royal family in england. now because of him, almost all the records of her birth were removed, leaving a very small amount of information about danielle or where her location was after that. danielle was placed in an orphanage and she was in the care of the nuns for two years. in most paperworks that did survive, her name is labeled as andree du sault. which is why in one of her verses, she named her daughter andree because it was believed to be her real birth name.

how did she get adopted?around the time that she turned two, a group of american army men decided to spend time volunteering while stationed in france and spent time at the orphanage that danielle was in. at this time, christopher, soon to be her adoptive father, saw danielle playing on her own in the playroom while the other kids were giving attention to the american strangers. he took an interest in her because danielle showed advance signs of creativity and independence so every day, chris would come back and play with dani and she got very close to him early on. now, this was the make or break. chris wanted to adopt danielle but his wife, ava, was very against it at the start. they couldn’t have their own kids so naturally, chris thought about going about it different ways to have their own family. ava decided to visit the orphanage with chris one day to visit the little girl, danielle, and she fell in love. so, they spoke with the nuns and started filling out the paperwork.

what’s with the name change?ava didn’t think that danielle was a good fit for her the longer that they spent time together. so when it was time to officially adopt her, ava requested for a name change to her paperwork and she was named halcyon elizabeth charles.

after adoption?since hal was young when she got adopted, she doesn’t remember her time in the orphanage. the few memories she does have from that time of her life, she thinks that it was with her parents and she was playing with the neighborhood kids. now the charles family spent eight years in france so chris and ava could finish out their military duties and halcyon can grow up with her culture. halcyon was actually pretty advanced when it came to language and grammar compared to the kids in her school and it was because ava and chris learned french in order to communicate with her. while they learned, they also taught her which is why she’s still fluent in the language as an older adult.

how did she get to america?a little bit after she turned eight, the charles family packed their bags and returned to america!! exciting right? wrong. since ava and chris had high ranking positions within the american army, they were constantly moving from city to city which made halcyon to become the literal definition of an army brat. she’s lived on the bases, played with the other brats and was always packing up her stuff within 6 - 9 months of their move. now, she realized that since they were always moving, she never had to keep friendships or relationships because communicate will die out when you’re always on the move. this, in return, is what started developing her promiscuous nature after she lost her virginity in the 10th grade. she started fucking and leaving them early on. in addition, halcyon did play soccer at every school she went to even if it was just for a little while.

how did she find out about her adoption?in the 11th grade, halcyon had a school project about her family tree. she started digging through old family documents for information and found her adoption paperwork. her parents didn’t want her to know until after high school because, honestly, they didn’t know how to go about it. once hal found out, it did break the relationship she had with them. halcyon still loves them but it doesn’t feel the same when they had lied to her. because of that, she wanted to know more about her birth family. however, since most of her documentation was destroyed, halcyon could only ever find paperwork that said andree du sault and didn’t know about her full name, and titles, until years later. did she ever find her birth parents?in due time, she does find out the literal truth of her birth parents and learns that she’s actually a duchess. her brother, gabriel, is the one who found her during their college years and told her the truth when he felt it was time for her to know. without her current verses, that part isn’t fully developed on its own. how does she behave?so, halcyon actually does behave and act a lot like her birth mother but she has a lot of characteristics of her birth father. the funny thing is that ava is very much like marie, hal’s birth mother, but the major difference between the two is that ava thinks more with logic and marie is a free spirit with a creative personality. they’re both witty and sarcastic, which is why hal behaves in that matter. it is also why hal turned to animation, illustration, photography and film directing, because it was already in her blood. but her father, antoine, is much more guarded and protective of what he cares about. hal behaves like him when she’s in love, causing her to get jealous sometimes and doesn’t allow people to come in easily. and she has his very pigment green eyes (which is a trait that only runs in his family and gabriel have them too).

now, since you have a better understanding of who she is as halcyon, time to introduce the royal duchess, danielle andree-lucie giselle du quenoy-sault!

so i won’t be using questions for this because i am still developing halcyon’s alt. life as a duchess so anything on here is subject to change!overall, it’s still the same story that her parents fell in love and had danielle out of wedlock during an affair. her mother’s husband found out about the affair that his wife had and she begged him not to take danielle away. in response, he agreed to let her stay and only if marie follows whatever he says. without thinking about it, she said yes and everything was pretty good for a couple of years. dani got her primary education of grammar, math, etiquette and so on. basically how to behave and act like a duchess 101. at the age of 5, danielle got placed into ballet and she kept doing it for years. most kids her age would pick on her because they’d say that the teachers only liked her or she only did the lead roles because she’s the duchess but really, danielle was a natural born ballerina and was talented. due to that bullying, it basically pushed her to keep up with training and become the best principle dancer that the paris opera house has had in years. in addition to her ballet training, danielle is very talented with it comes to art (mainly illustration) and modeling (like her mother).now, although dani has a good life as a duchess, with all the luxury and comfort that one could have in the world, she hated the lifestyle. growing up, danielle felt like she was a bird in a golden cage. most of her days were planned months in advance and she couldn’t do as she pleased without requesting it early on. at least, that’s how it was when she stayed with her mother and it was because of her husband, who was grooming danielle to be the perfect duchess to marry her off to somebody and use in a business deal. whenever she stayed with her dad, things were more laid. gabriel and her would play pranked on each other and their dad. they would go on vacation together and actually have fun. you know, she actually got to be a kid and not think about the royal engagements she had to do in a week.as for danielle’s personality, she is still very much like her mother, marie. although she doesn’t do it in public, dani is very sarcastic in private and often fights with her mother’s husband to give her more freedom. she’s pretty naive when it comes to life outside of her duchess bubble (like, normal life for common people), but she’s highly educated in several different subjects and languages. as for her sexual life, she has been active among other nobles around her age but she’s still kinda lost when it comes to pleasing somebody else (and herself). then even tho her parents aren’t together, she can see the love they have for one another whenever they have their secret family reunions and hopes she can find that one day.dani is still developing but she’s a spoiled duchess and i love her stupid royal ass. i also have pinterest boards for halcyon and danielle (and her verses) if you’re very curious, anon!

#Anonymous #↳ halcyon | aesthetic.#↳ danielle - duchess | ( halcyon ) aesthetic.#↪ laughing my ass off | memes - answered.#cant believe somebody wants more info.#i cry.#i spent two hours writing this.

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badthingstrumpdidtoday · 7 years

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A Summary of Bad Things Trump Did This Week, 3/26/17-4/1/17

March 26, 2017:

Trump photographed at gold course despite claims of being in meetings

Source: indy100

This trip, the 12th for Trump since he was inaugurated 9 weeks ago, came after the press pool was reportedly told Trump was in meetings at Trump National. The White House hasn’t yet commented on this trip, which carries a hefty price tag:

The White House has made no comment regarding the trip, which, according to NBC News was the US leader’s eighth consecutive visit to a Trump-owned property.

According to Politico each of these trips costs approximately $3 million (£2.4 million).

Trump’s team reportedly wiping electronic devices of evidence in the face of potential subpoenas

Source: The Independent

Members of Trump’s team and other White House officials may be cleansing devices of data and evidence that could be used in the ongoing Russian investigation. This investigation into possible collusion between Russian operatives and the Trump administration could bring on severe consequences for the president:

John Schindler, a security expert and former counterintelligence officer, said that if the US President was to face an indictment over allegations his campaign team colluded with Russia to disrupt the presidential election, it could put an end to his presidency.

Speaking to CBC radio, Mr Schindler said: "If, not just people around him, but the president himself is facing possible indictment down the road, that could be a game changer. He could be removed from office for that, whether he wants to be or not."

Bannon told Freedom Party members that they needed to vote for the proposed healthcare bill; that it wasn’t up for debate

Source: The Hill

Bannon confronted members of the House Freedom Caucus earlier this week during the White House's push for the American Health Care Act, Axios's Mike Allen reported Saturday in his newsletter.

"Guys, look. This is not a discussion. This is not a debate. You have no choice but to vote for this bill,” Bannon reportedly said.

March 27, 2017:

Trump approves overturning Obama-era education regulations

Source: The Washington Post

Bills signed by Trump Monday undo regulations that included new requirements for training K-12 teachers and rules illustrating how individual states need to carry out the Every Student Succeeds act. While the Every Student Succeeds act is a bipartisan law, support and opposition for the bills Trump signed was split largely across party lines:

Leaders of the Republican majority claimed that the accountability rules represented an executive overreach by former president Barack Obama. Democrats argued that rescinding the rules opens loopholes that states can use to shield poorly performing schools from scrutiny, especially when they fail to serve poor children, minorities, English-language learners and students with disabilities.

Jared Kushner to be questioned by Senate committee regarding meeting with Russians

Source: The New York Times

Reports that Kushner will be questioned as part of the Senate’s investigations into election interference by Russia comes after news surfaced of a previously undisclosed meeting Kushner had with the chief of Vnesheconombank. Vnesheconombank was sanctioned after the Russian annexation of Crimea, and is linked to Russian oligarchs and members of government:

Mr. Gorkov is a graduate of the academy of Federal Security Service of Russia, a training ground for Russian intelligence and security forces. And as the head of Vnesheconombank, Mr. Gorkov presides over a bank whose supervisory board is controlled by members of Mr. Putin’s government, including Prime Minister Dimitri A. Medvedev. It has been used to bail out oligarchs favored by Mr. Putin, as well as to help fund pet projects like the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

Around the time the Russian ambassador asked that Mr. Kushner meet with Mr. Gorkov, American intelligence agencies were concluding that Russian spies, acting on the orders of Mr. Putin, had sought to sway the election by hacking political targets, like the Democratic National Committee, and passing stolen emails to WikiLeaks.

Trump administration threatens sanctuary cities with removal of Justice Department grants

Source: Bloomberg Politics

The attorney general spoke at the beginning of the daily White House briefing, as Trump tries to reset his administration following the defeat of major health-care legislation on March 24. Sessions reiterated a policy announced in an executive order Trump signed in his first week in office. That document authorized the attorney general and secretary of Homeland Security to withhold federal grants from sanctuary cities that don’t help the U.S. government deport immigrants.

Sessions said the federal government also could "claw back" grants to jurisdictions refusing to work with the federal government, in addition to refusing to approve new grants.

Mayors of several leading sanctuary cities said they wouldn’t capitulate to Trump.

March 28, 2017:

Trump signs executive order striking down Obama-era policies on climate change

Source: The New York Times, The Independent

Along with unraveling numerous policies from the Obama administration to fight climate change, Trump directed the EPA to begin withdrawing the Clean Power Plan. This Plan would have closed down a number of coal-fired power plants and replaced them with solar and wind farms. The Clean Power Plan was a vital part of the United States’ commitment to meeting the clean energy goals set out in the Paris agreement of 2015:

With his order to move forward with the rollback, climate diplomats around the world maneuvered to fill the vacuum left by the exit of the globe’s second-biggest climate polluter.

“There are countless countries ready to step up and deliver on their climate promises and take advantages of Mr. Trump’s short-termism to reap the benefits of the transition to the low-carbon economy,” said Laurence Tubiana, the chief French negotiator of the 2015 Paris agreement, the landmark accord that committed nearly every country to take action to reduce planet-warming emissions.

Over all, the goal of the Paris deal is to keep the planet from warming more than 3.6 degrees, the point at which scientists say the earth will be irrevocably locked into a future of severe droughts, floods, rising sea levels and food shortages.

Mr. Obama pledged that the United States would cut its emissions about 26 percent from 2005 levels by 2025. Carrying out the Clean Power Plan was essential to meeting that target.

An article in The Independent also covers this executive order HERE, along with the responses from many groups and individuals committed to fighting climate change:

Green group Earthjustice was one of many organizations that said it will fight the order both in and out of court. “This order ignores the law and scientific reality,” said its president, Trip Van Noppen.

Given that private sector investment in the renewable energy industry hit $350 billion in 2016 globally, outpacing new investment in the oil and gas sector for the first time, Ms Kelly said she expects the “marketplace is going to go forward regardless of what the White House does.”

Several of the country’s largest pension funds, accounting for tens of billions in investment, have already begun divesting money from oil and gas companies in order to ensure a more profitable future for their investors.

Congress votes to overturn Obama-era rules requiring internet providers to get customer permission before selling their browsing data

Source: The Verge

This resolution is now on it’s way to the President’s desk. If Trump signs it, internet providers will be allowed to sell personal data on users without their permission:

It’s hard to see this as anything but a major loss for consumers. While reversing the FCC’s privacy rules will technically just maintain the status quo — internet providers have actually been able to sell your web browsing data forever (it’s just not a thing we think about all that much) — they were about to lose permission to keep doing it, unless they got explicit consent or anonymized the info.

This is an increasingly important issue as Americans spend more and more time online — and keep more and more devices with them at all times. Internet providers can see what sites you visit and what apps you use, and they can see how long you’re using them for. That information is extremely revealing, and it’s easy to imagine most people would prefer to keep their reading habits private.

“The consequences of passing this resolution are clear: broadband providers like AT&T, Comcast, and others will be able to sell your personal information to the highest bidder without your permission,” said Representative Anna Eshoo (D-CA) on the House floor this afternoon. “And no one will be able to protect you, not even the Federal Trade Commission that our friends on the other side of the aisle keep talking about.”

Trump administration will not include LGBTQ people on the 2020 census

Source: Out Magazine

This decision has large implications on the stance the government is taking on the LGBTQ population. Inclusion on the census would help gather data on people of different sexual orientations and gender identities in the United States, which could then aid in the creation of legislation to improve the lives of LGBTQ people in America:

Last year, various federal agencies urged the Census Bureau to include sexual orientation and gender in their data as it was crucial to their role in enforcing the law. The survey, which has been conducted every ten years since 1790, includes a wide range of questions designed to gather data on everything from languages spoken to household plumbing facilities. The current census, however, only allows for a snapshot of same-sex households, but Democrats in Congress had pushed for more specific questions around sexual orientation and gender identity to improve results. The logic was simple: With more focused questions law makers would be better equipped to ensure appropriate legislation to improve the lives of LGBTQ citizens.

Trump proposes additional cuts to the National Institution of Health

Source: NBC News

These cuts would affect many federal programs, including those that support medical research, and would take away $1.2 billion in funding. This article also contains a list of health and science programs across various government agencies that would also see budget cuts.

March 29, 2017:

Trump calls for domestic budget cuts in order to pay for border wall

Source: ABC7

Trump has proposed cuts of $18 billion dollars from U.S. programs in order to pay for the border wall. This undermines his previous claims that Mexico would pay for the wall construction - with these cuts in funding, U.S. taxpayers would be footing the bill. ABC7 provides coverage of some of the proposed cuts, which would include some popular, bipartisan programs:

The latest Trump proposal, disclosed Tuesday, would eliminate $1.2 billion in National Institutes of Health research grants, a favorite of both parties. The community development block grant program, also popular, would be halved, amounting to a cut of $1.5 billion, and Trump would strip $500 million from a popular grant program for transportation projects. Some of that money would help pay for parts of the wall.

[...]

Other cuts include $434 million to immediately eliminate a program to encourage community service opportunities for senior citizens, eliminating $372 million in remaining funding for heating subsidies for the poor, and cutting $447 million in transit grants.

March 30, 2017:

Reports surfacing that Russia hired 1,000 people to generate fake news on Hillary Clinton in key states during Presidential election

Source: The Independent

Senators Mark Warner and Richard Burr, a Democrat and Republican respectively on the Senate committee investigating claims of Russian election interference, presented this information at a recent press conference:

[Sen. Warner:] “It’s been reported to me, and we’ve got to find this out, whether they were able to affect specific areas in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, where you would not have been receiving off of whoever your vendor might have been, Trump versus Clinton, during the waning days of the election, but instead, ‘Clinton is sick’, or ‘Clinton is taking money from whoever for some source’ … fake news.

“An outside foreign adversary effectively sought to hi-jack the most critical democratic process, the election of a President, and in that process, decided to favour one candidate over another.”

The key states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania which Mr Warner named all fell narrowly - and unexpectedly - to Donald Trump.

Trump threatens to change libel laws, go after The New York Times

Source: The Hill

Image Source: Donald Trump’s Twitter account

Trump previously mentioned changing libel laws during the campaign. He vowed in February 2016 to “open up” laws in order to sue media outlets that write “purposely negative” and “horrible” articles about him.

“I’m gonna open up our libel laws, so when they write purposely negative and horrible, false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money,” Trump said at a rally in Fort Worth, Texas.

“We’re going to open up those libels laws, so that when The New York Times writes a hit piece, which is a total disgrace, or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money.

[...]

Despite Trump's threats, there are no federal libel laws on the books. Suits are decided at the state level under current law.

Trump reportedly feels “great” about Mar-a-Lago visits, despite resistance he’s facing over cost of the trips

Source: The Independent

Despite claims he made on the campaign trail that he would rarely be leaving the White House as president, Trump has spent numerous weekends over the past months at Mar-a-Lago. In addition to security concerns, including that sensitive information could be accessed or overheard by other Mar-a-Lago guests, the trips add up to a hefty bill:

The projected cost of security for Mr Trump’s visits over a four year presidential term was reported to be an estimated to be $600 million. This is just over the amount his administration plans on cutting for social, education and cultural programmes.

March 31, 2017:

Sessions admits crime is close to a historic low amid criticism from community activists

Source: The Guardian

Sessions spoke mainly to law enforcement during a visit to St. Louis, MO where he acknowledged that crime rates have been falling. His statements, which only briefly touched on the subject of crime prevention programs, raised eyebrows of community activists:

“One outreach worker can do more to reduce crime in a neighborhood than five police officers can,” said James Clark, vice-president of community outreach for the St Louis not-for-profit group Better Family Life.

“If we continue to lay the issue of crime and violence at the feet of the police department, then that’s a very short-sighted, not well thought-out approach.”

The St Louis city alderman Jeffrey Boyd added: “Let’s remind ourselves of when Ronald Reagan came into office and there was this war on drugs campaign, and then Bill Clinton came in with ‘three strikes you’re out’. It didn’t help the African American community or the poor community. It ended up being a disaster generations later,” Boyd said, noting the disproportionate impact that mass incarceration has had on the black community.

Boyd lost three male relatives to gun violence in 2015 alone and represents the area of the city the Guardian identified in January as the most violent neighborhood in the nation.

April 1, 2017:

Trump tells NBC to stop talking about Russia, start talking about wiretapping allegations

Source: The Hill

Image Sources: Donald Trump’s Twitter page

The president has frequently decried coverage of the investigations into Russian meddling as "fake news."

Trump last month claimed in a series of tweets that Obama “wiretapped” him before the election. He did not supply any evidence.

FBI Director James Comey says he knows of “no information” validating Trump’s accusation. Trump has stood by the allegations, and the White House has said the comment refers to the Obama administration’s surveillance activities more broadly.

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#politics #bad things trump did this week #bad things congress did this week #march 2017 #april 2017 #donald trump #trump #presidential election #president trump #resist

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