They must be a cat country:

"Chinese city bans daytime dog walking in a crackdown on canines" by Tiffany May New York Times  November 17, 2018

HONG KONG — A major city in China is cracking down on pet dogs, banning dog walking during the day and prohibiting many larger breeds, after a publicized fight between a dog owner and a bystander.

The new rules in Hangzhou, in eastern China, were adopted after a dog owner was filmed pushing and shoving a woman who had kicked his dog. Before the fight, surveillance footage showed a young boy hiding behind the woman as the dog circled them without a leash.

The harsh restrictions on dogs— which hark back to anti-pet rules in earlier decades of communist rule and reflect continuing tensions over the place of dogs in society — officially took effect Thursday.

Hangzhou’s animal rights volunteers said they had seen dogs of all sizes being confiscated this week. Thousands have also commented on a post on Weibo, a popular social media platform, from the International Olympic Committee to debate Hangzhou’s fitness to host the 2022 Asian Games in light of its treatment of dogs.

Going to ruin the party before it's begun.

Videos of uniformed city law enforcers beating dogs with metal poles have circulated widely on Chinese social media and chat groups, but the authenticity of the videos could not be verified, as similar crackdowns have occurred in other cities in the past, and it is unclear when the videos were filmed.

China has a history of using dogs to make aggressive political statements. Dogs were branded as political enemies in the 1940s for revealing the movements of communist fighters who resisted Japanese colonizers by nightfall. For decades, they were derided as bourgeois house pets that wasted scarce resources. Sometimes, dogs were openly beaten on streets as an act of aggression.

Though many dog restrictions were gradually loosened after China’s economic reforms in the 1980s, some officials and others have remained hostile.

Pet ownership has become increasingly affordable for the emerging middle class, and animal rights activism is increasingly accepted, especially among younger generations, but some animal rights advocates acknowledge that the deeply rooted fear of dogs may also be aggravated by a lack of discipline on the part of some dog owners.....

Still man's best friend.

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That article is going to tarnish China's image:

"How China is rewriting its own script" by Amy Qin and Audrey Carlsen   November 19, 2018

When was the last time you watched a movie with a Chinese villain?

If you can’t remember, that may not be too surprising. Take the 2012 remake of the Cold War drama “Red Dawn.” It depicted Chinese enemies invading a US town.

At least it did until the script was leaked, angering the Chinese state media.

In the end, MGM spent $1 million digitally erasing evidence of the Chinese army, frame by frame, and substituting North Koreans instead.

China wields enormous influence over how it is depicted in the movies Americans make and watch. It’s part of a broader push by the government to take control of its global narrative and present a friendlier, less menacing image of China to the world.

I'm sorry. Having the Jew York Times tell me China controls Hollywood is almost as bas as Alex Jones telling me it's Saudia Arabia!

It's not China that is going to the dogs, it's the AmeriKan pre$$.

China’s booming box office and seemingly inexhaustible cash reserves have provided a much-needed boost to Hollywood as it faces slowing ticket sales in the United States and challenges from Amazon and Netflix, but Hollywood’s embrace of China has not come without strings attached.

Oh, so China isn't so much as controlling the scripts as it is keeping Hollywood afloat as Americans stop going to movie theaters (I know I have).

So when the creators of “Pixels” wanted to show aliens blasting a hole in the Great Wall of China, Sony executives worried that the scene might prevent the 2015 movie’s release in China, leaked studio e-mails show. They blew up the Taj Mahal instead.

India, oddly enough, will come up later in this post.

In the 1960s, Marvel Comics introduced a mystical guru character known as the Ancient One into its universe. He was portrayed as an elderly Tibetan man, but in the 2016 movie “Doctor Strange,” the Ancient One is Celtic, played by white actress Tilda Swinton. Moviemakers decided to change the character’s ethnicity early in the process, reportedly to avoid offending the Chinese government.

What is interesting is who they are not concerned about offending.

Invariably, the villains are either Arabs terrorists or Russian bad guys!!

And CUI BONO?

Whose enemies are those?

As recently as two decades ago, major Hollywood movies were sharply critical of China. “Seven Years in Tibet,” which depicts Chinese soldiers brutalizing Tibetans, was one of the top 100 grossing movies of 1997. Also that year, Disney released Martin Scorsese’s “Kundun” — a sympathetic portrayal of the Dalai Lama’s early life in Mao-era China and his subsequent exile in India — despite objections from Chinese authorities.

“You’re not going to see something that’s like ‘Seven Years in Tibet’ anymore,” said Larry Shinagawa, a professor at Hawaii Tokai International College who specializes in Asian and Asian-American studies. Studios that make films critical of China, he said, risk being banned from releasing movies in the country.

At stake for China is more than just the validation of Hollywood’s power brokers and celebrities. In speeches and at forums, President Xi Jinping has repeatedly emphasized the need to “tell China’s story well,” to make sure a coherent, compelling, and, most important, Communist Party-sanctioned narrative of China’s rise to power reaches global audiences.

I actually have no complaints. Most Americans know so little of China.

“There is a notion that its propaganda has not worked well enough,” said Orville Schell, director of the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society. “So this is where the film industry comes in. There’s a real sensitivity to the blockbuster power of Hollywood.”

As one who has consumed movies most of his life, I sadly agree.

China has raised its influence in Hollywood by bankrolling a growing number of top-tier films.

So it is like the Democratic donor model then? 

Those who pay call the play?

Of the top 100 highest-grossing films worldwide each year from 1997 to 2013, China helped finance only 12 Hollywood movies, but in the five years that followed, China cofinanced 41 top-grossing Hollywood films.

Hollywood studios are also eager to grab a slice of China’s fast-growing box office market, which surpassed the United States in total revenue for the first time ever in the first quarter of 2018.

Success in China can make up for a disappointing box office performance at home or even transform a hit into a global blockbuster. By the same token, getting shut out of the Chinese market can be devastating for a movie.

That’s a powerful incentive to avoid causing any offense to China.

I'll bet Hollywood's Jewish pooh-bahs have quite an adjustment to make there.

One of China’s top movie regulators spelled it out in a speech at the US-China Film Summit in Los Angeles in 2013.

“We have a huge market, and we want to share it with you,” said Zhang Xun, then the president of the state-owned China Film Co-Production Corp., speaking to a room full of Hollywood executives.

Then came the condition. “We want films that are heavily invested in Chinese culture, not one or two shots,” she said. “We want to see positive Chinese images.”

China’s campaign to push a positive image abroad has extended beyond Hollywood.

They are not the only ones.

The 2016 film “The Great Wall,” a $150 million China-Hollywood co-production starring Matt Damon, was China’s highest-profile attempt to make a crossover hit. It was, by most measures, an international flop.

Since then, China has stepped away from the big-budget co-production model, focusing instead on making features that cater to its large and still-expanding domestic market. To do that, it has enlisted Hollywood talent: producers, technical experts, and even top celebrities, but they have had to walk a fine line.

A number of actors, musicians and other celebrities have been barred from entering the country over behavior deemed inappropriate or critical of the Chinese Communist Party.

Here’s why some of them were barred from China:

In order they are Justin Bieber, Björk, Jon Bon Jovi, Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga, Elton John, Katy Perry, and Brad Pitt; however, they did make the guest list to another function.

Perhaps most central to China’s soft-power push is CGTN, the international arm of the state broadcaster CCTV. With employees from more than 70 countries and regions working on television channels broadcasting in English, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Russian, CGTN’s mission is to report news for global audiences “from a Chinese perspective.”

The difference in the “Chinese perspective” was most evident in CGTN’s coverage this year of an unexpected proposal to abolish presidential term limits in China’s constitution. While Western media outlets raced to explain why the amendment, which would open the door to Xi’s indefinite rule, was unprecedented, CGTN’s anchors were calm — and eerily synchronized — in their message praising the change.

That seems eerily familiar to me.

It is difficult to tell whether China’s push to soften its image has been successful.

“Chinese soft power has not been that successful outside of the developing world,” said Stanley Rosen, a professor at the University of Southern California who studies Chinese society and cinema. “If China does have any soft power, it’s probably because of the success of their economy and the Chinese model that they’re pushing very hard now.”

The professor they turned to for expert analysis is named Rosen?

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That has to be one of the most absolutely laughable pieces of crap that has come from the New York Times in some time.

Now for some hard power:

"Pence and China’s leader stake out dueling positions at trade meeting" by Jamie Tarabay and Choe Sang-Hun New York Times  November 17, 2018

SYDNEY — President Xi Jinping of China and Vice President Mike Pence pushed back against criticism of each of their countries’ trade practices in speeches Saturday at an Asia-Pacific trade summit in Papua New Guinea, while seeking to assure allies of their commitment to the region.

Xi and Pence spoke before what is likely to be a tense meeting between President Trump and the Chinese leader at the Group of 20 conference in Argentina later this month, where they will attempt to defuse a trade war.

That's when things will be sunk for sure.

Xi may also be looking to shore up ties with an important trading partner, North Korea. He told President Moon Jae-in of South Korea on the sidelines of the trade forum that he was considering visiting the North after its leader, Kim Jong Un, extended an invitation, according to a spokesman for Moon.

Pence and Xi spoke at the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea. The 21 Pacific Rim countries and territories participating in the APEC forum account for 60 percent of the global economy.

Pence, appearing in Trump’s place, reiterated recent criticism of China’s geopolitical strategies and attacked the country’s “belt and road” initiative, an enormous infrastructure plan financed by China that spans some 70 countries.

He urged Asian nations to avoid investment offers from China and to choose a “better option” — working with the United States, which, he said, would not saddle them with debt, a quandary some countries are facing as a result of their partnerships with Beijing.

“Let me say to all the nations across this wider region, and the world: Do not accept foreign debt that could compromise your sovereignty,” Pence said.

“We don’t drown our partners in a sea of debt,” he added. “We don’t coerce or compromise your independence. We do not offer a constricting belt or a one-way road. When you partner with us, we partner with you, and we all prosper.”

Is he of his meds or just delusional?

What does he think U.S.-controlled instruments like the IMF and World Bank do? 

Their prescription for the problem they foist on you is always austerity (go ask the Greeks about it).

Xi, perhaps anticipating the criticism, spoke before Pence and disputed the notion that accepting Chinese investment as part of the initiative called “One Belt, One Road” would compromise a nation’s sovereignty.

The initiative “is not for geopolitical purposes; it will exclude no one; it will not close a door and create a small circle,” Xi said. “It is not the so-called trap, as some people say. It is the sunshine avenue where China shares opportunities with the world to seek common development.”

That seems to be what is being offered, too. 

You can either have the unipolar U.S. way, complete with economic and military coercion if you don't agree, or the Chinese-Russian future that, while far from perfect, at least offers a let's all get along world even if we don't agree.

Xi sought to paint China as continually opening its markets to the world. He described the trade dispute as a choice between “win-win progress or a zero sum game.”

“Mankind has once again reached a crossroads,” Xi said. “Which direction should we choose? Cooperation or confrontation? Openness or closing doors?”

In his speech Saturday, Pence lauded the economic and military cooperation between the United States and its Asia-Pacific allies, and he warned China that US ships and jets would sail and fly anywhere allowed by international law.....

He says that as the United States government holds itself above international law when it sees fit.

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I actually don't like where this is going, and I wish Trump had gone himself and not sent Pence:

"US-China trade dispute leaves Asia-Pacific Forum without consensus" by Damien Cave New York Times  November 18, 2018

SYDNEY — The trade dispute between the United States and China has led to a standoff at a summit meeting of Pacific Rim leaders in Papua New Guinea, leaving the gathering of 21 nations without a joint closing statement on Sunday for the first time since the forum was founded.

The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, known as APEC, has not ended without a joint statement since 1989, when the forum was established in Australia. Experts said the stalemate would set up a high-stakes showdown at the Group of 20 conference in Argentina this month — which President Xi Jinping of China and President Trump are expected to attend — while intensifying frustration among countries caught in the crossfire.

“The entire world is worried,” said Prime Minister Peter O’Neill of Papua New Guinea, after he confirmed that only a summary of discussion would be issued, not a joint statement.

The disagreement concerned issues that have shaped the trade dispute between the United States and China for months.

Draft versions of the communiqué seen by the Associated Press showed that the United States wanted strong language condemning unfair trade practices like those that it says China regularly deploys, including restricting market access and pushing foreign companies to hand over valuable technology.

The Chinese delegation sought to reaffirm its opposition to what it says are protectionism and unilateralism practices by the United States, especially the US trade tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of Chinese goods.

What I see here is Trump trying to balance the books and move some jobs back here, and it is running up against half-a-century of globalist integration.

The Chinese have really thrown a monkey wrench into the process, too. The grand wizards that designed the global economy never thought non their wildest dreams that the Chinese would want to run the thing one day. They thought -- in their racism -- that the Asians would be a wonderful slave class with tyrannical governments taking orders. Wrong!

The opposing positions were staked out in stark terms on Saturday, with combative speeches by Xi and Vice President Mike Pence. Both men argued that their country had the best interest of the region at heart, battling for loyalty within a trade group that represents 60 percent of the global economy, but they also pushed each other toward conflict and escalation.

Pence, appearing in Trump’s place, doubled down on recent criticism of China’s geopolitical strategies and attacked the country’s “One Belt, One Road,” initiative — an infrastructure plan financed by China that covers some 70 countries.

He urged Asian nations to work with the United States, which, he said, would not saddle them with debt, an issue some countries are facing as a result of their partnerships with Beijing.

Xi, speaking before Pence, insisted that the criticism was misguided, arguing that China’s infrastructure plan would be inclusive and beneficial.

“It will not close a door and create a small circle,” Xi said. “It is not the so-called trap, as some people say. It is the sunshine avenue where China shares opportunities with the world to seek common development.”

Experts said the dueling arguments appeared to have become more entrenched.

“It boils down to mutual intransigence between the US and China,” said Rory Medcalf, head of the National Security College at the Australian National University.

Jonathan Pryke, a Pacific Rim expert at the Lowy Institute, agreed, describing the result as raw “stubbornness.”

Earlier on Sunday, Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia tried to sound upbeat. “I think there is a lot more progress being made here than I think is probably being acknowledged,” he said, but by Sunday night, it was increasingly difficult to see the summit meeting as anything but a continuation of hostilities.....

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Going to get you caught up on what has been going on down under:

"Five decades after losing his job for investigating priest, Australian detective vindicated" by Meagan Flynn Washington Post  May 08, 2018

WASHINGTON — Monsignor John Day, was sexually assaulting and molesting altar boys and Catholic school girls, but Denis Ryan’s superiors — devout Catholics, some of whom were close to Day — didn’t want to hear it.

Day was transferred from his post in the town of Mildura and became a priest at another parish far away in Victoria where he died in 1978.

Ryan resigned, effectively forced out of his job because he wouldn’t stop investigating, the report said. He lost his pension and his benefits, as well as his pay, and became a fruit packer, but on Sunday, Daniel Andrews, the premier of Victoria, called Ryan, now 86, a ‘‘hero.’’ He also apologized for the actions of the police decades ago.

Ryan has been living off his state-sponsored old age pension, the equivalent of Social Security. Reached by phone Thursday, Ryan said that he may be vindicated, but it’s the victims he still can’t stop thinking about.

The Victorian police have apologized to Ryan for ousting him, and the Royal Commission said it believed Ryan’s claims that he had been forced out of his job because of his investigation into Monsignor Day.

‘‘When he was forced out of the police force, it cost him the job he loved. It cost him his pension. It almost cost him his sanity,’’ said Vernon Knight, the former chief executive of a child welfare organization who filed a petition seeking compensation for Ryan.

‘‘Nothing will repay the last 47 years,’’ Knight said. ‘‘But at least now he’s totally validated, so he can complete his retirement with integrity.’’

Ryan started his investigation in 1971 after a meeting with a nun and a teaching principal at a Catholic college. A 17-year-old girl had complained to her mother that, eight years earlier, Day had fondled her while she sat next to him in the front seat of his car on five separate occasions, according to the Royal Commission’s 2017 report.

‘‘I’ve known about Monsignor Day’s behavior for some time now,’’ the nun reportedly told Ryan, according to the report. ‘‘It runs contrary to my vows of silence to say this to you, and I will never repeat what I have said from this moment forward.’’

Once he started his investigation, each victim he interviewed ‘‘gave another name’’ of another alleged victim, ‘‘so it was like stepping stones,’’ Ryan told the Royal Commission in his 2015 testimony.

One boy he interviewed said Day sexually abused him when he spent the night with the priest in a motel room just before Christmas 1970.....

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"Churches, Scouts and YMCA join Australian abuse redress plan" Associated Press  June 01, 2018

CANBERRA, Australia — Four in five victims of child sexual abuse in Australian institutions will be eligible for compensation after three churches, the Scouts movement, and the YMCA joined a federal government redress plan, an official said Thursday.

The Catholic Church, Australia’s largest denomination, on Wednesday became the first nongovernmental institution to commit to the $2.9 billion national plan.

The Anglican Church, Salvation Army, Scouts Australia, and the Young Men’s Christian Association, or YMCA, committed to join on Thursday.

Flanked by representatives of the churches and associations, Social Services Minister Dan Tehan said their participation meant that 80 percent of Australia’s 60,000 known victims were now covered.

‘‘Can I thank the institutions who are here with us today for the leadership that they have shown, for owning up to past wrongs, for owning up for behavior which can only be described as despicable and deplorable . . . for wanting to turn a page, to provide redress and make sure that those survivors get the justice that they deserve,’’ Tehan said.

Archbishop of Adelaide Philip Wilson last week became the most senior Catholic cleric in the world to be convicted of covering up child sex abuse. He faces a two-year prison term.....

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"Australian police chief apologizes to indigenous people" Associated Press  July 13, 2018

CANBERRA — An Australian police chief on Thursday made an apology to indigenous people who are overrepresented in prisons and vowed to improve relations.

Western Australia Police Commissioner Chris Dawson said police were key participants in past wrongs against indigenous people in the state over decades, including enforcing government policies of removing mixed-race children from Aboriginal families until the 1970s. The children are known as the Stolen Generations. Many were institutionalized, abused, and neglected.

‘‘Some of the comments I’ll be making shortly are confronting and may make some people feel uncomfortable, but I understand that truth-telling is an important part of enabling and facilitating change,’’ Dawson said in a speech at police headquarters in Perth.

That is why we don't get any in America. We are the most lied-to people on the face of the planet.

‘‘And so today, on behalf of the Western Australian Police Force, I would like to say ‘sorry’ to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples for our participation in past wrongful actions that have caused immeasurable pain and suffering,’’ he added.

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The American people are still waiting for untold apologies from this government for so many things.

"Australian archbishop convicted of sex abuse coverup resigns" by Nicole Winfield Associated Press  July 30, 2018

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis on Monday accepted the resignation of an Australian archbishop convicted in criminal court of covering up the sexual abuse of children by a priest, taking action after coming under pressure from ordinary Catholics, priests, and the Australian prime minister.

It was the second straight major announcement of a sex abuse-related resignation, after Francis’s dramatic sanctioning and demotion this past weekend of a prominent US cardinal — Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington.

The move suggests Francis is keen to reinforce his non-immunity policy on clergy abuse before he heads to Dublin next month for a big Catholic family rally.

The church sex abuse scandal is likely to dominate the agenda for the rally, given Ireland’s history with predator priests and the bishops who covered for them.

Archbishop Philip Wilson of Adelaide, Australia, was convicted in May and sentenced to a year’s detention for failing to report to police the repeated abuse of two altar boys by a pedophile priest, the late Rev. James Fletcher, in the Hunter Valley region north of Sydney during the 1970s.

After the sentence, he refused to resign as he appealed.

Wilson became the highest-ranking Catholic cleric ever convicted in a criminal court of abuse coverup.

Wilson, who denied the accusations, had immediately stepped aside after he was convicted but refused to resign pending an appeal. As recently as last week, though, Wilson acknowledged that calls for his sacking were increasing, and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull added his voice to the chorus July 19 in urging Francis to fire him.

Even one of Fletcher’s victims spoke out: Australian media published a letter last week from Peter Gogarty to Francis urging him to remove Wilson.

‘‘Imagine if you can, your own childhood, your Catholic upbringing and the character-destroying belief that you were engaged in the worst of mortal sins,’’ Gogarty wrote the pope. ‘‘I am now 57 years old and continue to struggle with the burden forced upon me.’’

In a one-line statement Monday, the Vatican said Francis had accepted Wilson’s resignation. At 67, he is well under the normal retirement age for bishops of 75.

In a statement issued by the archdiocese, Wilson said he had submitted his resignation to Francis of his own will on July 20 — a day after Turnbull’s call — and said he hoped his decision would help abuse victims and the rest of the Catholic community heal.

‘‘I had hoped to defer this decision until after the appeal process had been completed,’’ Wilson said. ‘‘However, there is just too much pain and distress being caused by my maintaining the office of archbishop.’’

Francis’s decision to accept the resignation is significant given he has previously refrained from taking action against accused bishops that might be perceived as prejudicing outcomes in cases.

Francis on Saturday accepted McCarrick’s resignation as cardinal, and imposed on him unprecedented penalties for a cardinal even before his canonical trial is completed, including living a lifetime of penance and prayer and living isolated from others.

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Also see:

"Catholic leaders in Australia on Friday rejected a government push to force priests to report accusations of child sexual abuse heard during confession, saying it would violate a sacred rite, infringe on religious freedom, and ultimately do little to protect children. The rebuke came as the local Roman Catholic Church issued a lengthy response to a five-year government inquiry uncovering what officials called a “national tragedy” of widespread sexual abuse of children spanning decades. The investigation examined abuse in religious institutions, schools, and other establishments, finding that many of the cases of suspected abuse involved Catholic priests and religious brothers."

Related: ‘We say sorry’: Australia formally apologizes to victims of child sexual abuse

I'm sorry to say that it is not good enough.

I used to want to hear sorry as a start to forgiveness and reconciliation, let the criminals off if they would just say sorry, but no longer, they made wait to long and now they use my attitude to justify not saying it, fine. Won't stop the eternal condemnations.

Australia set to ban covert foreign interference in politics

"The conservative government says the legislation, first proposed in December, is the major cause of a rift in diplomatic relations with China, Australia’s most important trading partner, but Attorney General Christian Porter told Parliament on Tuesday the bills include the most significant counter-spying reforms in Australia since the 1970s. ‘‘The practices of modern espionage are now being encountered in so many Western democracies around the globe,’’ Porter said, but independent lawmaker Andrew Wilkie, who quit his job as a defense intelligence analyst in 2003 in protest against the then-government’s use of non-existent weapons of mass destruction to explain sending Australian troops to back the US-led invasion of Iraq, voted against the bills. Wilkie argued their definitions of national security and foreign interference were too broad......"

Bravo to brave Mr. Wilkie, and any apologies are too late on that one.

How the US and Australia rely on each other

The Five Eyes surveillance program allows every ally to circumvent domestic spying laws!

That is the environment in which you are living:

Australian prime minister abandons climate targets
Australian ministers resign after leader survives challenge
Dutton planning 2nd challenge to Australian prime minister
Australian prime minister ousted in dispute over energy policy
Australia’s new prime minister appoints Cabinet

There has to be some other reason the government was overthrown!

"Australia sends migrants found in crocodile-infested waters to detention" August 29, 2018

SYDNEY — For the first time in nearly four years, a group of migrants was caught illegally entering the Australian mainland by sea this week, after surviving a shipwreck and several days in crocodile-infested waters, authorities said.

By Tuesday, all 17 migrants believed to be aboard the boat were found in the area near the mangrove swamps of Far North Queensland, two days after the vessel ran aground and law enforcement officials began a search of the area.

Once the migrants were all accounted for, the government said on Tuesday that the group would be deported to Christmas Island, an Australian territory nearly 1,000 miles from the closest point in continental Australia, where they would be detained and their immigration statuses determined.

“Under Australia’s strict border protection policies, no one who travels to Australia illegally by boat is permitted to remain in Australia,” the Department of Home Affairs said.

It is rare for migrants to reach mainland Australia by sea. The country has strict rules that ban such journeys. Since 2013, migrants caught in Australia’s territorial waters are subject to deportation or detention at offshore facilities on the islands of Nauru and Manus, Papua New Guinea.

The government also maintains such a facility on Christmas Island, where more than 200 migrants were being held as of June.

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They are lucky they made it past the Great Barrier Reef.

"A family of seven including four children was found dead with gunshot wounds Friday at a rural property in southwest Australia in what could be the country’s worst mass shooting in 22 years, police and news media said. Philip Alpers, a Sydney University gun policy analyst, said the tragedy appeared to be the worst mass shooting in Australia since a lone gunman killed 35 people in Tasmania state in 1996, prompting the nation to introduce tough gun controls. Australia’s gun laws are widely acclaimed as a success, with supporters including former U.S. President Barack Obama saying Australia has not had a single mass shooting since they were implemented. The generally accepted definition of a mass shooting — four deaths excluding the shooter in a single event — has been met only once in Australia since then. In 2014, a farmer shot his wife and three children before killing himself. Police have revealed few details about the recent killings, and it is not clear whether there was more than one shooter....."

They run the same sort of mind-bending psyops on you, huh?

Makes you want to start drinking:

"Posters Suggesting That Women Can Drink While Pregnant Stir Backlash" New York Times News Service  August 30, 2018

On posters distributed to medical facilities across Australia, large type over an image of a pregnant woman reads: “It’s safest not to drink while pregnant.”

Good so far.

It was the next line, in smaller type, that alarmed medical professionals: “It’s not known if alcohol is safe to drink when you are pregnant.”

Public health groups responded with resounding protests— drinking alcohol while pregnant is very definitively known to be unsafe, they said. Creating doubt around the science could confuse pregnant women and encourage them to ignore warnings, they feared.

The organization that made the posters, DrinkWise, describes its focus as promoting “a healthier and safer drinking culture in Australia,” but it is funded largely by the alcohol industry. It withdrew the 2,400 posters after hearing complaints and substituted new text, but concerns remained among people working to spread the message that women should stay away from alcohol while pregnant.

“It’s more than just erroneous for the alcohol industry to make that statement,” said Michael Thorn, chief executive of the Foundation of Alcohol Research and Education, which is based in the Australian capital, Canberra. “The truth is, that’s what they want the public to believe.”

DrinkWise’s chief executive, Simon Strahan, suggested the flap was more about precise messaging than intent.

“It is clear, from the ‘It’s safest not to drink while pregnant’ headline of the posters, that the intent is to encourage abstinence when pregnant, planning a pregnancy, or breast-feeding,” he said.

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Time to get off the teat:

"US leaker Chelsea Manning to be barred from Australia" Associated Press  August 31, 2018

CANBERRA — Convicted classified document leaker Chelsea Manning will not be allowed to enter Australia for a speaking tour scheduled to start Sunday, the event organizer said on Thursday.

Think Inc. said it had received on Wednesday a notice of intention from the government to deny Manning entry. The group is calling on Manning’s supporters to lobby new Immigration Minister David Coleman to allow Manning into Australia.

‘‘Ms. Manning offers formidable ideas and an insightful perspective which we are hoping to bring to the forefront of Australian dialogue,’’ Think Inc. Director Suzi Jamil said.

Manning, an analyst for the US Army who leaked military and diplomatic documents to the antisecrecy website WikiLeaks, served seven years of a 35-year sentence before being granted clemency by President Obama in 2017.

Manning was scheduled to speak at the Sydney Opera House on Sunday and has events in Australia and New Zealand.

--more--"

First to the Opera House and then to New Zealand:

"Horse racing ad on Sydney Opera House ignites debate: Is all Australia for sale?" by Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore New York Times  October 11, 2018

SYDNEY — The Sydney Opera House will celebrate its 45th anniversary this month with global dignitaries, including Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, but this week, its gleaming white sails became the focus of a bruising local debate over culture, sports, misogyny, and national identity.

On Tuesday night, thousands of people turned up to protest a six-minute light projection on the Opera House’s tiled sails. Put on by Racing NSW, the governing horse-racing body for New South Wales, the projection was designed to promote the Everest — Australia’s newest, and richest, horse race.

Racing NSW’s chief executive, Peter V’landys, backed by the prime minister and one of Australia’s most infamous conservative radio hosts, said the projection would increase tourism. Many, however, including the Opera House’s chief executive, felt the move was a tone-deaf commodification of the building — a World Heritage site — the equivalent to turning Stonehenge or the Statue of Liberty into billboards to promote gambling.

“Even Donald Trump wouldn’t get away with putting advertising onto the Lincoln Memorial, but it’s akin to that,” said Ben Oquist, executive director at the Australia Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. “It was a step too far for everybody.”

The conflict, which played out over the past week with slights and insults that are likely to linger, has resembled the kind of dramas regularly seen in the Opera House theater.

You best stay out of the theater.

It was a promotional gimmick that badly misfired, but the backlash has revealed deeper fault lines in Australian society. Sydney’s conservative old guard collided this week with a younger, more diverse electorate. The latter is frustrated over a city and a country that in its view have become enslaved to big corporations at the cost of shared values, and where sports, the right-wing media, and rich insiders can dictate policy to politicians.

That is pretty much what we have!

“The Opera House represents art that has never been biased to color and age and money,” Carlos Lara, a 27-year-old musician, said at the protest Tuesday amid a crowd chanting “not for sale” and “our house.” “That’s why people feel so passionate,” he said, “this represents so much more than a horse race.”

Built on a former island now known as Bennelong Point, the Opera House was designed by Danish architect Jorn Utzon. After a conflict with the government over rising construction costs, he resigned in 1966 and left Australia before its completion in 1973.

Helen Pitt, author of “The House,” a book about the building and its history of discord and tragedy, has called it “our great Shakespearean story.”

It is also a building that stands for diversity. Constructed largely by postwar migrants — about 10,000 workers from 90 different countries — the Opera House was “very much the product of a new reimagined Australia,” Pitt said.

Critically, she said, it propelled Sydney from a provincial small town on the far side of the world to a global player, and while it is officially run by a trust overseen by the state government, in the public’s mind, the house belongs to all.

Reflecting that sense of shared ownership, a petition on Change.org, “Defend Our Opera House,” has racked up more than 300,000 signatures since Sunday. A survey conducted this week by the market research firm Micromex also showed that 80 percent of residents surveyed in New South Wales were opposed to the decision by the state premier, Gladys Berejiklian, to allow the advertisement.

Much of the anger has been aimed at Alan Jones, a right-wing radio host, whose withdrawal of support for former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull helped contribute to Turnbull’s ouster in August.

During an interview on his show Friday, Jones shouted down the Opera House’s chief executive, Louise Herron, who opposed the racing promotion.

“Who the hell do you think you are?” Jones asked Herron. “You don’t own the Opera House, we own it.”

Jones, who has since apologized, said on air that Herron should be sacked if she did not revise her stance and “come to the party” and that he would be speaking with Berejiklian about it.

Berejiklian later overruled Herron’s decision and allowed the ads.

To many, Jones represents an old world Australia: One that is white, wealthy, conservative, and male. He lives in a luxury apartment block nicknamed the Toaster that looks over the Opera House and owns his own race horses.

His behavior has come to be seen as not just in his own interest, but also as another example of his penchant for bullying.

Jenny Leong, Greens representative for the Sydney suburb of Newtown, said of Jones: “The massive groundswell of public outrage about this was as much to do about the fact we had a conservative old school shock jock basically threatening a woman to lose her job.”

“What we have seen in the last few days is people saying, ‘This is enough, we want our city back,” she added.

In an e-mail interview, Graeme Hinton, chief operating officer at Racing NSW, said that the publicity that has arisen from the conflict has “certainly raised the profile of the Everest, which can only be a good thing.”

Tickets, he said, were selling fast, but critics, including Oquist of the Australia Institute, are hoping the furor marks a turning point.

“For a relatively new country, our ethos hasn’t been about treasuring our heritage,” he said. “This should spark a bigger debate.”

--more--"

It was like waving a red flag in front of a bull:

"British medical authorities acknowledged Monday that they were checking the credentials of some 3,000 foreign physicians after one was convicted of fraud and accused of falsifying qualifications. For more than two decades, Zholia Alemi, 56, worked at health facilities in Britain using what she said was a qualification from her native New Zealand. The document enabled her to treat patients suffering from dementia and an array of other psychiatric complaints, but in recent weeks, an investigation by a provincial newspaper uncovered a very different version of Alemi’s background. When she arrived in England in the mid-1990s, she benefited from a program that helped physicians from some former British colonies, including New Zealand, to secure licenses to practice in Britain with only limited examinations of their credentials. The case of Alemi came to light after she attempted to take advantage of a patient, Gillian Belham, an 84-year-old widow whom she befriended in 2016 at a dementia clinic in the coastal town of Workington....."


"Pence’s China attacks fuel fears of new Cold War" by Jason Scott Bloomberg News  November 20, 2018

SYDNEY — Since the Soviet Union fell in the early 1990s, Southeast Asia has sought to avoid getting caught in a fight between major powers. The Trump administration is making that position look increasingly untenable.

Vice President Mike Pence sharpened US attacks on China during a week of summits that ended Sunday, most notably with a call for nations to avoid loans that would leave them indebted to Beijing. He said the United States wasn’t in a rush to end the trade war and would ‘‘not change course until China changes its ways’’ — a worrying prospect for a region heavily reliant on exports.

‘‘The language we heard from Pence is quite concerning because it shows we’re moving toward a zero-sum game geopolitics in the Asia-Pacific,’’ said Jonathan Pryke, a researcher specializing in the Pacific at the Lowy Institute, a Sydney-based research group. ‘‘The great hope of convergence between China and the U.S. is becoming less and less of a likely reality.’’

The meetings in Singapore and Papua New Guinea produced little to suggest President Trump and Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping would reach a deal when they meet in a few weeks at the Group of 20 summit in Argentina. The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit ended in disarray on Sunday after leaders failed to agree on a joint statement.

Stocks in Asia kicked off the week in lackluster fashion after the discord, and the Australian and New Zealand dollars fell from near multimonth highs. Financial markets have swerved in recent weeks as investors gauge whether an end to the trade war is near.

Also see:

"America’s farmers have been shut out of foreign markets, hit with retaliatory tariffs, and lost lucrative contracts in the face of President Trump’s trade war, but a $12 billion bailout program Trump created to “make it up” to farmers has done little to cushion the blow, with red tape and long waiting periods resulting in few payouts so far....."

Cost him the House.

Smaller economies in the Asia-Pacific have long sought to balance ties, reaping the benefits of trade with China’s fast-growing economy while relying on American firepower to rein in Beijing’s assertiveness over disputed territory. Yet the trade war has raised the prospect that nations will now need to pick sides, particularly as higher US tariffs threaten to alter long-established supply chains.

Earlier this month, former US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson warned of an ‘‘Economic Iron Curtain’’ dividing the world if the United States and China fail to resolve strategic differences. That could lead both sides to deny each other technology, capital, and investment, reversing decades of gains from globalization.

Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong echoed those fears last week, saying tensions between the United States and China are rising to a point where Southeast Asia may one day have to ‘‘choose one or the other.’’

For the moment, that day still looks a ways off. Papua New Guinea, an economy smaller than all 50 US states that hosted the APEC summit, signed deals in excess of $1 billion with both China and a US-led bloc.

‘‘Smaller and middle powers lean to one side or to the other,’’ Richard Maude, a senior adviser at Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, told an Asia Society event hosted by Bloomberg in Sydney earlier this month. ‘‘They don’t want to make one big single binary choice between Washington and Beijing. What they want is to find the space to stay in the middle and to prosecute their own interests.’’

Sort of like a, gulp, nationalist?

While the United States can depend on allies like Japan, Australia, and Taiwan, nations such as South Korea and the Philippines that have defense arrangements with the United States would try to hedge, according to Minxin Pei, a China scholar and specialist in US-Asia relations.

Southeast Asian countries were ‘‘desperate fence sitters’’ who don’t want to make China an enemy, said Pei, who is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in California. ‘‘China and the U.S. will try very hard in the next few years to charm the countries in the region.’’

While in Asia, Pence said the United States provides ‘‘a better option’’ for nations in the region and announced a plan along with key Pacific allies to build a $1.7 billion electricity grid in Papua New Guinea. The United States also joined with Australia to redevelop a naval base, and held a meeting of ‘‘the Quad’’ — a grouping that also includes India and Japan — in a bid to balance China’s rising economic and military strength.

Pence also had stinging remarks for Xi’s Belt-and-Road Initiative, which Morgan Stanley says may total $1.3 trillion by 2027 -- dwarfing the funds the United States and allies have mobilized. The vice president said the United States doesn’t ‘‘drown our partners in a sea of debt’’ or ‘‘offer a constricting belt or a one-way road.’’

Compared with Pence, Xi had a softer message for Asia this week. He voiced support for the multilateral trading system, called for greater cooperation, and said that implementing tariffs and breaking up supply chains was ‘‘doomed to failure.’’ He also defended his signature Belt-and-Road Initiative, saying it’s ‘‘not a trap as some people have labeled it.’’

‘‘As the tension with U.S. has risen, China’s approach to its neighboring countries has changed,’’ said Shi Yinhong, an international relations professor at Renmin University in Beijing. ‘‘China would like to gain as many friends as it can at the moment.’’

After APEC, Xi is due to visit Brunei and the Philippines, a US ally that has moved closer to China under Rodrigo Duterte. Xi also recently hosted Shinzo Abe in the first bilateral visit by a Japanese leader to Beijing in seven years.

Despite strong security ties, neither Japan nor Australia supports Trump’s protectionist policies. Both went forward with a Pacific trade pact even after Trump pulled out, and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison used his speech at APEC to warn that ‘‘tit-for-tat protectionism and threats of trade wars are in no one’s interests economically.’’

‘‘Our role here is to maximize Australia’s interests,’’ Morrison told reporters. ‘‘That’s done by working constructively with our long-term partner, the U.S., and working closely with the Chinese government.’’

Pence sought to downplay regional concerns that American actions would lead to economic pain and force countries to choose between the United States and China.

‘‘Great power competition between the United States and China in this region doesn’t have to mean hostility,’’ Pence said. ‘‘These issues can be resolved, we believe, at the negotiation table,’’ but many in the region don’t expect a deal anytime soon, despite periodic optimism from Trump’s camp.

‘‘This is one episode in the hegemonic struggle between the U.S. and China — it will go on for a while,’’ said Kunihiko Miyake, a former Japanese foreign ministry official who is now a visiting professor at Ritsumeikan University. ‘‘It will be a Cold War, whether we call it that or not.’’

Just what we don't need!

--more--"

Related:

"Walt Disney Co. said Monday it won unconditional approval from Chinese authorities for its $71 billion purchase of assets from 21st Century Fox Inc. The ruling removes one of the last major hurdles for the deal, which unites the entertainment assets of Rupert Murdoch’s empire with Disney. The Burbank, Calif.-based entertainment giant has already obtained approval from regulators in the United States and the European Union, though both required divestitures that the company has agreed to make. There had been some concern in the investment community that China’s approval of the deal might not come easily, given the ongoing disputes over trade and tariffs between the country and the Trump administration. Disney continues to invest heavily in China, including in theme parks in Shanghai and Hong Kong."

Maybe things are warming up again!



Quick stop in the Philippines:

"US, Philippines launch largest military drills under Duterte" Associated Press  May 08, 2018

MANILA — US and Philippine forces on Monday began their largest annual military exercises since President Rodrigo Duterte came to power and vowed to scale down America’s military presence in the country as he sought closer ties with China and Russia.

The Balikatan exercises opened with a ceremony at the main Philippine military camp in Manila and are to feature 8,000 American and Filipino personnel and contingents from Japan and Australia.

American and Philippine officials praised the long treaty alliance between the United States and its former Southeast Asian colony and then linked arms in a show of solidarity.

The volatile leader, who has been critical of US security policies, has taken steps to revive ties with China.

Duterte’s animosity with Washington was partly ignited by US government condemnation of his deadly campaign against illegal drugs.....

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Related:

"The complaint is unlikely to have much practical effect, since President Rodrigo Duterte’s government does not recognize the international court. He said in March that he was withdrawing the Philippines from the treaty that established it. The new complaint comes as Duterte is strengthening his grip on the Philippines’ judicial system. Over the weekend, he announced the selection of Teresita de Castro as the new chief justice of the Supreme Court, replacing Maria Lourdes Sereno, a fierce critic of Duterte’s war on drugs. A rights group, Rise Up for Life and for Rights, said there was “more than enough proof of widespread and systematic attacks against civilians.”

She took on Duterte, which was the kiss of death, and now she's out and her expulsion has been upheld.

"Communist rebels tell Philippine leader: No more talks" Associated Press  June 28, 2018

MANILA — A Philippine communist rebel leader said Thursday that the insurgents can no longer hold peace talks with President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration and that it is better to help oust him and work with his successor.

So they are working with the CIA now!

Jose Maria Sison said Duterte wants the guerrillas to surrender without addressing the social ills that have inflamed one of Asia’s longest communist rebellions. He accused the president of being ‘‘subservient to US imperialism’’ and blamed him for the ‘‘traitorous sellout’’ of disputed South China Sea territories to China.

Proving the commies are nothing more than another arm of the globalist banksters.

After preliminary talks, both sides agreed to a new temporary cease-fire on June 21, with peace talks to resume on Thursday in Norway, which has been brokering the decades-long negotiations, but Duterte delayed the resumption indefinitely, antagonizing the guerrillas.

‘‘Based on the implications drawn from the current impasse,’’ the rebel front involved in the talks, the National Democratic Front of the Philippines, ‘‘can no longer negotiate with a government of the Republic of the Philippines that is headed by Duterte,’’ Sison said.

Duterte said he is ready to continue fighting the insurgents. The rural rebellion has raged for nearly half a century.

Crush 'em like Islamists!

--more--"

Whatever happened out there anyway?

"Sniper assassinates Philippines politician" Associated Press  July 03, 2018

TANAUAN, Philippines — A Philippine city mayor known for parading drug suspects in public but also alleged to have drug ties himself was shot and killed by a sniper Monday in a brazen attack during a flag-raising ceremony in front of hundreds of horrified municipal employees.

Mayor Antonio Halili of Tanauan city, which is in Batangas province, south of Manila, was shot as he and about 300 employees and newly elected village leaders sang the national anthem in a parking lot outside the city hall. The gunman escaped, police and witnesses said.

‘‘I didn’t know that it was gunfire until people started screaming, ‘Somebody’s shooting, somebody’s shooting,’ while running in all directions, and I saw my mayor slumped on the ground,’’ said village leader Rico Alcazar, who was standing behind Halili.

Halili’s bodyguards opened fire toward a grassy hill where the gunshot was apparently fired from, adding to the bedlam, Alcazar said by phone.

The Philippines grassy knoll!

Cellphone video shot by Alcazar shows a few men standing around the fallen Halili as gunfire rings out and people scream, run, and take cover.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte expressed suspicion in a speech that the killing was linked to illegal drugs.

--more--"

Related: Mayor Is Gunned Down in Philippines

Was a different shooting the next day.

Maybe someone is sending Duterte a message.

"Duterte in Israel, first visit by a Philippines president" Associated Press  September 02, 2018

JERUSALEM — Rodrigo Duterte, accused of committing serious human rights violations as part of his deadly crackdown on drugs at home, and who has stirred controversy with comments about the Holocaust, received a warm welcome in Israel when he arrived Sunday for a four-day visit.

Ahead of his departure, Duerte said he ‘‘looks forward to broader cooperation on a broad range of mutually important areas — defense and security, law enforcement, economic development, trade (and) investments and labor.’’

Sales of Israeli weapons to his government are high on the agenda, according to Israeli media. Filipino officials have said the Philippines has recently acquired Israeli-made arms such as Galil assault rifles and pistols for its 120,000-strong police force, which is at the front line of Duterte’s battle against illegal drugs and other crimes.

Duterte was set to kick off his four-day visit by attending an event of the Filipino community in Israel Sunday evening. An estimated 28,000 Filipinos live in Israel, mostly as health aides.

A Filipino living in Israel, Lisa Levi, told Channel 10 TV that she is ‘‘excited’’ and ‘‘proud’’ he is visiting.

Speaking in Hebrew, she said, ‘‘I wish I could hug him and thank him for everything he does.’’

She said her home country is safer now and that accusations of rights abuses are ‘‘untrue.’’

Duterte, who has stirred controversy with his foul-mouthed attacks on Barack Obama and even God, will receive a warm welcome in the Holy Land, meeting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other officials.

Duterte drew outrage in 2016 when he compared his antidrug campaign to the Nazi genocide of Jews in World War II and said he would be ‘‘happy to slaughter’’ 3 million addicts. He later apologized.

He is scheduled to visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem on Monday and later a monument commemorating the Philippines’ rescue of Jews during the Holocaust.

In contrast to the warm official welcome, Israeli human rights activists plan to protest the visit and have encouraged President Reuven Rivlin not to meet him over accusations of rights abuses at home.

Official Philippine police tallies place the number of suspects killed in police-led antidrug raids at more than 4,500 since Duterte took office in June 2016.

International human rights watchdogs have cited far higher death tolls.

Duterte, a 73-year-old former government prosecutor, denies condoning extrajudicial killings but has openly threatened drug dealers with death.

--more--"

Look what happened when he returned:

"Duterte orders arrest of Philippine senator, one of his top critics" by Felipe Villamor New York Times  September 04, 2018

MANILA — President Rodrigo Duterte has ordered the arrest of one of his most prominent critics in the Philippine Senate, declaring that an amnesty granted to the senator years ago over his role in two military uprisings was invalid.

The senator, Antonio Trillanes, a former naval officer, called Duterte’s order the act of a dictator and said he would not resist arrest. If he is detained, he will be the second well-known Duterte critic in the Senate to be put behind bars.

“If the ordinary folk are being killed, he is now jailing his critics,” Trillanes said Tuesday, referring to Duterte’s bloody crackdown on narcotics. “That is the situation in the Philippines.”

The president’s order, which was signed last week and made public Tuesday, declares that the amnesty granted to Trillanes in 2010 by Duterte’s predecessor, Benigno S. Aquino III, was “void ab initio,” or invalid from the start.

The amnesty applied to Trillanes’s role in two brief, bloodless uprisings. In 2003, he was one of about 300 junior military officers who declared themselves in rebellion against the government of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who is the speaker of the House of Representatives and a Duterte ally.

The officers occupied the Oakwood Hotel in the Manila area, but they soon surrendered after Arroyo promised to look into their allegations of corruption within the Philippine military.

The 2007 rebellion, which was even briefer, took place while Trillanes and other officers were on trial for the first one. He and some of the other defendants walked out of court, joined other military officers in the Manila streets, and took over another upscale hotel, calling for Arroyo’s ouster.

That mutiny was put down dramatically within hours, after military forces crashed an armored personnel carrier into the lobby.

Trillanes, a charismatic figure who was the public face of the rebellion, was elected to the Senate from jail that same year. As a senator, he has been one of the most prominent figures in the opposition to Duterte, particularly over his war on drugs, which has left thousands of people dead at the hands of police officers and unknown gunmen.

Last year, another vocal presidential critic in the 24-seat Senate, Leila de Lima, was jailed on charges that she had protected drug dealers. Senator De Lima, a former justice secretary, has denied the charges and accused Duterte of exacting political payback from her.

“This is all bogus,” Trillanes said Tuesday.

He called Duterte “a dictator who does not respect institutions.”

Duterte was visiting the Middle East on Tuesday. His order said that Trillanes’s amnesty was invalid because the senator had not met the “minimum requirements” for it, including filing an official application for amnesty and admitting his guilt.

“It never was effective; there was nothing to undo,” the president’s spokesman, Harry Roque, told reporters in Jerusalem, according to Reuters.

The leader of the opposition in the Senate, Francis Pangilinan, called the presidential arrest order “clear persecution.” He said Duterte could not legally revoke Trillanes’s amnesty himself because it had required, and received, the approval of both houses of Congress.

“It could not be easily set aside by the whims of one man,” Pangilinan said. “Absent our concurrence, any arrest is illegal.”

Duterte was also criticized by Anwar Ibrahim, a prominent Malaysian politician allied with Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad who was visiting Manila on Tuesday for a business conference.

“My consistent view is we cannot abuse power to victimize opposition participants,” said Anwar, who was imprisoned for years while in the Malaysian opposition.

“If I meet President Duterte, I will tell him I support some of his measures,” Anwar said at a news conference. “But I will also tell him to continue to ensure there is a vibrant democracy and the respect for the rule of law in the Philippines.”

I think he has been hanging out with the wrong people.

--more--"

Related: Second Philippine senator who defied Duterte is arrested

It ended a dramatic, weekslong standoff with authorities.

Also see:

"A Philippine town mayor who was linked by the president to illegal drugs was fatally shot in his office Wednesday in the latest brazen attack on local officials. Four gunmen barged into the Ronda municipality’s town hall in Cebu province early Wednesday and repeatedly shot Mayor Mariano Blanco, who was sleeping in his office, police said. President Rodrigo Duterte had included Blanco in a list of officials allegedly linked to illegal drugs. The mayor had denied any wrongdoing and had been alternately sleeping in his office and his nearby house after reportedly receiving death threats, officials said."

"Duterte says, ‘my only sin is the extrajudicial killings’" by Felipe Villamor New York Times  September 27, 2018

MANILA — President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines on Thursday said for the first time that extrajudicial killings had happened under his government’s brutal war on drugs, an admission that could bolster two cases filed against him at the International Criminal Court.

In a rambling speech before government executives at the presidential palace, Duterte again touched on the government’s drug war that has left thousands dead, a common theme in his two-year-old presidency.

He said he had challenged the country’s military and police brass to remove him from office if they were not satisfied with the way he was running the country.

“I told the military, what is my fault? Did I steal even one peso?” Duterte said. “My only sin is the extrajudicial killings.”

He did not elaborate, but it was the first time Duterte publicly acknowledged that extrajudicial killings by the authorities had occurred in his presidency, and it added credibility to claims by rights groups that he had engineered mass killings of alleged drug suspects.

That's why the powers-that-be are upset with Duterte. He is disrupting the drug pipeline.

Two criminal complaints against the president have been filed with the International Criminal Court, based in The Hague. Angered by what he called foreign interference in the Philippines’ internal affairs, Duterte subsequently pulled out of an international treaty that established the court.

Two men — a former police officer and a self-confessed hit man — filed the first case, claiming that they had carried out killings at Duterte’s order when he was still the mayor of a southern city. The second case was filed in August by relatives of eight people slain in the drug war, and accused Duterte of “crimes against humanity” for ordering thousands of murders connected to his drug war.

The Philippine National Police estimate that they have killed about 4,500 users and dealers in drug enforcement operations in the past two years, and insist that all of the killings were legitimate uses of force.

Rights groups, including the New York-based Human Rights Watch, estimate that more than 12,000 people have died in the drug war, many of them victims of summary execution by the police.

Duterte last year temporarily halted police anti-drug operations after three teenagers were mistakenly killed, igniting street protests led by the Catholic Church, but police operations have since resumed, leading to near-daily killings.

On Thursday, Duterte criticized an opposition leader, Senator Francis Pangilinan, for sponsoring a law that exempts children below age 15 years from criminal liability. The president’s allies in Congress say that it encourages criminals to employ minors.

Duterte also reiterated that the drug war would continue until his six-year term ends in 2022.

“It will not end,” he said. “As I have said, I will put on the table my life, the presidency. I can lose it anytime. My honor.”

Romel Bagares, a lawyer for a human rights group, the Philippine Coalition for the International Criminal Court, noted that while Duterte was known for his off-the-cuff remarks, Thursday’s comments were “by far his most direct admission of being responsible for” extrajudicial killings.

“And I am surprised there has been no retraction of any kind from the palace since he made them,” he said. “I’m sure this would also be of extreme interest to the ICC’s Office of the Trial Prosecutor now making a preliminary investigation of his drug war.”

--more--"

I'm surprised no one has tried to kill him.

"Philippine leader says there’s a possibility he has cancer" Associated Press  October 05, 2018

MANILA — Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said Thursday he might have cancer and added that ‘‘I don’t know where I’m now physically’’ as he awaited the result of recent medical tests.

That's how they dispatched Chavez.

Duterte said in a speech in Manila that he underwent an endoscopy and colonoscopy about three weeks ago but his doctor was advised this week to repeat the tests. Both tests aim to diagnose any abnormality in the digestive tract and colon.

‘‘I don’t know where I’m now physically but I have to wait for that. But I would tell you if it’s cancer, it’s cancer,’’ the 73-year-old Duterte said to a Philippine Military Academy alumni group and top security officials.

Duterte added that ‘‘if it’s third stage, no more treatment. I will not prolong the agony in this office or anywhere.’’

Rumors have swirled for some time that Duterte, known for his deadly crackdown on illegal drugs, might have a serious illness. Duterte and his aides, however, repeatedly said he was generally fit although he had grown tired of politics after serving for about 40 years in different government posts.

‘‘I really don’t want it because I’m tired and I know that time’s up for me,’’ Duterte said, adding that physical limitations usually come at around age 70.

‘‘I can’t say now if I really got hit or not,’’ he said, noting that he has other illnesses such as Barrett’s esophagus, a condition thought to be caused by stomach acid washing up into the esophagus.

--more--"

"Philippine president: Tests showed ‘I’m not yet cancerous’" Associated Press  October 09, 2018

MANILA — Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said Tuesday that medical tests show he doesn’t have cancer, but added that he won’t release a detailed report on his health.

‘‘I’m not yet cancerous so do not be afraid to go near me. I will not contaminate you,’’ the 73-year-old leader told a journalist in jest during a news conference. When asked if tissue samples taken from him tested negative for cancer, the president nodded.

Interior officer in charge Eduardo Ano earlier told reporters that Duterte announced his test results in a Cabinet meeting Monday night, eliciting applause from top officials. Ano said the president looked well and attended back-to-back meetings Monday.

‘‘We can drink now, really. I’ll give you a run for your money,’’ Duterte told a journalist. He denied speculation he flew to Hong Kong over the weekend to seek treatment, saying he went there with his family to buy larger clothes because he had gained weight.

Duterte said in a speech last week that he might have cancer and was awaiting test results, adding to growing uncertainty about his health.

Duterte failed to hold a scheduled Cabinet meeting and skipped another ceremony last Wednesday, leading to speculation that he had been hospitalized. His spokesman, Harry Roque, denied that.

This was after he returned from Israel, too.

Rumors have swirled since last year that Duterte might have a serious illness. Duterte and his aides, however, have given assurances that he’s generally fit, although he had said in recent months that he had grown tired of politics, including deeply entrenched government corruption and the country’s drug problem.

Me, too.

Duterte took office in June 2016 for a six-year term. He is known for his deadly crackdown on illegal drugs, which has drawn international condemnation.

He has said in the past that he has various ailments, including recurring migraines, as a result of a motorcycle accident and drinking, but he said his most serious ailment is Barrett’s esophagus, a condition thought to be caused by stomach acid washing up into the esophagus. That may have been caused by his drinking, which he continued despite warnings from his doctors, he said.

Duterte said he underwent an endoscopy and colonoscopy about a month ago but his doctor was advised recently to repeat the tests. Both tests aim to diagnose any abnormality in the digestive tract and colon.

Roque said Duterte would abide by the country’s constitution, which requires presidents to publicly disclose any serious illness, but he added that since ‘‘it is not serious, he will treat his medical condition as confidential.’’

Duterte said the Cabinet would decide if a president is ‘‘fully incapacitated to discharge the functions of the office.’’

The Philippine constitution provides that the vice president, currently opposition leader Leni Robredo, would take over if the president cannot lead the country due to health problems or other reasons.

Duterte has questioned the competence of Robredo, a respected human rights lawyer, to lead the country and has suggested he preferred a military junta to take overin case he is removed from office. Top defense and military officials, however, have said they would follow the political succession specified by the constitution.

--more--"


He better be careful flying into exile:

"It is no simple process to keep a 737 in the air" by James Glanzand Mika Gröndahl, Allison McCann and Jeremy White New York Times  November 17, 2018

Investigators and experts are uncertain why Lion Air Flight 610 plummeted into the Java Sea last month, killing all 189 people on board, but they are focusing on an automatic system designed to keep the plane, a Boeing 737 Max 8, from going into a “stall” condition.

I'm just going to state right from the beginning that I have learned that virtually all official explanations for plane crashes are bull. 

Be that as it may, let's see what they have to say.

A stall can occur when the plane’s nose points upward at too great an angle, robbing the craft of the aerodynamic lift that allows it to stay aloft, but if the 737 receives incorrect data on the angle — as the same plane did on the flight just before the crash — the system designed to save the plane can instead force the nose down, potentially sending it into a fatal dive.

So some sort of mechanical failure?

The situation in this case is further complicated by Boeing’s installation of the system, which the company did without explaining it in the new model’s operating manual. So the pilots might well have been unfamiliar with it. 

Wait a minute. 

They installed a system and didn't tell anyone, not even the pilots? 

They are really pushing the credulity envelope here!

In a statement, Boeing said it was confident in the safety of the 737 Max, and added, “While we can’t discuss specifics of an ongoing investigation, we have provided two updates to operators that re-emphasize existing operating procedures — the series of steps required — for these situations.”

Yeah, only a plane dove into the ocean.

If the pilots of Lion Air 610 did in fact confront an emergency with this type of anti-stall system, they would have had to take a rapid series of complex steps to understand what was happening and keep the jetliner flying properly. These steps were not in the manual, and the pilots had not been trained in them.

I'm sorry, but this is another specious cause like the fuel tank gauge on TWA 800.

I'm not saying it couldn't be this, but were there any war games in the area?

Approximate data on the plane’s speed and altitude on the 11 minutes it spent in the air suggest that the first indication of trouble may have come just above 2,000 feet, when its trajectory was beginning to level off.

At that point, said John Cox, the former executive chairman of the Air Line Pilots Association and now a safety consultant, something unexpected occurred: Instead of leveling off momentarily, the plane dropped around 600 feet.

“This may have been the onset, the first time something happened,” Cox said. By this point in the flight, the pilots typically would have moved the flaps on the main wings from the down position needed for takeoff into a trimmed up position for flying at higher speeds. The Boeing anti-stall system cannot activate until the flaps are up.

After the 600-foot drop, the pilots climbed to 5,000 feet, possibly to give themselves more maneuvering room if another unexpected dive occurred. They sought and received permission to return to the airport, but for reasons not yet known, they did not appear to have tried to do so. When the plane leveled off just above 5,000 feet, there was another indication that something was amiss: Instead of the smooth, straight flight that the usual autopilot setting would produce, the plane pitched up and down, indicating manual operation.

That could indicate that the pilot simply was not very good at flying in manual mode. More likely, said Les Westbrooks, an associate professor at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, the pilot already was struggling with some system causing the plane to veer from its straight path.

Why say he wasn't very good if it's more likely he was struggling with a problem he knew not how to address?

Blame the dead guy, right?

In that case, Westbrooks said, it would be like trying to drive a car that is tugging one way or another— the driver can counteract it, but the path is jagged. The plane’s up-and-down motion continued, including a larger dip and recovery of about 1,000 feet in the last few minutes of the flight that might have felt like a bit of rough turbulence to passengers, said R. John Hansman Jr., a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and director of the international center for air transportation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Then, suddenly, the plane went down.

There has been no official finding that the anti-stall system — known as the maneuvering characteristics augmentation system, or MCAS — was activated, but if the 737’s sensors were indicating erroneously that the nose had pitched dangerously up, the pilot’s first warning might have been a “stick shaker”: The yoke — the steering wheel-like handles in front of the pilot and co-pilot — would vibrate.

Ah, but if.

If the false warning in turn activated the automatic anti-stall system, the pilots would have had to take a series of rapid and not necessarily intuitive steps to maintain control, a particular challenge since those steps were not in the plane’s operating manual and the pilots had not been trained on how to respond.

That's where my print copy crashed.

If it sensed a stall, the system would have automatically pushed up the forward edge of the stabilizers, the larger of the horizontal surfaces on the plane’s tail section, in order to put downward pressure on the nose.

“After a period of time, the elevator is going to lose, and the stabilizer is going to win,” he said.

With only fragmentary data available, Hansman said he suspected that a runaway of the MCAS system played a central role in the crash. “The system basically overrode the pilot in that situation,” Hansman said.

It's like they lay the groundwork for what they are going to conclude.

If the anti-stall system indeed ran away with the stabilizer control, only a fast sequence of steps by the pilot and first officer could have saved the aircraft, instructions later issued by Boeing show.

How many times have you seen the word IF in this report, huh?

On the outside of the yoke in front of both the pilot and the first officer, there is a switch for electrically controlling the trim — the angle of the stabilizers. If the pilot understood what was happening, he could have used that switch for a few seconds at a time to counteract what the MCAS was doing to the stabilizers, but that would have been only a temporary solution: The pilot has to release the switch or the nose could go too high, but if he releases the switch, the anti-stall system would reactivate a few seconds later, according to a bulletin issued by Boeing.

(Blog editor just shakes head at report that would receive an F in a college writing class. Wow)

The crucial step, according to the Boeing bulletin, would be to reach across to the central console to a pair of switches (sometimes protected with covers that must be opened), and flip the switches off. Those switches disable electric control of the motor that moves the stabilizers up and down, preventing the anti-stall system from exerting control over their position.

The final step would complete the process for giving the pilots physical control. Cables for manually operating the stabilizers run over a wheel — actually two wheels, one on either side of the console next to the ankles of the pilot and first officer. One of the pilots must rotate the wheel to pull the stabilizer back into the correct position.

--more--"

I'm surprised they didn't mention anything about the 20 Indonesian finance ministry staff who were on the flight.

Related:

"A steep loss for Boeing, a major exporter which would stand to suffer greatly in a protracted trade war, weighed heavily on the Dow. Boeing gave up 4.5 percent to $320.94, but is still one of the best-performing stocks in the 30-stock index....."

Hey, as long as Boeing's stock is flying high.....

They did find the black boxes (or so we are told):

"Black box from Lion Air crash is recovered after ‘desperate’ search" by Hannah Beech and Muktita Suhartono New York Times  November 01, 2018

BANGKOK — An Indonesian Navy diving team retrieved one of the flight recorders from Lion Air Flight 610 on Thursday from the depths of the Java Sea, raising hopes that investigators will be able to solve the mystery of what led abrand-new Boeing jet to fall from the sky this week.

That's the thing. 

A brand new jet, huh? 

With a new anti-stall system they said nothing about.

There are two so-called black boxes on each plane, and they are actually bright orange. Later on Thursday, the navy confirmed that it had been the flight data recorder that had been recovered.

Without the flight recorders, investigators despaired of figuring out what caused Lion Air Flight 610, bound from Jakarta to the small city of Pangkal Pinang on Monday morning with 189 people on board, to crash into the Java Sea. The weather en route was fine, and the plane had only begun flying in August for Lion Air, a low-cost carrier with a history of safety issues.

How can you blame the carrier when it was a brand new Boeing?

And down goes my print again.

Speculation about what caused the crash has centered on possible problems with the plane’s transmission of airspeed data. The day before the crash, the same plane had experienced unreliable airspeed readings, which could have been the result of a malfunction of instruments that measure data needed to fly the plane.

Such an information glitch does not necessarily doom a plane, but it can catalyze a deadly sequence of events. That is what is believed to have happened when Air France Flight 447 plummeted into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009 after a coating of ice addled readings from its pitot tubes, the external probes affixed to airplanes to monitor airspeed data.

Do you see why I am skeptical when it comes to their explanations?

That Air France flight left from Brazil by the way, and I'm sure I have the blogs from way back. They blamed equipment something, but there were at least French drug officials on board from what I remember.

That's what you need to ask yourself. Who was on board, and why won't the pre$$ mention it?

Lion Air, which is part of a company that controls the majority of Indonesia’s domestic aviation market, was told Wednesday by the Transportation Ministry to suspend its technical director and the ground crew that serviced the plane in the hours before the plane’s takeoff Monday.

Investigators want to know whether the problem with inaccurate airspeed readings that occurred on Sunday’s flight was truly resolved, as maintenance logs seen by aviation experts indicate.

Again, if it is a problem and not resolved, who feels comfortable going up in a brand new Boeing?

Representatives from Boeing are scheduled to meet with Transportation Ministry officials Thursday. The plane, a 737 Max 8, is one of the most advanced and newest aircraft on offer. While there is no indication that there is a systemic flaw with the plane model, Indonesia ordered an inspection of all Max 8 jets operated by domestic carriers.

Lion Air has suffered at least 15 major problems since it began operations in 2000, ranging from fatal crashes to airplane collisions, but the airline has expanded quickly, in part because of the urgent need for air travel in an island nation spread out across the equator.

There they go again blaming the carrier who just bought a brand new Boeing.

For years, Indonesia’s aviation record was so poor that Western nations blacklisted the country’s carriers, but both the United States and European Union have since lifted their bans on Indonesian airlines.

On Thursday, Transportation Minister Budi Karya Sumadi said that the licenses of four Lion Air personnel had been suspended, including that of the company’s director of maintenance and engineering and the fleet maintenance manager. A day earlier, Budi said the government was evaluating the safety systems of low-cost carriers in Indonesia.

“Low-cost carriers are a necessity,” he said. “It’s not that low-cost carriers are in the wrong, it’s that we want to increase their safety.”

--more--" 

Reminds me of another plane crash in the same region:

No sign of MH370 found in new scan of Indian Ocean floor

Flight 370 disappeared March 8, 2014, while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people aboard.

The most plausible explanation and theory, one which the pre$$ will never touch, is that the plane was remotely flown to the island of Diego Garcia after the crew and passengers were incapacitated, and then the plane was deposited on a field in Ukraine in order to strengthen the junta.

"Malaysia’s leader expresses regret over ending MH370 search" AP  May 30, 2018

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said Wednesday that his country regrets having to end the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 and will consider resuming the hunt for the plane if any new information emerges.

The final search effort, focused on the seabed in the distant Indian Ocean, ended Tuesday after more than three months. Malaysia had signed a ‘‘no cure, no fee’’ deal with US technology company Ocean Infinity to resume the hunt in January, a year after the official search by Australia, Malaysia, and China was called off, and nearly four years after the plane went missing.

Mahathir said Malaysia has come to a stage ‘‘where we cannot keep on searching for something we really cannot find.’’

‘‘If anybody has any information, we will consider resuming the search, but at the moment we have to put a stop to the search,’’ he told a news conference. ‘‘We regret very much and we understand the feelings of the relatives, but we cannot keep on searching for this 370 forever.’’

The plane vanished with 239 people on board on March 8, 2014, while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Confirmed debris that washed ashore in the western Indian Ocean helped narrow the search area where Ocean Infinity focused.

The company said Tuesday that the search covered more than 43,000 square miles of ocean floor — an area more than four times larger than the zone targeted by experts as the most likely crash site — but failed to uncover any evidence in one of the world’s biggest aviation mysteries.

Ocean Infinity stood to be paid $70 million if it had found the wreckage or black boxes.

Transport Minister Anthony Loke said Wednesday that the international safety investigation team is expected to finalize its report by July.

--more--"

"Fate of Malaysia Airlines jet remains a mystery, panel says" by Austin Ramzy New York Times  July 30, 2018

HONG KONG — One of the greatest aviation mysteries of all time deepened Monday when the official government inquiry into the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 released a 495-page report that gave no definitive answers as to the fate of the airliner.

What we will get one day on the TV is it was space aliens that abducted the aircraft in some sort of Bermuda Triangle thing.

The plane was heading north from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing on March 8, 2014, when it deviated from its scheduled path, turning west across the Malay Peninsula. It is believed to have turned south after radar contact was lost and crashed somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean after running out of fuel.

No significant pieces of the wreckage of the jetliner, a Boeing 777, have ever been found. Nor have any remains of the 239 people on board.

Another Boeing.

The absence of definitive answers in the report, which was released at a news conference, devastated families of the victims, who have waited more than four years for the searches and investigations to be concluded.

Intan Maizura Othaman, whose husband, Mohd Hazrin Mohamed Hasnan, was a steward on the flight, told reporters after a briefing for family members that she was angered by the absence of answers.

The long-awaited report offered no conclusion on what caused the plane with 239 people aboard to veer off course, cease radio communications and vanish.

The head of the safety investigation team, Kok Soo Chon, said the available evidence — including the plane’s deviation from its flight course, which tests showed was done manually rather than by autopilot, and the switching off of a transponder — “irresistibly point” to “unlawful interference,” which could mean that the plane was hijacked, but he added that the panel found no indication of who might have interfered or why, and that any criminal inquiry would be the responsibility of law enforcement authorities, not safety investigators.

You read that and you realized the "conspiracists" are likely correct. It's the governments and official pre$$ organs that can't admit it. The Malaysians pretty much are as far as they can.

While Kok did not directly address theories that the disappearance was the result of pilot suicide, he said investigators were “not of the opinion that it could have been an event committed by the pilot.”

Remember back in 1999 when the US military followed Page Stewart's plane across the country because low cabin pressure had knocked everyone unconscious?

That is how they could have disabled the crew.

The disappearance of Flight 370 led to numerous conspiracy theories. And the report, by offering no final conclusion, will do little to settle the matter, but the investigators did dampen some of the most provocative theories.

Was that the actual point of the official report? 

Usually is!

While Kok suggested the possibility of “unlawful interference by a third party,” investigators could not establish that anyone except the pilot had flown the plane.

Kok said there had been no threats or credible claims of responsibility for the plane’s disappearance, which might have been expected as part of a plan to take it down intentionally.

Technology that would allow someone to pilot the aircraft remotely had not been installed on this plane, the report said. No mechanical issues that would affect the plane’s airworthiness were identified either.

“The aircraft was well-maintained,” Kok said.

Other possible factors — like lithium-ion batteries that could have caught fire and the presence of mangosteen fruit in the plane’s cargo, which was deemed unusual — were considered, but such materials had been carried dozens of times before on the same route without incident, the report said.

The panel said it would disband, but declined to call the report final.

“It is too presumptuous of us to say this is the final report,” said Kok, a former director general of Malaysia’s Civil Aviation Department. “No wreckage has been found. The victims have not been found. How could this be final?”

Families of the 239 people who disappeared with the plane had expected clearer answers in the report, and were left disappointed.....

My feeling these days is you expected to much out of them.

--more--"

Time to clean this stuff up:

Malaysia's Ex-Leader Is Charged in Corruption Inquiry

Malaysia Sidelines Officials Accused of Ignoring Graft

"Malaysian reformist Anwar Ibrahim released from prison; Granted a pardon, former opposition leader is poised to return to politics" by Simon Denyer Washington Post  May 17, 2018

BEIJING— Anwar Ibrahim, the standard-bearer of Malaysia’s reform movement, was released from prison and granted a royal pardon on Wednesday in one of the most dramatic developments since an opposition alliance scored a stunning win in national elections last week.

Anwar, 70, was convicted in 2015 of sodomy in a case that he maintained was trumped up to crush his opposition movement. His release reunites him with a man who was once his ally and mentor, then his bitter enemy, and is now his ally again: 92-year-old Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.

Anwar served as Mahathir’s deputy and finance minister in the 1990s before falling out with him during the Asian financial crisis, being sacked from the government and forming the Reformasi movement.

Within weeks, Mahathir had him jailed on charges of sodomy and corruption. A second jail term followed in 2015 under Prime Minister Najib Razak, who lost last week’s election and faces an investigation into massive corruption himself.

How Mahathir and Anwar will get along, and whether and when the prime minister will stand aside for the man who built the opposition alliance is one of the biggest questions facing Malaysia.

For now, Anwar, whose wife, Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, is the new deputy prime minister, says he wants to spend time with his family, rest, and carry out some speaking engagements. He insists he is in no hurry to take a spot in the cabinet or, indeed, take over as premier.

On Wednesday, Anwar called his release a victory for all Malaysians, regardless of race or religion, who stood by the principles of democracy and freedom.

‘‘When you are incarcerated, you realize what is the meaning and significance of freedom,’’ he told reporters outside his house in Kuala Lumpur. ‘‘There is a new dawn for Malaysia.’’

He thanked Mahathir for his help in getting him released and pardoned, the latter a critical step in allowing Anwar to return to politics.

‘‘I and Mahathir have buried the hatchet already, it was a long time ago,’’ he said, his tie and jacket off and sleeves rolled up, news agencies reported.

‘‘I have forgiven him, he has proven his mettle. Why should I harbor any malice toward him?’’ Anwar said. ‘‘My position is to give him all the support necessary to allow him to ensure the agenda for reform, the changes that need to be done, can be made.’’

During the campaign, Mahathir promised to stand aside for Anwar once he had been pardoned, but the veteran leader is now talking of running the country ‘‘for one or two years’’ to fix its financial problems.

Anwar’s first trial in 1998 was a dramatic affair, with the man who had only just been dismissed as deputy premier appearing in court with a black eye and bruises, sparking international condemnation of Mahathir. At one point, prosecutors produced a mattress that they said was stained with semen, accusing Anwar of having sex with two male aides.

Anwar was convicted and sentenced to prison. In 2014, he was again convicted of sodomy in a separate case during the Najib administration. An appeal was rejected, and his prison sentence upheld in 2015.

Amnesty International said Anwar’s release was a ‘‘landmark moment for human rights’’ in Malaysia and called for the repeal of repressive laws muzzling freedom of expression and assembly.....

--more--"

It's also a landmark because Mahathir is one of the few world leaders who has called out not only the Zionist stranglehold on world governments, but the 9/11 false flag operation as well. I expect Malaysia to be hit by terror in the not too distant future.

"Feeling ‘vindicated,’ Malaysia’s Anwar takes lawmaker oath" by Eileen Ng Associated Press  October 15, 2018

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Malaysian Prime Minister-in-waiting Anwar Ibrahim said he felt ‘‘vindicated’’ after taking his oath as a lawmaker Monday, marking his return to active politics three years after he was imprisoned for sodomy in a charge that critics said was politically motivated.

The swearing-in ceremony in Parliament followed Anwar’s landslide win in a by-election Saturday in the southern coastal town of Port Dickson in which he defeated six other candidates. The seat was vacated after a lawmaker from his party quit, paving the way for Anwar’s political comeback.

Anwar, 71, joins his wife, Wan Azizah Wan Ismail — currently Malaysia’s deputy prime minister — and his eldest daughter, Nurul Izzah Anwar, in Parliament. He has said that his by-election victory is a ‘‘vote of confidence’’ in the new government.

‘‘I have been deprived of my right from time to time and I have to go through a by-election to come back . . . I feel vindicated,’’ Anwar told reporters Monday. He reiterated support for Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad’s leadership to ensure a stable government and pledged to focus on parliamentary reforms.

--more--"

"US accuses ex-Goldman Sachs bankers in Malaysian money laundering scheme" by Matthew Goldstein New York Times  November 01, 2018

NEW YORK — Federal prosecutors filed criminal charges Thursday against a Malaysian financier and two former Goldman Sachs investment bankers who helped raise money for a Malaysian government investment fund from which about $4 billion disappeared.

The charges against the former Goldman bankers, Tim Leissner and Roger Ng, were announced by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn. Also charged was Jho Low, the Malaysian financier whom prosecutors have depicted as being a mastermind of a scheme to misappropriate money from the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund.

Leissner pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit money laundering and to violating foreign anti-bribery laws. In pleading guilty, he was ordered to forfeit nearly $44 million that he earned from the scheme. Ng faces similar charges. Ng was arrested Thursday in Malaysia, authorities said. Low remained at large.

The filing of criminal charges in the matter was a rare moveagainst senior executives of a major US bank in the decade since the financial crisis. The charges could put pressure on Goldman — the primary bond underwriter for the fund at the center of the case, 1Malaysia Development Berhad, or 1MDB — to reach a potential settlement with the federal authorities.

It took Trump to do it, huh?

The charges could also have wider repercussions within the bank. Leissner, the charging documents said, arranged to pay bribes and kickbacks to officials in Malaysia and Abu Dhabi with either the help or knowledge of several unnamed conspirators, one of whom was identified as “an Italian national who was employed as a participating managing director” at Goldman.

The authorities contend that the bribes and kickbacks were paid to secure 1MDB’s bond underwriting business for the bank. The unidentified co-conspirator agreed with Leissner not to tell anyone in Goldman’s compliance department about the bribes, according to court documents.

The unidentified co-conspirator is Andrea Vella, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Until two weeks ago, Vella was Goldman’s co-head of investment banking in Asia. At that point, according to a Reuters report, Vella and his co-head were replaced by another veteran Goldman banker.

The alleged misappropriation of billions of dollars from the 1MDB fund has become the focus of an international scandal reaching from Malaysia to the United States to Hong Kong.

Until recently, the investigation had mainly focused on allegations that Low misappropriated billions of dollars from the 1MDB fund. Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles have filed multiple lawsuits to recoup assets bought with some of that money.

Prosecutors in the United States and elsewhere believe that a group of people with close ties to former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak stole from the fund to buy paintings, yachts, real estate, and even investment stakes in movies like “The Wolf of Wall Street.”

Some of those allegations were described in civil forfeiture complaints filed by federal prosecutors in Los Angeles last year. Prosecutors from the Justice Department’s money-laundering and asset-recovery division also played an active role in the foreign bribery investigation.

The investigation rocked Malaysian politics earlier this year, leading voters to oust Razak. The new prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, has moved quickly to investigate the alleged theft of billions of dollars from the investment fund, which was created under Najib. The Malaysian government is seeking restitution from Goldman, according to the country’s new finance minister.

Careful. 

That is one of the things that got Khadafy in trouble.

Goldman provided an array of services to the fund, including helping it sell billions of dollars in bonds to investors, earning about $600 million in fees for its work. The authorities have examined what role, if any, the firm played in the 1MDB fraud, whether it knew about the alleged fraud and whether it should have done more to uncover the misappropriation of funds.

Goldman has repeatedly played down its role in the scandal, saying it was unaware of how money from the fund was being used. The firm has said it was cooperating with the investigation.

Goldman did not immediately have a comment Thursday. A lawyer for Leissner could not be reached for comment. A representative for Low did not have an immediate comment.

Leissner, who worked closely with the Malaysian fund, had been in plea talks with federal prosecutor for some time. Ng reported to Leissner at Goldman. It was not known who was representing Ng.

Both Leissner and Ng left the bank more than a year ago.

--more--"

Someone said it reached into Hong Kong?

"Malaysia cancels two massive Chinese projects, fearing they will bankrupt the country" The Washington Post  August 22, 2018

BEIJING — Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia announced Tuesday he will shelve two major infrastructure projects by Chinese companies for being too expensive for his debt-ridden country.

The rejection of the projects, part of China’s signature Belt and Road Initiative, was in stark contrast to the prime minister’s cozy dinner with President Xi Jinping of China the day before, when they said they were optimistic about their shared future and promised to enhance mutual political trust.

‘‘I believe China itself does not want to see Malaysia become a bankrupt country,’’ he said. ‘‘China understands our problem and agreed.’’

One of the projects, dubbed the East Coast Rail Link, would have connected the South China Sea with strategic shipping routes in Malaysia’s west, providing an essential trade link. The other was a natural gas pipeline in Sabah, a Malaysian state on the island of Borneo.

At a news conference on Tuesday, a Chinese spokesman said that Xi was ‘‘deeply satisfied’’ with the visit with Mohamad.

‘‘China has always carried out economic and trade and investment cooperation with other countries on the principle of mutual benefit,’’ he said.

He really put it to Pence, didn't he?!!!

--more--"



This post, like the alleged debris of Flight 370, is going to wash up in India:

"‘Tell everyone we scalped you!’ How caste still rules in India" by Jeffrey Gettleman New York Times   November 17, 2018

THATI, India — Sardar Singh Jatav is a Dalit, a class of Indians who are not just considered lower caste, but technically outcaste — what used to be called untouchable. Bound at the bottom of India’s Hindu society for centuries, the Dalit population, now estimated at more than 300 million, has been abused for as long as anyone can remember, and now, according to crime statistics, the violence against them is rising.

This might seem surprising against the new narrative India is writing. So much has changed. Millions of people have been lifted out of poverty. The Indian economy is now one of the world’s biggest. Everywhere in the country, there are new roads, new airports, new infrastructure, but in many places, especially in poorer rural areas, caste infrastructure is still the one that counts, and those who rebel against it, like Sardar, are often greeted with unchecked brutality.

It is violence intended to send a message, pain inflicted to maintain India’s old social order. The crimes are happening across the country, and Dalits are not simply killed: They are humiliated, tortured, disfigured, destroyed.

“We have a mental illness,” said Avatthi Ramaiah, a sociology professor in Mumbai.

“You may talk about India being a world power, a global power, sending satellites into space,” he said. “But the outside world has an image of India they don’t know. As long as Hinduism is strong, caste will be strong, and as long as there is caste, there will be lower caste. The lower castes don’t have the critical numbers to counterattack,” he added.

I have held off commenting now, only because I'm sick of being sold narratives, images, and messages. Tired of being constantly propagandized. 

The other thought was, how Gandhi would be rolling in his grave had he not had his ashes dumped into the Ganges. Think of the river as all the tears he has cried since his death.

For decades, India has struggled to de-weaponize caste. When the constitution was being written in the late 1940s, intellectuals knew caste was a sore spot that needed to be urgently addressed. They included specific protections for Dalits, who make up about 15 to 20 percent of India’s 1.3 billion people.

Affirmative action programs, though they have generated deep resentments among upper castes, have helped some Dalits escape poverty. Today there are Dalit poets, doctors, civil service officers, engineers, and even a Dalit president, though it is mostly a ceremonial post, but 95 percent of Indians still marry within their caste, experts say, and recent studies show income and education levels correlate very closely with caste. Even controlling for education, Dalits still fall behind, indicating that caste discrimination is alive and well in the workplace.

Scholars argue that the current political environment has increased the vilification of the other— whether that be along caste, creed, or gender lines. Many analysts blame the ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, whose Hindu supremacist roots have emboldened supporters to lash out at minorities, often in the name of Hinduism.

The Gujjars, who are hardly at the top of the overall caste ladder, are the most powerful caste here and own most of the land. Gujjars live in bigger homes, and many have tractors and small cars. Most Dalits don’t even have bicycles.

Dalits must show Gujjars respect. They are not supposed to look Gujjars in the eye or touch their food or water cups — Gujjars would consider it polluted. The two castes have separate water taps, like in the Jim Crow American South.

All of this is illegal.....

--more--"

Well, now you know what is under the Indian sheet.

Also see:

India’s top court ruled women can enter prominent temple

Protesters walled it off from them.

"The death toll from a cyclone that hit the coast of southern India has risen to 33. India's navy has assigned two ships and a helicopter for relief work. State authorities on Saturday rushed drinking water, food and paramedics to nearly 82,000 people who took shelter in more than 400 state-run camps. They were evacuated from areas in the path of Cyclone Gaja, which struck six districts of Tamil Nadu state on Friday with heavy rains and winds that reached 90 kilometers per hour, or 55 miles per hour. Most deaths were caused by flooding, house collapses and electrocution....."

Then it hit Vietnam before the coverage dissipated.

NEXT DAY UPDATES:

"Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey landed in a raging controversy in India by posing for a photo with a sign alluding to the touchy subject of the country’s caste system. While on a tour of one of Twitter’s fastest-growing markets, Dorsey met with a group of women activists and journalists, and was photographed alongside them holding a poster that read: ‘‘Smash Brahminical Patriarchy.’’ The photograph went viral and Dorsey got trolled on the very social network he built. In India’s hierarchical Hindu caste system, Brahmins top the four caste groups and historically include teachers, priests, and intellectuals. Patriarchy, meanwhile, isn’t limited to any single caste in India. Some furious tweeters said the act amounted to racism, while an apology by Twitter only riled up activists who oppose the caste system and patriarchy."

Dead whale had 115 plastic cups, 2 flip-flops in its stomach

Did you know Indonesia is one of the world’s largest plastic polluting countries?

"Boeing cancels call to discuss issues with its newest plane" by David Koenig Associated Press  November 21, 2018

Boeing Co. canceled a conference call that it scheduled for Tuesday with airlines to discuss issues swirling around its newest plane, which has come under close scrutiny after a deadly crash in Indonesia.

The company didn’t immediately give an explanation for canceling the call, which would have included American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, and United Airlines, all of which have Boeing 737 MAX aircraft in their fleets.

I hope you are not flying home for Thanksgiving!

What is most disturbing is they never told the pilots about the problem.

Indonesian investigators are examining whether a new anti-stall system in the MAX played a role in the Oct. 29 crash of a Lion Air jet shortly after takeoff from Jakarta. The plane flew erratically before plunging into the Java Sea, killing all 189 people on board.

CFRA Research analyst Jim Corridore said canceling the call was ‘‘a bad look for the company at a time when it is facing increasing criticism for potential problems with sensors on the plane that could cause the aircraft to erroneously correct itself into a steep dive.’’ He said Boeing ‘‘needs to communicate more and better, not less.’’

‘‘Boeing has been and continues to engage with our customers. We continue to schedule meetings to share information,’’ said Boeing spokesman Chaz Bickers. He declined to say why Tuesday’s call was canceled.

I guess they can't hear themselves due to the roar of their jet engines. Must be deaf by now.

A spokeswoman for Southwest said Boeing did not give a reason for canceling and did not reschedule the call. She said the airline would follow any future guidance from Boeing or the Federal Aviation Administration as they continue their investigation.

A spokesman for American said the airline would continue to work with Boeing and the FAA. United did not immediately comment.

Through October, Boeing had delivered 241 MAX planes to airlines and taken orders for nearly 4,800.

The new system can point the nose of the plane down sharply if sensors detect that the plane may be about to enter an aerodynamic stall.

Investigators in the Lion Air crash say the plane received faulty readings from so-called angle-of-attack sensors, which track whether the nose is pointed up, down, or level, and they are probing whether the bad data caused the nose of the plane to pitch down automatically.

Boeing shares closed down about 1 percent, at $317.70.....

Oh, no, Boeing shares took a dive!

--more--"

3 men charged with planning mass killing in Australian city

"Russia, which has tried to manipulate Interpol, is poised to lead it" by Matt Apuzzo New York Times  November 20, 2018

BRUSSELS — Gathered at a glitzy Dubai resort this week for their annual conference, the leaders of Interpol hoped to emerge from the shadow of the controversy that erupted after Beijing snatched the agency’s Chinese president and unilaterally announced his resignation.

Yet, just weeks later, Interpol appears poised to select as its next president a senior security official from Russia, which has been accused of manipulating the agency’s arrest warrants to harass its enemies.

American and European officials were lobbying behind the scenes to tip a vote on Wednesday away from the Russian candidate, Alexander V. Prokopchuk. The virulently anti-Russian Ukranian government went public, declaring that Prokopchuk’s candidacy was part of a Kremlin assault on the international order.

For years, the Kremlin has used Interpol to demand the arrest of political enemies who have fled to other countries. This spring, William F. Browder, a critic of President Vladimir Putin of Russia, live-tweeted his arrest in Spain on a warrant issued in Moscow. He was quickly released, but the incident served as a reminder that Interpol’s vaunted systems remain vulnerable to Kremlin influence even after years of pressure from lawyers and rights groups.

Despite its portrayal in spy movies as an omnipotent global police force, Interpol has no powers to investigate crimes or to make arrests. Rather, it serves as a sort of United Nations for police leaders and an information clearinghouse to help local authorities catch international fugitives.

The presidency of Interpol is in many ways a ceremonial position with little power to influence the issuance of warrants. Nevertheless, elevating a Russian in the face of such criticism would be a public relations coup for Putin.....

How appropriately that this post ends with a pile of dog doo from the NYT.

--more--"

Also see: When Qin the Chinaman Gets Here

He never arrived?

Related: Pompeo calls out lack of diversity in Hollywood and the media

Different Pompeo, and did you see who will be playing Tom Brady in the Chinese version?

Been front page news the last two days:

Ivanka Trump used personal e-mail for government work, report says

It's an AP report for the webbers; my print was a WaComPo pile:

"Ivanka Trump used personal e-mail account to send e-mails about government business" by Carol D. Leonnig Washington Post  November 20, 2018

WASHINGTON — Ivanka Trump sent hundreds of e-mails last year to White House aides, Cabinet officials, and her assistants using a personal account, many of them in violation of federal records rules, according to people familiar with a White House examination of her correspondence.

White House ethics officials learned of Trump’s repeated use of a personal account when reviewing e-mails gathered last fall by five Cabinet agencies to respond to a public records lawsuit. This review revealed that throughout much of 2017, the unpaid senior adviser often discussed or relayed official White House business using a private e-mail account with a domain that she shares with her husband, Jared Kushner.

The discovery alarmed some advisers to President Trump, who feared that his daughter’s practices bore similarities to the personal e-mail use of Hillary Clinton, an issue he made a focus of his 2016 campaign. Trump attacked his Democratic challenger as untrustworthy and dubbed her ‘‘Crooked Hillary’’ for using a personal e-mail account as secretary of state.

Let's think of that for a minute before turning to Ivanka. Hillary is still walking around free, and any time you mention her scandal surrounding e-mails as Secretary of State, the chief diplomatic officer and foreign representative of this country, it's dismissed by Democrats and their pre$$ as a witch hunt, etc, she was cleared, etc, Comey blew it for her, etc, never mind that the Obama DoJ and FBI worked overtime to shield her from legal liability. Even worse, Sessions laughed when urged to move on her -- proving that the criminal enterprise that is the Clintons has somehow reached that rarified air above the law.

What you would expect in this case is much more fluff, but the treatment is going to be different. It's not an excuse for Ivanka, but the double standard is going to be so damn obvious. House Democrats must be drooling over this.

Some aides were startled by the volume of Ivanka Trump’s personal e-mails — and taken aback by her response when questioned about the practice. Trump said she was not familiar with some details of the rules, according to people with knowledge of her reaction.

That's the Hillary excuse, and Comey agreed that she didn't mean to do it!

The White House referred requests for comment to Ivanka Trump’s attorney and ethics counsel, Abbe Lowell.

In a statement, Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for Lowell, acknowledged that the president’s daughter occasionally used her private e-mail before she was briefed on the rules, but he said none of her messages contained classified information.

Unlike Hillary's, which were then subsequently "lost" or destroyed. 

Of course, the NSA has all the stuff. They have everything.

‘‘While transitioning into government, after she was given an official account but until the White House provided her the same guidance they had given others who started before she did, Ms. Trump sometimes used her personal account, almost always for logistics and scheduling concerning her family,’’ he said in a statement.

Mirijanian said Ivanka Trump turned over all her government-related e-mails months ago so they could be stored permanently with other White House records, and he stressed that her e-mail use was different than that of Clinton, who had a private e-mail server in the basement of her home in Chappaqua, N.Y. At one point, an archive of thousands of Clinton’s e-mails was deleted by a computer specialist amid a congressional investigation.

Looks criminal to me and what happened there?

Answer is nothing, and with the Republicans losing control of the House the rat's nest of Obama leftovers will be left in tact.

‘‘Ms. Trump did not create a private server in her house or office, no classified information was ever included, the account was never transferred at Trump Organization, and no e-mails were ever deleted,’’ Mirijanian said.

Like Trump, Clinton also said she was unaware of or misunderstood the rules. However, Clinton relied solely on a private e-mail system as secretary of state, bypassing government servers entirely.

Wondering why my pre$$ never bothered to investigate. 

Is it all the dead bodies of those that do that surround the Clintons (think Seth Rich)?

I can not believe they are seriously talking about her stealing the nomination again in a possible 2020 bid.

Both Trump and Clinton relied on their personal attorneys to review their private e-mails and determine which messages should be retained as government records.

Hers was Lanny the Liar!

Clinton originally said none of the messages she sent or received were ‘‘marked classified.’’ The FBI later determined that 110 e-mails contained classified information at the time they were sent or received.

So she lied.

Austin Evers, executive director of the liberal watchdog group American Oversight, whose record requests sparked the White House discovery, said it strained credulity that Trump’s daughter did not know that government officials should not use private e-mails for official business.

‘‘There’s the obvious hypocrisy that her father ran on the misuse of personal e-mail as a central tenet of his campaign,’’ Evers said. ‘‘There is no reasonable suggestion that she didn’t know better. Clearly everyone joining the Trump administration should have been on high alert about personal e-mail use.’’

Yeah, it SURE IS!

Let's hope Trump doesn't use the IRS to investigate his political enemies like Obama did, huh, or spy on and infiltrate the opponent's campaign in 2020.

Ivanka Trump used her personal account to discuss government policies and official business less than 100 times — often replying to other administration officials who contacted her through her private e-mail, according to people familiar with the review.

Another category of less-substantive e-mails may have also violated the records law: hundreds of messages related to her official work schedule and travel details that she sent herself and personal assistants who cared for her children and house, they said.

People close to Ivanka Trump said she never intended to use her private e-mail to shroud her government work. After she told White House lawyers she was unaware that she was breaking any e-mail rules, they discovered that she had not been receiving White House updates and reminders to all staff about prohibited use of private e-mail, according to people familiar with the situation.

Using personal e-mails for government business could violate the Presidential Records Act, which requires that all official White House communications and records be preserved as a permanent archive of each administration. It can also increase the risk that sensitive government information could be mishandled or hacked, revealing government secrets and risking harm to diplomatic relations and secret operations.....

Unless you are running a pay-to-play racket out of the U.S. State Department and using a separate server in your basement to do it.

Of course, the ones they destroyed had to do with Libya and the death of the ambassador in the political false flag gone wrong.

--more--"

Here is the hypocrisy:

"House Democrats plan to investigate Ivanka Trump’s use of personal e-mail for government business" by Felicia Sonmez and Colby Itkowitz Washington Post  November 20, 2018

WASHINGTON — The House Oversight Committee plans to investigatewhether Ivanka Trump violated federal law by using a personal e-mail account for government business, the panel’s incoming chairman, Representative Elijah Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, said Tuesday.

In a statement, Cummings said the committee launched a bipartisan investigation last year into White House officials’ use of personal e-mail accounts, but the White House did not provide the requested information.

‘‘We need those documents to ensure that Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, and other officials are complying with federal records laws and there is a complete record of the activities of this administration,’’ Cummings said.

(You just shake your head at the level of disingenuousness by Democrats these days)

President Trump downplayed reports that his daughter used personal e-mail for government business, saying the e-mails didn’t contain classified information and haven’t been deleted.

Trump, speaking to reporters as he left the White House to spend Thanksgiving in Florida, said his daughter didn’t do anything to hide her e-mails and called recent reports about the private e-mail use “fake news.”

“Ivanka can handle herself,” Trump said. “No deletion whatsoever.”

In what appeared to be an acknowledgment of the potential risk of a backlash against Democrats for aggressively probing the Trump administration, Cummings also emphasized that his focus upon becoming chairman of the committee will be to address the everyday issues affecting Americans.

Hey, why worry when you can rig elections with fraud while the pre$$ pushes the narrative?

‘‘My goal is to prevent this from happening again — not to turn this into a spectacle the way Republicans went after Hillary Clinton,’’ he said.

Then he is dropping it?

House Republicans created a special committee to investigate the deadly 2012 attacks on US facilities in Benghazi, Libya, and it was that panel that uncovered Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail server for government business during her tenure as secretary of state under President Barack Obama.

Republicans excoriated Clinton’s use of personal e-mail during her 2016 bid for president, prompting an FBI investigation that found that she had been ‘‘extremely careless’’ but that there was no intention to violate laws on handling classified information.

Look at how they cleaned that up!

That the same FBI that botched the Kavanaugh investigation?

Besides, Ivanka is saying the same thing. No intent to violate. 

Of course, in her case it likely is the truth. Not so much for the other. They hide things.

During the yearslong Benghazi panel’s investigation, House majority leader Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, acknowledged the political impact, saying the committee’s inquiry hurt Clinton’s poll numbers.

The Washington Post contacted representatives for all of the Republicans still in office who served on the Benghazi committee or as chairmen of the Oversight and Government Reform committee about Trump’s e-mail use. Of those, only one — a spokesman for Representative Susan Brooks of Indiana — replied: ‘‘No comment.’’

American Oversight, the liberal watchdog group whose record requests led to the discovery regarding Trump’s use of her personal e-mail, said in a letter to the top members of the panel and the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier Tuesday that ‘‘it is incumbent on Congress to investigate this matter immediately.’’

Did you see who makes up their staff of lawyers?

‘‘The parallels between Ms. Trump’s conduct and that of Secretary Clinton are inescapable,’’ Austin Evers, the group’s executive director, said in the letter. ‘‘In both her use of personal e-mail and post-discovery preservation efforts, Ms. Trump appears to have done exactly what Secretary Clinton did — conduct over which President Trump and many members of Congress regularly lambasted Secretary Clinton and which, they asserted, demonstrated her unfitness for office.’’

Yeah, they sure are!

I'm fine with that. Clearing out all the Orthodox Chabad can only help.

Evers added that ‘‘while much of the rhetoric surrounding Secretary Clinton’s use of personal e-mail was hyperbolic and untethered to the law or facts, the extensive use of personal e-mail by a senior public official raises important questions that merit investigation.’’

He's untethered himself!

The White House has been bracing for the new revelation to spur a deeper investigation next year by House Democrats of Ivanka Trump’s correspondence in her personal, official, and business life.

Ivanka Trump first used her personal e-mail to contact Cabinet officials in early 2017, before she joined the White House as an unpaid senior adviser, according to e-mails obtained by American Oversight and first reported by Newsweek.

When she joined the White House, Trump pledged to comply ‘‘with all ethics rules,’’ but she continued to occasionally use her personal e-mail in her official capacity, people familiar with an administration review of her e-mail use said.

In a statement Monday, Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for Ivanka Trump’s attorney and ethics counsel, Abbe Lowell, said that the first daughter’s e-mail use was different than that of Clinton, who had a private e-mail server in the basement of her Chappaqua, N.Y., home. At one point, an archive of thousands of Clinton’s e-mails was deleted by a computer specialist amid a congressional investigation.

Sure looks criminal.

Behind the scenes, White House officials urged supporters and allies to defend Ivanka Trump and make the case publicly that her personal e-mail use was different than that of Clinton, according to two people familiar with the administration’s talking points.

The core of their argument: The volume of private e-mails she sent was much smaller, the messages did not contain classified material, and she did not delete them, they said. The White House is urging surrogates to make the case that it would be Democratic overreach to investigate her, the people added.

In the wake of the news, several lawmakers ridiculed President Trump for having attacked Clinton over her e-mail use.

‘‘Cue the chant?’’ tweeted Representative Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democrat, in a nod to Trump supporters’ frequent cries of ‘‘Lock her up!’’ at the president’s rallies.

Representative William Lacy Clay, a Missouri Democrat, tweeted a story about Ivanka Trump’s e-mail and commented, ‘‘Karma has a sense of humor.’’

Look at Democrats gloat and engage in the very behavior they claim of the president.

I will never vote for a Democrat ever again.

--more--"

They didn't get the message, and it's not like I'm part of the family, either:

"A firsthand account of the tumult inside President Trump’s White House is scheduled to be published in January, the latest in a string of books that seek to decipher his unprecedented presidency. The new book, “Team of Vipers,” is written by Cliff Sims, a former aide in the White House communications office who had previously worked on the Trump campaign. “He saw how Trump handled the challenges of the office, and he learned from Trump himself how he saw the world,” Sims’s publisher, Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press, said in announcing the book. A person familiar with the deal said Sims had received a seven-figure advance from the publisher. As the title indicates, the book does not paint a rosy picture of the atmosphere in the White House, but Sims’ goal, according to people familiar with the book, was not to damage Trump....."

Couldn't get it out in time for Christmas, huh?

CNN drops suit against White House after press pass is fully restored

Forgot all about Assange.

"President Donald Trump’s famously opaque business will face a bracing new reality next year when House Democrats hit it with a flurry of subpoenas for the first time. Republicans and the Trump Organization have been able to ignore Democrats’ questions about the company’s finances and business practices. Come January, Democrats taking control of the House will be able to investigate many angles, starting with how much contact the president maintains with Trump Organization executives after agreeing to suspend his role in running the company. They’ll be asking whether Trump discusses business with his sons, Eric and Donald Jr., who he left in charge. Democrats also have unanswered questions about the Trump Organization’s contacts with foreign governments, its potential ties to Russian and Saudi interests, and its dealings with Deutsche Bank. Representative Jackie Speier of California has even released a memo from advisers theorizing that Trump’s business may be a racketeering enterprise that facilitates money laundering. The Democrats’ pent-up demands for investigations face one major constraint, though: the risk Republicans will portray them as indulging in an anti-Trump vendetta instead of attending to legislative business....."

Because that is what the donors want, and did you just hear a pop?

Trump provides special counsel with answers to questions

Democratic senators challenge Whitaker appointment in court

They are Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Mazie K. Hirono of Hawaii, and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.

Filings show nonprofit paid Whitaker nearly $1m

Time to begin an investigation:

"Trump pressed to have Justice Department prosecute Comey and Clinton" by Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman New York Times  November 20, 2018

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump told the White House counsel in the spring that he wanted to order the Justice Department to prosecute two of his political adversaries: his 2016 challenger, Hillary Clinton, and former FBI Director James Comey, according to two people familiar with the conversation.

Has he used the IRS to audit them like Obama did?

The lawyer, Donald McGahn, rebuffed the president, saying that he had no authority to order a prosecution. McGahn said that while he could request an investigation, that too could prompt accusations of abuse of power. To underscore his point, McGahn had White House lawyers write a memo for Trump warning that if he asked law enforcement to investigate his rivals, he could face a range of consequences, including possible impeachment.

Trump must have the wrong color skin because the guy before him actually did all that stuff and there was never a whiff of impeachment. 

In fact, we are told it was one of the most scandal free administrations ever when the truth was far from it. Parties paid by lobbyists at all the alphabet agencies, government workers viewing porn, the VA scandal, Fast and Furious, IRS audits of political enemies, the Gulf Gusher, jailing and spying on reporters, spying on and infiltrating the opposing party's presidential campaign, and on and on.

But all that has been flushed down the agenda-pushing pre$$'s memory hole.

The encounter was one of the most blatant examples yet of how Trump views the typically independent Justice Department as a tool to be wielded against his political enemies. It took on additional significance in recent weeks when McGahn left the White House and Trump appointed a relatively inexperienced political loyalist, Matthew Whitaker, as the acting attorney general.

Gee, the NYT sure has the hatchet out today, and it is applying it in generous, Lizzy Borden-like portions.

It is unclear whether Trump read McGahn’s memo or whether he pursued the prosecutions further, but the president has continued to privately discuss the matter, including the possible appointment of a second special counsel to investigate both Clinton and Comey, according to two people who have spoken to Trump about the issue. He has also repeatedly expressed disappointment in the FBI director, Christopher Wray, for failing to more aggressively investigate Clinton, calling him weak, one of the people said.

In other words, this is more NYT ax-grinding and agenda-pushing fake news.

Who even knows if it is true!?

A White House spokesman declined to comment. A spokeswoman for the FBI declined to comment on the president’s criticism of Wray, whom he appointed last year after firing Comey.

“Mr. McGahn will not comment on his legal advice to the president,” said McGahn’s lawyer, William Burck. “Like any client, the president is entitled to confidentiality. Mr. McGahn would point out, though, that the president never, to his knowledge, ordered that anyone prosecute Hillary Clinton or James Comey.”

So who leaked this? 

Or did the NYT just make it up? 

It wouldn't be the first time!

It is not clear which accusations Trump wanted prosecutors to pursue. He has accused Comey, without evidence, of illegally having classified information shared with The New York Times in a memo that Comey wrote about his interactions with the president. The document contained no classified information.

Trump’s lawyers also privately asked the Justice Department last year to investigate Comey for mishandling sensitive government information and for his role in the Clinton email investigation. Law enforcement officials declined their requests. Comey is a witness against the president in the investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller.

Comey is also a major source for the New York Times. 

There is a video out there somewhere of him walking into their offices!!

Trump has grown frustrated with Wray for what the president sees as his failure to investigate Clinton’s role in the Obama administration’s decision to allow the Russian nuclear agency to buy a uranium mining company. Conservatives have long pointed to donations to the Clinton family foundation by people associated with the company, Uranium One, as proof of corruption, but no evidence has emerged that those donations influenced the U.S. approval of the deal.

OMFG!!!!

Ever hear of a quid-pro-quo?

Yeah, just breeze past that example of Russian collusion and influence, as well as endangering the national security of this country, like they breeze past the U.K. interference and meddling in the 2016 election by helping the Clinton campaign compile a phony piece of propaganda to then send up through various channels within the Obama administration and Congre$$ to thereby obtain a warrant of false premises to spy on American citizens of the opposing political campaign while attempting to infiltrate said campaign. I'm sure those were in her emails somewhere!

In his conversation with McGahn, the president asked what stopped him from ordering the Justice Department to investigate Comey and Clinton, the two people familiar with the conversation said. He did have the authority to ask the Justice Department to investigate, McGahn said, but warned that making such a request could create a series of problems.

McGahn promised to write a memo outlining the president’s authorities. In the days that followed, lawyers in the White House counsel’s office wrote a several-page document in which they strongly cautioned Trump against asking the Justice Department to investigate anyone.

The lawyers laid out a series of consequences. For starters, Justice Department lawyers could refuse to follow Trump’s orders even before an investigation began, setting off another political firestorm.

If charges were brought, judges could dismiss them, and Congress, they added, could investigate the president’s role in a prosecution and begin impeachment proceedings.

Ultimately, the lawyers warned, Trump could be voted out of office if voters believed he had abused his power.

Trump’s frustrations about Comey and Clinton were a recurring refrain, a former White House official said. “Why aren’t they going after” them? the president would ask of Justice Department officials.

It's a damn good question. 

Where is Mueller, btw? 

This is supposed to be part of his mandate.

For decades, White House aides have routinely sought to shield presidents from decisions related to criminal cases or even from talking about them publicly. Presidential meddling could undermine the legitimacy of prosecutions by attaching political overtones to investigations in which career law enforcement officials followed the evidence and the law.

Well, the way they handled the Clintons already ruined it!

Perhaps more than any president since Richard Nixon, Trump has been accused of trying to exploit his authority over law enforcement. Witnesses have told the special counsel’s investigators about how Trump tried to end an investigation into an aide, install loyalists to oversee the inquiry into his campaign and fire Mueller.

Now they are accusing him of Nixonian tactics!

Let me tell you this: he only used the national security agencies of this country to try and help him cover up what his political plumbers were doing. Obama actually used those instruments of national security in an active effort to spy on and infiltrate the opposing campaign before trying to cover it up. That is to the nth degree worse than anything Nixon ever did.

In addition, Trump has attacked the integrity of Justice Department officials, claiming they are on a “witch hunt” to bring him down.

Well, if the shoe fits.....

More significant, Mueller is investigating whether the president tried to impede his investigation into whether any Trump associates conspired with Russia’s campaign to sow discord among the U.S. electorate during the 2016 presidential race.

And he has come up with nothing, or what he has come up with has led him down roads he can't go.

Trump stoked his enmity for Clinton during the campaign, suggesting during a presidential debate that he would prosecute her if he was elected president. “If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation,” Trump said.

“It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country,” Clinton replied.

“Because you would be in jail,” Trump shot back.

I guess that is his first broken promise, and it tells you the power they have over the entire system. 

During the presidential race, Whitaker, a former U.S. attorney, also said he would have indicted Clinton, contradicting Comey’s highly unusual public announcement that he would recommend the Justice Department not charge her over her handling of classified information while secretary of state.

“When the facts and evidence show a criminal violation has been committed, the individuals involved should not dictate whether the case is prosecuted,” Whitaker wrote in an op-ed in USA Today in July 2016.

Two weeks after his surprise victory, Trump backed off. “I don’t want to hurt the Clintons, I really don’t,” Trump said in an interview with The Times. “She went through a lot and suffered greatly in many different ways, and I am not looking to hurt them at all. The campaign was vicious.”

So it's all an act and bull, huh? 

Law means nothing!

Nonetheless, he revisited the idea both publicly and privately after taking office. Some of his more vocal supporters stirred his anger, including Fox News commentator Jeanine Pirro, who has railed repeatedly on her weekly show that the president is being ill-served by the Justice Department.

Pirro told Trump in the Oval Office last November that the Justice Department should appoint a special counsel to investigate the Uranium One deal, two people briefed on the discussion have said. During that meeting, the White House chief of staff, John Kelly, told Pirro she was inflaming an already-vexed president, the people said.

Shortly after, Attorney General Jeff Sessions wrote to lawmakers, partly at the urging of the president’s allies in the House, to inform them that federal prosecutors in Utah were examining whether to appoint a special counsel to investigate Clinton. A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney for Utah declined to comment Tuesday on the status of the investigation.

That's comment enough! 

He's sitting on it and burying it.

Trump once called his distance from law enforcement one of the “saddest” parts of being president.

“I look at what’s happening with the Justice Department,” he said in a radio interview a year ago. “Well, why aren’t they going after Hillary Clinton and her emails and with her, the dossier?” He added: “I am not supposed to be doing the kind of things that I would love to be doing. And I am very frustrated.”

He's not the only one frustrated by the double standard.

--more--"

Also see: Why does Trump hate the military so much?

Has to do with his rejection of the bin Laden cover story. 

Related:

"Pakistan summoned the top US diplomat in Islamabad on Tuesday to protest President Trump’s allegation that the country had harbored Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden despite getting billions of dollars in American aid. According to a statement, Foreign Secretary Tahmina Janjua told the US diplomat, Paul Jones that ‘‘such baseless rhetoric . . . was totally unacceptable.’’ The statement also claimed that the cooperation from Pakistan’s intelligence service had provided initial evidence that helped Washington trace bin Laden. Washington and Kabul have long accused Islamabad of harboring militants — a charge it denies. US commandos killed bin Laden in a May 2011 raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he had been living in seclusion in a house near a well-known military academy. Pakistan denies it knew bin Laden’s whereabouts prior to the raid, which was carried out without its knowledge. It later arrested Dr. Shakil Afridi, who had run afake vaccination campaign in Abbottabad to help the CIA confirm bin Laden’s whereabouts. 

No wonder they are opposed to vaccination campaigns in those hills.

Trump said in an interview with ‘‘Fox News Sunday’’ that ‘‘everybody in Pakistan’’ knew bin Laden was there and no one said anything despite the United States providing $1.3 billion a year in aid. That statement created a furor in Islamabad. New Prime Minister Imran Khan fired back, tweeting on Monday that Pakistan suffered 75,000 casualties and lost $123 billion in the ‘‘US War on Terror,’’ despite the fact that no Pakistanis were involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. He says the US has only provided a ‘‘miniscule’’ $20 billion in aid. Janjua went so far as to say that ‘‘no other country had paid a heavier price than Pakistan in the fight against terrorism,’’ adding that the US leadership acknowledged on multiple occasions that Pakistan’s cooperation helped in ‘‘decimating’’ al-Qaida. ‘‘Baseless allegations about a closed chapter of history could seriously undermine’’ the cooperation that exists today between Islamabad and Washington, she added."

Hey, don't take it personally. It's just the way he is.

Trump renews criticism of Fed

He might want to watch that criticism, though. It's the kind of thing that can get your head taken off driving through Dallas.


Time to head on over to the House: 

Seth Moulton catches heat for Pelosi rebellion

You know, “anybody who respects veterans should be angered by this” when only half of the House Democrats in New England support Pelosi. All he is doing is shaking things up and rubbing people the wrong way while trying to keep our democracy intact.

"Brenda C. Snipes, the elections supervisor of Broward County, Florida, turned in a letter of resignation Sunday, hours after the conclusion of a vote recount that exposed a series of failures in her office, including a poorly designed ballot that may have contributed to a weak showing by the defeated Democratic Senate incumbent, Bill Nelson. Snipes, an elected Democrat who was the subject of searing criticism during the recount, submitted her resignation to the state government in Tallahassee, effective Jan. 4. “It has been my passion and honor to serve as the Supervisor of Elections for Broward County voters,” she said in a letter to Governor Rick Scott. “Although I have enjoyed this work tremendously over these many election cycles, both large and small, I am ready to pass the torch.” Snipes becomes the first political figure to fall in the wake of the tumultuous recount, which revealed systemic flaws and areas vulnerable to human error in Florida’s election system, 18 years after the infamous presidential recount of 2000. Scott, who is now the state’s Republican senator-elect, last week had asked the state’s Department of Law Enforcement to investigate potential wrongdoing in Snipes’s office. Snipes, 75, did not immediately comment on her plans."

She's moving to Mexico:

Trump’s ban on asylum for illegal border crossers challenged in court

The article was written by a former Globe reporter.

"In Mexico, thousands of Central American migrants are waiting in a crowded sports complex and squalid shelters to head north into the United States, where thousands of armed American soldiers are guarding the line to deter them from crossing, but a spokesman for the migrant caravan said the Central Americans were waiting peacefully in Mexico and had no intention of forcing their way into the United States. The challenge to the asylum ban was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy groups on behalf of East Bay Sanctuary Covenant......"

So where did the 3,000 Haitians come from?

The ban has been ruled unconstitutional as the stores close in Mexico.

Some are tying that even with this:

Frantic search goes on for missing after California wildfire

The photo in my printed paper was this:



"How climate change will cause more simultaneous disasters" by John Schwartz   November 20, 2018

Global warming is posing such wide-ranging risks to humanity, involving so many types of phenomena, that by the end of this century some parts of the world could face up to six climate-related crises at the same time, researchers say.

Bring on the weather weapons, huh?

Yeah, forget the unreported below-average temperatures all across the planet.

This chilling prospect is described in a paper published Monday in Nature Climate Change, a respected academic journal, that shows the effects of climate change across a broad spectrum of problems, including heat waves, wildfires, sea level rise, hurricanes, flooding, drought, and shortages of clean water.

They just got caught phoning up the sea temperatures while plucking hypothermic turtles out of the Atlantic around here, etc, etc. 

Maybe shutting down the war machine would help, 'eh?

Such problems are already coming in combination, said the lead author, Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He noted that Florida had recently experienced extreme drought, record high temperatures, and wildfires— and also Hurricane Michael, the powerful Category 4 storm that slammed into the Panhandle this summer. Similarly, California is suffering through the worst wildfires the state has ever seen, drought, extreme heat waves, and degraded air quality that threatens the health of residents.

Things will get worse, the authors wrote. The paper projects future trends and suggests that, by 2100, unless humanity takes forceful action to curb the greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change, some tropical coastal areas of the planet, like the Atlantic coast of South and Central America, could be hit by up to six such crises at a time.

The authors include a list of caveats about the research: Since it is a review of papers, it will reflect some of the potential biases of science in this area, which include the possibility that scientists might focus on negative effects more than positive ones; also, the authors cite the ongoing margin of uncertainty involved in discerning the imprint of climate change from natural variability.

Already walking back their Chicken Little scenario because the science doesn't support it.

New York can expect to be hit by four climate crises at a time by 2100 if carbon emissions continue at their current pace, the study says, but if emissions are cut significantly that number could be reduced to one. The troubled regions of the coastal tropics could see their number of concurrent hazards reduced from six to three.

PFFFFT!

They can't possibly know that. It's all reliant on their unreliable computer models.

The paper explores the ways that climate change intensifies hazards and describes the interconnected nature of such crises. Greenhouse gas emissions, by warming the atmosphere, can enhance drought in places that are normally dry, “ripening conditions for wildfires and heat waves,” the researchers say. In wetter areas, a warmer atmosphere retains more moisture and strengthens downpours, while higher sea levels increase storm surge and warmer ocean waters can contribute to the overall destructiveness of storms.

To coin a phrase, I'm tired of having hot air blown up my butt.

In a scientific world marked by specialization and siloed research, this multidisciplinary effort by 23 authors reviewed more than 3,000 papers on various effects of climate change. The authors determined 467 ways in which those changes in climate affect human physical and mental health, food security, water availability, infrastructure and other facets of life on Earth.

The paper concludes that traditional research into one element of climate change and its effects can miss the bigger picture of interrelation and risk.

Climate change also has different effects on the world’s haves and have-nots, the authors found: People are not generally attuned to dealing with problems like climate change, Mora said. “We as humans don’t feel the pain of people who are far away or far into the future,” he said. “We normally care about people who are close to us or that are impacting us, or things that will happen tomorrow,” and so, he said, people tend to look at events far in the future and tell themselves: “We can deal with these things later, we have more pressing problems now,” but, he added, this research “documented how bad this already is.”

Speak for yourself, and take your internalized supremacism somewhere else.

A coauthor of the new paper, Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, hailed its interdisciplinary approach.....

--more--"

It's also caused the lettuce to wilt, and you know where to deposit that study.

"The Trump administration is moving to expand the territory open for oil exploration in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve, a process that could shift drilling rigs closer to herds of caribou and flocks of threatened birds. The effort responds to complaints from oil companies and state officials that the Obama administration’s plan was overly restrictive, blocking drilling in promising areas while hampering the construction of pipelines across the reserve. Environmentalists argue the Obama administration in 2013 rightly blocked development in 11.8 million acres of the reserve home to caribou herds and polar bears — and those protections shouldn’t be undone now. Both environmental concerns and oil industry interest center on Teshekpuk Lake. The freshwater lake in northern Alaska provides habitat for the Teshekpuk caribou herd as well as nesting shorebirds, molting geese and the Spectacled Eider, a bird threatened with extinction. The lake also happens to sit on top of an oil-rich geologic formation known as the Barrow Arch, making it a potent lure for energy companies....."

People are erupting in outrage on social media.



"Police in the Seattle suburb of Kirkland apologized this week for helping the owner of a frozen yogurt shop kick out a black man because employees said they felt uncomfortable. Outrage led police to announce they have launched an internal investigation, and the city apologized Monday. The owner of the shop apologized Monday....."

Related: The Kansas county official who made a ‘master race’ comment to a black city planner has resigned

Kansas now a blue state.

Four dead, including suspected gunman, after Chicago hospital shooting, police say

It's been minimized by the pre$$, and has the stench of another mind-bending false flag psyop hoax.

"A man who fatally shot his ex-fiancee outside a Chicago hospital before killing two people inside the building was once kicked out of the city’s firefighting academy after threatening a female cadet, officials said Tuesday. Juan Lopez, who died following the shooting Monday at Mercy Hospital, was also the subject of a protection order request filed four years ago, and he legally purchased several guns in recent years, police said. It was unclear whether Lopez shot himself or was fatally shot by police....."

He was no hero.

Police say mother drove with son on car hood over dentist dispute

Making airline travel safe for all

Says the Democratic US senator from New Hampshire.

Tell it to the Indonesians and Malaysians.

Message from the men: We know the power of women on boards

Kill the King?

Related: "The setback for the hard-liners is some rare good news for May, who is fighting for her political life....."

Which is on life $upport at the moment.

Euro countries to consider budget proposed by France and Germany

Yeah, the French know how to handle money:

"Societe Generale SA settled its longstanding sanctions violations case with US authorities, entering a deferred prosecution agreement with federal prosecutors and paying $1.34 billion to regulators in New York and Washington. As part of the settlement announced on Monday, France’s third-largest bank acknowledged violations of US sanctions laws against Cuba, Iran, and Sudan starting as far back as 2003 and extending to 2013. The bank agreed to pay $1.34 billion in all to settle the matter, the US Federal Reserve said in a statement. In addition to paying $717 million to the US Justice Department, the bank will pay $420 million to New York’s Department of Financial Services, $163 million to the Manhattan district attorney’s office, $81 million to the US Federal Reserve, and $54 million to the US Treasury."

That is what is called a kickback.

The French people have other concerns:

"Citizen protests of fuel tax hikes are choking facilities critical to the French economy, and police have orders to remove the drivers blocking sensitive sites to show their anger, France’s interior minister said Monday. In a third day of actions, grass-roots protesters blocked oil depots with their vehicles and disrupted English Channel traffic in a bid to keep up pressure on President Emmanuel Macron’s government. Interior Minister Christophe Castaner said the demonstrations around France had grown smaller while yielding ‘‘a multiplication of violent acts, racist acts, anti-Semitic acts, and vandalism’’ since Sunday. Scattered road blockades have continued around France since mass protests of the tax increases Saturday left one protester dead. An injured motorcyclist was between life and death, Castaner said. Since the main protests on Saturday, 528 people have been injured — 17 seriously, the minister said. The figure did not include 92 police officers who were injured, two of them seriously. He said that 27,000 protesters blocking strategic traffic zones were active on Monday, far fewer than the nearly 300,000 counted Saturday."

He's toast despite the agent provocateurs they deployed.

Was the top story yesterday:

"Tech’s troubles on Wall Street haven’t hit Boston yet — but they could" by Andy Rosen Globe Staff  November 19, 2018

Technology stocks took a beating on Monday, the latest in a string of downdrafts that has erased hundreds of billions of dollars in market value from companies such as Apple and Google and left investors concerned that the industry’s long period of runaway growth is over.

In Boston, where there are few tech giants and hundreds of startups, the tremors on Wall Street have so far not shaken the faith of executives and their investors. In the past week, a handful of young companies have announced funding from early-stage investors. The venture team at Bain Capital said it had raised a new $1 billion fund to invest in promising companies, but the local tech sector isn’t immune to the turmoil on Wall Street. No boom lasts forever, and when this one ends, Boston could get hurt.

Related: 

"Two private equity owners of the iconic Toys R Us toy chain will be handing over a $20 million hardship fund to the thousands of former workers left jobless and without severance after the chain was liquidated in June. The move by KKR and Bain Capital is aimed at helping the 30,000 workers affected by the store closures and comes following efforts by worker-backed groups. Workers are pushing to get an additional $55 million they believe they’re owed and are looking to other firms that had a stake in Toys R Us and that they believed played a role in the chain’s demise."

They should have unionized.

“The storyline has been so positive, with such good prospects for such a long time that it’s hard to remember that there could be a significant headwind at some point,” said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. “The Boston region is deeply involved with the digital sector, and itself could see ramifications of any adjustment.” While the Dow Jones industrial lost 396 points, or 1.6 percent, on Monday, the tech-heavy Nasdaq dropped 3 percent. The biggest names in tech — including Amazon, Facebook, and Netflix — all tumbled.

While the focus has been on publicly traded stocks, a broad pullback could also affect the significant wealth generated here by venture capital, private investments to support the rapid growth of emerging tech companies.

Nationwide, that money has generally been concentrated in tech hubs such as Silicon Valley, Calif., New York, and Boston.

Venture-backed companies are generally insulated from the caprice of the stock market, but that doesn’t mean they’re invulnerable, and since Boston depends more heavily on such companies, it has more to lose.

Josh Lerner, a Harvard Business School professor who studies entrepreneurial management, said his research has shown that venture investors tend to draw back when the stock market retreats.

“Venture capital, even though it’s private, is equity, and as such we would expect that it’s not divorced from what’s going on in public markets,” he said.

Geopolitical shifts could be a factor in slowing the flow, however.

Saudi Arabia has been key among overseas tech investors, which has led some to wonder whether the international firestorm over the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi might have some effect on the sector.

Increasing trade tensions between the United States and China could also have an effect on foreign investment, said Kirsten Morin, co-head of global venture capital at Aberdeen Standard Investments, but she said she doesn’t see as much risk that investment in tech will slow down because of the companies’ performances alone. The startups she has examined are doing well, she said.

They are going to the dogs, too.

“Ultimately, you would first have to see companies encountering operational challenges before they would think about needing to make workforce changes,” she said. “Unless the economy changes dramatically, they seem to have been beating their plans in recent quarters.”

Yeah, nothing to see here or there.

--more--"

Related: Verizon’s Boston plans include expanded Fios service, 2,000 more jobs at North Station

Since they are blaming the Khashoggi situation, let's stick with that:

"Saudi king stands by crown prince as outrage over Khashoggi killing spreads" by Ben Hubbardand Carlotta Gall   November 19, 2018

BEIRUT — King Salman of Saudi Arabia stood by his son and crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, on Monday, avoiding any mention of the international outrage toward the kingdom in his first public remarks since Saudi agents killed the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul last month.

The echoes of that killing continued to spread, with Germany sanctioning 18 Saudis suspected of involvement and freezing arms exports to Saudi Arabia on Monday, and the Turkish defense minister suggested that Khashoggi’s killers could have left the country with his body.

Khashoggi’s killing inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul has become a lightning rod for Western criticism of Saudi Arabia, its human rights record, and the leadership of Crown Prince Mohammed, the kingdom’s day-to-day ruler. A growing chorus of current and former Western officials have concluded that an operation as elaborate as the one to kill Khashoggi could not have been carried out without the prince’s knowledge, and US officials told The New York Times and other publications last week that the CIA had concluded that the prince had ordered the killing.

Saudi officials have vehemently denied that the crown prince had any involvement in the death of Khashoggi, a Virginia resident who wrote columns for The Washington Post that were critical of some Saudi policies. They have portrayed the killing as a result of a rogue operation to return Khashoggi to Saudi Arabia.

The heightened scrutiny of Crown Prince Mohammed, 33, has caused speculation in some quarters that he could be pushed aside, but in Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy, only his father has the authority to do so and in Monday’s remarks he showed no intention to sideline his son.

In his annual address to the Shura Council, the kingdom’s advisory assembly, the 82-year-old monarch stuck to general statements on official Saudi policy, calling on the world to stop Iran’s nuclear program, press for political solutions to the wars in Syria and Yemen, and keep up the fight against terrorism.

If the king made any reference to the aftermath of Khashoggi’s killing, it was done obliquely.....

--more--"

Related:

Trump issues statement ‘standing with Saudi Arabia’ after Khashoggi murder

That is an Associated Press piece in place of the WaComPo story that was in print:

Trump defends Saudi Arabia's denial

What do you mean Page not found and We're sorry for the inconvenience?

"Saudi women’s rights advocates reportedly abused while in prison" by Kareem Fahim Washington Post  November 20, 2018

ISTANBUL — Several women’s rights activists who have been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for more than six months have been subjected to psychological or physical abuse while in custody, including sleep deprivation and beatings, according to four people familiar with the conditions of the activists’ detention.

Some of the abuse occurred during interrogations, during which several of the women were administered electric shocks or flogged, two of the people said, citing a witness account. Other women displayed what witnesses said were apparent signs of abuse, including uncontrollable shaking or difficulty standing, the people said.

When the pre$$ starts waving women at you, you know there is a deeper agenda at stake.

The allegations of abuse and torture were impossible to independently confirm. Families are reluctant to repeat what they hear from the detainees during prison visits, fearing retaliation by the authorities. The four people who spoke about the abuse, all Saudi citizens, have contacts in the prison or had been briefed on conditions there. They spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern that revealing their names could identify the detainees.

The Saudi government did not immediately respond to an e-mail sent Monday requesting comment on the allegations. In previous cases, Saudi officials have vigorously denied detainees are tortured while in the state’s custody.

The killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents last month in Istanbul has heightened scrutiny of human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia and fueled rumors that Saudi authorities were considering releasing some of the female activists to blunt some of the attacks on the kingdom, but seven weeks after Khashoggi’s killing, none of the activists have been released and there has been no indication that prosecutors have taken new steps to formally indict them.

Saudi authorities began detaining the country’s most prominent feminists in mid-May, after several waves of previous arrests had targeted other high-profile figures, including clerics, royal family members, business executives, and independent political activists. Some of the women had worked for decades to repeal a female driving ban in Saudi Arabia. The arrests, which included men who had worked with the female activists, drew international outrage in part because they occurred just weeks before the Saudi government officially lifted the driving ban — and hailed its repeal as an important step forward for women’s rights in the kingdom.

Saudi authorities, which usually withhold the names of criminal suspects, also mounted a highly unusual campaign to publicize the women’s identities after detaining them on accusations that included illegal contacts with foreign countries.

None of the activists have been formally charged or been granted access to lawyers, the people familiar with the matter said.

So much for the rule of law the U.S. champions so much.

According to the people familiar with the detentions, some of the female activists were detained for months at a building believed to be a hotel, where some of the worst abuses occurred at the hands of male interrogators. Many were then transferred to Dhahban prison in the coastal city of Jiddah. In both facilities, detainees were held in solitary confinement for long periods.

In addition to the beatings and electric shocks, at least one prisoner was hung from the ceiling during an interrogation. Another prisoner was told, falsely, that a relative had been killed. A third inmate has attempted suicide several times, the people familiar with the matter said.

A former inmate at Dhahban prison who said she was released about three months ago said that she had witnessed interrogators beat inmates at the facility, using phone cables and other implements. She did not have any specific information about the treatment of the women’s rights activists, she said.

Amnesty International released a report Tuesday also alleging that several of the Saudi activists detained since May have reportedly faced sexual harassment, torture, and other forms of mistreatment while being interrogated. The report was released subsequent to The Washington Post’s independent interviews with the four people familiar with detention conditions.

The report said that one of the female detainees was reportedly subjected to sexual harassment by interrogators wearing face masks. According to testimonies cited by Amnesty, the human rights group also reported that activists were repeatedly administered electric shocks or flogged. Some of the activists were left unable to walk or stand properly.

‘‘Only a few weeks after the ruthless killing of Jamal Khashoggi, these shocking reports of torture, sexual harassment, and other forms of ill-treatment, if verified, expose further outrageous human rights violations by the Saudi authorities,’’ said Lynn Maalouf, Amnesty International’s Middle East research director.

According to Amnesty, at least a dozen women and men associated with the Saudi feminist movement have been detained since May. Several who were well known for their activism had been arrested in the past, including Samar Badawi, Aziza al-Yousef, and Loujain al-Hathloul. The activists had fought to end the driving ban as well as to repeal regulations that require women to seek the permission of a male guardian to travel or to work.

Saudi officials denied that the arrests were because of the women’s activism and accused them of trying to pass on information to foreign countries hostile to Saudi Arabia.

When the detentions began in May, the women’s pictures were circulated in pro-government media outlets with headlines that branded them as ‘‘traitors.’’

--more--"

Yes, "barring an unexpected discovery of presidential spine, it seems likely that Congress will need to intervene" as the Globe also says that Gulen, a US resident wanted by Turkey, must be protected.



"Palantir, Merck KGaA form Boston venture to mine health care data" by Jonathan Saltzman Globe Staff  November 19, 2018

Palantir Technologies, the Silicon Valley data analytics company — and a contractor for the US intelligence community— and German drug maker Merck KGaA announced Monday they were forming a joint venture in the Boston area to help advance cancer research.

The collaboration will be called Syntropy. It will offer data analytics tools to teaching hospitals, biotechnology firms, pharmaceutical companies, and others so that scientists can detect patterns that could lead to the development of new cancer treatments.

Too often, said executives at Palantir and Merck KGaA, drug makers and academic research centers collect data from clinical drug trials but don’t thoroughly mine it or compare it with information gathered by other institutions.

Syntropy will combine Palantir’s Foundry data platform with the scientific know-how of Merck KGaA’s life sciences unit, MilliporeSigma, to sift data for potential nuggets, the executives said. MilliporeSigma has 1,600 employees in the state, including 1,000 on a massive campus in Burlington.

“There have been lots of attempts to do this that have failed,” said Alexander Karp, the billionaire businessman who cofounded Palantir, of Palo Alto, Calif., and serves as its chief executive.

“Sure, there will be jobs,” Karp said. “Sure, there will be offices. Sure, there will be money. But the main thing that will be created will be the advancement of medical progress.”

Palantir has attracted considerable attention in recent years for providing data-mining software to US intelligence agencies. The company was credited with helping the government and Navy SEALs hunt down Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011.

PFFFT!

However, the company has drawn criticism from civil libertarians who worry that Palantir’s data mining might violate the privacy of ordinary Americans.....

WHY WORRY!

--more--"

Right below that article, this:

"Breaking the code: program trains young adults to enter computer industry" by Morgan Hughes Globe Correspondent  November 20, 2018

In a crowded classroom in downtown Boston, Anne Demosthene was using NASA data to build a weather app.

She had come a long way in a short time. Just seven weeks earlier, Demosthene was learning basic technical skills in HTML.

“It was over my head a day ago,” she said with a laugh.

Through a nonprofit called Resilient Coders, Demosthene and about 20 other young adults are working to turn the tech industry’s traditional image of software engineers on its head.

The group helps young people of color in the Boston area break into an industry that typically relies on recruits from elite universities and other technology companies, said David Delmar, the group’s founder and executive director.

This approach, Delmar said, has made it difficult for minorities to enter the field.

“This workforce pipeline is so well-baked that if you do not have access to it, it’s much harder to break into professional employment,” Delmar said.

Better than the prison pipeline.

Delmar said minorities also need to prepare for a rapidly changing job market. The rise of automation will be “catastrophic” to communities like Roxbury and Dorchester, where many people work as retail associates or drivers — jobs that may be on their way out.

“We’re worried about the future of Boston’s workforce,” Delmar said.

What are they going to do with the surplus population?

Through a program called Resilient Bootcamp, students of color learn coding languages such as Javascript, React, and Node. They complete projects that range from website interfaces to apps.

The 14-week boot camp is both a learning experience and networking opportunity, Delmar said. Teachers are on the lookout for talent, and students can display their skills first hand. This is crucial, Delmar said, because computer engineers tend to follow a “show, don’t tell” philosophy.

Another pervert procurement front?

“Interviewing someone with a capital ‘I’ is not a perfect way to get to know them,” said Delmar, who used to screen candidates when he worked at PayPal.

Many students gave up full-time jobs to enter the program.....

--more--""

"US Treasury to scrutinize all-cash home sales in Boston" by Tim Logan Globe Staff  November 19, 2018

Secret buyers of luxury real estate in Greater Boston will soon get extra scrutiny.

The US Treasury Department has added Suffolk and Middlesex Counties to a program that requires people who buy homes with cash through shell companies to share their name with the government. It’s a bid to combat money laundering in high-end real estate, which critics say is becoming increasingly popular with buyers who can hide their identity behind a limited liability company or other shell entity.

Such shell-company deals are legal, and there are no state or federal laws requiring public disclosure of an owner’s name. The rules, however, would require title companies to disclose to the government the identity of people who make all-cash purchases through a shell company. That enables prosecutors of financial crimes to screen for people they’re investigating for potential criminal activity.

The Treasury launched the program in 2016 in New York and Miami and has gradually expanded by adding more cities and less-expensive purchases. The latest expansion, announced Thursday, will bring the review to 12 housing markets and all deals worth $300,000 or more — which would cover nearly all cash sales in Suffolk and Middlesex counties. The government also, for the first time, will review deals in “virtual currencies” such as Bitcoin.

The expanded program “will further assist in tracking illicit funds and other criminal or illicit activity,” the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network said in a statement.

The issue of shell-company purchases in recent years has become more relevant in Boston, as a wave of luxury condo buildings have drawn high-end investors and wealthy buyers who want to remain discreet. Some members of the City Council, concerned units are sitting empty amid a housing shortage, have called for greater public disclosure of ownership. Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh had asked the Treasury to add the city to its anti-laundering program.

What are they saying, that the Bo$ton building boom has a foundation of dirty money?

A report in September by the Institute for Policy Studies looked at 12 high-end condo buildings in Boston and found that 35 percent of the units are owned by LLCs, trusts, and other kinds of shell companies. Study author Chuck Collins said adding Boston to the program was “a positive outcome” from the report.

“The issue of illicit funds and secrecy really touched a nerve around Boston,” Collins said. “No one wants Boston to become Miami or New York City as a center of money laundering.”

The potential impact on the housing market is unclear.

A study released this summer found that shell-company purchases in Miami fell sharply after the new rules took effect there, but that overall sales were little changed, suggesting would-be shell buyers simply found another way to buy real estate. In several of the cities that the Treasury has been studying, high-end sales have levelled off for other reasons.

In Boston, real estate brokers say, luxury condo buildings typically conduct their own scrutiny to identify potential buyers, and that episodes of real-estate-related money laundering and other financial crime has been relatively rare.

Yeah, don't kill the golden goo$e!

--more--" 

Related:

"Confidence among US homebuilders plummeted by the most since 2014 as the highest borrowing costs in eight years restrain demand, adding to signs of a cooling housing market that will weigh on the Federal Reserve’s debate over how far to raise interest rates......"

Also see:

Slowdown in building of single-family homes
That's because people are not getting married as much now.



They be Ghosn you:

"Nissan chairman is arrested over financial misconduct allegations" by Motoko Rich and Jack Ewing New York Times  November 20, 2018

TOKYO — Carlos Ghosn, who created an alliance between Nissan and Renault that made it effectively the world’s largest carmaker, was arrested by authorities in Japan on Monday in a remarkable tumble for one of the industry’s most powerful and admired leaders.

Ghosn, a larger-than-life figure widely hailed for saving Nissan, reviving Renault, and rethinking how automakers could share technologies, was detained after an internal company inquiry found that he had underreported his compensation to the Japanese government for several years.

The alliance, which in 2016 was broadened to include Mitsubishi, accounts for 10.6 million cars sold annually. The arrest of Ghosn, who is chairman of Nissan, chief executive of Renault, and chairman of the board at Mitsubishi, stunned the industry. It comes at an uneasy time: The companies face a slowing economy, a global trade war, and a shift toward electric cars.

If the alliance were one entity, it could be considered the world’s largest automaker, on track to sell more cars than Toyota or Volkswagen this year — if it can match results in the first six months of this year, when it sold 5.5 million vehicles.

Hiroto Saikawa, Nissan’s chief executive, said he would recommend to his board, which will meet Thursday, that Ghosn be removed. “Needless to say, this is an act which cannot be tolerated by the company,” he said.

Saikawa, speaking at a news conference at Nissan headquarters in Yokohama, described Ghosn and Greg Kelly, a director who was also arrested Monday, as “masterminds” of a long-running scheme to mislead financial authorities. He offered few details, citing the prosecutors’ continuing investigation.

“I feel a big disappointment,” said Saikawa, who did not bow in deep apology before television cameras, as is customary in Japan. “And I feel frustration and despair, and indignation or resentment.”

Kelly was Nissan’s first American director, appointed in 2012, but had a much lower profile than Ghosn. Neither of the men could be reached for comment.

Nissan said it was cooperating with Japanese prosecutors and that its investigation into Ghosn began after a whistleblower said he had misrepresented his salary and used company assets for personal purposes.

Born in Brazil to Lebanese parents and educated in France, Ghosn made his reputation after joining Nissan in 1999. Renault, where Ghosn was an executive vice president, had bought a large stake in the Japanese company, which was on the verge of collapse at the time.

Ghosn made sweeping changes at Nissan, closing five domestic factories and cutting 21,000 jobs. Later, he engineered an arrangement between Renault and Nissan that allowed them to operate like a single carmaker. Short of a full merger, the alliance enabled them to share the cost of developing new models and to negotiate better deals with suppliers by buying components together.

As chairman and chief executive of the partnership, Ghosn was celebrated in Japan: His life story was made into a manga comic, although critics on the left noted he had earned his French nickname, “Le cost killer.” Still, he had enough political savvy to retain the support of the French government, which owns 15 percent of Renault, despite some bitter pay disputes.

In 2016 and 2017, Ghosn’s salary at Renault was questioned publicly, by French government officials and a shareholder group; this year he agreed to a 30 percent pay cut in return for another four-year term as chief executive.

Under Ghosn, the alliance overcame the kinds of differences in corporate and national cultures that have often doomed megamergers like the ill-fated marriage between Daimler and Chrysler, which was dissolved in 2007.

“His world is the world of efficiency,” said Ferdinand Dudenhöffer, a professor at the University of Duisburg-Essen who follows the auto industry. “It’s the American style of management: clear plans, clear goals, and permanently monitored.”

With the corruption, too.

Dudenhöffer said it was questionable whether Nissan or Renault would have survived in the brutally competitive market for mid-price autos without Ghosn. In a measure of investors’ regard for him, Renault shares slid 10 percent on the Paris stock exchange Monday; Nissan shares fell 9 percent in trading in Düsseldorf, Germany.

According to Nissan’s securities filings, Ghosn was paid 735 million yen, about $6.5 million, in cash in 2017. That is a drop of 33 percent from the 1.1 billion yen he received in 2016.

He stepped down from the top job at Nissan last year but remained at the top of the alliance.....

--more--"

Related:

Citizens Bank pursues national ambitions

They are looking to find new corporate clients because it's all about the Benjamins, of course.

"BuzzFeed founder’s big idea to revive its fortunes? A merger with rivals" by Edmund Lee New York Times   November 20, 2018

BuzzFeed has long positioned itself as the future of publishing— it practices the mysterious arts of digital media better than anyone. From the beginning, its ability to know, before anyone else, what sort of content would go viral delivered it a large audience and helped the company attract half a billion dollars in venture money and a steady stream of mostly positive media attention.

Then came 2017, but efforts to reestablish its fortunes have already begun.

Oh, I'm so happy then!

Still, these are largely stopgaps. The better solution according to Jonah Peretti, a founder of the company and its chief executive, would require a much more audacious effort: a series of mergers with five or six top Internet publishers.

Peretti extolled the logic of combining forces: A larger entity could lobby for a higher percentage of the ad dollars Facebook and Google share with publishers whenever their content, videos in particular, run on the platforms. In turn, publishers can supply them with content that is safe for users and friendlier for advertisers.

He pointed to how Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have had to answer for the latest content crisis plaguing social media. In addition to Russia’s misinformation campaign to try to sway the 2016 presidential election in the United States, hate speech and conspiracy theories regularly show up on their platforms.

OMFG!

“Having some bigger companies that actually care about the quality of the content feels like something that’s very valuable,” he said......

HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!

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"Big technology and Internet companies tumbled again Monday, leading to broad losses across the stock market. The Dow Jones Industrial Average briefly fell 500 points. Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon, the most valuable companies on the market, sustained some of the worst losses. After a brutal October, stocks had started to recover early this month, but continued losses for tech companies have sent major indexes lower again. Mark Hackett, chief of investment research at Nationwide Investment Management, said investors are dumping the high-profile technology companies that have dominated the market recently. He said investors are picking companies based on traditional profit and revenue figures instead of the kind of user growth figures favored by tech companies. Investors focused again on trade tensions between the United States and China after the two countries clashed at a Pacific Rim summit over the weekend. A steep loss for Boeing, a major exporter which would stand to suffer greatly in a protracted trade war, weighed heavily on the Dow. Boeing gave up 4.5 percent to $320.94, but is still one of the best-performing stocks in the 30-stock index.

Boeing is still dropping.

Apple fell 4 percent to $185.86 on renewed worries that iPhone sales could slow, Microsoft lost 3.4 percent to $104.62 and Amazon gave back 5.1 percent to close at $1,512.29. High-dividend stocks like real estate companies and utilities, which investors favor when they are fearful of market turmoil, held up better than the rest of the market. Among tech and Internet stocks, chipmaker Nvidia dropped another 21 percent to $144.70. Nvidia said last week that it had a large number of unsold chips because of a big drop in mining of cryptocurrencies. Facebook sank 5.7 percent to $131.55 and Netflix lost 5.6 percent to $270.21. The S&P 500 index of technology companies has now plunged 13.1 percent since the end of September. Nissan said its chairman, Carlos Ghosn, was arrested Monday and will be dismissed from the company after allegedly under-reporting his income. Nissan said an internal investigation found Ghosn under-reported his income by millions of dollars and engaged in other ‘‘significant misconduct.’’ US-traded shares of Nissan lost 5.8 percent to $16.90. In Paris, shares of Nissan’s partner Renault dropped 8.4 percent."

Also see: Dow drops more than 500 points as tech and retail stocks fall

"Stock market’s slide is flashing a warning about the economy" by Matt Phillips New York Times  November 20, 2018

NEW YORK — Unemployment is near lows not seen in half a century. The American economy is set for its best year since 2005. Large corporations are producing giant profits. Even wages are starting to rise, and the stock markets are a mess.

The losses extended on Tuesday, as the S&P 500 turned negative for the year, stoking fears that one of the longest bull markets in history could be at risk.

The stock market struggles may seem incongruous with an American economy that by many measures looks strong, but stocks often act as an early warning system, picking up subtle changes before they appear in the economic data.

In recent weeks, retail stocks have been hit over concerns of rising costs, a sign that the trade war may be starting to take a toll and that higher wages are cutting into profits. Commodities and the companies that depend on them have been pummeled by the prospect of weaker demand should the global economy slow. Five tech giants — Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet, Apple and Netflix — have shed more than $800 billion in market value since the end of August, the fallout from slowing growth and regulatory scrutiny.

The S&P 500 closed on Tuesday at 2,642, down 1.8 percent. Other markets also flashed warnings, with oil dropping by 6.8 percent, falling deeper into bear territory.

The sell-off doesn’t mean the United States is headed into a recession. The stock market suffered several sharp stumbles in recent years before climbing to new highs on the back of booming corporate profits and strong economic growth, but the recent market drop is consistent with a potential downshift in the American economy. In 2018, a hefty dose of fiscal stimulus allowed the United States to shake off the growth worries in China, Europe, and the rest of the world. It won’t have the same potency next year, leaving the US economy vulnerable to a global slowdown.

“I think there’s very clear signs that investors are beginning to worry about weaker growth in the coming year or so, and how that’s going to feed through to corporate earnings,” said Michael Pearce, senior US economist with Capital Economics.

Until recently, investors were willing to ignore the geopolitical dramas, economic risks, and other issues clouding the outlook for US companies. Now, they are jittery, pressing sell at even small signs of trouble.

Strong growth and deep corporate tax cuts have supercharged corporate profits this year. Once all the results are tallied up, the third-quarter earnings for companies in the S&P 500 are expected to be up more than 28 percent from a year earlier — outpacing previous quarters, but those numbers haven’t satisfied investors, who have grown simultaneously concerned about risks they face if the economy stays strong — such as rising interest rates and increased expenses for wages — as well as the threat to stocks from a significant global slowdown.

The profit growth is mind-bogglingly obscene.

On Tuesday, shares of the retailer Target dropped by more than 10 percent, on worries that rising costs — from increased wages to higher prices for the Chinese goods facing tariffs — could continue to crimp profits. Apple continued its slide on worries about softening demand.

Yeah, it's going to crimp profits, boo-hoo-hoo!

Also see: TJX stock falls on weaker fourth-quarter guidance

China, the world’s largest consumer of oil, has also been weighing on commodities. Oil prices, now just above $53 a barrel, have fallen more than 20 percent since early October.

Weakness in China is feeding broader global concerns. Last quarter, the country’s growth slowed to its lowest level since 2009, during the depths of the global financial crisis.

Japan is also looking shaky, with the economy contracting in the third quarter, and Germany, the powerhouse behind Europe, shrank unexpectedly during the third quarter as well.

Yeah, blame everyone and everything but the bankers profiting from and running it.

The global slowdown could eventually spill over into the United States, particularly as the impact of this year’s tax cuts fades in 2019. For investors, that could mean a choppy new phase in the markets after years of solid gains.

“I think this is what a low-return environment starts to feel like,” said Joe Davis, chief economist with Vanguard. “The past five years, although entirely welcome from an investment standpoint, is clearly unsustainable.”

Yeah, we are f***ed.

--more--"

"A Massachusetts investment adviser has pleaded guilty to defrauding her clients of more than $3 million and using the money for vacations, luxury vehicles, and other personal expenses. Federal prosecutors say 51-year-old Kimberly Kitts, of Orleans, pleaded guilty Monday to investment adviser fraud, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft. Sentencing was scheduled for March 20. Authorities say starting in 2011 Kitts engaged in various schemes to misappropriate her clients’ assets. In one scheme, she directed client assets to a bank account for Marquis Consulting, an entity she controlled. In another, she cashed her clients’ annuities, transferred funds out of her clients’ brokerage accounts, and directed distributions from her clients’ Individual Retirement Accounts."

It's always discouraging to see a woman as the thief, but at least the office is now has local owners.

"Vacation rental company Airbnb said it is removing its listings in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The company said Monday it will take down some 200 listings in Israeli settlements ‘‘that are at the core of the dispute between the Israelis and Palestinians.’’ Airbnb said that although it had been operating in accordance with US law, it long wrestled with the question of whether to do business in Israeli settlements, which most of the international community views as illegal. Palestinians and human rights groups have long urged the company to remove the listings. Airbnb said it would cease its operations in the occupied territory in hopes that ‘‘a framework is put in place where the entire global community is aligned.’’ Israeli officials condemned the decision."

"Israel is threatening vacation rental company Airbnb with high taxes and legal repercussions over its decision to remove listings from Jewish West Bank settlements. The threats step up Israel’s fight against a global movement advocating for boycotts over the country’s treatment of the Palestinians. Israeli Tourism Minister Yariv Levin says Tuesday that Israel will seek to impose ‘‘very high taxes’’ on the company in order to restrict its operations in the country. He also says Israel will encourage hosts in settlements to sue the company to make it ‘‘pay’’ for its decision. Airbnb’s decision on Monday sparked outrage among Israeli officials and settler leaders, but was welcomed by Palestinian officials and human rights groups that had long pressured the company to end its contentious West Bank settlement listings."

Related: Banksy exhibit opens in Milan on heels of auction stunt

I love Banksy, and you won't be able to find a room in Bo$ton, either.

"Jury finds former Aveo CFO misled investors" by Jonathan Saltzman Globe Staff  November 21, 2018

A federal jury in Boston found the former chief financial officer of Aveo Pharmaceuticals liable for civil securities fraud Tuesday for misleading investors about the Cambridge biotech company’s prospects to win approval of a kidney cancer drug candidate.

The US District Court jury concluded that David Johnston concealed from investors that the Food and Drug Administration had expressed concerns about the drug candidate, known as tivozanib.

Johnston told investors that the drug was moving toward approval. In fact, the FDA was telling the company it had deep concerns about how the trial had been designed and said the way the company was comparing tivozanib with another medicine on the market was fundamentally flawed.

In a statement issued after the verdict Tuesday, Stephanie Avakian and Steven Peikin, co-directors of the SEC’s division of enforcement, said the outcome “makes clear that a company and its officers are required to be honest in their public communications, including about matters as critical as communications with regulators about approval of a key product.”

Aveo agreed to pay a $4 million penalty to settle SEC charges without admitting or denying the allegations in the complaint.

Michael P. Bailey, CEO of the company since 2015, said at the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco in January that Aveo was “truly a turnaround story.”

--more--"

The glamour is gone:

"Glamour magazine to cease regular print publication" by Jaclyn Peiser   November 20, 2018

NEW YORK — Yet another women’s magazine is moving away from print.

Condé Nast, the legacy publisher of glossy and aesthetically rich magazines like Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker, announced Tuesday that it was ending regular print publication of Glamour.

Two moves foreshadowed the change. Last year, Condé Nast reduced Glamour’s frequency to 11 issues a year, from 12, and in January, the company installed a digital journalist, Samantha Barry, as the magazine’s new top editor.

Although the numberofGlamour’s paid subscribers has remained stable over the last three years, at around 2.2 million, Barry said it was time for the publication to break away from the printed page.

“This is my plan, because it makes sense,” Barry, a former executive producer for social and emerging media at CNN Worldwide, said in an interview. “It’s where the audiences are and it’s where our growth is. That monthly schedule, for a Glamour audience, doesn’t make sense anymore.”

The editor added that the magazine might still publish occasional print issues centered on its annual Women of the Year award or topics like power and money. Online access to Glamour will remain free for now.

All I can think of is what will I look at in the checkout line at the supermarket.

Barry, 37, took over the top editorial position at Glamour after Cindi Leive had run the magazine for 16 years. She seemed to hint at its digital future soon after accepting the job when she said in an interview with The New York Times, “Glamour is a brand — it’s not just a magazine.”

Do you know how tired I am of brands, images, and narratives posing as news?

In a statement, Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue and Condé Nast’s artistic director, called Barry “a change-maker — the embodiment of the modern Glamour woman.”

“I am thrilled with her plan for Glamour’s future,” Wintour said. “She’ll be reaching the title’s loyal readers on the digital and social platforms they use most, while using the power of print to highlight tentpole moments like Women of the Year.”

Glamour’s digital audience has grown since Barry took the helm.

Glamour, which was founded by Condé Montrose Nast himself as Glamour of Hollywood in 1939, is not the first women’s magazine to move away from print. Last year, Condé Nast put an end to the regular print editions of Teen Vogue and Self, and Hearst Magazines recently announced that it would stop publishing Seventeen as a bimonthly. All three plan to publish occasional special print issues.

The appeal to the adolescents bothers me now, knowing what we do regarding the rampant pedophilia across so many institutions.

The end of Glamour as a regular print publication is part of a general belt-tightening at Condé Nast, a company that was known for its lavish offices and generous pay packages back when its publications were so stuffed with ads that readers had trouble finding the articles.

The ads were the articles, the glamour, if you will!

The publisher lost more than $120 million last year and has leased six of its 23 floors at its headquarters at One World Trade Center in New York City.

Pamela Drucker Mann, Condé Nast’s chief marketing officer, said Glamour’s disappearance from newsstands should not be viewed as a failure.....

And when he went there, the newsstand was bare?

--more--"

Usually the markets try to end the week or a holiday with a positive gain so that everyone has a good one; however, after gaining most of the day the Dow ended with a near 100-point loss. 

Thanksgiving's been ruined!

I'll let you be the judge:

"Chief Justice Roberts fires back at President Trump on judges" by Felicia Sonmez and Robert Barnes Washington Post  November 22, 2018

WASHINGTON — Chief Justice John Roberts directed a rare and pointed shot at President Trump on Wednesday, defending the federal judiciary in the wake of Trump’s criticism of an ‘‘Obama judge’’ who ruled against the administration’s attempt to bar migrants who cross the border illegally from seeking asylum.

‘‘We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,’’ Roberts said in a statement released by the court’s public information office. ‘‘What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.’’

The Thanksgiving eve statement added: ‘‘That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.’’

He's going to be the new Kennedy.

Supreme Court justices, and the chief in particular, hardly ever issue statements on news events, but it appeared Roberts was eager to counter Trump’s criticism when asked to comment by the Associated Press.

The chief justice, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, is an aggressive defender of the judiciary and has frequently expressed concern about attacks on its impartiality, whether they come from the left or the right. He had made it clear last month that he felt the recent partisan battle over the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh had cast a shadow on the Supreme Court.

Yeah, you don't want to reopen that!

At an event at the University of Minnesota just after Kavanaugh’s confirmation, Roberts sought to assure that the court served ‘‘one nation’’ and not ‘‘one party or one interest.’’

‘‘Our role is very clear: We are to interpret the Constitution and laws of the United States, and to ensure that the political branches act within them,’’ he said. ‘‘That job obviously requires independence from the political branches. The story of the Supreme Court would be very different without that sort of independence.’’

Trump also complained that his opponents file lawsuits in courts that are part of California’s liberal-leaning Ninth Circuit, which covers several Western states. It’s not unusual for those challenging a president’s policies to sue in courts they consider likely to back their claims. Conservative groups tended to bring challenges to Obama-era policies in Texas, part of the conservative-leaning Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.

The Ninth Circuit has long had a majority of judges appointed by Democratic presidents, with the current breakdown at 16-7, but Trump has the opportunity to narrow that edge significantly because there are six vacancies, and he already has nominated candidates for five of them.

And the new Senate will confirm them.

I imagine that in a few years, the roles will be reversed due to the massive Democratic electoral fraud. They will consistently win elections like Republicans used, and Republicans will find the courts their only line of defense like Democrats did for so long.

Lower courts have not been accommodating to Trump’s efforts to crack down on illegal immigration, but the Supreme Court last June upheld the president’s travel ban on people from certain Muslim-majority countries, in a 5-to-4 decision written by Roberts.

Roberts has not commented on Trump before, even though Trump as a candidate called Roberts a ‘‘disaster’’ because of his vote with the court’s liberals to uphold the Affordable Care Act, more commonly known as Obamacare.

His opinion of the ruling read more like a dissent, and it makes you wonder what the NSA has on Roberts.

Liberals who follow the court and are often critical of Roberts applauded his Wednesday statement.

‘‘A remarkable rebuke of a President by a Chief Justice — offhand, I can’t think of any historical analogy even close,’’ Georgetown law professor Marty Lederman said in a tweet. ‘‘But then again, every day Trump breaches norms never before breached.’’

Good.

--more--"

I'm told “we are a nation of laws,” and maybe the retired judges should be reinstated.

Related:

New Justice Department head erroneously says bomber had help

He's literally begging for forgiveness.

While we are discussing the rule of law:

"In his statement Tuesday, President Trump argued that punishing Saudi Arabia by ‘‘foolishly canceling’’ arms deals worth billions of dollars would only benefit Russia and China. Critics, including high-ranking officials in other countries, accused Trump of ignoring human rights and giving Saudi Arabia a pass for economic reasons. Trump also said the United States needs Saudi Arabia’s help to counter Iran in the region, fight extremism, and keep oil prices steady. Criticism of the president will likely resume after the holiday. ‘‘Congressional Republicans will have to do a gut check,’’ said Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. ‘‘The Republican Party has believed for more than 50 years that morality was one of the reasons why the United States won the Cold War. And the president walked away from that.’’

I'm sorry, but those are all really sh**ty reasons to support war criminal slaughter that is soaking us in blood.

"One day after President Trump backed the Saudi crown prince over accusations that he may have ordered the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a leading charity has issued a blistering report that poses more uncomfortable questions over Saudi practices. More than 85,000 children may have died from hunger since Saudi Arabia intervened in the war in Yemen three years ago, according to Save the Children, a British charity. The United States has long remained largely silent on the war, even when Saudi Arabia enacted a blockade on its borders with Yemen last November....."

Related(?):

"In 1967, the UN Security Council approved Resolution 242, which called for Israel to withdraw from territories it had captured the previous June and implicitly called on adversaries to recognize Israel’s right to exist."

Not only are they still there, the children dying from hunger in the previous article also made me think of Gaza.

"Two decades after 9/11, militants have only multiplied" by Eric Schmitt   November 21, 2018

WASHINGTON — Nearly four times as many Sunni Islamic militants are operating around the world today as on Sept. 11, 2001, despite nearly two decades of US-led campaigns to combat Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, according to the study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

PFFFT!

It's the same $tink tank that was front-paged to beat the war drums against North Korea, and it was once again standard BS spew.

I guess it doesn't help when it is the U.S. and its allies that are creating, funding, and directing the very terrorists we are fighting, but it sure is a nifty trick to keep the endless wars going while mind-f***ing the domestic population.

The report’s conclusions, drawing on multiple databases dating to 1980 to compile one of the most extensive studies of its kind, underscore the resiliency of these terrorist groups, and the policy failures by the United States and its allies in responding. The findings also highlight the continuing potency of the groups’ ideology and social-media branding in raising money and attracting recruits as they pivot from battlefield defeats in strongholds like Iraq and Syria to direct guerrilla-style attacks there and in other hot spots.

Once again, the New York Times is a mouthpiece of war propaganda in full throat.

“Some of these groups do want to target Americans overseas and at home, particularly the Islamic State and Al Qaeda,” said Seth Jones, the director of the center’s transnational threats project and one of the report’s six authors. “All this indicates that terrorism is alive and well, and that Americans should be concerned.”

Yeah, the conversation needs to be changed away from the California Fires because that ‘window of opportunity’ is nearly closed and all luxury mansions will need to be rebuilt.

The West has largely failed to address the root causes of terrorism that perpetuate seemingly endless waves of fighters who are increasingly turning to armed drones, artificial intelligence, and encrypted communicationsto foil the allies’ conventional military superiority, the report said.

So the terrorists is us, huh? 

Good God!

“Perhaps the most important component of Western policy should be helping regimes that are facing terrorism improve governance and deal more effectively with economic, sectarian, and other grievances,” the study concluded.

They can start at home with their own people!

For example, the report said, the slow pace of reconstruction in Iraqi cities like Ramadi, Fallujah, and Mosul — once controlled by the Islamic State — has angered residents in those Sunni-majority areas and made them more susceptible to militant entreaties.

It's the U.S. that has flattened those places, and the stink of corpses in Mosul is revolting.

The report also warns that withdrawing US forces from Africa and the Middle East — as the Pentagon has started to do — could serve as a boon to these terrorist groups as the Trump administration shifts its national security priorities to confront threats from Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran.

Don't tell me you didn't see that coming from the war shop?!

The report further intensifies the growing scrutiny of the fight against the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, as well as other Sunni groups that are not affiliated with either but sometimes form battlefield alliances or draw inspiration from their ideology and operations.

Earlier this week, the Soufan Center, a research organization in New York, called the results of the US-led counterterrorism campaigns “mixed, at best.”

“The good news is that there has not been an attack anywhere near the scale of 9/11 in the US since that day, a significant achievement,” the center said. “The bad news is that the ideology that leads someone to fly a plane into a building or drive a car into a crowded sidewalk seems to have metastasized.”

They have been reduced to driving trucks into crowds. How pathetic.

The fact that there hasn't been another attack on that scale is all you really need to know about that terrible September morning and the inside job quality of the event; however, this article appears to be serving as a warning for the near future during this Christian time of year (and who benefits most when Christian and muslim are at each others throats for no reason at all other than trickery?).

General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged at a security conference on Saturday that the fight against the Islamic State and other Salafi jihadi groups was far from over. Dunford said the United States must maintain sufficient forces and political will“to make sure that we’re putting pressure on and disrupting these terrorist networks.”

Yup, the endless wars won't be allowed to continue unless the increasingly weary and woke American  people can once again be traumatized into maintaining its political will. Scary.

An examination by The New York Times in September found that Islamic State attacks in the West have fallen sharply in 2018 compared with the previous four years, the first time the number has fallen since 2014, but the number of attempted attacks remained steady......

--more--"

Maybe it is just time to declare victory, come home, and leave it to Interpol:

"Interpol Rejects Russian as President, Electing South Korean Instead" by Matt Apuzzo   November 21, 2018

Interpol elected a South Korean police veteran as its next president Wednesday in the face of pressure from Western diplomats who said choosing a Russian candidate who had been considered the front-runner could jeopardize the independence of the world’s largest international policing organization.

That is about as close to a rejection and admission that the "West" doesn't want to talk or work with them.

The South Korean, Kim Jong-yang, was elected by secret ballot at Interpol’s annual conference in Dubai, where its top official downplayed the controversy surrounding the vote and offered assurances that the agency would remain independent.

“No matter what the nationality of the president is, it is not affecting Interpol’s neutrality and the independence of our organization,” Secretary-General Jürgen Stock told reporters after the vote.

What he means by that is it will continue to be a tool of the West.

If his statement is truthful, why did the Russian need to be blocked? 

Why must all Western leaders be such damn liars?

US and European officials lobbied behind the scenes early this week to prevent a senior Russian security official, Alexander V. Prokopchuk, from winning the organization’s presidency. The Russian government has tried for years to use Interpol and its international warrants, known as red notices, to track down and arrest political enemies and dissidents living abroad.

Human rights groups said that electing Prokopchuk would be seen as rewarding the Kremlin for those efforts. They warned that it would undermine confidence in Interpol and make it susceptible to political interference.

What do you think just happened?

That turned Wednesday’s vote into an unusually closely watched diplomatic event. The Kremlin accused its adversaries of meddling in the elections of an independent international body, while opponents countered that Russia was trying to hijack Interpol.

Look at the charged language in that NYT paragraph. 

So it's okay if the West meddles in the election of an international organization, even if the Russians never meddled in the 2016 elections, because it would prevent a Russian hijacking of Interpol, wooooo (see the article above for the obvious linkage, and the next time they will have help from the Russkies rather than Putin warning us like before 911).

Related: 

"Over the past year, President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi has welcomed a line of foreign leaders to Cairo, where he signed deals for billions of dollars in advanced military equipment: German submarines, Russian combat helicopters, a French aircraft carrier and a military satellite. US military officials have tried quietly to persuade him to allocate his resources, including $1.3 billion in annual US aid, to tools and techniques better suited to fighting the insurgency in Sinai, like equipment and training for intelligence gathering, but Sissi, they say, is not listening, and his generals prefer to buy tanks, jets, and other heavy weapons for their bases around the Nile. Concrete information about the conflict is hard to come by....." 

Once again, the NYT paints a picture for you in such poetic terms!

The election came at a difficult time for Interpol, which has faced controversy over its handling of the disappearance in September of its president at the time, Meng Hongwei of China. The Chinese government later produced a resignation letter in his name and acknowledged that it had secretly arrested him on unspecified corruption charges.

He never showed up, huh?

They never even apologized for the insult.

Interpol’s tepid response to that highly unusual action sparked criticism that it was too quick to yield to influence from an authoritarian government. Stock did not directly address those criticisms,

“Interpol has to work in a space neutral to geopolitics, but not of course neutral to human rights,” he said.

Kim has served as Iterpol’s interim president since Meng’s disappearance. Prokopchuk has served as a vice president and is well regarded by his colleagues, but Prokopchuk has also worked for more than a decade in a Russian department that has flooded Interpol with requests for international warrants, known as red notices, seeking the arrest of political dissidents and others. Interpol has rejected requests that it viewed as baldly political, but the Russian government has at times found workarounds by seeking a different type of warrant, known as a diffusion. Diffusions are circulated through Interpol but do not get reviewed there.

Investor Bill Browder, one of the highest-profile Kremlin critics, is the most public target of this effort. The Russian government has repeatedly sought his arrest. Early this year, he tweeted his detention in Spain on a warrant issued out of Moscow.

On Tuesday, Browder held a news conference in London and warned that President Vladimir Putin of Russia was trying to use Interpol to intimidate his opponents.

“This is a perfect way for Putin to basically breathe the fear of God into all of his enemies,” Browder said. “So they know they can’t even escape Russia if one of his guys is at the head of Interpol.”

What they don't tell you is Browder is wanted for financial fraud and is a western agent of agitation.

The presidency is in many ways a ceremonial position at Interpol, where executive power is held by the secretary-general.....

Then what is all the hoopla about?

--more--"

Maybe someone should call the cops on this:

"Child bride auction in South Sudan goes viral, sparks anger" by Sam Mednick Associated Press  November 21, 2018

JUBA, South Sudan — Five hundred cows, two luxury cars, $10,000, two bikes, a boat, and a few cellphones made up the final price in a heated bidding war for a child bride in South Sudan that went viral after the auction was pointed out on Facebook. It is the largest dowry ever paid in the civil war-torn country, the government said.

The highest bidder was a man three times the 17-year-old’s age. At least four other men in Eastern Lakes state competed, said Philips Anyang Ngong, a human rights lawyer who tried to stop the bidding last month. Among the bidders was the state’s deputy governor.

‘‘She has been reduced to a mere commodity,’’ Ngong told The Associated Press, calling it ‘‘the biggest test of child abuse, trafficking, and auctioning of a human being.’’ Everyone involved should be held accountable, he said.

Earlier this month, Nyalong became the man’s ninth wife. Photos posted on Facebook show her sitting beside the groom, wearing a lavish dress and staring despondently at the floor. The AP is using only her first name to protect her identity. The groom did not respond to requests for comment.

South Sudan has a deeply rooted cultural practice of paying dowries for brides, usually in the form of cows. It also has a long history of child marriage. Even though that practice is now illegal, 40 percent of girls still marry before age 18, according to the United Nations Population Fund. The practice ‘‘threatens girls’ lives’’ and limits prospects for their future, said Dr. Mary Otieno, the agency’s country representative.

The importance of cows in the area is what I remember most from my anthropology class so long ago.

The bidding war hascaused local and international outrage. It took several days for Facebook to remove the post that first pointed out the auction, and after it was taken down other posts ‘‘glorifying’’ the situation remained, George Otim, country director for Plan International South Sudan, told the AP.

‘‘This barbaric use of technology is reminiscent of latter-day slave markets. That a girl could be sold for marriage on the world’s biggest social networking site in this day and age is beyond belief,’’ he said. The auction was discussed, not carried out, on the site.

Must have missed it while cleaning out the haters and fake accounts.

Facebook did not reply to a request for comment.

While South Sudan’s government condemns the practice of child marriage, it says it can’t regulate communities’ cultural norms, especially in remote areas.

That's a very interesting argument that deserves a lot of careful consideration; however, I always feel the pre$$ pushes these sorts of things in order to advance a certain lifestyle by a set of chosen people. That's the goal at bottom.

‘‘You can’t call it bidding as if it was an auction. It’s not bidding. If you see it with European eyes you’ll call it an auction,’’ government spokesman Ateny Wek Ateny told the AP. ‘‘You have to see it with an African eye, as it’s a tradition that goes back thousands of years. There’s no word for it in English.’’

Maybe there shouldn't be a word for it. 

This kind of thing does need to be abolished, but in a sensitive, careful, and considered way, and certainly not by force of arms.

Some local lawmakers and activists disagree. In a statement released this week, the National Alliance for Women Lawyers in South Sudan called upon officials to comply with the government’s plan to end child marriage by 2030. Ending the practice includes putting a stop to the auctioning of girls.

South Sudan’s anti-human trafficking chief called the case reminiscent of others he has seen across the country, in which girls are forced or tricked into marriage after being told they are going to live with relatives and go to school instead. ‘‘It is clear that some human trafficking practices are hidden in our culture,’’ John Mading said.

They are hidden in all cultures, from Catholic pedophiles to elite pedophilia in the educational institutions, media, government, and nearly every industry you name.

In other cases, some girls who grow up in the South Sudanese diaspora are brought back to the country and forced to marry. The AP spoke with several people who know girls who arrived for what they thought was a vacation, only to have their passports taken away and forced into marriage by their families.

‘‘Some families want children to marry in their countries and in their ethnic communities, but most do it if the kids are misbehaving,’’ said Esther Ikere Eluzai, undersecretary for South Sudan’s ministry of gender.

--more--"

Just wondering why female genital mutilation case in the United States isn't causing as much of a ruckus.

"An American adventurer who kayaked to a remote Indian island populated by a tribe known for shooting at outsiders with bows and arrows was killed, police said Wednesday. Officials said they were working with anthropologists to recover the body. Dependera Pathak, director-general of police on India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands, identified the American as John Allen Chau, 26. He was apparently killed by arrows. Chau arrived in the area on Oct. 16 and stayed in a hotel while he prepared to travel to the island. It was not his first time in the region......"

Pronounced CIAo.

And it was just last year that Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general whose forces carried out the worst massacre in Europe since World War II, was convicted of genocide and other crimes by the United Nations’ Yugoslav war crimes tribunal and sentenced to life behind bars:

Defense lawyer says Mladic may not be fit to hear verdicts

The groundbreaking work leading to the Ratko Mladić verdict

"Serb general sentenced to life for genocide; Mladic’s decision revealed amid xenophobic push" by Marlise Simons New York Times  November 22, 2017

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — Nationalist passions, the clamor for redrawn frontiers, and collisions of faith are rising anew, not to the crump of mortar fire and the stutter of machine guns, but in the recharting of the political landscape.

In October, Austria became the latest European nation to veer to the right, following Hungary and Poland. In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany secured enough votes in national elections in September to enter Parliament for the first time. In many lands there is a sense of flux, from the secessionist yearnings of Catalonia in Spain to Britain’s planned departure from the European Union.

I hate to say it, but that is the only way to save the United States and drain the swamp: be destroying it. Each region must secede and decide on its own path forward.

In Serbia, calls are intensifying for a return to the nationalist politics of the 1990s. Once-discredited senior officials from the barbarous government of Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade — and not a few convicted war criminals — are reclaiming positions of prominence.

Thankfully, Hillary did not win here.

There is a sense, too, of unfinished business and resentments that the war did not heal. Indeed, the trials of Mladic and others, including his political boss Radovan Karadzic, who was jailed for 40 years on almost identical charges last year, may simply have intensified Serbia’s rancorous perceptions of being treated unfairly and Muslims’ sense of loss.

On both sides of the enduring ethnic divide, there was a feeling that the pronouncements of robed judges at The Hague will have no perceptible impact on the practicalities of eking out an existence in straitened times.

Bosnians in Sarajevo who once ran from snipers’ bullets and sheltered from incessant indiscriminate shelling have traded those perils for a dysfunctional government, joblessness, and a collapsed social security and health system.

Must be the AmeriKan model.

In Belgrade, the crumbling socialist-era grandeur harks back to better times, when the city was the capital of a moderately developed Yugoslavia with a population of 22 million, rather than the impoverished republic it is today.

Coupled with that struggle is a lingering memory not just of the war in Bosnia and Croatia of the early 1990s but also of the fighting later in the decade in what was then the southern Serbian province of Kosovo.

That is what enabled 

Against that dim backdrop, Serbia is hoping to become the next member state of the European Union....

I wonder if they still feel that a year later.

--more--"

Through it all, “Mladic remains a legend.”

Related: "In 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

There is more than one way to skin a cat:

"War Criminal Dies After Apparently Drinking Poison in Court" by Marlise Simons New York Times   November 30, 2017

The session was meant to mark the final act of a decades-long legal process over the atrocities of the Bosnian and Croatian wars. Instead, it descended into chaos, confusion and, ultimately, death.

As judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia were in the midst of delivering rulings Wednesday over appeals related to Croatia’s involvement in the Bosnian conflict, one of the six defendants before the court suddenly drank what appeared to be a vial of poison and died shortly afterward, Croatian state television and a tribunal official said.

It's like Nuremberg, and it was before Salisbury!

When judges upheld a 20-year sentence against Slobodan Praljak, the former general addressed the bench. In a solemn voice, he said: “Slobodan Praljak is not a war criminal. I reject your judgment with contempt.”

Praljak then raised a vial and drank from it. His lawyer called out, “Our client says he took poison.” Praljak was taken from the courtroom shortly afterward, and the hearing was suspended.

He was later pronounced dead and his body removed from the court building, a tribunal official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Croatian state television said Praljak had died in a hospital in The Hague, citing unidentified sources close to him.

Didn't Milosevec also die in their custody when he threatened to reveal the links between the Clinton administration and Al-CIA-Duh in the Bosnia?

The presiding judge suspended the session after Praljak, 72, drank the liquid, and ordered curtains that divide the court from the public gallery to be drawn. Guards seized the vial used by the defendant. If tests prove the liquid was poisonous, officials will have to explain how he managed to smuggle it into the courtroom — proceedings at The Hague are typically tightly controlled.

The hearing drew attention to Croatia’s often overlooked role in the Bosnian war. The tribunal has for the past 24 years largely focused on the dominant Serbian role in the conflict, but Croatia, trials at the tribunal have shown, also orchestrated a brutal campaign of ethnic violence.....

That's because Croatia was on the right side of that one, unlike in WWII.

--more--"

Related:

"A former Croatian general who died after swallowing a liquid at a war crimes hearing had cyanide in his blood, Dutch prosecutors said. A toxicological test revealed potassium cyanide in Slobodan Praljak, 72, which induced heart failure after he lost his appeal Wednesday (AP)."

He pulled a Goering, and the stuff came from Vermont.

"Bosnians vote in divisive election testing EU bid" Associated Press  October 07, 2018

BANJA LUKA, Bosnia-Herzegovina — Bosnians voted Sunday in a general election that could install a pro-Russian nationalist to a top post and cement the ethnic divisions of a country that faced a brutal war some 25 years ago.

Meddling, meddling!

After polls closed, the two main contenders for the Serb seat in Bosnia’s three-person presidency both said they were leading the election for the post, which appeared to be very tight. Preliminary official results are expected later.

The ballot was seen as a test of whether Bosnia will move toward integration in the European Union and NATO or remain entrenched in rivalries stemming from the 1992-95 war.

More than half of Bosnia’s 3.3 million eligible voters cast ballots, election officials said. Voters chose an array of institutions in Bosnia’s complex governing system, which was created by a 1995 peace accord that ended the war that killed 100,000 people and left millions homeless.

That's when my printed paper stopped reading returns.

Election officials described the voting that took place as ‘‘extremely fair’’ despite several incidents.

The country consists of two regional mini-states— one Serb-run and a Muslim-Croat entity — with joint institutions in a central government. Voters were electing the Bosnian presidency, the Serb president, and the two entities’ parliaments and cantonal authorities.

The campaign was marred by divisive rhetoric and allegations of irregularities that fueled tensions.

All elections are the same!

In a show of widespread popular discontent with Bosnia’s politicians, thousands rallied at anticorruption protests Friday in Sarajevo and in the main Serb city of Banja Luka.

Bosnia’s Serbs and Croats want to move closer to their ethnic kin in neighboring Serbia and Croatia, while the Muslims want to keep Bosnia together. The issue was at the core of the 1990s’ war.

Tribalism has taken over the planet, from the top down!

The election’s main focus was the Bosnian presidency, because of the candidacy of hard-line Serb leader Milorad Dodik, who advocates eventual Serb separation from Bosnia.

Dodik also is a key Balkan ally of President Vladimir Putin of Russia, and his victory would mean stronger influence of Russia.

The West has hopedprospects of EU and NATO membership would encourage nations in the Balkans to solve their disputes stemming from the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia. Russia opposes any more Balkan countries joining NATO.

It's like the Ukraine all over again.

Dodik shifted to the race for the Bosnian presidency because of term limits for his current job leading the Bosnian Serb regional mini-state. His ruling coalition hopes to maintain a firm grip on power in the Serb region.

He urged the voters Sunday to elect a ‘‘compact and unified’’ government that will preserve the unity of Republika Srpska, the Serb entity, and work to further benefit it.

‘‘Of course I expect a victory, a big victory that will enable for important work to be done for Republika Srpska,’’ he said.

The current Serb member of the federal presidency and a relative moderate, Mladen Ivanic, is also running, backed by an opposition Serb coalition that hopes to undermine Dodik’s rule.

Ivanic was alsooptimistic Sunday.

‘‘I wouldn’t run if I didn’t believe I could win,’’ he said.

The main ethnic Croatian presidential candidate, Dragan Covic, is also dashing hopes that Bosnia will be strengthened as a multi-ethnic union. Covic seeks the formation of a third government body, a Croat mini-state that would spell further fragmentation for the fragile nation.

He urged voters to ‘‘deliver a clear, new message’’ they want to turn Bosnia into a country of ‘‘absolute constitutional equality’’ for all ethnic groups.

Liberal candidates who back a civil society free of ethnic divisions largely have been pushed to the margins.

‘‘I expect a lot, but I have little hope that something will change,’’ said Dragica Ruzic, a 72-year-old retiree from the Bosnian Serb region.

At the other side of Bosnia’s ethnic divide in the capital of Sarajevo, worker Kemal Cengic, 57, said he wished ‘‘someone younger wins.’’

‘‘Anyone really, just not those who have been in power so far,’’ he said. ‘‘I don’t care who wins, as long as it’s someone new. There is great potential here among the young people.’’

Who is their Trump?

--more--"

Also see:

New York congressman who signed letter against Pelosi now says he’ll support her

It's part of the speakership battle, and ‘‘there’s no alternative right now and there’s not going to be one.’’ 

Obama’s book sells 1.4 million copies in a week

It's a massive hit.


Ready to get hungry?

"4 lessons from the Mass. marijuana law roll-out" November 20, 2018

Well, at least it’s a start.

More than two years after Massachusetts voted to legalize marijuana for recreational use, the first two stores are finally set to open on Tuesday, one in Northampton and the other in Leicester, where “budtenders” will help customers pick just the right pot-infused lozenge in sleek and stylish buildings resembling out-of-place Apple stores. Police details have been added for the expected throngs.

It’s a milestone (and it’s inspiring many eager shoppers to learn where Leicester is — Exit 10 off the Pike, by the way), but the long wait has been symbolic of some of the frustrating ways the legalization law has so far failed to live up to its potential to spur economic development and address inequities.

State and local officials can do better as the industry rollout continues. Too often, officials seem to run for the hills when the subject of marijuana comes up, or view stores as nothing more than opportunities to extract tax revenue. “In my view, we’re running into a lot of challenges because, generally, local and state officials are not caught up to where the people are,” said Shaleen Title, one of the five members of the Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission.

As stores open, customers may confront an odd scenario where they can buy marijuana legally but are unable to consume it legally (landlords can bar marijuana). Because of confusion over legal technicalities, it may require legislative action or new rules from Secretary of State William F. Galvin to move forward with social consumption venues. 

All that rewriting after the pay raise they gave themselves, months and months, commission regulations, and somehow they missed it! 

What are they smoking under that dome anyway?

If mayors, selectmen, and town officials start treating marijuana as something they have an opportunity — and a responsibility — to get right, here are four ways they could help steer the state’s marijuana industry in the right direction.....

--more--"

Also see:

Recreational pot shops prepare for thousands on opening day

The two-year wait is over!

Recreational marijuana sales begin in Massachusetts, first on the East Coast

Meet the first pot customers in Massachusetts

One was Joe Kennedy.

Consumers spent $440,000 on marijuana products Tuesday in Massachusetts 

The location of the article on page B4 means it must have been a mere pittance!

Related:

"Boston police SWAT officers and members of a drug control unit arrested a 20-year-old Dorchester man Wednesday after seizing drugs and a loaded gun in a predawn raid, authorities said....."

"A Boston man, who was arrested with a gun and more than 20 bags of marijuana Monday morning after he lead police on a foot chase through Downtown Crossing, was arraigned in Boston Municipal Court Tuesday, authorities said. Junior Louis, 20, was charged with unlawful possession of a firearm, unlawful possession of ammunition, unlawful possession of a firearm with a defaced serial number, assault and battery, and possession of a Class D drug with intent to distribute, said Jake Wark, a spokesman for the Suffolk district attorney’s office. His bail was set at $7,500 cash. If he posts bail he must wear a GPS monitor, abide by a curfew of 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., and stay away from the location of his offense, Wark said. Officers responded to the area of Temple Place and Tremont Street around 10:40 a.m. after receiving a call about a man who had been threatening someone with a gun, Boston police said in a statement. As the officers were making their way toward a man who matched the suspect’s description, the man began to run, and the officers took off after him, police said. “While bravely running behind the suspect, officers noted that the individual was displaying behavior indicative of a person in possession of a firearm,” police said in the statement. The man was running with his left arm pressed against the front of his body, which police said is indicative of someone trying to hide a gun. The man led police to Music Hall Place, about a block from Temple Place, and tossed his pistol over a fence before running into a bathroom in the Corner Mall food court, police said. Police found the man, identified as Louis, hiding in a bathroom stall and arrested him. He was carrying more than 20 small plastic bags of marijuana. The gun was later recovered from Music Hall Place, police said....."

He was arrested after gunshots made him shit his pants!

"A 19-year-old man from Holbrook was arrested and charged with manslaughter while operating under the influence of liquor Monday morning, about a week after he allegedly crashed his car into a house, killing one of his passengers, police said. On Nov. 11, Hector DeJesus was allegedly driving more than 100 miles per hour on Route 139 when he sideswiped a telephone pole, sending his car airborne and into the roof of a house on Kingsley Street around 4:30 a.m., police said. DeJesus was charged Monday with manslaughter while operating under the influence of liquor, driving under the influence of drugs (marijuana) causing serious bodily injury, negligent operation of a motor vehicle, malicious destruction of property over $1,200, and speeding, Holbrook police said in a statement. First responders had to use a hydraulic tool to extricate Nicole Ricci, 20, of Stoughton. She was taken to a nearby hospital, where she later died. DeJesus was ejected from the car, and he and a 21-year-old male passenger were taken to a hospital to be treated for serious injuries, police said. The house, which was unoccupied at the time of the crash, was seriously damaged, police said. DeJesus was expected to be arraigned Monday in Quincy District Court, police said."

"A Roxbury man who was driving with a loaded gun and several open alcohol containers was arrested Sunday afternoon after he drove through a stop sign, police said. Officers were in the area of Ruthven Street and Elm Hill Avenue in Roxbury around 1:11 p.m. when they saw a car speeding past another car that was stopped at a stop sign, Boston police said in a statement. Police stopped the driver, later identified as Reginald Clagon, 38, and ordered him to get out of the car after learning that he did not have a valid driver’s license, police said. Inside Clagon’s car officers found three open containers of alcohol, police said. As they were arresting Clagon, officers found a loaded .380 caliber handgun and an additional loaded magazine that he had been hiding on his person, police said. Clagon was charged with unlawful possession of a firearm (second and subsequent offense), unlawful possession of ammunition, carrying a loaded firearm, possession of a large-capacity feeding device, and operating a motor vehicle after license revocation or suspension. He was expected to appear in Roxbury District Court, police said. He was also cited for failure to stop for a stop sign, unsafe passing, and violation of the open container law, police said."

He's lucky he didn't kill anyone and deserves at least four years in jail.

Also see:

Victim of Sunday shooting identified as 28-year-old Roxbury resident

Police identify woman fatally shot in Jamaica Plain earlier this week

It was Boston’s 49th homicide this year.

Good thing the city has changed since the days of ‘Whitey’ Bulger. 

If nothing else, the parking in Southie these days is a lot easier.


Speaking of criminals and liars:

"More questionable spending found at Dorchester charter school" by James Vaznis Globe Staff  November 19, 2018

Questionable spending at the embattled Helen Y. Davis Leadership Academy runs much deeper than excessive pay to a former executive director, according to a state audit released Monday that found the Dorchester charter school made more than $126,000 in improper credit card transactions and that its former executive director dipped into school funds to pay her mortgage.

The audit indicated that some of the most vulnerable students at the small middle school may have paid a big price for the financial missteps. Instead of hiring two special education professionals in 2017 to work with these students, the school used the money to help cover a $117,000 sick-time payout to retiring executive director, Karmala Sherwood.

“This audit makes clear that the Board of Trustees for the Helen Y. Davis Leadership Academy fell considerably short of their fiduciary and oversight responsibilities,” state Auditor Suzanne Bump said in a statement.

Davis Leadership officials could not be reached for comment.

The state audit is one of three investigations into Sherwood’s payout that have gone on for more than year, casting a shadow on a school that aims to foster “good character” in marginalized youth.....

I $uppo$e they learned a life le$$on on how to get ahead, though.

--more--"

Related:

"About 100 teenagers from Boston Public Schools walked out of class Monday afternoon and rallied at City Hall to protest school budget cuts and closures as well as gun homicides. According to the organizers, the walk-out was to protest the proposed closure of West Roxbury Academy as well as the McCormick Middle School in Dorchester, which they said will disproportionately affect black and brown students. Nearly all of the students who rallied were students of color, but the walk-out was also to protest a litany of problems that organizers said affect students, including homelessness and gentrification. The rally was organized by groups including March Forward Mass, Black Lives Matter Boston, Teen Empowerment and Stuck on Replay. After a brief rally, with chants of “black lives matter,” they went into City Hall where they staged a “die in” in front of the offices of Mayor Martin J. Walsh. Students lay on the floor for 43 minutes, one minute to represent each of the gun homicides in Boston over the past year, according to organizers....."

The print article told me that a Ms. Aleva Fernandez told the mayor to "step his game up," and are the kids showing the kind of good character they are being taught in school?

Btw, are the buses still driving late? 

School Department stopped sharing information and the Globe stopped riding.

Just going to have to hoof it, I gue$$:

"The highly touted new dormitory was supposed to mark a turning point in the school’s transformation from a commuter college into something more grand, but then the problems came: As acting head of the state university system’s Dorchester campus, Katherine Newman has stepped into a role steeped in drama. It’s an unexpected step in a distinguished academic career. Newman, a sociologist, has written 15 books focused on poverty and inequality. She’s taught at Harvard, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins. Newman was vice president for academic affairs for the UMass system before assuming her current role. While Newman has spent much of her career in elite institutions, she has much in common with the working-class young people who make up the bulk of the UMass Boston student body. She worked her way through college at the University of California San Diego, graduating with her bachelor’s degree in 1975, and is “robustly supportive of public higher education.”

Thankfully, there are members of the elite ruling cla$$ looking out for you!

Now try to get some sleep.

Dartmouth case galvanizes female scientists

What a nightmare!

And just by coincidence, after nearly 50 years, investigators may finally have cracked one of the Boston area’s most notorious unsolved murders:

Prosecutors blame serial rapist for 1969 murder of Harvard student Jane Britton

They just had a feeling it was him. 

Knife-wielding Ludlow man assaults woman speaking to police

Conn. man accused of abducting young son in 1987 faces arraignment

Betsy DeVos reinstates controversial gatekeeper of for-profit colleges

It's an agency Obama tried to shut down.


Better take the dog for a walk before eating:

"Teens accused of animal cruelty can’t be tried as adults, SJC rules" by John R. Ellement and Travis Andersen Globe Staff  November 20, 2017

Teenagers cannot be prosecuted as adults when they physically assault animals because the legal term “bodily injury” only applies to human beings, the state’s highest court ruled Monday.

The Supreme Judicial Court ordered the dismissal of animal cruelty and bestiality charges filed against a 14-year-old boy who “tortured a friend’s dog” forcing a soap dispenser into the animal’s body, causing “serious internal injuries to the dog.”

The puppy was left for dead.

“Preventing animal cruelty is a tenet of our collective humanity and a crucial public policy goal in Massachusetts,’’ Justice Elspeth B. Cypher wrote. “A juvenile who intentionally harms an animal displays a concerning propensity for viciousness. If the Commonwealth can respond to juvenile animal abuse effectively, it may help spare future victims, animal and human alike,’’ she wrote.

Cypher said the youthful offender statute, if broadened, “can provide the Commonwealth more flexibility when dealing with such disquieting cases of animal cruelty. Prosecutors then may be able to enlist the comprehensive assistance of the criminal justice system in addressing allegations of animal cruelty that may be harbingers of violence to come.”

--more--"

The SJC believes he is a mentally troubled child, and just think, one day he could be president:

"We were terrible to animals," recalled Mr. Throckmorton, laughing. "We'd put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up." When he was not blowing up frogs, young George-- always restless and something of a natural leader-- would lead neighborhood children on daredevil expeditions around town."

The genesis of the Iraq invasion!

Related:

Poodles in Wayland attacked by coyotes
A wandering coyote carrying a cat in its mouth was spotted in Newton
Here’s what to do if you encounter a coyote
North Attleborough police shoot, kill coyote that attacked residents

Then drown it:

Traces of hormone allow scientists to detect stress in whales
New study used ocean-floor listening devices to track endangered right whales
Dolphin whistles may help predict mass strandings and help prevent them

It's either that or the plastic, so I guess it'll be paper.

Kitten brought back from the brink of death
A doctor bonds with his furry little patient

It's almost deer season.


"Martha’s Vineyard detective fired for conducting illegal background checks" by Matt Rocheleau Globe Staff  November 21, 2018

A veteran detective was fired from a Martha’s Vineyard police force this month for allegedly conducting illegal background checks— a problem that surfaced after a separate investigation found packages filled with large amounts of cocaine had been delivered to a tenant living inside his home, police officials said.

Investigators said they did not believe Oak Bluffs Police Detective James T. Morse was involved in the alleged drug trafficking, but an internal probe into the drug case led officials to uncover Morse had used police computers while on duty over the last year to look up the criminal histories for a “large” number of people not associated with any recent cases, according to an internal report.

Accessing such sensitive information without proper justification violates state law.

His firing and the circumstances around it were first reported by The Martha’s Vineyard Times and the Vineyard Gazette.

The probe into Morse began Oct. 9 when, according to the internal report, Williamson said he was told that troopers involved in a yearlong drug investigation had found multiple packages containing a total of about three kilograms of cocaine had been delivered during the summer to a tenant who was living in Morse’s home, a condominium in Falmouth.

Property records show Morse owns a two-bedroom, one-bathroom condo in that town assessed for tax purposes at about $340,000.

Williamson wrote he was told there was “no indication or information that Morse had any involved in the [drug] activity other that [sic] he believed that Morse rented a room to the target.”

Still department officials placed Morse on administrative leave while they launched an internal investigation, the report said.

When department officials asked Morse a series of questions about the packages and his tenant, who had moved out in mid-September, Morse declined to answer one about background checks, the report said. Morse cited his constitutional right to refuse to answer.

That prompted the department to audit background checks Morse had run over the past year, which uncovered he had improperly searched the state’s Criminal Justice Information System for numerous individuals’ Criminal Offender Record Information, or CORI.

Morse declined to answer questions from the department about those searches.

A person’s CORI record potentially includes a person’s complete criminal history — or “rap sheet” — including arrests, criminal charges, judicial proceedings, sentencing, incarceration, rehabilitation, and release in Massachusetts.

Access to much of the data is restricted to law enforcement agencies, licensing agencies, employers, and others with a reason to view the information. There are strict rules about under what circumstances and how the information can be accessed, stored, and shared.

Oak Bluffs Chief Erik Blake said by phone Tuesday he still does not know why Morse ran the background checks in question. As for the drug investigation, Blake said Morse’s former tenant was arrested, but declined to provide the person’s name or other details, saying the investigation is ongoing and his department is not involved.

State Police troopers assigned to the Cape and Islands district attorney’s office have assisted with the drug probe, which is an ongoing multi-agency effort, officials from both agencies said, declining to comment further.

Blake expressed disappointment over the matter but said he hopes the case will serve as a lesson for his department of about 20 sworn officers.....

--more--"

Related: Embattled former union boss retires from Mass. State Police

Also see: Monday's SPAM

The Globe has been gunning for him for a long time.

"Suspended Rockland town administrator files complaint over sexual harassment claims" by Laura Crimaldi Globe Staff  November 21, 2018

A Town Hall soap opera in Rockland involving allegations of sexual harassment, affairs between married members of the Board of Selectmen, and late-night surveillance video from town offices took a new turn Tuesday as the suspended town administrator filed a discrimination complaint.

Allan Chiocca, who was placed on paid leave on May 29, alleges Deirdre Hall, a former member of the Board of Selectmen, falsely accused him of sexual misconduct tied to an encounter at Rockland Town Hall, the complaint states.

“She was actually the true victimizer, exploiting her position of power to force him to participate in sexual acts against his will,” Chiocca’s lawyers wrote in the 46-page complaint filed with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination.

He is seeking damages for wages, benefits, emotional distress, and other costs.

In a statement issued Tuesday night, the Board of Selectmen announced it would not take action against Chiocca’s contract, which ends next June 30 . The town also disclosed for the first time that former Selectman Edward Kimball, who resigned in July, has also threatened legal action.

“This entire episode has been an embarrassment to the Town of Rockland, and we would all like it to end,’’ selectmen said in the statement. “Unfortunately, the individuals that put the Town in this position do not seem interested in putting this behind them or letting the Town do so.”

The incident began late on May 1 and continued into the early morning hours of the following day. An investigator hired by the town concluded that Hall sexually harassed Chiocca, writing in a July report that she sought sexual relations with the town administrator in exchange for her support for his contract extension and raise, records show.

When Hall became worried that the encounter would become public, she accused Chiocca of inappropriate conduct and asked the Board of Selectmen to investigate, the complaint said.

“Hall repeatedly used her position on the [Board of Selectmen] to threaten to vote against Mr. Chiocca’s then-pending raise and contract extension if he did not accede to her sexual demands, and when she became concerned that Mr. Chiocca was going to disclose her conduct, she brazenly accused him of being the aggressor,” the complaint said.

Hall, who resigned her position in July, declined to comment on Tuesday. Chiocca’s complaint was filed against her, the town, three current selectmen, and Kimball.

Kimball and Hall were engaged in an “intense physical and emotional affair” in March and April, the complaint said. Kimball’s wife confronted Hall about it on May 1, hours before the encounter between Hall and Chiocca at Town Hall.....

I don't want to know anymore.

--more--"

Related:

"Last year, former sports doctor Larry Nassar, accused of molesting at least 125 girls and young women while working for USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University, pleaded guilty to multiple charges of sexual assault."

Also see: Michael Leonard toots his own horn, and rents out others

Related(?): Pedophilia Found at Philharmonic

He should have taken a private sector job.


Time to turn the game on:

R.I. casino to allow sports betting beginning Monday

I'm blocked from betting on it?

Time to put on some music and dig in:

On Thanksgiving, revisiting the other Plymouth

Yeah, somehow New York has stolen a holiday that by all rights should be ours as we gather together to give Thanksgiving its meaning, and there are plenty of reasons to be thankful in the hope of a better life in P-Town.

It's a holiday built on food, and the first thing I notice is the cranberry sauce missing on the Globe's table.

Anyhow, it smells good but is only the plate is only lukewarm. They waited too long to serve it serve it, and it was undercooked.

Thanksgiving dinner to be a bit cheaper this year

You know who deserves the thanks, right? 

(Hint: He works and lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue)
I suppose I should be thankful for the dinner conversation with the people I love:

"The United States seems more polarized than ever after the midterm elections. Vitriol and name-calling seem to crowd out reasoned discourse not just on social media, but in much of public life. In such a climate, Metro Minute wonders: Are there practical ways to bring people together? We sought answers from Carl Hobert, , a graduate of Middlebury College and The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University who has decades of experience in conflict-resolution education....."

Stick to the trivial says the granddaughter of the grandfather of modern propaganda.

Did you see the pie they put out for dessert?

This will give you indigestion before you head out to shop:

"House staff to get 6 percent pay hikes" by Matt Stout Globe Staff  November 20, 2018

Hundreds of employees working for the state’s House of Representatives will receive a 6 percent pay hike, according to House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo’s office, which Tuesday estimated the pay package will cost $1.35 million.

The pay bumps, which a DeLeo aide described as cost-of-living increases, mark the fourth in as many sessions for House staff, which now number more than 500 and includes legislative aides, chiefs of staff, communication directors, and other employees making an average of $39,000 a year, according to state payroll records.

The state Senate has awarded 3 percent raises to its 277 full-time staff members both this year and last, though Senate President Karen E. Spilka’s office couldn’t say Tuesday when the most recent pay increase went into effect.

Catherine Williams, a DeLeo spokeswoman, said the costs of the House raises will be absorbed by the chamber’s existing $40.2 million budget. The pay increases will go effect in the current two-week pay period, according to the DeLeo’s office.

Where do you think that money comes from, taxpayers?

DeLeo has routinely announced the biennial raises for House staff ahead of Thanksgiving. The 2014 and 2016 pay hikes also came in stretches when the state was struggling with flagging revenues and looming cuts. Two years ago, for example, the Baker administration was in the midst of finalizing buy-outs for hundreds of state employees in a cost-cutting measure.

This cycle, the state has faced no such problems: It finished last fiscal year with more than $1 billion in unexpected revenue, and officials said this month it had already built a $350 million cushion above estimates four months into this fiscal year, which began in July.

Thanks to the Trump tax cuts!

State House staff are among the last to receive extra compensation this legislative session.

Legislative leaders last year pushed a controversial bill into law awarding themselves, judges, constitutional officers, and an array of other public offices pay hikes as part of an $18 million package.

They said they had to get it out of the way before assigning committee chairmanships so they could quickly rewrite the pot referendum, and then spent months and months holding their hit before rushing a budget through.

DeLeo and the Senate president each saw their pay rise from $97,500 to $142,500, plus additional money for office and travel expenses.....

You know who he should be thanking, right?

--more--"

Remember all that when they are cutting budgets early next year.

Related:

Dukakis, Weld urge transportation board to get moving on north-south rail link

They are still waiting on the platform, and they didn't even notice the graffiti on the train


You can really go places with Black Friday, Cyber Monday deals

Yeah, right:

"Amazon.com informed some customers on Wednesday that their names and e-mail addresses had been ‘‘inadvertently disclosed’’ as a result of a ‘‘technical error,’’ but declined to provide more details about the security incident. The e-commerce giant confirmed it sent the messages, adding in a subsequent statement it had ‘‘fixed the issue.’’ It’s not the first time Amazon has run into security troubles. In October, the tech giant reportedly fired an employee who inappropriately shared customer e-mails with a third-party seller. The security lapse, which Amazon said it was working with law enforcement to investigate, similarly resulted in messages to customers indicating their e-mail addresses had been exposed. The latest incident, however, could embolden those who would like to see tech giants and other businesses disclose more information about security incidents to their customers....."

Cui bono?

I guess you won't be worried about Ivanka's Emails as much, huh?

Stocks edge higher on Wall Street after 2 days of big losses


Christmas tree arrives at Boston Common from Nova Scotia

Not only is it hypocrisy considering their position on climate change, but they didn't even buy local!

Globe Santa Christmas campaign begins

I don't have any gift ideas, do you?

The beer is flat by now, sorry:

"Trouble is brewing at craft beer darling Trillium" by Nestor Ramos Globe Staff  November 21, 2018

It was charred right from the start:

US economy faces hit from climate change, report warns

They are getting on Trump because "just this week, he mocked the science of climate change because of a cold snap in the Northeast, tweeting, “Whatever happened to Global Warming?”

He's got a good point. The contradiction is literally a cold slap in the face, but beyond that is now the attempt to blame the coming economic downturn and stock market crash on climate change! If not that, China, if not that, anything and everything but those who caused the problem and escaped with their pockets full of loot. 

In fact, those guys will then be touted as the ones saving the economy from the very problems and corruption that they in fact brought about while enriching themselves. Nice trick, especially when you have a mouthpiece media to bullhorn your narrative.

I'll get to economy later, though, after I get out of the water:

Turtle rescuers blame climate change, geography for unprecedented stranding numbers

Somehow the frozen dead turtles seem to conflict with the warming seas bit:

"Rising seas and erosion are threatening lighthouses around the United States and the world. Volunteers and cash-strapped governments are doing what they can, but the level of concern, like the water, is rising....."

I would be more worried about the fires, whatever their cause:

Rain helps douse Calif. fire, slows search for bodies

Oddly enough, the rain also destroys evidence of whatever it was that sparked the fires.

Everything around him burned in Paradise, Calif. He stayed put.

Yeah, "somehow the home he rents on Birch Street emerged unscathed from a firestorm that turned most of Paradise into charred ruins and killed dozens of residents offers a glimpse into the unpredictable behavior of both wildfires and those trapped in them. He pointed at the dry pine needles in his yard and wondered why they didn’t burn."

That's about as close to arson as the pre$$ will admit.





All of the above makes the nominal lead, the next big question for the T, seem rather unimportant.

[flip to below fold]

O’Malley left out of group planning child abuse prevention summit

His silence on the seminary scandal is why.

Mourners consider new ways to scatter a loved one’s remains

I usually burn the Globes in the fireplace.

Michelle Obama, Beyoncé, and the double standard of success

Beyonce is building a better construction process.


"Jerome Corsi, friend of Roger Stone, is in plea talks with Mueller" by Sharon LaFraniere and Maggie Haberman New York Times  November 24, 2018

WASHINGTON — Jerome Corsi, a conspiracy theorist and ally of the former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone, is in plea negotiations with prosecutors working on the special counsel investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

A person familiar with the talks said the prosecutors had presented Corsi with evidence he had not been truthful when investigators asked him whether he knew beforehand that WikiLeaks was going to publish e-mails stolen from Democratic computers during the campaign.

So this is where Mueller is going with the collusion, huh?

The hacks themselves, which they weren't, wouldn't prove collusion in any way, shape, or form.

The truth is, the the files weren't hacked at all, they were leaked by disgruntled DNC insiders like Seth Rich (subsequently murdered) who were angry that Clinton stole the nomination from Sanders. 

What's never remarked upon regarding the controversy is this: the veracity of the documents Wikileaks published has never been challenged, not once.

Instead of investigating that, Mueller is looking to silence Corsi. 

The special counsel, Robert Mueller, and his team are trying to discover whether anyone connected with the Trump campaign knew of or cooperated with the Russian intelligence operatives who hacked the Democratic systems and funneled the e-mails to WikiLeaks to undercut Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Although Corsi apparently had no direct connection to the Trump campaign, he was in touch with Stone, a former campaign adviser who communicated with senior campaign officials through the election. Stone claimed during the campaign he had a back channel to WikiLeaks, but now says he was merely bluffing to unsettle Clinton’s team. Stone also communicated with Guccifer 2.0, the online persona used by one or more Russian intelligence operatives who hacked the Democratic systems.

Looks like guilt by association.

Although Corsi, 72, insisted in an interview two weeks ago with The New York Times that he had told investigators the truth, the special counsel’s office has decided his text messages and e-mails contradict some of his statements about whether he knew details about the purloined materials before they were released, according to people familiar with those discussions.

Gee, Ivanka's emails sure disappeared fast, huh?

David Gray, Corsi’s lawyer, declined to comment on the plea talks, which were first reported by The Washington Post.

Federal investigators have questioned a host of Stone’s associates about his relationship with WikiLeaks. Corsi is among a string of witnesses who have recently testified before a federal grand jury about the matter. In the interview with The Times, he said prosecutors quizzed him for about 40 hours, then warned his lawyer that the next phase of their talks would involve a possible plea agreement.

“I took that to mean they were planning to indict me” on charges of lying to federal authorities, Corsi said. “I still believe I’ve told them the truth, and to the best of my ability and the best of my recollection,” he added, but “my memory of 2016 is not perfect, by any means.”

Asked about the plea talks Friday, Stone said, “My friend Dr. Corsi has been under a tremendous amount of pressure, and it is beginning to affect him profoundly.” Stone insisted, as he has repeatedly, that he had only secondhand information, at best, about WikiLeaks’ plans to disrupt the presidential race.

Among other issues, investigators have been asking about an Aug. 21, 2016, Twitter message in which Stone predicted that John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, would soon face his “time in the barrel.” Stone posted his message six weeks before WikiLeaks began releasing tens of thousandsof Podesta’s e-mails, throwing the Clinton campaign on the defensive a month before the November election.

As if that affected the already set-in-stone impression most voters had of her. 

The Wikileaks only confirmed the corruption we knew was there.

Corsi has publicly backed Stone’s explanation of the message, saying Stone was predicting that Podesta would face controversy about his overseas business dealings, not stolen e-mails. “Having reviewed my records, I am now confident that I am the source behind Stone’s tweet,” he wrote in an early 2017 article on Infowars, a site that promotes conspiracy theories.

In a broadcast on YouTube this month, Corsi insisted he had possessed no inside information or ties to Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. He compared the special counsel’s team to the Gestapo, saying “they asked the same questions over and over again,” until “my mind was mush.”

That's how this government operates, yeah.

Like Stone, he said he had relied mostly on public information to “connect the dots” about the role of WikiLeaks in the November election.....

--more--"

All they are doing is throwing more rocks, and how odd is it that the Globe omitted the cellphone calls from Stone to Credico? 

Pardon the pun, but Credico has no credibility.

Whatever happened to Assange anyway?

"Editorial: Julian Assange: Bad guy, yes. Criminal? Not so fast." November 23, 2018

Love him or hate him, Julian Assange shouldn’t be prosecuted by the United States.

The WikiLeaks founder, a divisive figure who’s either a transparency hero or a Russian pawn who helped elect Donald Trump, depending on whom you ask, has been living inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London for the past six years. Assange has been afraid to leave the embassy, fearing authorities would arrest him and extradite him to the United States to face charges related to releasing a vast amount of US government documents in 2010.

It turns out those fears were well founded. Last week, it emerged that there is a secret indictment of Assange, which was accidentally revealed in an unrelated legal filing.

We don’t know what the charges are, when they were filed, or what evidence the government has to support them. It’s always possible that there’s more to the Assange case than meets the eye — and if there is credible evidence that he hacked e-mail accounts, conspired with others to do so, or committed other crimes, he should be charged. But based on what is known publicly, there are good reasons to be skeptical of his prosecution, and to fear it could set a damaging precedent that would weaken press freedom.

Assange has published information that exposed government wrongdoing, including the abuse of detainees in Iraq. He also published information no responsible publication would touch, including social security numbers and other private material that’s nobody’s business. His cavalier publication of sensitive information may have endangered lives, although there is no evidence that anyone has been killed as a result of WikiLeaks disclosures. The leaks came from sources like former Army private Chelsea Manning, who clearly violated the law by giving classified files to WikiLeaks and was punished for it, but filing criminal charges against the recipient of those leaks is dangerous territory.

The Globe is only worried now because they could find themselves in the crosshairs like the rest of us out here! 

Means a hell of a lot more than whether the self-serving hack Acosta got his press pass back, huh?

Assange’s is, no doubt, a complicated case; and a man totally beholden to one foreign government (Ecuador) and suspected of coordinating with another (Russia), doesn’t fit the traditional definition of an independent journalist. Some US officials argue that WikiLeaks should not be granted the same latitude as a conventional media organization, but the fact that Assange is such an obnoxious, compromised character shouldn’t lead anyone to excuse what the government seems to be doing by targeting him. A free press needs to be free even for people like Assange. Prosecuting him solely because of what he published would have a chilling effect on US journalism.....

Let me know when you find some.

--more--"

Related:

"The head of Russia’s military intelligence agency, who oversaw the hacking of the Democratic Party’s computers during the United States’ 2016 presidential election, died on Wednesday after a long illness, Russian state news agencies reported. Col. Gen. Igor V. Korobov, 63, had not been seen in public for months and was notably absent from a ceremony on Nov. 2 marking the 100th anniversary of the military intelligence agency, known as the G.R.U. Historically a secretive, little-understood agency, the G.R.U. under General Korobov emerged as Russia’s primary tool of global disruption. Mr. Korobov was sanctioned by the Treasury Department for the release of emails stolen from the Democratic Party in support of Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016. Under his watch, the G.R.U. was implicated in the theft and publication of documents belonging to the presidential campaign of Emmanuel Macron in France, the hacking of computers of the global antidoping watchdog and the poisoning of a former G.R.U. officer, Sergei V. Skripal, with a highly potent nerve agent in Britain this year. G.R.U. operatives also play a key role in the wars in Ukraine and Syria....."

Well, that settles that. 

One night even say he was aborted.

Also see:

"The House Judiciary Committee has issued subpoenas for former FBI director James Comey and former attorney general Loretta Lynch to appear for closed-door interviews in a probe of how federal law enforcement officials handled investigations of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails and the Trump campaign’s alleged Russia ties. The orders direct Comey to appear on Dec. 3, while Lynch is to appear on Dec. 4, to speak with members of the House Judiciary and Oversight and Government Reform committees, but Comey has already objected to the format of the interview, and on Thursday, his lawyer promised he would challenge the subpoena in court....." 

I was wondering who other than Blasé-Ford could dictate to Congre$$ the terms of their testimony, and there they are. You can add the name Rosenstein, too. 

You know, if you or I were to do such a thing we would be under arrest and in jail!


"Chinese presence in Pakistan is targeted in strike on consulate in Karachi" by Meher Ahmad and Salman Masood New York Times  November 24, 2018

KARACHI, Pakistan — In the most significant strike against Chinese interests in Pakistan in years, three militants assaulted the Chinese Consulate in the southern port city of Karachi on Friday morning, killing two policemen and two civilians at a checkpoint before being gunned down by the security forces.

Gee, who would want to do that, and why?

On a day of violence that included a bombing that killed at least 30 people in northwestern Pakistan, the near-miss attack on the consulate in Karachi was a rare moment of upheaval for a tightening economic and strategic partnership between Pakistan and China.

That's a clue. Who would want to put a wedge between that?

A Twitter account associated with the Baluchistan Liberation Army, a separatist group in the sprawling and violent province of Baluchistan, said three of its members had “embraced martyrdom” in an attack on the Chinese Consulate, and a spokesman for the group was quoted by Reuters as accusing China of “exploiting our resources.”

BLA = CIA!!

The stench is undeniable!

Pakistan has been a showcase for China’s huge international development program, the Belt and Road Initiative, in recent years. China is estimated to have spent some $62 billion on those projects in Pakistan, mostly to build a transportation corridor through Baluchistan to a new, Chinese-operated deepwater port in the Pakistani town of Gwadar.

And who would want to stop that?

The road corridor being built through Baluchistan, which is also rich in natural resources, is one of the most strategic projects associated with the Belt and Road Initiative. Its stated purpose is to greatly reduce shipping costs and time for Chinese goods, but it would also give China an important alternative if faced with naval blockades by the United States or its Asian allies.

The perpetrators couldn't be more damn obvious!!

Baluchistan has also been the center of two resilient insurgencies, making it one of the most sensitive areas for Pakistan’s powerful military establishment: Ethnic Baluch separatists there have been pursued by a stifling Pakistani security presence, and part of the leadership of the Afghan Taliban also continues to take shelter there, in the city of Quetta.

In a video sent to an Indian news service in March, Aslam Baloch, a senior commander of the Baluchistan Liberation Army, accused China and Pakistan of plundering resources in Baluchistan, which his group wants to turn into an independent state.

Tell it to the Kashmiris.

Prime Minister Imran Khan issued a statement on Twitter insisting that such attacks could not shake the relationship between China and Pakistan. He said the strike had clearly been intended “to scare Chinese investors” and came as a result of trade agreements announced during his trip to China this month.

The Chinese Embassy in Islamabad, the capital, later issued a statement extending condolences over the deaths and expressing faith in Pakistani security.

“We believe that the Pakistani side is able to ensure the safety of Chinese institutions and personnel in Pakistan,” the statement said, adding that any attempt to undermine the countries’ relationship was “doomed to fail.”

After the attack in Karachi, another bombing — this one in the Orakzai region of northwestern Pakistan — showed the continuing threat posed by militants on a separate front.

At least 30 people were killed and 40 or more wounded when a bomb blast ripped through a fruit and vegetable market in the Hangu district there, officials said. The market was near a seminary for Shi’ite Muslims, a minority in Pakistan that is often targeted by extremist Sunni groups, but the dead included a mix of Pakistanis.

And cui bono?

“The dead include Sunnis, Shi’ites, and a couple of Sikh community members,” said a local official, Mutahir Zeb Khan. “We are identifying the dead.”

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombing, which ended a brief lull in violence in the restive northwestern region, where the Pakistani Taliban were once active.

Khan, the prime minister, implicitly linked the two attacks Friday, saying they represented “a planned campaign to create unrest in the country by those who do not want Pakistan to prosper.”

And we know who specializes in directing destabilization campaigns in foreign countries, too. And why.

The State Department condemned the attacks and commended the Pakistani security forces’ response to the Chinese Consulate, in a statement made Friday.

“The United States stands with the Pakistani people in the face of these terrorist acts, and will continue to seek opportunities to cooperate with the Pakistani government to combat these threats in the region,” said Heather Nauert, a spokeswoman for the State Department..... 

Crocodile tears isn't a strong enough analogy.

--more--"

Related:

"The suicide bomber that targeted the Chinese consulate in Karachi used a foreign-made C-4 plastic explosive, said Pakistani police, who suggested Saturday that the attack was orchestrated in India. Counter-terrorism officer Umar Khitab said that authorities are investigating whether Baluch separatist commander Aslam Achhu, who they believe masterminded the attack, is in India....."

I wouldn't doubt it.

More loads of crap:

"Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who arrived in Abu Dhabi late on Thursday, is also scheduled to visit other Mideast countries, where he will be warmly received by Arab leaders who have stood firmly by his side amid international outrage over Khashoggi’s horrific slaying. The crown prince will round off his tour with a stop in Argentina where he’ll come face-to-face with world leaders on Nov. 30 for the two-day Group of 20 summit. Among those expected to attend that summit are President Trump and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. The crown prince’s tour abroad underscores the strong support he continues to have from his 82-year-old father, King Salman....."

A Friday leftover for you:


"May takes her case for Brexit to the people" by Benjamin Mueller New York Times  November 23, 2018

LONDON — Prime Minister Theresa May, estranged from much of her own party and dealing with scorn even from supposed allies in business, is trying to apply pressure to reluctant lawmakers by building public approval for the deal.

Since weathering a bumbling leadership challenge from proponents of a clean split from Europe within her Conservative Party, May has seen her popularity rebound. More people backed her staying on as prime minister than standing down in a YouGov poll this week, a reversal of the results from a week earlier, but the draft deal itself remains deeply unpopular, with only 23 percent of people saying in a YouGov poll this week that they supported it, and only 3 percent saying they did so strongly.

May ducked the thorniest questions put to her by radio callers Friday, in a preview of what looked to be a week of public campaigning for the deal.

The feeling that May’s deal was worse than remaining in the bloc was reported to be spreading among Conservative lawmakers.....

--more--"


"Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg won’t testify before 7 countries’ lawmakers" by Tony Romm Washington Post  November 23, 2018

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is ‘‘unable’’ to testify at a rare joint hearing with lawmakers from seven countries - representing more than 368 million people - who remain frustrated about the social media giant’s handling of misinformation online.

Instead, Facebook will dispatch Richard Allan, the company’s vice president of policy solutions, to answer questions at a Tuesday hearing featuring top policymakers from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Latvia, Singapore and the United Kingdom, representatives from the U.K. said Friday.

Zuckerberg’s decision against testifying at the global gathering could add to Facebook’s woes with governments around the world, which have grown frustrated with the company’s business practices. It’s uncommon for seven countries to band together and seek to question a chief executive, reflecting the heightened threat of regulation and other punishments now facing Facebook and its peers in Silicon Valley.

In Europe, lawmakers recently have taken aim at the way social media companies handle users’ personal data and combat hate speech and terrorism online. The European Union previously grilled Zuckerberg at a short, controversial hearing in May. In Brazil, meanwhile, Facebook has had to battle back misinformation on its site during its most recent election, while WhatsApp emerged as a major flash point for candidates who felt it had been deployed deliberately to spread falsehoods.

I'm sure the Russians were behind it all, even gifting Brazil with their own Trump.

The push for Zuckerberg to testify began earlier this year with the U.K., where Damian Collins, the leader of a top, tech-focused parliamentary committee, has probed Facebook over mishaps, including the company’s entanglement with Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy that had improperly accessed personal data of about 87 million Facebook users.

Of course, it is okay when Democrats do it.

--more--"


"Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s friend offered to testify Tsarnaev knew his brother was involved in Waltham triple slaying" by Matt Rocheleau Globe Staff  November 23, 2018

Newly unsealed court documents in the case against Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev provide new insight— and raise new questions— about a still-unsolved 2011 triple murder in Waltham.

One document revealed that Tsarnaev’s college classmate Dias Kadyrbayev was the previously unnamed prosecution witness offering to testify that Tsarnaev knew that his older brother was involved in the Waltham killings.

Kadyrbayev said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told him in the fall of 2012 that Tamerlan “had committed jihad” in Waltham, according to an August 2014 letter from federal prosecutors describing conversations they had with Kadyrbayev’s attorney just days before Kadyrbayev pleaded to conspiracy and obstruction charges.

He was coerced into saying it because he was part of his circle of friends.

On Sept. 12, 2011, Brendan Mess, 25, once a close friend of Tamerlan’s, Erik H. Weissman, 31, and Raphael M. Teken, 37, were discovered in Mess’s apartment with their throats slit and marijuana scattered on their bodies. Presumed to be a drug-related crime, the case went cold.

It's another leg in the Marathon bombing.

Nearly two years later, Tsarnaev and his younger brother, Dzhokhar, planted two bombs near the Marathon finish line that killed three people and wounded more than 260 others in April 2013. The brothers also killed an MIT police officer.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed in a police shootout in Watertown a few days after the bombing, and his brother has been convicted and sentenced to death in the bombing. The documents were unsealed as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev pursues an appeal of his sentence.

That's the conventional myth narrative surrounding the staged and scripted crisis drills gone live that was piggybacked on by private contractors with a real bomb.

Related: Tsarnaev's Cell

He didn't have a very good defense.

Kadyrbayev, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s friend at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, pleaded guilty to trying to throw away Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s laptop and a backpack containing explosive powder from fireworks after he recognized Tsarnaev in FBI photos released to the public after the bombings.

Kadyrbayev was released from federal prison in August and was due to be deported to Kazakhstan, where he is a citizen.

The Middlesex district attorney’s office, which has been investigating the Waltham killings, has remained tight-lipped about the case. No one has been charged.

A month after the Marathon bombing, Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s friend, Ibragim Todashev, 27, was fatally shot after attacking an FBI agent and State Police officer in Florida. He had allegedly confessed on tape to helping Tamerlan kill the three men in Waltham.

No, what really happened was the FBI was trying to force him to sign a confession for something he didn't do, and when he wouldn't they executed him.

Related:

FBI Fires Away in Florida
Globe Fogging Up FBI Shooting in Florida
Long Jog in the Boston Globe
Another Leg in Marathon Bombing Posts
Government Snow Job?
Last Leg of Marathon Bombing Posts
Marathon Bombing Finish Line
Over the Top(sfield)! 

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s attorneys sought unsuccessfully during the trial to raise the Waltham case to paint a picture of Tamerlan Tsarnaev as the mastermind behind the bombings and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as a pawn acting under his older brother’s influence.

Another unsealed document showed that online searches for information about the Waltham killings were made about one week after they happened on a laptop computer belonging to Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s wife, Katherine Russell.

Yet another unsealed document raised new questions about Khairullozhon Matanov, a Quincy cab driver who was a friend of the Tsarnaev brothers and who took them both out to dinner only hours after the bombings.....

He mentioned it to a lawyer during a cab ride.

--more--"

Isn't life in prison enough?