917: Judas Goat

Hi Adam,

If you can please include this PR mention on tomorrow's show I would really appreciate it!

Please join us for a meetup at NYC's official No Agenda restaurant on Tuesday, April 25th at 6:30pm! Celebrity Chef Rob McCue (who you may remember from JCD's Birthday meetup in NYC last April) would love to welcome any and all No Agenda Producers to his new gastropub, The Fat Monk, to chat, eat, and drink with other Producers/fans of the podcast. Chef Rob is planning a whimsical No Agenda-themed menu including the Dvorak ANT Taco (I don't think it actually has ants in it, but you never know!).

A direct link to the event in the No Agenda group on Meetup.com (for the shownotes) is here -- please RSVP: https://www.meetup.com/NoAgenda/events/238873337/

If anyone doesn't want to sign up for Meetup.com, just shoot me a tweet at @tanyaweiman with the number of people attending to RSVP.

Thanks!!

All the best & TYFYCAP,

Dame Tanya, Viscountess of NYC

My Dear Sir,

Please accept this humble submission until our current administration

fixes their RSS feeds.

http://whfeeds.surge.sh

Let me know if any of the links or feeds are broken. Request a new feed

anytime!!

Many thanks for the best podcast in the universe!

Cheers,

Nick Hampshire

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Sun, 02 Apr 2017 04:16

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release

March 31, 2017

CANCER CONTROL MONTH, 2017

- - - - - - -

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A PROCLAMATION

The creativity and commitment of America's incredible medical research and healthcare communities have made the United States the biomedical innovation capital of the world. In particular, American innovators have made ground-breaking advances in cancer research. These innovations help drive the declining rates of cancer mortality.

Still, much work remains to be done. Cancer is still the second-leading cause of death in the United States and causes too much suffering for too many of our families and communities.

During Cancer Control Month, we honor the memory of loved ones lost to cancer and we celebrate our cancer survivors. We recommit ourselves to developing cures for those currently battling this disease across the country and to educating people on the many ways they can prevent cancer and take care of those who have fallen ill.

Our Nation is committed to winning the fight against cancer. Throughout April, we promote methods to combat cancer and we recognize the thousands of medical professionals, public health advocates, scientific researchers, innovative companies, and family members and friends who treat, find cures for, and support those suffering from all forms of cancer.

My Administration will continue to work with the Congress to implement the 21st Century Cures Act and clear the way for enormous breakthroughs in medical science. Cutting-edge research can transform cancer treatment, so that it is more effective, less toxic, and less debilitating. Together, we will make possible the medical advances necessary to prevent, treat, and defeat this disease.

Experts believe that nearly half of the most common cancers can be prevented. Americans can reduce their risk of developing cancer through healthy eating habits, regular physical activity, and avoiding tobacco and excessive alcohol consumption. Regular physicals and cancer screenings and awareness of family medical histories are also critical to preventing cancers and helping those who fall victim to cancer discover it at earlier, more treatable stages.

Because of the toll cancer imposes on our citizens, families, and communities, as well as the importance of promoting prevention and early detection, my Administration wholeheartedly concurs in the request of the Congress, that dates back to 1938, to declare April as "Cancer Control Month."

NOW, THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim April 2017 as Cancer Control Month. I call upon the people of the United States to speak with their doctors and healthcare providers to learn more about preventive measures that can save lives. I encourage citizens, government agencies, private businesses, nonprofit organizations, the media, and other interested groups to increase awareness of what Americans can do to prevent and control cancer. I also invite the Governors of the States and Territories and officials of other areas subject to the jurisdiction of the United States to join me in recognizing Cancer Control Month.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this thirty-first day of March, in the year of our Lord two thousand seventeen, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-first.

DONALD J. TRUMP

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Sun, 02 Apr 2017 04:15

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release

March 31, 2017

NATIONAL CHILD ABUSE PREVENTION MONTH, 2017

- - - - - - -

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A PROCLAMATION

Childhood is precious. Growing up in a loving home, with a nurturing family, surrounded by a safe community gives our children the best opportunity to realize their full potential. Sadly, mistreatment by parents, guardians, relatives, or caregivers all too often threatens children's ability to flourish. Abuse or neglect can rob children of their sense of dignity and worth, which are indispensable to the pursuit of happiness and success in the classroom, in the workplace, and in relationships. Children rightfully impose a moral obligation on adults, who must protect them from harm and preserve their opportunity to reach their full potential and achieve their dreams. They deserve nothing less. The dreams of our children are the future of this country.

As we observe National Child Abuse Prevention Month, we renew our commitment to stop child abuse before it begins. That means preventing destructive conduct from shattering the secure and protective environments in which our children deserve to live, learn, and thrive. We must all be aware of the signs of child maltreatment and take appropriate steps to safeguard children by reporting concerns and connecting families with the help they may need.

The family is society's most important institution, and its impact on human potential is unmatched by any other influence that government, education, or even community can wield. We must promote strong families. By respecting and supporting parents, we will reduce risks and increase the safety and protection critical to our children's happiness and success. The best child abuse prevention program is a strong family with well-equipped, mature, and child-focused parents. We therefore celebrate the many community members who help parents fulfill their moral obligations by providing them a needed shoulder to lean on in troubled times.

We also honor foster and adoptive parents, child protective workers, faith leaders, community mentors, teachers, and law enforcement officials, whose tireless work every day protects children who have been tragically abused or neglected. Their often thankless service in these difficult and painful situations helps restore the safety and dignity of these wounded children and, in many cases, dramatically improves the course of their precious lives. As a Nation, we pledge to honor our commitment to protecting the vulnerable among us, not just this month, but every day of the year.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim April 2017 as National Child Abuse Prevention Month. I call upon all Americans to be alert to the safety and well-being of children and to support efforts that promote their physical, emotional, and developmental health.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this thirty-first day of March, in the year of our Lord two thousand seventeen, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-first.

DONALD J. TRUMP

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Sun, 02 Apr 2017 04:15

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release

March 31, 2017

NATIONAL SEXUAL ASSAULT AWARENESS AND PREVENTION MONTH, 2017

- - - - - - -

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A PROCLAMATION

At the heart of our country is the emphatic belief that every person has unique and infinite value. We dedicate each April to raising awareness about sexual abuse and recommitting ourselves to fighting it. Women, children, and men have inherent dignity that should never be violated.

According to the Department of Justice, on average there are more than 300,000 instances of rape or other sexual assault that afflict our neighbors and loved ones every year. Behind these painful statistics are real people whose lives are profoundly affected, at times shattered, and who are invariably in need of our help, commitment, and protection.

As we recognize National Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month, we are reminded that we all share the responsibility to reduce and ultimately end sexual violence. As a Nation, we must develop meaningful strategies to eliminate these crimes, including increasing awareness of the problem in our communities, creating systems that protect vulnerable groups, and sharing successful prevention strategies.

My Administration, including the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services, will do everything in its power to protect women, children, and men from sexual violence. This includes supporting victims, preventing future abuse, and prosecuting offenders to the full extent of the law. I have already directed the Attorney General to create a task force on crime reduction and public safety. This task force will develop strategies to reduce crime and propose new legislation to fill gaps in existing laws.

Prevention means reducing the prevalence of sexual violence on our streets, in our homes, and in our schools and institutions. Recent research has demonstrated the effectiveness of changing social norms that accept or allow indifference to sexual violence. This can be done by engaging young people to step in and provide peer leadership against condoning violence, and by mobilizing men and boys as allies in preventing sexual and relationship violence. Our families, schools, and communities must encourage respect for women and children, who are the vast majority of victims, and promote healthy personal relationships. We must never give up the fight against the scourge of child pornography and its pernicious effects on both direct victims and the broader culture. We recommit ourselves this month to establishing a culture of respect and appreciation for the dignity of every human being.

There is tremendous work to be done. Together, we can and must protect our loved ones, families, campuses, and communities from the devastating and pervasive effects of sexual assault. In the face of sexual violence, we must commit to providing meaningful support and services for victims and survivors in the United States and around the world.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim April 2017 as National Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month. I urge all Americans, families, law enforcement, health care providers, community and faith-based organizations, and private organizations to support survivors of sexual assault and work together to prevent these crimes in their communities.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this thirty-first day of March, in the year of our Lord two thousand seventeen, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-first.

DONALD J. TRUMP

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Sun, 02 Apr 2017 04:15

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release

March 31, 2017

National Financial Capability Month, 2017

- - - - - - -

By the President of the United States of America

A Proclamation

The ability of Americans to plan, save, and invest is vital to their building wealth and pursuing the American Dream. One of my first actions as President was to issue an Executive Order entitled "Core Principles for Regulating the United States Financial System," and its first core principle is that financial regulation should "empower Americans to make independent financial decisions and informed choices in the marketplace, save for retirement, and build individual wealth."

Empowering Americans to make independent financial decisions and informed choices is critically important to our Nation's prosperity. Yet more than half of households today do not have 3 months of funds saved for emergency, and most families with children are not currently saving for college. In addition, a majority of working Americans worry about running out of money in retirement, and nearly a third of workers have no retirement savings at all.

We must address these challenges. Creating and implementing innovative financial education curriculums is critical. For example, the Department of Defense has made long'‘term financial security education opportunities available for our service members and their families. As a result, the men and women of the Armed Forces can plan a healthy financial future by seeking advice from personal financial managers and counselors.

My Administration will work with committed organizations in all sectors to improve financial education and share best practices so that all Americans '‘'‘ no matter their income, education, or background '‘'‘ have the capability to make sound financial decisions. Together, we will empower Americans to take advantage of the many opportunities they have to attain more financially secure and prosperous futures for themselves and their families.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim April 2017 as National Financial Capability Month. I call upon all Americans to observe this month by engaging in activities that improve their understanding of important financial decisions.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this thirty-first day of March, in the year of our Lord two thousand seventeen, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-first.

DONALD J. TRUMP

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Sat, 01 Apr 2017 18:52

The Internet is on fire after an in-depth Washington Postprofile of Vice President Mike Pence's wife, Karen Pence. The article revealed that Pence explained, in 2002, that unless he is with his wife, he won't eat alone with a woman or attend an event where alcohol is served, a spin on what evangelicals call the ''Billy Graham Rule.'' Twitter threads and think pieces have abounded. ''Mike Pence's 'Billy Graham Rule' has Internet yelling sexism,'' blared a USAToday headline that could have read, but didn't, ''Mike Pence's 'Billy Graham Rule' is sexist.''

What a luxury it is for a man to decide he can't, and doesn't have to, be unchaperoned in the presence of a woman who might be an evil temptress out to destroy him. And what a serious problem for women.

This quiet informal rule isn't only a matter of Pence's private life, but of his professional life and public policy. It is, if still true, ridiculous and a good illustration of the absurdity women have to put up with regularly. As Mother Jones' Clara Jeffrey tweeted, ''Would Pence dine with Theresa May? Angela Merkel? What, if he were to become POTUS, with female VP candidates?'' Someone then asked her, ''What sort of bosses have you had that required you to dine with them alone?'' to which she replied, ''I am the boss.''

In May 2015, Sarah Mimms wrote a lengthy Atlantic piece titled, Why Some Male Members of Congress Won't Be Alone with Female Staffers. The starting point for her article was an anonymous survey of female staffers conducted by National Journal. Women aides described the many ways in which men who adhere to the Graham Rule left them out of meetings and professionally relevant recreational activities. The ''never alone with a woman'' rule makes it difficult for these women to do their jobs, become part of their workplace cultures and compete effectively for promotions.

One woman worked for a man for twelve years during which time he ''never took a closed door meeting with me.'' His refusal to meet with her ''made sensitive and strategic discussions extremely difficult.'' Male coworkers witnessed knowledgeable senior women being barred from key meetings. ''I'd say, 'she has more experience, this isn't my area,''' reported one staffer. ''They'd still say, 'we need you to staff him tonight.''' Women who came forward in the survey would not share their names or the names of their employers for fear of retribution.

The Graham rule is based on two ideas, both of which reflect deeply impoverished views of human nature, debase men and impose real restrictions on girls and women.

One is that men are little better than animals who cannot control themselves and, so, can't, ultimately, be held accountable. I have often heard men like Pence openly describe not hiring capable women because they might find them attractive, distracting and, from a marital perspective, disruptive. This equation was central to a 2013 Iowa Supreme Court case in which the all-male court reaffirmed the firing of a woman because she was too pretty and her employer viewed her as an ''irresistible attraction.'' In 2010, a woman sued Citibank for firing her for being ''distracting'' to the men in her office. The same ideas are the stuff that dress code enforcements that penalize girls and women for having the audacity to live in their bodies are made of. Men can and do control themselves. Predicating life on the idea that men can't control themselves is a pillar of sexist discrimination.

Which brings us to the second idea, that in this world view women are understood in terms of their functionality to men, not ends in themselves but as means to children or sex. Either women are fulfilling a reproductive mandate or they are sex objects and temptresses. These assumptions might be among the most unifying shared by Pence and Donald Trump whose attitudes about women's instrumentality appear to be the same. Pence is a man who calls his wife ''mother'' and Trump is one who sees all women through the filter of his sexual pleasure and violability, including, shamelessly, his own daughter. If you ever wondered what a walking/talking Madonna/Whore complex looks like you'd be hard pressed to find a better example than the dynamic duo currently in the White House

The fact that so many are eager to practice, tolerate or defend the acceptability of Pence's ''private'' decision is a reminder of much deeper and less obvious issues that are rarely addressed as sexist. Gender essentialists are not just uncomfortable with women in the workplace, but actually hostile to them, particularly women in leadership roles. They can talk a good game and trot out sparkly loophole women, but they are measurably disinclined to create or enforce policies that help women achieve equality in the workplace. (For a good corky read: ''Marriage Structure and Resistance to the Gender Revolution in the Workplace).

While conservatives like nothing more but to explain that women in the United States have achieved equality and should that we should consider ourselves lucky, the reality is that the United States, particularly under this administration, is a powerful reminder of how far women have yet to go.

There is no separating the fact that we are the most religious country in the industrialized world from the fact that we also have the worst record of institutionalized support for women working outside of the home. We are the only country among peer countries to have no mandated family friendly workplace policies, and the only one in which the percentage of women entering the workplace has been steadily declining for years. The entire economy is grounded in maintaining powerful fraternal orders reliant on women's unpaid and low wage care and domestic work.

Today, women are still primarily responsible for children, do an average of two hours more unpaid work a week and make up three quarters of minimum wage workers. Thirty-nine percent of working mothers are sole providers for their families, compared to 43 percent of men, who are twice as likely to be making more than $50K and more than six times as likely to be making six-figure incomes. The top jobs in America for women today remain the same as half a century ago. They are jobs in which women support other people '' administrative assistant, teacher, nurse - overwhelmingly men making more money and enjoying higher status. And the higher up you go in any organization in the country, the fewer women you will find because they remain, in culture and norms, fraternities. Fraternity is one of the most powerful obstacles to freedom and equality that women, including in the US, face today.

The idea that a man cannot be alone with a woman he is not married to is the essence of maintaining fraternity in the professional and political worlds. Despite women's monumental gains in the workplace, and the notions that patriarchy is dead, women are the richer sex, and the end of men is nigh, women are stuck at 17 percent of leadership and management positions '-- in politics, entertainment, media, religion or corporations. This is true even though we know that companies and countries with more equitable gender balanced leadership are demonstrably more productive and economically secure. Some people find it hard to come to terms with sexism, even as it's grinding them into a fine powder.

Pence and his wife will do what they need to in order to safeguard their marriage, but let' s not pretend that what they do is a strictly private matter. Pence's marital arrangement is central to his proudly being part of the most white, most heterosexual, and most male administration of the past 40 years. It's dishonest and destructive to suggest that the quality and pervasiveness of a politician's practice of faith should be off limits or restricted to a tidy ''culture war'' box. The evanescent effects on the workplace of self-described religious beliefs like these make any statements about women's equality moot in tangible, practical terms. Attitudes like his will keep women out of important roles in the White House and beyond.

We should be openly and publicly discussing the social, economic and political impacts and costs of Pence's private religious beliefs on women's political and social equality. God or not, call it what it is: sexism, plain and simple.

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Thu, 30 Mar 2017 21:57

A corruption scandal involving payments running into millions of euros has rocked the Council of Europe. But details are still hard to come by and the organisation seems unwilling to delve deeper into the matter. EURACTIV's partner Der Tagesspiegel reports.

The biggest scandal in the history of the Council of Europe would probably have never come to light if two suspicious bank transfers hadn't been noticed in a Milanese money house.

Those six-figure transfers were made through banks in the Baltic by shell companies based in the United Kingdom and the Marshall Islands. Milan's public prosecutor took on the case and what emerged was politically explosive.

Officially, the company that received the money belonged to the wife of an Italian politician. Luca Volont¨ received a total of '‚¬2.39 million between the end of 2012 and the end of 2014.

Investigators established that the money was being sent by Azerbaijan and Volont¨ is due in court next month to answer charges of money laundering.

EU to launch negotiations for a new agreement with AzerbaijanEU foreign ministers decided today (14 November) to start negotiating a comprehensive agreement with Azerbaijan, replacing the Association agreement proposed in 2010, which had omitted to take into account Baku's view about the future of relations.

Prosecutors are also looking into if those payments are linked at all to Volont¨'s work as a member of the Council of Europe's parliamentary assembly (PACE).

The Council of Europe is the guardian of human rights and democracy for its 47 member states, which include Russia and Turkey. Each country appoints representatives to PACE, which meets four times a year in Strasbourg.

Many Western European states show little interest in the institution but Azerbaijan has expended a lot of effort trying to prevent the Council from condemning its human rights situation.

Its politicians celebrated a small victory in January 2013 when a resolution by German Christoph Str¤sser about political prisoners in Azerbaijan was surprisingly voted down by the Council.

For years, there have been indications that it isn't just lobbying that has played a role and that ''caviar diplomacy'' has been at play.

But in Volont¨'s case, the problem goes deeper than just fish eggs and expensive carpets. The Italian has admitted to receiving '‚¬2.39 million but denies that the money was connected to his activities with the Council.

Volont¨ told Italian broadcaster RAI that the money originated from Azerbaijani politician Elkhan Suleymanov.

It all started for Luca Volont¨ with a trip to Azerbaijan in July 2011. His secretary told Der Tagesspiegel that he flew business class because Suleymanov was footing the bill. On his return, he wrote an email of thanks to his Azerbaijani colleague, lauding their ''growing'' friendship and ''precious gifts''.

They stayed in contact and Volont¨ even shared his thoughts on how to improve Azerbaijan's image on the world stage. When in May 2012 the European Stability Initiative (ESI) published a report about ''caviar diplomacy'', causing a stir in the Council of Europe, Volont¨ stressed in an internal note that there was ''no evidence of corruption''.

In December 2012, a few weeks before the vote on the resolution, Volont¨ sent an email to Azerbaijani lobbyist Muslum Mammadov, detailing which ''friends'' they could count on when it came to the debate.

The people mentioned spoke unusually positive about the South Caucasus republic, including current PACE President Pedro Agramunt.

In December, Volont¨ received his first payment from a company headquartered in the UK, via an Estonian bank account. Effort had clearly been spent to conceal the fact the money came from Azerbaijan.

After the Str¤sser-resolution was defeated, Volont¨ seemed to fear that the lucrative friendship was at an end. ''So you've forgotten me after your victory'...'', he wrote to Suleymanov. A short time later he proposed a new resolution on political prisoners, which he promptly withdrew a few days later.

''Every wish from you is a command'', he later wrote to middleman Mammadov. Further talks were then held in Baku with Suleymanov and Russian politician Alexei Pushkov.

The friendship paid off for Volont¨. By his own account he received '‚¬10 million over the course of ten years. So far though the money has been frozen by Milanese prosecutors. But Volont¨ will not stand trial on corruption charges, instead, he will appear in court accused of money laundering.

The story could have petered out there, if it was just a matter of alleged misconduct by politicians. But deputy leader of Germany's Council delegation Frank Schwabe (SPD) fears that the scandal may go far deeper.

''There is the suspicion that the corruption has a larger scope and it is not just Volont¨ involved,'' he warned. ''The Parliamentary Assembly has to do everything possible to clarify this.''

According to research carried out by Der Tagesspiegel, there is evidence that only a part of the scandals have been unearthed. Payments to Volont¨ were from 2014 handled by Hilux Services LP, an offshore company based in Glasgow.

Its owners are two companies based in the Virgin Islands. The same people that registered the company in March 2013 set up at least 12 other offshore firms with the same address at the same time.

The Estonian account of Hilux Services received nearly '‚¬1 billion between the end of 2013 and end of 2014 from Azerbaijani company Baktelecom. This sum and the company network suggest that a largest apparatus is in place, which serves to do more than just pay one politician.

But efforts to shine light on this matter have been sluggish at best. Only politicians from Azerbaijan's neighbour and rival, Armenia, have tried to raise the issue in plenary. Council President Agramunt cut them off though.

But in January, cross-border and cross-party support was secured at the Strasbourg plenary session and 64 lawmakers called for an independent investigation into the scandal.

There are now concerns about the credibility of the Council. ''The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe is there to stand up to those who abuse human rights,'' said Estonian politician Eerik-Niiles Kross, one of the 64 that supported the resolution. ''If this organisation is discredited, then it is not just bad for the Council of Europe, it is bad for the entire European idea,'' he warned.

And it's not just Azerbaijan that is implicated. ''In the meantime, a network in the Council has sprung up, of countries with authoritarian tendencies, that protects them from critical opinions,'' Schwabe said. A debate on the human rights situation in Turkey already fell by the wayside because of this.

ESI Chairman Gerald Knaus hopes that the Volont¨ affair will cause waves: ''If an MP can wire hundreds of thousands of euros without there being an independent investigation, then the Council of Europe is just a bazaar.''

Now there is evidence of what he and his organisation have been warning about for some time. ''It now shows how corrupted the organisation has been for a number of years.''

Those in the Council seeking answers have been met with resistance though. Agramunt is looking to downplay the matter and has spoken about ''unlawful attacks on the honour and reputation of a person''.

The PACE president has already deferred a decision on an independent investigation. Now the Council's group leaders will have to submit a proposal.

Council of Europe condemns Jordan hangingsJordan's execution of 15 prisoners has provoked ''indignation'' from Council of Europe leader Pedro Agramunt, who insisted the Arab kingdom remains committed to maintaining a moratorium on the death penalty. EURACTIV Spain reports.

A crucial role is being played by the leader of Germany's delegation, Axel Fischer (CDU), because he is also chairman of the EPP group, to which Volont¨ belonged.

But Fischer is not among those that are actively seeking clarity on the matter and has been sympathetic to Volont¨'s version of events.

After learning of the allegations of corruption, he called for a register of non-governmental organisations, which would detail their finances. This initiative, which clearly targets outfits like the ESI, resembles Russia's much-criticised ''foreign agents'' law.

When asked by Der Tagesspiegel about the Volont¨ affair, Fischer declined to comment, insisting that he does not want to prejudice the outcome of the case.

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Thu, 30 Mar 2017 22:54

WASHINGTON'--Mike Flynn, President Donald Trump's former national security adviser, has told the Federal Bureau of Investigation and congressional officials investigating the Trump campaign's potential ties to Russia that he is willing to be interviewed in exchange for a grant of immunity from prosecution, according to officials with knowledge of the matter.

As an adviser to Mr. Trump's presidential campaign, and later one of Mr. Trump's top aides in the White House, Mr. Flynn was privy to some of the most sensitive...

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Source: Natural Gas World - Latest News

Fri, 31 Mar 2017 10:50

Naftogaz Ukrainy is suing the European Commission at the General Court of the European Court of Justice in order to force it to reverse its October 28 decision to allow Gazprom significantly greater use of Opal capacity and '' therefore '' of Nord Stream, it said March 29.

The 27.5bn m"/yr Nord Stream line, owned half by the Russian export monopoly and half by European energy companies, runs under the Baltic Sea and allows it to avoid shipping the same amount of gas through Ukraine. But European Commission restrictions on the use of Opal capacity, on competition grounds, mean Gazprom cannot use Nord Stream fully '' even if the decision was found lawful it has a ceiling of 80%, but normally its limit is 50%.

Ukraine's state gas enterprise said March 29 that, by acting without consulting with Ukraine, the EC broke Article 274 of the agreement of association between Ukraine and the European Union as well as the EU's obligations under the Energy Charter Agreement and the agreement on the formation of the Energy Community.

Naftogaz bases its argument on the fact that the decision was taken without the commission's competency; that it contradicts the Third Energy Package; and that it does not foster competition. It also threatens the security of gas supplies to Ukraine and other east European countries and the effective functioning of the internal market of the EU and the Energy Community as it increases the power of Gazprom and its affiliates, it said.

Routes of Nord Stream 1&2

Source: Gazprom

Poland, another Russian gas transit country, sued the EC on similar grounds last December; that case is still being heard in a court in Dusseldorf and, in the meanwhile, flows are at the reduced 50% rate.

The Opal line, operated by a Wintershall-Gazprom joint venture, brings gas south from northern Germany to the Czech Republic. Earlier this month Gazprom made concessions concerning its gas marketing methods in Europe, including the use of hubs as the prevailing price mechanism and different delivery points. These are out for consultation until early May, with the European Commission able to make further changes depending on the feedback.

Gazprom is planning to double the capacity of Nord Stream through another line, running parallel (see map). Once the gas arrives in Greifswald it will flow where shippers book capacity for it.

William Powell

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Sat, 01 Apr 2017 16:47

(AP)

In the spirit of bipartisanship, let's try a little thought experiment:

Instead of jumping to the worst of conclusions, as many on the left have begun to do, let's do the opposite. Let's grant President Trump his single biggest wish by giving the president and his administration the benefit of every possible doubt regarding its relationship with Russia.

We'll start with the basics, by assuming that President Trump long ago reached an honest, informed strategic decision about trying to work with Vladimir Putin that had nothing to do with his own private business interests or with a misplaced case of hero worship. That leads us in turn to the further assumption that Trump and his staff in no way colluded with the Russian effort to interfere in our election, that they were as surprised by its discovery as anybody else.

In this world, the infamous British dossier was a complete fabrication and the string of rather amazing coincidences regarding Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn and Roger Stone and others was exactly that and no more, a meaningless string of amazing, amazing coincidences. The repeated denials of meetings and contacts '-- denials that we now know to have been false '-- are purely the product of bad memories on the part of people so busy that they just can't recall things accurately.

If we accept all that, presuming innocence at every turn, where do we find ourselves?

Not a good place.

We are left with the most amazingly incompetent administration perhaps in American history, an administration that is so clueless and bumbling that in a matter of two months in office, it has managed to make itself look guilty and defensive even when it is presumably innocent. We face an administration that for some reason cannot tell the American people a straight story even when a straight story would be to its immense benefit, that cannot get its message across accurately even with an extremely gifted messenger as its leader.

If they truly are hiding nothing, then the absurd theatrics involving U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes going to the White House to inform the White House of what the White House had leaked to him the night before rises to an even higher level of absurdity. In this best of all possible worlds, Sean Spicer's hapless, desperate evasions are no longer comical but '... I don't know what term to use. Downright tragic?

Personally, I don't think that's the way the history books are going to cover this. I think this will end up being attributed to gross incompetence on the part of people not half as smart as they think they are, combined with at the very least willful deceit if not felonious complicity. And heaven help the country if malfeasance ends up outweighing the considerable amount of incompetence already on display.

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Sat, 01 Apr 2017 06:08

''General Flynn certainly has a story to tell, and he very much wants to tell it.''

So begins a Thursday statement from former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn's attorney, Robert Kelner, about his client's willingness to testify before the House and Senate intelligence committees in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

The implication is that Flynn has vital information about the ties between Trump and Russia, and that he did some questionable stuff while working for the Trump team. Thus, it would be in the public's interest for Congress to grant Flynn immunity so he could explain what he did '-- and how many others in the campaign were involved.

Here's the catch: We have no idea what, if anything, Flynn actually has.

''If he really had some very specific information about Trump campaign collusion with the Russians ... there's no way a lawyer would try to sell that information for immunity by way of release of a statement,'' says Ronald Wright, a law professor at Wake Forest University who studies immunity deals.

To understand where Wright is coming from, you need to understand a little bit about the way congressional immunity works in the US legal system. You also need to understand Flynn's particular role in the Trump-Russia saga '-- because Flynn's long history of ties to Russia put him in a uniquely significant position.

Ultimately, though, the odds suggest that Flynn won't get an immunity deal. The Senate Intelligence Committee has already turned down his request, according to NBC News; getting it from the House committee would require a two-thirds vote, and the ranking Democrat on the committee, Adam Schiff, said in a statement that he's not prepared to offer Flynn immunity yet.

''There is still much work and many more witnesses and documents to obtain before any immunity request from any witness can be considered,'' Schiff said.

More fundamentally, it's hard to see Democrats granting one to a widely disliked former Trump official when there's still a chance the FBI might prosecute him for allegedly lying to the bureau about his contacts with the Russian envoy to the US. The Trump administration's call for Flynn to appear before Congress, in Sean Spicer's Friday press briefing, could very well harden their resolve against immunity.

This is all very bad news for Flynn, who ironically said that asking for immunity was proof that you had done something wrong when discussing Hillary Clinton's email scandal during the campaign. ''When you are given immunity, that means that you have probably committed a crime,'' he told NBC's Chuck Todd in an interview.

''There's every possibility that this will turn into nothing '-- that nobody will take the bait and he will not get any kind of immunity from anybody,'' Wright concludes.

Flynn's lawyer is making a political appeal, not a legal oneThere are two kinds of immunity in the US legal system: ''transactional'' immunity and ''use'' immunity. Transactional is the typical type of immunity that you're probably familiar with from watching cop dramas: We promise not to prosecute you as long as you agree to testify in court against a bigger target. For Flynn to get transactional immunity, he'd need to go to the FBI, which is currently investigating him on counterintelligence charges tied to his communications with the Russian ambassador to the US; Flynn's lies about those interactions led Trump to fire him in mid-February.

That kind of immunity doesn't seem very likely. The Wall Street Journal, which first reported Flynn's appeal, reports that Kelner had already gone to the FBI but has ''so far found no takers.'' Moreover, publicly releasing a letter spelling out your desire for an immunity deal isn't what attorneys do when they feel they have a strong case that could pave the way for a deal with prosecutors.

''What [prosecutors] want to do is get a story while doing as little damage as possible to other criminal cases,'' Wright explains. ''The way you do as little damage as possible is you keep it quiet. You don't negotiate through the press.''

Use immunity is a different story. Any congressional committee conducting an official investigation can offer it, provided there's a supermajority vote in favor of granting immunity and that a judge signs off afterward. Once granted, it means that nothing the person says when testifying before the committee can be used against them at trial.

In theory, this is supposed to be more limited than transactional immunity: Federal prosecutors can still go after someone who has use immunity, provided they don't rely on anything the person said during congressional testimony. In practice, however, granting someone use immunity usually ends up making it impossible for prosecutors to successfully get a conviction.

''It is just really hard, later on, to prove to a judge that the prosecutor remained independent and untainted from the information that was bought [by Congress] through the immunity,'' Wright explains.

Michael Flynn could be in a lot of trouble. And it seems like his attorney knows it.

The most famous case here is Lt. Col. Oliver North, a National Security Council staffer in the Reagan administration. North was a pivotal figure in the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan's secret sale of weapons to Iran in order to fund the anti-communist Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua. North had lied under oath about the arms sales and altered official records to hide them, crimes that probably would have earned him a prison sentence absent congressional intervention or a presidential pardon.

Yet a joint House-Senate investigative committee, deeming North's information vital to the public interest, granted him use immunity before the FBI could fully build its case. North's hearing was televised, and was watched so widely that it became impossible for prosecutors to prove that their case hadn't been influenced by North's admissions to Congress about his own activities. His initial conviction was overturned on appeal by a DC federal court, and he went on to have a successful post-government career as a Fox News personality.

Flynn's lawyer is most likely trying to accomplish something similar: convince members of Congress that the disgraced former national security adviser, like North, has vital information about the investigation into the Trump-Russia scandal. Dangling the possibility of Flynn's testimony in front of them, and then building public interest in hearing from him, seems like Kelner's strategy for persuading Congress to make a deal.

Flynn's connections to Russia make the offer somewhat tempting, but they're probably not enoughHere's the attractive core of Kelner's offer, from Congress's point of view: Michael Flynn has a very long, very shady history of ties to Russia.

Flynn was fired from his position as the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014. Furious with the Obama administration over his ouster and its unwillingness to listen to his hardline views about Islamist terrorism, Flynn started to cozy up with Vladimir Putin's Russia. He became a semi-regular guest on RT, Russia's English-language propaganda outlet, regularly arguing for the US and Russia to partner in Syria against ISIS.

Flynn did not disclose whether RT was paying him for these appearances. But we've since learned that he was paid $45,000 for attending RT's 10th anniversary gala in December 2015. He sat next to Putin himself, and delivered a speech to the attendees about his view of the world. A recent Washington Post investigation found two more payments from Russian-affiliated companies totaling $22,500, also ostensibly for speeches.

These pro-Russia and hardline anti-Islam views (he once tweeted ''fear of Muslims is RATIONAL'') made Flynn a natural for the Trump campaign. He became one of Trump's key foreign policy advisers and perhaps his most prominent surrogate on national security affairs. During his speech at the Republican National Convention, he led the crowd in a rousing anti-Clinton jeer: ''Lock her up! Lock her up!''

After Trump won the election in November, it seems Flynn was a key point of contact between the Trump transition team and Russia. On December 29, the Obama administration announced a series of new sanctions on Russia as punishment for its interference in the US presidential election. That same day, Flynn called Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak multiple times '-- and they talked about the sanctions.

This, ultimately, is what got Flynn fired and into hot water with the FBI. But it wasn't the calls themselves; it was the fact that Flynn lied to Vice President Mike Pence about it, and the fact that this lie became public knowledge. We still don't know whether Flynn called Kislyak on his own initiative or with the president's approval.

The key question for both Congress and the FBI is whether the Trump campaign knew about Russia's hacking of the Clinton campaign and colluded in it '-- and, if so, whether Trump himself was involved or aware of the collusion. Flynn's long history of involvement with the Russians suggests he might have at least some insight to share on this topic '-- which is what makes his offer enticing.

However, we don't know that any collusion took place; FBI chief Jim Comey recently told a House panel that law enforcement hasn't yet found evidence of that. Even if there were improper contacts between Team Trump and Russia, it's not clear Flynn knew or was involved.

Just as likely, if not more so, is that other Trump campaign associates with close ties to Russia, like former campaign manager Paul Manafort, ran point on any putative coordination with Russian intelligence '-- if any took place. Manafort has agreed to testify before Congress already, seemingly without any kind of immunity request.

So while Flynn's past makes him a target of suspicion in this investigation, it's hardly enough to guarantee he has enough to persuade lawmakers or prosecutors to agree to spare him from court.

And the fact that Flynn's lawyer released such a high-profile statement, as we've discussed, militates against it. So while it might be tempting for Congress to take Flynn up on his offer, they're savvy enough to pick up on the signal that there isn't anything here. That appears to be why the Senate investigation, by far the more serious of the two, has already turned down Flynn's attempt at a deal.

Ultimately, according to Wright, the most likely scenario is that Flynn is attempting to immunize himself against prosecution without having solid information to add about Trump and Russia. If that's right, then the chances of any kind of immunity are exceedingly low.

Michael Flynn could be in a lot of trouble. And it seems like his attorney knows it.

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Fri, 31 Mar 2017 10:37

Washington, D.C. '' In the midst of a national financial catastrophe, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) used her position as a senior member of Congress and member of the House Financial Services Committee to prevail upon Treasury officials to meet with OneUnited Bank. She never disclosed that her husband held stock in the bank. This outrageous conduct has led Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) to include the congresswoman as one of the Most Corrupt Members of Congress. Click here to read the full report on Rep. Waters.

''By contacting then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to request a meeting, allegedly for a group of minority-owned banks, but then arranging for only one bank '' OneUnited, in which she had a financial interest '' to attend, Rep. Waters violated House conflict of interest rules,'' said CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan.

Around the same time Rep. Waters asked the Treasury Department to hold the initial meeting, Rep. Waters spoke to Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) about OneUnited, telling him that her husband previously had served on the board. Rep. Frank advised her to stay out of matters related to the bank. Nevertheless, Rep. Waters' chief of staff and grandson, Mikael Moore, continued to actively assist OneUnited representatives in their quest to receive bailout funds, and worked to craft legislation authorizing Treasury to grant OneUnited's request.

Rep. Waters was scheduled for an ethics trial on November 29, 2010, but the House Ethics Committee postponed the hearing. Inconsistent reports have emerged suggesting both potential new evidence and serious misconduct by two of the committee's attorneys and improper conduct by committee members. In July 2011, the committee hired respected D.C attorney Billy Martin as outside counsel to investigate both the case against Rep. Waters and the committee itself.

''The ethics committee has handled the case against Rep. Waters with the maturity of school children,'' said Ms. Sloan. ''Happily, adult supervision in the form of Mr. Martin has been brought in to clean up the mess.''

This is the 7th edition of the CREW'S Most Corrupt Report, an annual look at a bipartisan collection of Washington's worst. This year's list includes seven Democrats, and 12 Republicans. Five are repeat offenders. Since 2005, CREW has named 70 members of Congress to the list, 32 of whom are no longer in office.

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Sat, 01 Apr 2017 06:36

Gangs of angry Haitians trawled Port-au-Prince as violence aimed at UN peacekeepers blamed for the cholera crisis spread to the capital after deadly rioting in the north. HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP/Getty Images

In October 2010, United Nations Peacekeepers from Nepal infected Haiti's most significant river system with cholera, inciting the first cholera outbreak in the country in over a century. So far, the epidemic has taken over 10,000 lives, and some estimate that the disease has infected up to 800,000 people. Those who caused the outbreak'--and covered it up'--have not assumed assumed responsibility, including the United Nations and several government agencies under the Obama administration, such as Hillary Clinton's State Department.

Slate's Jonathan Katz reports, ''Nepal hadn't invaded Haiti on its own: Its troops were part of a multinational force created by the Security Council, specifically at the behest of the George W. Bush administration in 2004. For the 13 years since, it has remained in Haiti largely to carry out U.S. policy'--at a discount.''

President Donald Trump's ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, ducked questions about the outbreak in her confirmation hearing, as did Obama's UN ambassadors during his presidency. The United Nations formally apologized and proposed a plan to curb the outbreak. However, its members'--including the United States'--refuse to provide the necessary funding for the plan.

New emails obtained from the Center for Disease Control reveal that they suspected the origin of the outbreak was UN Peacekeepers before news of the outbreak was even reported in the press. In the emails, officials exercise damage control to prevent backlash in Haiti toward the UN presence, citing concerns from the National Security Council, which was chaired by Obama at the time. The National Security Council spokesperson refused to respond to Katz's request for comment and the State Department refused to disclose when or how they became aware of the outbreak's origin. It would take six years for the United Nations to finally admit they were responsible.

The cholera outbreak occurred less than a year after Haiti was devastated by a massive earthquake that killed over 100,000 people. The United States was already deeply involved in Haiti and funding an important election in the country, which the United States has been criticized for repeatedly. In 2011, Hillary Clinton flew to Haiti as secretary of state and insisted that the current president of Haiti step down in favor of the U.S. backed candidate, Michel Martelly. Bill Clinton was selected to serve as Haiti's special envoy for the United Nations, and his chief of staff was initially selected to serve as Martelly's prime minister.

Katz cited that officials at the Center for Disease Control intentionally cast doubt as to the origin of the outbreak and refused to conduct any investigation to confirm its source. Meanwhile, UN soldiers destroyed evidence before other scientists could investigate it. The State Department, under the control of Hillary Clinton, told Katz, ''U.S. government has not taken a position on the validity of the underlying claims in this particular case.''

In 2011, victims and families petitioning the United Nations to fight the epidemic were ignored. Federal judges in the United States threw out a lawsuit against the United Nations over the organization's absolute immunity from legal process, as stipulated by a 1947 treaty. The United Nation's inaction was cited by a New York University professor who Katz interviewed as legal advice coming from the State Department.

The United States' poor response to this epidemic'--not to mention the controversies surrounding the Clinton Foundation'--have earned the Clintons a poor reputation among Haitians, including the population of roughly 200,000 Haitian born immigrants in the South Florida area who predominantly support Democrats. Though many misleading claims have circulated about the Clintons' involvement in Haiti, the foreign policy that Hillary Clinton championed during her tenure as secretary of state, in which she viewed reconstruction as a business opportunity, contributed to Haiti's problems. Millions of dollars in relief funds went to international non-government organizations and international contractors instead of Haitian citizens, Haitian contractors and Haitian government. The relief effort exploited the disaster by divvying up funds among corporations. In October 2016, ABC News reported that an Old Navy factory that the Clintons brought to Haiti fell short of its promise of jobs, became riddled with labor abuse, and the firm that helped fund the project ''became a Clinton Foundation donor and its owner invested in a startup company owned by Hillary Clinton's former chief of staff.'' A separate investigation by ABC News found that top Clinton Foundation officials prioritized offers of relief assistance based on who was friends of Bill Clinton's.

''Hillary Clinton once hoped that Haiti would be the shining jewel of her foreign policy,'' wrote Jonathan Katz for Politico in 2015. ''But far from transforming this poorest of countries, many of the Clintons' grandest plans and promises remain little more than small pilot projects'--a new set of basketball hoops and a model elementary school here, a functioning factory there'--that have done little to alter radically the trajectory of the country. Visiting some of their projects over the course of an April research trip affirmed as much about their tenuousness as about the limited benefits they've provided. Many of the most notable investments the Clintons helped launch, such as the new Marriott in the capital, have primarily benefited wealthy foreigners and island's ruling elite, who needed little help to begin with.''

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Sat, 01 Apr 2017 06:37

A protester holds up a sign during a demonstration against the U.N. mission in downtown Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Nov. 18, 2010. (C) Allison Shelley / Reuters

Halfway through her confirmation hearing in January, the nominee for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, found herself navigating a river of human waste in Haiti.

Some suspected the then''president-elect had picked the South Carolina governor, who had no foreign policy experience, in order to exile a potential rival to an institution he's derided as ''a waste of time and money.'' But for two and a half hours, as senators probed her on places like North Korea, Ukraine, and Israel, the nominee held her own, shoring up talking points with governor's office banter.

That's when Sen. Ed Markey, the junior Democrat from Massachusetts, asked about a crisis that threatens nothing less than the legitimacy of the United Nations itself. The crisis is the cholera epidemic in Haiti, a still-unfolding catastrophe that all available evidence shows began when U.N. peacekeepers from Nepal infected the country's most important river system in October 2010. Yet still, after more than 10,000 people have died and incalculable damage has been done to a country the United Nations swore to protect, no one has been held accountable.

Haley's first stab at an answer reflected the confusion at the heart of the new administration's foreign policy. ''What happened in Haiti is just nothing short of devastating,'' she said. ''It's also why I think it's so important that the contributing countries take responsibility and take actions against those violators that are doing anything to harm the people that they're supposed to be protecting.''

But that isn't how U.N. peacekeeping works, Markey replied. Nepal hadn't invaded Haiti on its own: Its troops were part of a multinational force created by the Security Council, specifically at the behest of the George W. Bush administration in 2004. For the 13 years since, it has remained in Haiti largely to carry out U.S. policy'--at a discount. So Markey rephrased the question, asking if Haley agreed that ''all of the other countries that use the Nepalese military as their agent '... be held accountable as well, financially.''

Realizing what she was being asked to endorse, Haley sidestepped the issue. A few days later, in a written follow-up, she backpedaled further, saying she ''would need to be fully briefed on this issue in order to provide a complete response.''

She is not the first U.S. official to duck the question. As seen in newly revealed emails, reported here for the first time, officials at the highest levels of the U.S. government were aware almost immediately that U.N. forces likely played a role in the outbreak. Multiple federal agencies, from national security officials to scientists on the front lines, shielded the United Nations from accountability to protect the organization and themselves. Obama's U.N. ambassadors, Susan Rice and Samantha Power, dodged the issue as the administration danced between often contradictory goals of protecting human rights, asserting American dominance, and defending an institution central to its multilateral diplomacy.

As he left office in December, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was forced to grudgingly apologize for the organization's role in poisoning Haiti's watershed and propose a plan to end the epidemic. Member states, however, are refusing to provide the $400 million he promised. The result is an ever-deepening health crisis in which about one Haitian dies from cholera per day, amid incalculable cost to the country's economy and social fabric.

Those actions and inactions fostered mistrust and damaged reputations'--including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's'--helping pave the way for the first explicitly anti-humanitarian U.S. presidency in a century.

Trump mocks the U.N. as ''just a club for people to get together, talk and have a good time.'' His advisers want to slash U.S. funding for the United Nations by more than $5 billion as part of an effort to gut the foreign and global health aid that has been a pillar of U.S. foreign policy since the end of World War II.

But the past will not be easy to cast off. After a century positioning itself as the world order's indispensable leader'--often through U.S-based global organs like the U.N.'--America has a legacy that runs deep in every part of the globe. Trump inherited control of not only the globalized, U.S.-dominated economy his predecessors helped create, but the refugees of their wars and the increasingly urgent consequences of environmental ruin. And nowhere are the stakes of that legacy as clear as in Haiti.

Evenel Dorvilier rests on a stretcher at a cholera treatment center in Port-au-Prince in 2016. Years after the U.N. sowed cholera in Haiti, people are still contracting the disease. (C) Andres Martinez Casares / Reuters

On Oct. 20, 2010, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the first recorded cholera outbreak in Haitian history. Within days, 300 people would be dead. In a country where few had clean water, adequate sanitation, or immunity to the disease, experts knew the waterborne infection could rip through the island like lightning through an ungrounded swimming pool.

Six days later, a senior analyst in the CDC's Global Disease Detection Operations Center emailed his colleagues with a less scientific concern. The CDC's job was to provide front-line medical responders with field and lab research to back up their work. As a standard CDC reference paper put it: ''When outbreaks of disease occur, there usually is an urgent need to identify the source and/or cause of the problem as a basis for control.''

But the analyst, Rohit Chitale, wasn't writing about finding the source. He was relaying a concern from higher up in the U.S. government that someone else already had.

''There are many rumors circulating in the media and blogosphere that the origins of cholera in Haiti are from Nepalese or Bangladeshi UN soldiers,'' he wrote colleagues in four CDC departments, in an email disclosed under a Freedom of Information Act request. ''This has been discussed on our CDC calls at least once, I believe. I heard from someone at the National Security Council that they are very concerned about this issue.''

CDC scientists in Atlanta were analyzing cholera samples at the time. ''If the genomic data comes back indicating that this is true, we may want to have appropriate health [communication] materials ready,'' Chitale wrote. ''The last thing we would want is for Haitians to blame the UN soldiers in a pernicious way.''

The truth was that neither the CDC nor its partners in the U.N. system made an attempt to uncover that evidence.

The National Security Council is the U.S. government's highest-level defense-planning body. Its chairman is the president of the United States. What's fascinating here is the timing: The first international news report linking the U.N. to the outbreak'--my dispatch for the Associated Press'--would not appear until a day later, Oct. 27. It would take a handful of journalists, university labs, and independent epidemiologists, often working at odds with the U.N. and its allies, weeks more to gather evidence cinching the conclusion. Thanks in part to aggressive official denial and pushback in the press, most people outside Haiti would not learn about the probable link for months, if not years. The U.N. would continue denying any involvement in the outbreak until it finally admitted in 2016 having played a role. By then, at least 800,000 people in Haiti had been sickened and officially more than 9,500 killed, with experts estimating the real toll could be two or three times higher.

Yet less than a week after the outbreak was confirmed, top officials in Washington tasked with global issues of war and peace were already concerned about what the outbreak might mean for the U.N.

In a phone interview, Chitale could not recall where his NSC contact got their information. An NSC spokesman declined multiple requests for comment. State Department officials would not say when or how they learned that the U.N. was likely responsible for the outbreak.

What is clear is that U.S. experts and officials followed an immediate instinct to move into damage control. Minutes after receiving Chitale's email, the director of the CDC's emergency operations division forwarded it to four other senior colleagues. One of them, a veteran CDC epidemiologist named Muireann Brennan, noted that another in the group was a scientist ''already working on a document that will say what we can and can't say'' about the pending lab results.

The scientist, Arunmozhi Balajee, responded immediately. ''I need help with this document,'' he wrote. ''I am predicting this is only going to become worse.''

When cholera broke out in central Haiti, both the United States and U.N. were heavily involved on the island. Nine months earlier, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake had struck the southern part of the country, killing an estimated 100,000 to 316,000 people. Obama had declared his commitment to save lives in Haiti, which advisers hoped would signal a break from his predecessor's disastrous foreign policy and much-criticized response to Hurricane Katrina. Thousands of responders and billions of dollars had been dedicated to the recovery. The U.S. was also funding a crucial election in Haiti, for which the peacekeeping force'--the U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti, or MINUSTAH'--was tasked with overseeing security. Protecting the U.N. was a priority.

The genomic tests discussed in the Oct. 26 emails revealed that the Haiti samples did match isolates from South Asia, including Nepal, and equally important, that the Haiti isolates all came from a single source. Those findings bolstered the hypothesis that U.N. troops'--the only significant South Asian population on Haiti's sparsely populated central plateau'--introduced the disease.

In the document written following the discussion about ''what we can and can't say,'' the CDC scientists added a prominent caveat: without further evidence, the genomic tests alone did ''not prove that the outbreak strain was brought directly from South Asia to Haiti.'' This cautiousness would be echoed for months as CDC scientists publicly cast doubt on whether an answer could ever be found.

The truth was that neither the CDC nor its partners in the U.N. system made an attempt to uncover that evidence. From Oct. 21 to 23, CDC and Haitian health ministry investigators visited hospitals in the lower Artibonite River Valley, interviewing 27 patients who lived or worked in rice paddies nearby, according to the CDC. Eighteen said they had drunk untreated water before getting sick. Yet no effort was made to figure out which water source was putting them at risk. The CDC also knew some of the first stool samples sent to the national laboratory had come from villages 50 miles up the Aribonite River, around the town of Mirebalais'--including M¨y(C), the village where the U.N. base was located. But, the CDC openly acknowledges, the Americans did not go there to investigate.

In a recent interview, Jordan Tappero, then the incident manager for the Haiti cholera response, said the CDC did not have enough resources to address those questions as well as to respond to other elements of the outbreak. ''Our mission was to save lives, and we had no room for distraction,'' he told me. CDC interventions probably helped lower the death rate by several thousand, he said.

Yet despite having far fewer resources, Haiti's health ministry sent its own teams to investigate the area around Mirebalais on Oct. 19 and 21, where they found 15 likely cases of cholera. No one from the CDC accompanied them.

The emails show how much the CDC's incuriosity frustrated other scientists. In a December 2010 email thread, Bangladesh-based cholera expert Alejandro Cravioto mentioned that he had ''not seen a single note about cultures done to the UN soldiers in Haiti or on a good environmental sampling.'' Peter Gerner-Smidt, a point man on the CDC's cholera outbreak task force, responded: ''The whole thing about how the strain was introduced into Haiti is so political [sic] inflamed that it probably is not possible to do a proper scientific assessment.''

CDC epidemiologist Eric Mintz chimed in: ''I fully agree with Peter's assessment.'' Two days earlier, Mintz had poured cold water on the link between the U.N. and the epidemic in a CNN interview, citing a lack of evidence.

Meanwhile, the U.N. troops destroyed evidence at their base, including digging up leaking pipes and draining septic tanks, before scientists could examine it.

''To call CDC's lack of interest unusual is an understatement,'' Ralph R. Frerichs, founding chair of the University of California at Los Angeles' epidemiology department, wrote in his 2016 book, Deadly River: Cholera and Cover-Up in Post-Earthquake Haiti.

Available emails show that, by instinct or coordination, multiple U.S. government departments closed ranks to defend the U.N.

The stonewalling had consequences. In November 2010, anger over the U.N.'s refusal to give answers spilled over into fiery protests in northern Haiti. Young men pelted peacekeepers with rocks. At least three protesters were killed.

Under pressure, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed a four-scientist panel to investigate. Cravioto led the group, stopping at CDC headquarters in Atlanta on his way to Haiti in February 2011. But after four months of delays and the active destruction of evidence, there was not much for investigators to find. Their May 2011 report strongly suggested the U.N. was responsible for the epidemic but lacked definitive proof.

In 2013, the same four scientists authored a new report which stated more positively that ''personnel associated with the Mirebalais MINUSTAH facility were the most likely source of introduction of cholera into Haiti.'' However, the scientists cautioned, that conclusion would always be partially in doubt because ''it is not possible to travel back in time to conduct the necessary investigations, and those on the ground at the time focused on outbreak response not source introduction.''

For their part, the U.S. government scientists do not believe they abetted a cover-up. Tappero, now director of the CDC's Division of Global Health Protection, was quick to emphasize the role of Haitian behavior in our interview'--telling me that Haitians don't experience ''shame associated with open defecation.'' Yet those same scientists are much more cautious when it comes to talking about the well-documented, dangerously negligent sanitation practices of the U.N. or the mounting proof showing how their negligence cost thousands of lives.

Ironically, it may have been partly the very obviousness of the outbreak's origin that led to U.S. government scientists' lack of interest in proving it. ''We focused a lot more on the response versus the attribution, but that's because we figured yeah, it probably did come from the U.N,'' Chitale told me.

Other U.S. government agencies have been less forthcoming with information than the CDC. Asked when and how the U.S. government learned about the U.N.'s role in the epidemic, and what should be done, the State Department responded that the ''U.S. government has not taken a position on the validity of the underlying claims in this particular case.''

But the available emails show that, whether by instinct or coordination, multiple government departments closed ranks to defend the U.N. In November 2010, an official from CDC's Emergency Operations Center relayed a request from the Department of Health and Human Services for a one-paragraph summary of ''why we don't think you can tell where the strain came from even with genetic analysis.''

A December 2010 interagency memo to dozens of State Department, Defense Department, and USAID officials instructed press liaisons to tell any reporters who asked: ''Bottom line is unless an investigation was done before the cholera spread '... it cannot be said definitively that the source was a sanitation site at [the U.N.] camp.''

The U.S. also sided against Haiti's cholera victims in other key ways. Thousands of victims and their families petitioned the U.N. for redress in 2011, seeking money to stop the epidemic and assist the millions of people directly and indirectly harmed. When the U.N. refused to hear their claims, lawyers with the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti sued the United Nations in U.S. federal court. Justice Department lawyers appeared in the U.N.'s stead to argue that the U.N.'s absolute immunity from legal process under a 1947 treaty meant the suit should be thrown out. The federal judges agreed.

With the lawsuit derailed and a damning internal report on the U.N. cover-up made public, Ban Ki-moon finally offered a limited apology to Haiti on Dec. 1, 2016, the first day of his last month as secretary-general. But U.N. lawyers edited the statement so thoroughly that Ban never said what he was apologizing for other than not having done ''enough with regard to the cholera outbreak and its spread.''

Relatives and patients treated for cholera after Hurricane Matthew in the Hospital of Port-a-Piment, Haiti, on Oct. 9, 2016. (C) Andres Martinez Casares / Reuters

By that time, cholera had surged again in Haiti after Hurricane Matthew smashed through the country's far southwestern peninsula in October 2016. Laura Chateau, a 26-year-old nurse from southwestern Haiti, left her storm-devastated hometown of Les Cayes to help neighboring villages being ravaged by disease. ''Right after the hurricane it was raining, raining, raining, with floods for days,'' she told me. ''People got infected and the water got contaminated. We brought aid, but there weren't enough resources.''

Philip Alston, a New York University law professor and U.N. adviser whose advocacy helped prompt Ban's apology, says the United Nations' refusal to accept legal responsibility is covered with U.S. fingerprints. ''The reason why the U.N. has done nothing about Haiti for the last six years is essentially legal advice that is coming from the U.S. State Department and then echoed by the U.N. Office of Legal Affairs. '... It's a totally inhumane, ruthless lawyerly tactic that just blocks out all of the humanitarian considerations, and all of the reputational costs for the U.N.''

U.N. officials proposed a $400 million effort to be voluntarily funded by member states. As initially conceived, about half the money would pay for health and sanitation to eradicate the disease, and the rest would go to Haitian victims, their families and communities. So far only France, India, Liechtenstein, Chile, and Ban's native South Korea have ponied up, for a total of roughly $2 million. The United Kingdom pledged a few hundred thousand. Canada and Japan promised to separately redirect aid money to the effort.

Sympathetic U.S. officials were unable to get any money out of the Obama administration before it ended. Given that Trump is currently proposing to slash funding for everything other than the U.S. military and the Mexico border wall, it seems unlikely the new administration will do differently.

Without support from member states, U.N. officials say their hands are tied. ''The way forward '... is hugely dependent on our membership,'' said David Nabarro, the U.N. official charged with raising money for the new cholera response, and a candidate for leadership of the U.N. World Health Organization. ''That restricts what we can do. It even restricts, I think, what opinions we can express.''

Not even Congress was able to get a straight answer on how the last administration justified the lack of accountability. Senators including Patrick Leahy, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, wrote Power while she was ambassador to argue for the U.N.'s legal responsibility toward Haiti. The State Department replied and simply avoided the question, said Tim Rieser, Leahy's foreign policy adviser.

Those like Chateau, who see the epidemic's daily toll, know there is no time to waste. ''This is a problem caused by the international community,'' she said. ''They can't get rid of cholera totally, but they can make it so Haitians avoid getting cholera. They can help put something in people's pockets so they can survive.''

Trump has never shown much interest in current or formerly colonized parts of the world, other than as places to makemoney. He briefly glommed onto Haiti at the end of the campaign when he realized Haitian Americans weren't fond of his opponent, the former secretary of state'--particularly in the crucial swing state of Florida. But his only action toward the country since winning has been to legitimize its even more recently, even more dubiously elected new right-wing president, Jovenel Mo¯se, with an inaugural delegation of longtime State Department hands and Trump's favorite black reality TV co-star, Omarosa Manigault.

Barring some overnight spasm of interest, Trump's Haiti policy will probably fall back on the Republican default. At her confirmation hearing, Haley echoed talking points from the conservative Heritage Foundation, which has used the Haiti cholera issue to call for U.N. reform, while making sure to stop short of having the U.S. held accountable in any way. Like Haley, its experts have also recommended passing the buck to troop-contributing countries such as Nepal'--ignoring the fact that the U.S. called for, voted for, and took the lead in paying for those peacekeeping missions in the first place.

No senior U.N. officials have been fired or punished for their roles in the 2010 cholera epidemic or cover-up.

There is a real crisis of unaccountability inside the U.N., of which the cholera crisis is only one example. Anthony Banbury, a longtime assistant secretary general who helped oversee peacekeeping, resigned in disgust last year, blasting the organization for allowing peacekeepers to rape and abuse people they were sent to help while protecting its own bureaucracy. Despite his reverence for the organization, Banbury wrote in a New York Times op-ed, it has become ''a black hole into which disappear countless tax dollars and human aspirations, never to be seen again.''

Meanwhile, no senior U.N. officials have been fired or punished for their roles in the cholera epidemic or cover-up. Guatemalan diplomat Edmond Mulet, who headed MINUSTAH when cholera was introduced, was continually promoted even as he openly lied about the epidemic's origins. He eventually became Ban's chief of staff and sat directly behind Ban as the U.N. chief recited his vague apology in December.

Member states ignored a letter from the new secretary-general, former Portuguese prime minister Ant"nio Guterres, asking them to declare by March 6 if they intended to contribute to the $400 million cholera fund. Insiders say a proposal to force member states to come up with that amount'--a fraction of the billions spent on MINUSTAH over 13 years'--by assessing it as part of their regular U.N. dues has likely been shelved amid resistance from the United States, Russia, and China.

In a March 16 letter to the Security Council, Guterres recommended shutting down MINUSTAH by Oct. 15 of this year but made no mention of using any part of its current $346 million annual budget to help pay for the damage it caused. Among the reasons to end the mission, Guterres noted, ''the outbreak of cholera in the country has impacted negatively on the country's development and on the public perception of MINUSTAH.''

Those flaws give Trump, Haley, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and the administration's allies plenty of cover in arguing for less American participation in an imperfect body. Trump's problem is that, for 70 years, the United States has depended on a strong and accountable United Nations as a linchpin of American power.

Top Comment

The UN is an institution Trump has derided as ''a waste of time and money.'' But he's wrong there. It's worse. More...

Founded by the victors of World War II in 1945 to prevent another global war, the institution headquartered on the east side of Manhattan has provided a place for countries to hash out their differences and make alliances'--and yes, ''get together, talk and have a good time'''--instead of massing troops on borders and punching in launch codes. The United States has used its veto-wielding position on the Security Council to legitimize its policies and condemn its rivals. But as the kind of anger and mistrust of the United Nations that has grown in Haiti is felt around the world, the authority and protection it has provided could come to an end.

Trump was born a year after the United Nations was founded. He wasn't in charge when its peacekeepers brought cholera to Haiti, nor when the U.S. government helped shield its leaders from accountability. But he's inherited its legacy, good and bad. And in global politics, as the new president may now be discovering, you can't just declare bankruptcy to get out of your debts.

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Archived Version

Tue, 28 Mar 2017 22:48

Public life Laura Silsby founded the New Life Children's Refuge and led the expedition in Haiti. Though she was freed after serving her sentence in Haiti, she also faced legal problems in Idaho [1][2]. In early March 2010, her attorney in these cases filed a motion to withdraw as her counsel.[3] Another lawyer who represented Silsby in a child custody case also withdrew as her attorney.[4]

Silsby faced civil lawsuits for fraud, wrongful termination and unpaid wages mostly related to Personal Shopper,[5][6][7] an Internet company that she founded in 1999 with James Hammons. Silsby and Hammons worked together at Hewlett-Packard [8].

Currently, Silsby goes by her married name, Laura Gayler, and works at AlertSense as their VP of Marketing.[9](archive.is) AlertSense provides a platform for issuing emergency alerts on a large scale. This includes Amber alerts for abducted children. For example in Arizona, Prescott eNews reported, "By broadcasting frequent public alerts, descriptions and other vital information in the crucial first hours after a child abduction, the Arizona AMBER Alert can enlist large numbers of citizens in an effort to recover the child as soon as possible. AMBER Alert notifications are supported by the AlertSense AMBER Alert Web Based System and the Emergency Alert System (EAS)"[10](archive.is)

Source: Wikipedia on New Life Children's Refuge

Pizzagate findings The online blog, Zerohedge.com, did a great objective writeup explaining this scandal. It is highly recommended.

Here is the abstract from Zerohedge.com, The Clinton-Silsby Trafficking Scandal And How The Media Attempted To Ignore/Cover It Up, by William Craddick, published on January 25th, 2017:[11][Archived Version]

Abstract:Contrary to reports in the media, the crowd sourced investigation labeled by some as "Pizzagate" did not begin with internet sleuths digging through the Wikileaks Podesta Files releases looking for pizza parlors and encoded language discussing human trafficking. It began with the shocking discovery that Hillary and [[Bill Clinton]] provided assistance to convicted child trafficker, Laura Silsby, resulting in a reduced sentence for child trafficking.Silsby was arrested at the Haitian border attempting to smuggle 33 children out of Haiti without documentation. Her sentence and charges were reduced after an intervention by [[Bill Clinton]]. In the aftermath of Silsby's arrest, her originally retained lawyer [[Jorge Puello]] was arrested in connection with an international smuggling ring accused of trafficking women and minors from Central America and Haiti. The revelation of this news in November was either ignored by the Western media or attacked by Clinton controlled publications.Attempt to abduct 33 children from Haiti Laura Silsby was caught and faced charges in 2010 for trying to abduct 33 children from Haiti, most of whom were not even orphans and had families. Ms. Silsby had claimed she originaly planned to build an orphanage in the Dominican Republic, but authorities in the country said she never submitted an application for this purpose. Silsby's organization instead located to Haiti after the earthquake in February 2010.[12][13]

Silsby's connections to the Clintons, which go back as far as 2001, may have influenced the outcome of her case. Three days after the arrival of Bill Clinton to Haiti following the earthquake, all charges of kidnapping were dropped against Ms. Silsby.[14]

Connection to Hillary Clinton Clintons negotiate to significantly lower charges for Laura Silsby Huma Abedin was constantly forwarding Hillary articles on Silsby's organization and its status leading up to the event: https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/2772

Then Bill Clinton arrived in Haiti three weeks after the earthquake in February 2010 and just days after Laura Silsby and the New Life Children's Refuge missionaries were arrested. Within one month he managed to convince the Haitian government that there had been no wrong-doing and the charges were dropped from kidnapping to "irregular air travel".[15] All the missionaries were immediately freed aside from Laura Silsby, who then served 4 months in Haitian jail.[16]

Further connections between Laura, the Clintons, and trafficking Jorge Puello, the attorney who represented Laura Silsby, was himself convicted as a sex trafficker[17]

An email in Wikileaks was uncovered from the State Department describing the costs to transport children which included religious rhetoric:

UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05766639 Date: 08/31/2015 ' For God to guide us to the children He wants us to bring to NLCR and for their physical, emotional and spiritual healingSource: WikiLeaks

Cheryl Mills, close attorney to the Clintons, was intimately involved in the press releases surrounding the United States portrayal of Silsby's arrest.[18][19] Silsby and the New Life Children's Refuge come up many times in the Clinton emails in fact.[20]

Hillary Clinton also contacted a lawyer regarding the 10 people who were arrested for their roles in the New Life Children's Refuge kidnapping case.[21]

Special thanks to Voat user @Look_See_Think

More info on this story: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1249280/Haiti-earthquake-Missionaries-led-Laura-Silsby-accused-stealing-orphans.html

Connection to Max Maccoby and James Achilles Alefantis Special thanks to Voat user Sentastixc

Jorge Puello http://mobile.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/world/americas/16haiti.html[Archived Version]

July, 2009 - Laura Silsby and Charisa Coulter visit Dominican Republic and inquired about property in the northwestern village of Gaspar Hernandez, a known pedophile area. (Boston, [26])Nov, 2009 - Bill Clinton was scheduled to visit somebody at the NPH orphanage in Haiti, Friends of the Orphans, which is eventually revealed to be the orphanage that Laura Silsby was given children from. (Robin Forestal, [27])Dec 7, 2009 - Laura Silsby's $358,500 house gets foreclosed by the bank. (New York Times, [28])During late December, Laura Silsby and Charisa Coulter visited Haiti for a week to visit some orphanages. (Wall Street Journal, [30])Jan 12, 2010 - 7.3 magnitude earthquake hits 10 miles Southwest of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. [32]The Friends of the Orphans building in Petionville, Fr. Wasson Center, collapses, and 4 volunteers, including orphanage volunteer Molly Hightower, die. (NPH, [33])Official reports show that it originally housed 450 children, indicating an unexplained disappearance of 100 children. (NPH, [35]) (Molly Hightower, [36])Coincidentally, this number matches Laura Silsby's documented mission statement to collect 100 orphans. [37]Jan 15, 2010 - Body of volunteer, Molly Hightower recovered from Fr. Wasson Center in Petionville.Jan 22, 2010 - (NLCR) New Life Children's Refuge team flies to Dominican Republic.Jan 23, 2010 - Team takes a bus from Santo Domingo into Port-au-Prince, Haiti. (New York Times, [38])Jan 24, 2010 - Laura Silsby meets Ms d'Adesky at Lino Hotel in Santo Domingo, and dismisses warnings about the need documentation. (Anne d'Adesky, [39])Jan 26, 2010 - A director at Friends of the Orphans meets Laura Silsby at the collapsed Fr. Wasson Center in Petionville and loads 40 orphans onto the bus. (Fox News, [40])A concerned citizen catches them in the act and reports to a police officer, who stops them and orders the children to get off the bus. Afterwards, he directs Laura Silsby to the Dominican embassy. (CNN, [41])Dominican Republic consul in Haiti warns Laura Silsby that without necessary documentation, her actions would be considered child-trafficking. (CNN, [42])Jan 27, 2010 - Laura Silsby visits Ouanaminthe and meets with pastor Jean Sainvil to discuss the next plan. (NY Daily News, [43])Jan 28, 2010 - Jean Sainvil approaches villages and convinces parents to hand over their children. (NY Daily News, [44])Jan 29, 2010 - Laura Silsby and missionaries arrested for trying to take 33 children out of Haiti. (Boston, [45])Jan 30, 2010 - Pastor Jean Sainvil hears of Laura Silsby's arrest, and leaves the country. (Wall Street Journal, [46])Feb, 2010 - Hillary Clinton and staff work with media on press release regarding the (NLCR) New Life Children's Refuge . (Wikileaks, [47], [48]) NLCR is brought up several times in Clinton emails. (Wikileaks, [49])Feb 5, 2010 - Bill Clinton flies into Port-au-Prince for the second time since the earthquake, to negotiate a solution. (United Nations (UN) , [50])Feb 7, 2010 - ''And I was just amazed to see she was down in Haiti, saying she was trying to save orphans. She never struck me as the do-gooder type,'' says neighbor Chris Wentzel. (The Sunday Telegraph, [51])March, 2010 - her attorney in these cases filed a motion to withdraw as her counsel [52] (name of attorney referencing?)2015 - Silsby married and took the last name Gayler [53] (source of date of marriage?)See also External links

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Tue, 28 Mar 2017 22:46

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Thu, 30 Mar 2017 21:53

Pop singer Alicia Keys has reportedly come under fire for posting a photo of a woman in a tight-fitting burqa. According to Infowars, Keys posted the photo on Sunday evening along with a pro-diversity message.

Very quickly, several Twitter users lashed out at her.

Here are screenshots of replies to the now-deleted tweet collected by Infowars.

Note: It's not clear if it was actually Alicia Keys in the photo, although the following Twitter user claims it was.

At least one user mentioned Malak Al Shehri '' a Saudi woman who was detained by religious police for posting a photo of herself without a burqa. Shehri also received death threats for her act of defiance.

Elsewhere on Twitter, one user accused Alicia Keys of not even taking the time to find a woman actually striking that pose in a burqa but instead having it photoshopped on.

Zoom in on the picture. It looks like the Burka was actually Photoshopped in.

No words.

(h/t @DaDiDaDIDum for spotting it) pic.twitter.com/g0WTjTrOE5

'-- DatNoFact (@datnofact) March 28, 2017

Infowars reports that Keys ultimately deleted the photo yesterday, offering no explanation or apology. Sources:

Infowars

The Daily Mail

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Archived Version

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 16:13

North Korea is accusing the US of spreading the Ebola virus, claiming it has been ''bent on the development of bio-weapons'' in order to achieve world supremacy.

The secretive state reacted strongly to the Ebola outbreak by closing its border to tourists and quarantining anyone who does enter.

Now, a report by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) is claiming an aide to ex-President Reagan informed them the US had invented a progenitor of Ebola virus ''for the purpose of launching a biological warfare''.

The aide was named as Roberts, who The Washington Post said could be a reference to Paul Craig Roberts, an econmoist.

Mr Roberts recently published a blog post entitled 'Is The US Government The Master Criminal Of Our Time?' which cited work published by two academics on Ebola.

Only a few weeks after a UN resolution condemned the country's human right's record, The KCNA criticised the US for its own human rights record.

The article said the US had given $140 million (£89 million) to a pharmaceutical company for research into the virus and chose Africa as a bio-weapon testing ground. It credited this claim to an unnamed Liberian professor.

It also claimed that the ''US Department of Health and Human Services'' admitted that the US ''imperialists'' have long conducted ''vivisections with fatal epidemics, inflicting untold sufferings on mankind''.

Video: President Obama urges Congress for emergency Ebola funds It added: ''Russian, Singaporean and American newspapers criticised that the US developed anti-Ebola virus vaccine through experiment on Ebola contagion, but has prevented this vaccine from being known to the world, only for its own interests.''

It also went on to claim that the Aids pandemic was also created by the US. In one final accusation, it said: ''As already known to everyone, the US is the world's biggest nuke possessor.''

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Tue, 28 Mar 2017 15:25

less

The City of St. Louis and St. Clair County, Illinois, are among the areas considered at high risk for transmission of Zika infection.

That's according to an early online article in the American Journal of Public Health by Saint Louis University researchers.

The researchers at Saint Louis University put the bulls-eye of Zika transmission on the Mississippi delta.

They also predicted the virus, which is spread sexually and by bites from the Aedes aegypti mosquito, is likely to be transmitted in southern states extending northward along the Atlantic coast and in southern California.

''The purpose of this study was not to create unwarranted alarm, but rather to enhance Zika prevention methods such as mosquito control, effective prevention message dissemination, and treatment and care preparation, in advance of a Zika epidemic in the contiguous U.S.'' said Enbal Shacham, Ph.D., M.Ed., associate professor of behavioral sciences and health education at Saint Louis University and the lead author of the study.

''We need significant planning and prevention in areas and populations most likely to experience the highest burdens from Zika infection. Timely strategies to communicate risk, control mosquito populations, and prevent disease transmission are imperative to preventing a large-scale Zika epidemic in the United States.''

Zika poses the most serious threat to unborn babies who may die or develop devastating birth defects, such as brain damage, after their mothers contract Zika during pregnancy.

About 80 percent of those who contract Zika have no symptoms, which means they may engage in sexual activity without any indication they are at risk of transmitting the virus.

(C) 2017 KSDK-TV

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Thu, 30 Mar 2017 21:55

Two anti-abortion activists are facing 15 felony charges after they secretly filmed themselves trying to buy aborted fetal tissue from Planned Parenthood. (In case you missed it, these attempts were unsuccessful because, duh. But that didn't stop them from editing this video footage and then using it to claim that the women's health provider was selling baby parts. They weren't.)

State Attorney General Xavier Becerra announced the charges against David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt on Tuesday. The Associated Press reports:

Subscribe to our Youtube ChannelThe allegations say the pair filmed 14 people without permission between October 2013 and July 2015 in Los Angeles, San Francisco and El Dorado counties. One felony count was filed for each person. The 15th was for criminal conspiracy to invade privacy.

According to Becerra, Daleiden and Merritt created a fictitious biomedical research company, which they then lied about in order to convince representatives of Planned Parenthood to meet with them '-- and then they secretly recorded them without their knowledge.

Daleiden claims these charges are ''bogus'' and are only being brought against him because of ''Planned Parenthood's political cronies.'' Naturally.

''The public knows the real criminals are Planned Parenthood and their business partners,'' Daleiden said. (For the record, the women's health care provider has committed zero crimes.)

Last April, Daleiden claimed on social media that his home had been raided by agents from the California Department of Justice who confiscated all his video footage, among other things. There had been no word on the investigation since then until the charges were filed with the San Francisco Superior Court on Tuesday.

In January of 2016, Daleiden and Merritt were both indicted on similar charges by a grand jury in Texas. That grand jury had originally been convened to investigate Planned Parenthood, but not only did they find no wrongdoing on the part of the women's health care provider, they also ended up indicting the filmmakers for their bogus video. Unfortunately, these charges were dropped because the prosecutor said the jury had overstepped since this was not why they were convened.

Featured image via Eric Kayne/Getty Images

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Archived Version

Sat, 01 Apr 2017 17:10

The Texas Senate Committee and State Affairs voted this week to advance a controversial bill that would prevent parents from suing their care provider if their baby is born with disabilities, even if their doctor discovered the fetus' condition and failed to disclose it.

Proponents say Senate Bill 25 protects doctors and children with disabilities, but opponents have slammed it as a thinly veiled attempt to curb abortion rights by extending protections to doctors who mislead their patients.

''SB 25 would allow doctors to lie to their patients,'' Heather Busby, executive director at the advocacy group NARAL Pro-Choice Texas, said in a statement to The Huffington Post.

If, for example, an OB-GYN discovered during an ultrasound that a fetus had severe abnormalities and failed to inform his or her patient '• knowing the mother might chose to terminate the pregnancy '• that mother would be prevented from later bringing what is known as a ''wrongful birth'' suit.

''Pregnant Texans deserve to feel like they can trust their doctor to provide them with all the information and when the doctor does not do that, those families deserve to have a legal avenue to seek compensation to care for special needs children,'' Busby said.

Doctors who treat pregnant women have expressed their concern.

''Unanticipated fetal anomalies can be devastating in pregnancy. In those tragic moments, it is of vital importance that the patient be able to consider all of her options and decide what's best for her and her family,'' Dr. Lauren Thaxton, an OB-GYN in New Mexico and a fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health, told HuffPost.

''The concept of a physician not offering patients a full spectrum of options is unacceptable. It's not about us as providers and our personal beliefs, it's about the patient,'' she continued.

Now that SB25 has been voted through committee, it will move onto the state's full senate for a vote.

But this is not the first time Texas legislators have attempted to pass a ''wrongful birth'' lawsuit. A similar 2015 bill failed to become law that year.

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Archived Version

Sat, 01 Apr 2017 17:07

The Texas Senate Committee and State Affairs voted this week to advance a controversial bill that would prevent parents from suing their care provider if their baby is born with disabilities, even if their doctor discovered the fetus' condition and failed to disclose it.

Proponents say Senate Bill 25 protects doctors and children with disabilities, but opponents have slammed it as a thinly veiled attempt to curb abortion rights by extending protections to doctors who mislead their patients.

''SB 25 would allow doctors to lie to their patients,'' Heather Busby, executive director at the advocacy group NARAL Pro-Choice Texas, said in a statement to The Huffington Post.

If, for example, an OB-GYN discovered during an ultrasound that a fetus had severe abnormalities and failed to inform his or her patient '• knowing the mother might chose to terminate the pregnancy '• that mother would be prevented from later bringing what is known as a ''wrongful birth'' suit.

''Pregnant Texans deserve to feel like they can trust their doctor to provide them with all the information and when the doctor does not do that, those families deserve to have a legal avenue to seek compensation to care for special needs children,'' Busby said.

Doctors who treat pregnant women have expressed their concern.

''Unanticipated fetal anomalies can be devastating in pregnancy. In those tragic moments, it is of vital importance that the patient be able to consider all of her options and decide what's best for her and her family,'' Dr. Lauren Thaxton, an OB-GYN in New Mexico and a fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health, told HuffPost.

''The concept of a physician not offering patients a full spectrum of options is unacceptable. It's not about us as providers and our personal beliefs, it's about the patient,'' she continued.

Now that SB25 has been voted through committee, it will move onto the state's full senate for a vote.

But this is not the first time Texas legislators have attempted to pass a ''wrongful birth'' lawsuit. A similar 2015 bill failed to become law that year.

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Archived Version

Sat, 01 Apr 2017 17:05

A BILL TO BE ENTITLED

AN ACT

relating to eliminating the wrongful birth cause of action. BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF TEXAS: SECTION 1. Title 4, Civil Practice and Remedies Code, is amended by adding Chapter 71A to read as follows: CHAPTER 71A. PROHIBITED CAUSES OF ACTION Sec. 71A.001. WRONGFUL BIRTH. A cause of action may not arise, and damages may not be awarded, on behalf of any person, based on the claim that but for the act or omission of another, a person would not have been permitted to have been born alive but would have been aborted. SECTION 2. The change in law made by this Act applies only to a cause of action that accrues on or after the effective date of this Act. A cause of action that accrues before the effective date of this Act is governed by the law applicable to the cause of action immediately before the effective date of this Act, and that law is continued in effect for that purpose. SECTION 3. This Act takes effect September 1, 2017.

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Archived Version

Sat, 01 Apr 2017 06:21

March 31, 2017 03/31/2017 3:49 a.m. By Margaret Hartmann ShareNo matter where he goes, he knows where he came from (Exxon). Photo: Alex Wong/Getty ImagesRex Tillerson has never attempted to stab a childhood friend or fumbled his call for the elimination of the agency he now leads, yet he's emerged as a strong contender for the title of weirdest Trump Cabinet member. The secretary of State goes to great lengths to avoid the press and sometimes uses the alias Wayne Tracker, but the Washington Postreports that his relationship with his co-workers may be even weirder:

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson takes a private elevator to his palatial office on the seventh floor of the State Department building, where sightings of him are rare on the floors below.

On many days, he blocks out several hours on his schedule as ''reading time,'' when he is cloistered in his office poring over the memos he prefers ahead of in-person meetings.

Most of his interactions are with an insular circle of political aides who are new to the State Department. Many career diplomats say they still have not met him, and some have been instructed not to speak to him directly '-- or even make eye contact.

The claim that Tillerson has adopted J.Lo's alleged method for handling underlings lit up Twitter on Thursday night, though AP diplomatic reporter Matt Lee cast doubts on its veracity.

The Post's point wasn't that Tillerson is a diva, but that in addition to confusing foreign officials and potentially undermining the State Department's power, the secretary's reclusive behavior has ''sown mistrust among career employees at State, who swap paranoid stories about Tillerson that often turn out to be untrue.'' The story about making eye contact with Tillerson is the most galling, but his aide also had to shoot down rumors that he doesn't intend to fill certain key positions in the department and plans to tear up an attractive office next to his own to install cubicles.

False claims about Tillerson have already caused friction with a key U.S. ally. Earlier this month, Tillerson was forced to deny reports that he skipped a dinner with South Korean officials because he was too tired, and his statement suggested that Seoul officials lied about the incident.

If members of the media had access to Tillerson they might be able to refute these wild rumors. But since Tillerson is ''not a big media press access person,'' there are few who can assure the public that the secretary won't fly into a rage if he finds harsh lighting and brown M&Ms in his office.

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Sat, 01 Apr 2017 17:14

By Marc Leras and Simon Carraud

MARSEILLE/BIGUGLIA, France (Reuters) - France's centrist presidential contender Emmanuel Macron singled out the far-right National Front as his chief rival on Saturday, vowing to win the first round on April 23 as a new poll showed the election race getting tighter.

"The National Front, our main opponent, is attacking us on all sides. Never boo them. Fight them," a defiant Macron told a rally in the southern city of Marseille.

"I want us to kick far from this campaign and from the country the party of hatred and contempt and all those who make us so ashamed. We are going to be ahead in the first round and we're going to beat them," he said.

The presidential race is even closer than it was a week ago, an opinion poll indicated on Saturday.

First-round voting intentions for the frontrunners, Macron and National Front leader Marine Le Pen, showed both slipping one percentage point to 25 percent and 24 percent respectively.

Third-placed conservative Francois Fillon gained two points to 19 percent, while the far left's Jean-Luc Melenchon climbed one point to 15 percent, according to the survey by the BVA polling institute conducted on March 29-30.

Complicating predictions, 38 percent of people either could not say how they would vote, or may yet change their minds. That was down two percentage points from a week earlier, but showed the race remains wide open.

The poll showed independent Macron had solidified his voter base, with 63 percent of those opting for him sure of their decision, up 8 points from a week ago and his highest certainty score since campaigning began in earnest in February.

However, Le Pen still had by far the most solid voter base, with an unchanged 81 percent of her voters certain to pick her.

FILLON STIRS "FAILING STATE" CONTROVERSY

Shock election outcomes abroad including the U.S. presidential victory of Donald Trump and Britain's Brexit referendum vote have fed expectations that Le Pen's anti-euro, anti-immigration platform could sweep her to power in France.

The poll though, like others this year, showed Macron beating her with 60 percent of votes in the May 7 second round.

Fillon's recovery from the lows that followed a fake work scandal surrounding his wife puts him within 5 points of Le Pen and 6 points of Macron, with some voters previously tempted to abstain deciding to go for him after all, BVA's commentary said.

BVA put Melenchon's climb since a strong performance in the first TV debate on March 20 partly down to more of his natural sympathizers deciding to vote.

It said official Socialist candidate Benoit Hamon, who is in fifth place on 11.5 percent and also has hard left policies, could be vulnerable.

Le Pen was due to hold a meeting in Bordeaux on Sunday, but it was her two main rivals who made headlines on Saturday.

During his visit to Marseille, Macron met conservative and security hardliner Christian Estrosi, part of his strategy to show he wants to transcend the right-left divide.

Estrosi is a key ally of conservative former President Nicolas Sarkozy. He stands a long way to the right of the Socialist government in which Macron was economy minister until last year, but was among those who tried and failed to oust scandal-hit Fillon as the candidate of The Republicans.

Fillon sought to get his campaign back on track by turning back the clock with a warning about France's heavy debts.

France faces the same fate as Greece, he said during a visit to Corsica, reviving a controversy he stoked on the Mediterranean island in 2007 when -- during his term as prime minister under Sarkozy -- he said he was head of a "failing state."

Fillon has based his campaign on the need to rein in spending and cut France's deficit, pledging 100 billion euros ($106.5 billion) of spending cuts and a reduction of 500,000 public sector jobs, proposals that are tougher than those of any other mainstream candidate.

(Additional reporting by Dominique Vidalon in Paris; Editing by Andrew Callus and Helen Popper)

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Tue, 28 Mar 2017 22:48

Public life Laura Silsby founded the New Life Children's Refuge and led the expedition in Haiti. Though she was freed after serving her sentence in Haiti, she also faced legal problems in Idaho [1][2]. In early March 2010, her attorney in these cases filed a motion to withdraw as her counsel.[3] Another lawyer who represented Silsby in a child custody case also withdrew as her attorney.[4]

Silsby faced civil lawsuits for fraud, wrongful termination and unpaid wages mostly related to Personal Shopper,[5][6][7] an Internet company that she founded in 1999 with James Hammons. Silsby and Hammons worked together at Hewlett-Packard [8].

Currently, Silsby goes by her married name, Laura Gayler, and works at AlertSense as their VP of Marketing.[9](archive.is) AlertSense provides a platform for issuing emergency alerts on a large scale. This includes Amber alerts for abducted children. For example in Arizona, Prescott eNews reported, "By broadcasting frequent public alerts, descriptions and other vital information in the crucial first hours after a child abduction, the Arizona AMBER Alert can enlist large numbers of citizens in an effort to recover the child as soon as possible. AMBER Alert notifications are supported by the AlertSense AMBER Alert Web Based System and the Emergency Alert System (EAS)"[10](archive.is)

Source: Wikipedia on New Life Children's Refuge

Pizzagate findings The online blog, Zerohedge.com, did a great objective writeup explaining this scandal. It is highly recommended.

Here is the abstract from Zerohedge.com, The Clinton-Silsby Trafficking Scandal And How The Media Attempted To Ignore/Cover It Up, by William Craddick, published on January 25th, 2017:[11][Archived Version]

Abstract:Contrary to reports in the media, the crowd sourced investigation labeled by some as "Pizzagate" did not begin with internet sleuths digging through the Wikileaks Podesta Files releases looking for pizza parlors and encoded language discussing human trafficking. It began with the shocking discovery that Hillary and [[Bill Clinton]] provided assistance to convicted child trafficker, Laura Silsby, resulting in a reduced sentence for child trafficking.Silsby was arrested at the Haitian border attempting to smuggle 33 children out of Haiti without documentation. Her sentence and charges were reduced after an intervention by [[Bill Clinton]]. In the aftermath of Silsby's arrest, her originally retained lawyer [[Jorge Puello]] was arrested in connection with an international smuggling ring accused of trafficking women and minors from Central America and Haiti. The revelation of this news in November was either ignored by the Western media or attacked by Clinton controlled publications.Attempt to abduct 33 children from Haiti Laura Silsby was caught and faced charges in 2010 for trying to abduct 33 children from Haiti, most of whom were not even orphans and had families. Ms. Silsby had claimed she originaly planned to build an orphanage in the Dominican Republic, but authorities in the country said she never submitted an application for this purpose. Silsby's organization instead located to Haiti after the earthquake in February 2010.[12][13]

Silsby's connections to the Clintons, which go back as far as 2001, may have influenced the outcome of her case. Three days after the arrival of Bill Clinton to Haiti following the earthquake, all charges of kidnapping were dropped against Ms. Silsby.[14]

Connection to Hillary Clinton Clintons negotiate to significantly lower charges for Laura Silsby Huma Abedin was constantly forwarding Hillary articles on Silsby's organization and its status leading up to the event: https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/2772

Then Bill Clinton arrived in Haiti three weeks after the earthquake in February 2010 and just days after Laura Silsby and the New Life Children's Refuge missionaries were arrested. Within one month he managed to convince the Haitian government that there had been no wrong-doing and the charges were dropped from kidnapping to "irregular air travel".[15] All the missionaries were immediately freed aside from Laura Silsby, who then served 4 months in Haitian jail.[16]

Further connections between Laura, the Clintons, and trafficking Jorge Puello, the attorney who represented Laura Silsby, was himself convicted as a sex trafficker[17]

An email in Wikileaks was uncovered from the State Department describing the costs to transport children which included religious rhetoric:

UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05766639 Date: 08/31/2015 ' For God to guide us to the children He wants us to bring to NLCR and for their physical, emotional and spiritual healingSource: WikiLeaks

Cheryl Mills, close attorney to the Clintons, was intimately involved in the press releases surrounding the United States portrayal of Silsby's arrest.[18][19] Silsby and the New Life Children's Refuge come up many times in the Clinton emails in fact.[20]

Hillary Clinton also contacted a lawyer regarding the 10 people who were arrested for their roles in the New Life Children's Refuge kidnapping case.[21]

Special thanks to Voat user @Look_See_Think

More info on this story: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1249280/Haiti-earthquake-Missionaries-led-Laura-Silsby-accused-stealing-orphans.html

Connection to Max Maccoby and James Achilles Alefantis Special thanks to Voat user Sentastixc

Jorge Puello http://mobile.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/world/americas/16haiti.html[Archived Version]

July, 2009 - Laura Silsby and Charisa Coulter visit Dominican Republic and inquired about property in the northwestern village of Gaspar Hernandez, a known pedophile area. (Boston, [26])Nov, 2009 - Bill Clinton was scheduled to visit somebody at the NPH orphanage in Haiti, Friends of the Orphans, which is eventually revealed to be the orphanage that Laura Silsby was given children from. (Robin Forestal, [27])Dec 7, 2009 - Laura Silsby's $358,500 house gets foreclosed by the bank. (New York Times, [28])During late December, Laura Silsby and Charisa Coulter visited Haiti for a week to visit some orphanages. (Wall Street Journal, [30])Jan 12, 2010 - 7.3 magnitude earthquake hits 10 miles Southwest of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. [32]The Friends of the Orphans building in Petionville, Fr. Wasson Center, collapses, and 4 volunteers, including orphanage volunteer Molly Hightower, die. (NPH, [33])Official reports show that it originally housed 450 children, indicating an unexplained disappearance of 100 children. (NPH, [35]) (Molly Hightower, [36])Coincidentally, this number matches Laura Silsby's documented mission statement to collect 100 orphans. [37]Jan 15, 2010 - Body of volunteer, Molly Hightower recovered from Fr. Wasson Center in Petionville.Jan 22, 2010 - (NLCR) New Life Children's Refuge team flies to Dominican Republic.Jan 23, 2010 - Team takes a bus from Santo Domingo into Port-au-Prince, Haiti. (New York Times, [38])Jan 24, 2010 - Laura Silsby meets Ms d'Adesky at Lino Hotel in Santo Domingo, and dismisses warnings about the need documentation. (Anne d'Adesky, [39])Jan 26, 2010 - A director at Friends of the Orphans meets Laura Silsby at the collapsed Fr. Wasson Center in Petionville and loads 40 orphans onto the bus. (Fox News, [40])A concerned citizen catches them in the act and reports to a police officer, who stops them and orders the children to get off the bus. Afterwards, he directs Laura Silsby to the Dominican embassy. (CNN, [41])Dominican Republic consul in Haiti warns Laura Silsby that without necessary documentation, her actions would be considered child-trafficking. (CNN, [42])Jan 27, 2010 - Laura Silsby visits Ouanaminthe and meets with pastor Jean Sainvil to discuss the next plan. (NY Daily News, [43])Jan 28, 2010 - Jean Sainvil approaches villages and convinces parents to hand over their children. (NY Daily News, [44])Jan 29, 2010 - Laura Silsby and missionaries arrested for trying to take 33 children out of Haiti. (Boston, [45])Jan 30, 2010 - Pastor Jean Sainvil hears of Laura Silsby's arrest, and leaves the country. (Wall Street Journal, [46])Feb, 2010 - Hillary Clinton and staff work with media on press release regarding the (NLCR) New Life Children's Refuge . (Wikileaks, [47], [48]) NLCR is brought up several times in Clinton emails. (Wikileaks, [49])Feb 5, 2010 - Bill Clinton flies into Port-au-Prince for the second time since the earthquake, to negotiate a solution. (United Nations (UN) , [50])Feb 7, 2010 - ''And I was just amazed to see she was down in Haiti, saying she was trying to save orphans. She never struck me as the do-gooder type,'' says neighbor Chris Wentzel. (The Sunday Telegraph, [51])March, 2010 - her attorney in these cases filed a motion to withdraw as her counsel [52] (name of attorney referencing?)2015 - Silsby married and took the last name Gayler [53] (source of date of marriage?)See also External links

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Sat, 01 Apr 2017 06:01

The White House will briefly become the "blue house" on Sunday to mark World Autism Awareness Day.

Spokesman Sean Spicer says President Donald Trump is keeping a promise to the late wife of his friend Bob Wright that he would illuminate the White House in blue if he won the election.

Bob Wright and his wife, Suzanne, founded the advocacy group Autism Speaks in 2005. The organization uses the color blue in its logo.

Suzanne Wright died in 2016.

Spicer says it's in honor of the Wrights that the White House on Sunday will help draw attention to a "great cause."

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Sat, 01 Apr 2017 06:01

CREDIT: AP Photo/Evan VucciDuring Friday's press briefing, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer announced that the White House would participate in World Autism Day on Sunday by shining a blue light on the building.

This tribute, however, is a stark reminder that President Trump is the source of considerable misinformation about autism.

Trump has said that vaccines cause autism, a conspiracy theory that was only ever propped up by one since-discredited study. Trump has promoted this dangerous myth for several years without any evidence to support it. More recently, he tapped Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'Š'--'Šone of the most prominent proponents of the myth'Š'--'Što advise him on vaccines and autism and to chair a committee on ''vaccine safety and scientific integrity.'' Trump has also claimed that autism rates are increasing, even though that's not the case.

Spicer also noted that the idea to observe World Autism Day came from Bob Wright, a ''long-time friend of the president.'' Wright, and his late wife Suzanne, founded the organization Autism Speaks, which has become one of the largest advocacy organizations for autism. Unfortunately, Autism Speaks has also contributed to the myth that vaccines are a cause of autism.

In 2009, Autism Speaks' executive vice president of communications and awareness, Alison Singer, resigned in protest of the organization's openness to the belief that vaccines could cause autism and that ''more studies should be done.'' She went on to found the Autism Science Foundation, which prominently proclaims the safety and importance of vaccines.

Wright himself continues to prop up this myth. He wrote in his 2016 book that he tried to convince the Bush and Obama administrations to invest more in vaccine safety. In an interview with Today after the book came out, Wright said that ''there is no definitive answer'' to whether vaccines cause autism. ''We have not been able to determine that autism is caused by vaccines,'' he said. ''However, there are lots of issues having to do with the vaccine safety program that I got into very deeply, with no agenda, early on in autism.''

It's unclear if Wright is the source of Trump's belief in the myth.

There is some evidence that Trump has helped reinvigorate the anti-vaxxer movement. On Friday, those who reject the science behind vaccines held a ''revolution for truth'' in Washington, D.C., a march and rally that includes Kennedy, Trump's anti-vaxxer in residence, as a speaker.

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Fri, 31 Mar 2017 10:13

A family member holds twins Eloisa (left) and Eloa, both 8 months old and born with microcephaly, during a Christmas gathering. The mother of the twins, Raquel, who lives in Brazil, said she contracted Zika during her pregnancy. Mario Tama/Getty Imageshide caption

toggle captionMario Tama/Getty Images A family member holds twins Eloisa (left) and Eloa, both 8 months old and born with microcephaly, during a Christmas gathering. The mother of the twins, Raquel, who lives in Brazil, said she contracted Zika during her pregnancy.

Mario Tama/Getty Images Back in 2015, Brazil reported a horrific a surge in birth defects. Thousands of babies were born with brain damage and abnormally small heads, a condition called microcephaly.

Scientists quickly concluded the Zika virus was the culprit. So when Zika returned last year during Brazil's summer months of December, January and February '-- when mosquitoes are most active '-- health officials expected another surge in microcephaly cases.

But that never happened.

"We apparently saw a lot of cases Zika virus in 2016. But there was no microcephaly," says Christopher Dye of the World Health Organization.

The difference between 2015 and 2016 "is spectacular," he says.

Health officials were predicting more than 1,000 cases of microcephaly in the northeast of Brazil last year. But there were fewer than 100, Dye and his colleagues report Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

"This is a huge, huge discrepancy," Dye says. "So what could possibly be the explanation for that?"

Scientists aren't sure, Dye says. But he and his colleagues suggest a few possibilities in their study.

First off, Dye says, health officials could have vastly overestimated the number of Zika cases in Brazil.

Zika can be misdiagnosed as another mosquito-borne virus, called chikungunya. Both viruses cause a fever, a rash and joint pain. "So chikungunya can easily be mistaken for Zika," Dye says.

But chikungunya doesn't cause microcephaly.

So perhaps Brazil actually didn't have that many Zika cases in 2016. And in turn, there weren't a lot of babies born with microcephaly.

Now for this theory to hold true, we're talking about thousands of Zika cases being mistaken for a totally different virus that's not even closely related to Zika. Could this really happen?

"Yes, I do think it's a possibility," Dye says. "This is this is our best view of what happened in 2016."

But Albert Ko at Yale School of Public Health doesn't quite buy it.

"Misdiagnosis is a reasonable hypothesis. But it's not clear that this explanation accounts for the whole story," says Ko, an epidemiologist, who is studying mothers and babies born with Zika in the northeast part of Brazil.

Ko think's there's another possible explanation: When a pregnant woman contracts Zika, that might not be enough to cause microcephaly in all cases. In other words, Zika might not be working alone.

Since the surge in Brazil's microcephaly cases in 2015, many scientists began to wonder whether a second virus could be involved. Maybe another infection combines with Zika to make the disease worse and increase the risk of birth defects.

Dye agrees that this phenomenon could be contributing to the overestimation of microcephaly cases.

In particular, scientists have their eyes on another mosquito-borne virus, which is common in Brazil, called dengue. In 2015, the country recorded more than 1.5 million cases of dengue, including many in the northeast, where many of the birth defects occurred.

"Everything is probably speculation at this point," Ko says. "But many groups are concerned about the exposure to dengue in Brazil."

Here's why.

Dengue is a complex virus. There are actually five different versions. Prior exposure to one version of dengue can actually make your illness worse when you're exposed to a second version.

And what's closely related to dengue? Zika.

"So another hypothesis is that prior exposure to dengue may actually enhance or promote the risk of birth defects from Zika," Ko says.

Right now, there is no evidence that a dengue infection exacerbates the symptoms of Zika '-- or increases its risk to pregnant women.

But several studies suggest it could happen. For starters, the presence of dengue antibodies helps the Zika virus infect cells in a petri dish.

And now, scientists are reporting that dengue antibodies make a Zika infection more deadly in mice.

Typically mice don't get Zika. But a team at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York engineered the animals to be susceptible to a Zika infection by crippling their immune systems.

The engineered mice get a fever and show signs of neurological problems when they're infected with Zika. Fewer than 10 percent of them die from the infection.

But when the mice received dengue antibodies before the Zika infection, the outcome was quite different. More than 80 percent of the mice died after eight days, immunologist Jean Lim and her colleagues report Thursday in the journal Science.

So now the big question is: Does a similar phenomenon occur in people?

Ko is working on epidemiological studies in northeast Brazil, right now, to see whether that is the case. If the dengue theory turns out to be true, it could mean the global threat of Zika for pregnant women is less dire than scientists originally thought.

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Source: The Deplorable Climate Science Blog

Fri, 31 Mar 2017 10:45

EARTH'S CLIMATIC CRISIS EXAMINED BY 'NOVA' '' NYTimes.com

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Sat, 01 Apr 2017 05:57

Abused wife who inspired 'The Burning Bed' dies

Three transients arrested in Atlanta highway bridge collapse

1/25 SLIDES (C) FBI

More than 15 years after 9/11, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has released never before seen photos of the Pentagon right after the attacks. On Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked and flew the American Airlines flight 77 into the western side of the Pentagon, killing 189 people - 125 victims in the building, 59 on board the flights and the five perpetrators. Here is a look at some of the images.

2/25 SLIDES (C) FBI

The Boeing 757 damaged the entire section killing the 7 civilians and 55 military personnel who were in the building.

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At that time, the building was undergoing renovation so many of the offices were unoccupied.

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The impact of the collision caused the outer ring of that wing of the building to collapse.

5/25 SLIDES (C) FBI

Fire engulfed the entire section as firefighters handled the blaze.

6/25 SLIDES (C) FBI

Hundreds of firefighters managed to finally control the blaze that had started when the plane crashed into the three outermost rings of the five rings.

7/25 SLIDES (C) FBI

The section of the building that was struck housed the Naval Command Center.

8/25 SLIDES (C) FBI

Rescue work began soon after with construction workers clearing the debris.

9/25 SLIDES (C) FBI

The attack and crash sites was one of the largest crime scenes in FBI history.

10/25 SLIDES (C) FBI

Clean-up work at the damaged section went through the night.

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A tent city of sorts came around the area as makeshift operations started investigating

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People in HAZMAT suits inspected the charred remains of the building.

13/25 SLIDES (C) FBI

The ensuing investigation was code-named "PENTTBOM" and more than half of the FBI was involved in the investigation.

14/25 SLIDES (C) FBI

The FBI Evidence Response Team (ERT) worked on their largest ever investigation trying to put the event together.

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They deployed forensic specialists whose identities were not released, to investigate the attacks.

16/25 SLIDES (C) FBI

Canine teams were also called in to go through the building wreckage.

17/25 SLIDES (C) FBI

Components of the Boeing 757 were found in the debris.

18/25 SLIDES (C) FBI

What appears to be a part of the plane's fuselage was recovered.

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The rebuilding of the damaged section was named "Project Phoenix."

20/25 SLIDES (C) FBI

A melted photocopier is seen in one of the offices.

21/25 SLIDES (C) FBI

The area struck by the plane had blast resistant windows that stayed intact, but the resulting fire caused a lot of damage.

22/25 SLIDES (C) FBI

The wing was also the only one with a sprinkler system. Once the firefighters were through, the scope of the damage was finally seen.

23/25 SLIDES (C) FBI

A huge amount of debris was left to be cleared.

24/25 SLIDES (C) FBI

Personnel made a makeshift memorial at the Pentagon following the attack.

25/25 SLIDES (C) FBI

The rescue personnel raised the American flag on top of the building for the first time after the attack.

The FBI released an archive of photos showing the devastation at the Pentagon in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks.

A total of 27 photos were uploaded to the FBI website "FBI Records: The Vault" under the page name "9/11 Attacks and Investigation Images."

The photos show fragments of American Airlines flight 77, which left Dulles Airport outside Washington, D.C., around 8:51 a.m. ET that morning. While on its way to Los Angeles, the plane was hijacked by Al Qaeda terrorists and crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m. ET.

Efforts by firefighters to combat the ensuing blaze and emergency responders rushing to the scene are included in the collection.

Overhead photos show the massive hole left in the side of the Pentagon when the outer rings of the building were penetrated by the aircraft.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE FULL SLIDESHOW

Other photos include investigators going through the debris, and images of the scorched interior of the building.

A total of 189 people died at the Pentagon, including 125 who worked at the facility.

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Sun, 02 Apr 2017 04:04

On CNBC's Squawk Box on March 30, a former senior Obama administration official tried to take back her earlier admission that the former administration tried to ''get as much information'' as possible on Trump and his associates before the transition of power '' but she only dug herself in deeper.

Evelyn Farkas used to be the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia under President Obama. Now, like former Press Secretary Josh Earnest, she's made the move over to NBC News as a National Security Analyst. Claiming that her previous statements had been misunderstood, Farkas insisted to the Squawk Box panel that she was only explaining ''why people might be motivated to do that.'' Later she seemed to imply that the Trump administration would threaten intelligence sources when she said ''people could get hurt, if people were giving us information.''

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Sun, 02 Apr 2017 04:02

The liberal ladies at the View invited former Obama senior campaign advisor David Axelrod on the show Thursday, apparently just to bash Trump for how horrible his first 100 days in office have been. Axelrod, who now works as a political analyst for CNN, was warmly welcomed by the panel who gushed just a month ago that his former boss was their ''favorite president.'' The hosts discussed just about every current obsession the media has with the Trump White House from Russia to wiretapping to Nunes.

Read more on Newsbusters.

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Sun, 02 Apr 2017 04:01

More in the cross-post on the MRC's NewsBusters blog.

Appearing in MSNBC's 3 p.m. ET hour on Thursday, Evelyn Farkas, the former Obama administration official who admitted on national television earlier this month that the Democratic administration was trying to ''get as much information'' as possible about Donald Trump and his associates, claimed she was actually the victim of a ''dark campaign of fake news.''

Farkas, President Obama's former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and now an NBC News National Security Analyst, complained to anchor Kate Snow: ''And on the dark campaign of fake news, you know, that's still ongoing. We see even someone like myself get swept up in all of this. You know, when people like me are speaking on behalf of process, people spin to it suit their needs. And I think it may be that the Russians are behind even such fake news today.''

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Sun, 02 Apr 2017 03:47

More in the cross-post on the MRC's NewsBusters blog.

On Friday, NBC's Today invited on Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to attack the Trump administration over investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and even teed her up to push baseless conspiracy theories suggesting the President was being blackmailed by Russia.

Co-host Savannah gently tried to point out that Pelosi's recent anti-Trump ranting was not fact-based: ''Something you say a lot, and have said a lot, is that you think that the Russians have something on President Trump. You say, 'What do they have on him?' Do you actually have information to back up that question or are you just speculating without evidence?''

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Sun, 02 Apr 2017 03:46

To Hollywood and the media, it's more acceptable for a politician to cheat on their spouses and ''sext'' random women with their young children present, than it is to actually have a healthy, respectful marriage. Take the left's treatment of Vice President Mike Pence, whose comments made in 2002 about boundaries in his marriage have come back this week to haunt him.

Read more on the blog here.

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Sun, 02 Apr 2017 03:42

[See NewsBusters for more.] Meet the Press host Chuck Todd on Friday conducted a total freak out, declaring that Donald Trump, who has been president for a scant 70 days, to be a ''lame duck'' ''on the brink.'' Keep in mind, from the day after the 2016 election through early January, the networks never once called the outgoing Barack Obama a ''lame duck.'' Appearing on MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Reports, Todd declared investigations into Trump and Russia as a sign of the end. He hyperventilated, ''You have a presidency right now that I think is, it's beyond saying it is in crisis mode.... It's on the brink. The question is on the brink of what? Is it on the brink of collapse?''

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Sat, 01 Apr 2017 18:49

Without question, President Trump has been making an enormous number of serious mistakes and miscalculations. He has allowed his political capital to go out the window with sloppily crafted executive orders banning refugees, by badly mishandling the negotiations over repealing the Affordable Care Act, and by making almost no progress on the legislative front.

His wild tweets and irresponsible statements are contributing to his low national approval ratings (other presidents have had similarly low approval ratings). The courts and Congress have been able to check the President on several occasions, while a grassroots opposition movement called Indivisible succeeded at shaking legislators in both parties, forcing them to think twice about quickly throwing their support behind the President.The investigation into Russia is the most serious threat that he faces. When former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn asked for immunity in exchange for his testimony, every American with a historical memory could not help but ask if he would become this administration's John Dean.

And yet it is important to remember that other presidents, two-term presidents, have been able to survive rocky and controversial starts to their presidency.

Republican Ronald Reagan, who ended up remaking American politics by pushing the national debate sharply to the right, struggled during his first few months in office. His proposed cuts to the budget were met with a fierce resistance as Americans discovered what his rhetorical attacks on government would actually mean if implemented into law. The laggard state of the economy made it difficult for Reagan to expand his public support especially as his economic package stalled in a Republican-dominated Senate Budget Committee.He didn't sign his first bill -- cutting back dairy price supports -- until March 31 at George Washington University Hospital the morning after he was shot in an assassination attempt.President Bill Clinton had trouble through his first summer in the White House. A series of controversial and problematic cabinet appointments, including a series of missteps with his Attorney General (Janet Reno, his third choice, was not confirmed until March) left him looking incompetent and stifled progress on his legislation.

His watered-down compromise over whether gays and lesbians could serve in the military, "don't ask, don't tell" left many mad with him and few particularly pleased with the outcome.

Clinton also stalled on his legislative agenda while moving away from a middle-class tax cut that he had promised in the campaign. His approval ratings fell from 64% in February 1993 to about 37% in May 1993.One month later, Time magazine ran a cover story calling Clinton the "Incredible Shrinking President." One of his more experienced advisers, Vernon Jordan, complained that "There's nobody over there that's ever worked in the White House before."But Clinton and Reagan recovered and each went on to have pretty successful runs in Washington. Reagan bounced back following his physical recovery from the assassination attempt by pushing a historic supply-side tax cut through Congress in the summer of 1981. It energized Republicans and created a foundation for him to move forward with other policies including massive increases in defense spending.

While he would continue to experience difficult moments, such as the large Democratic gains in the 1982 midterm elections and the Iran-Contra scandal, he went on to become an iconic president.

It took Clinton longer to recover. His budget in the summer of 1993, which increased taxes on corporations and the wealthy, was a long-term policy success in terms of reducing the deficit, but caused enormous turmoil as conservatives labeled him as a big government liberal in hiding.

Like Trump's, Clinton's initial health care plan failed. The blow helped Republicans retake control of both chambers of Congress in 1994 for the first time in 40 years. During his second term, the House voted to impeach him in December 1998 for perjury over an extramarital affair. Yet Clinton did survive and enjoyed two terms with skyrocketing approval ratings and achievements on issues such as deficit reduction, counterterrorism and health care that remain central.Can President Trump do the same? Clearly it is possible that he could end up more like Herbert Hoover or Jimmy Carter, meaning that the problems he is experiencing will not go away and that he will be a one-term president -- at most.

With a major scandal looming over the White House involving possible collusion between his campaign and Russia, the possibilities for this presidency to spin out of control remain very real.

An emboldened House Freedom Caucus and Democratic minority, is not going to make things any easier for this President, and it seems that the investigation into Russia-gate is about to ramp up. Constituents opposed to Trump, who have a taste of victory after protesting Republican town hall meetings, will have that much more determination to take on the rest of his agenda.

But his opponents should also be cognizant that Trump does have the ability to rebound. The Russia scandal could easily turn out to be more like Iran-Contra, where an explosive and devastating investigation never quite reaches the president himself and where the targets of the investigation are able to frame the issue as being about overly partisan inquisitors undermining national security.

Democrats might also conclude that any attempt to remove Trump from office through impeachment would be self-defeating, since Vice President Mike Pence is very conservative and is more likely to work well with the Freedom Caucus on policies the left would strongly oppose.

If Trump can get his act together, he could push for legislation, such as some kind of bold infrastructure plan, that would make it much more difficult for all Democrats and non-Freedom Caucus Republicans to oppose.

This would create the potential for a bipartisan victory, remaking himself into an independent and breaking through some of the partisan alliances that have thus far held firm. Trump, whose tweets this week went after the Freedom Caucus, has the potential to weaken the group, a key source of obstruction in Congress since 2010, and that could appeal to Democrats.

A crafty Trump could do this while continuing to move forward with his very aggressive deregulatory agenda, combined with a Reaganesque supply side tax cut, that keeps Republicans as a whole happy with having him in the White House. This would be a one-two punch that would quickly put Democrats on the defensive.

Trump, who is still doing well in polling with Republicans, can continue to offer his base of supporters red meat with renewed attacks on illegal immigrants and a push for "law and order" in the cities. The conservative part of his populism has been a big selling point and he has proven to have the capacity to play to the darkest elements of the right wing.Trump can still, in the words of Steve Bannon, "deconstruct the administrative state." It's untrue that Obamacare will "explode" on its own, but Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price can do enormous damage to this fragile program, making it less effective and less appealing in the coming years. For instance, he could lower the cost-sharing subsidies that insurers have relied on, a step which would create instability in markets.

Trump can slowly build a stronger coalition for change by making the Affordable Care Act seem worse to most voters.

As Steve Rattner wrote, "if the effectiveness of the A.C.A is diminished . . . Rest assured that the Republicans will try to blame Obamacare's supporters."This is really an "it can go either way" moment for Trump. His next step is crucial. The problems he faces are very real, while the progress that he has made on certain issues and the potential to break through the current challenges are equally significant.

Part of the answer to the story will rest, not so much with Trump, but with what his opponents do in the coming months and whether they are able to capitalize on the vulnerabilities and instabilities that have been exposed in the White House as a result of the ACA fiasco.

His opponents should be aware, however, that just as big loss in politics sets the groundwork for more losses by allowing opponents to see all your vulnerability, one big win can create the political momentum that gives presidents a chance to move on with other issues and even win re-election.

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Sat, 01 Apr 2017 09:26

UPDATED: Friday, March 31, 2017

Now-former President Park Geun-hye faces at least 13 charges after having businesses donate to a fraudulent Foundation in exchange for political favors.

She also shared highly classified State secrets with a female aide with whom she had an intimate relationship. Police arrested her before she could destroy or tamper with the evidence.

Via the use of subtle propaganda, she had the people of South Korea convinced she was a champion of progress and human values. When they uncovered the truth, however, millions of people took the streets and demanded she step down and be arrested.

Thanks to the people's determination, the now-former South Korean President has indeed been arrested, reports say.

The arrest took place today and a convoy of black vehicles was observed transporting her to jail.

The people of South Korea began celebrating upon hearing the news.

''Finally we see that it can happen. Justice is real,'' said one commenter.

The disgraced politician was found to be involved in numerous instances of high-profile corruption which resulted in over two million people taking to the streets to protest against her.

It was also reported that she was involved in occult activity or rituals during which she believed entities were taking ''complete control'' of ''her body and mind.''

Park Geun-hye on her way to jail after being arrested on Friday.

The Seoul Central District Court gave prosecutors permission to proceed with the arrest now that she has been impeached.

Despite her crimes against people, some of her die hard supporters (mostly elderly people who may not have been aware of the news) were still calling her ''president.''

They tried to block the convoy of cars so that she couldn't be taken to jail. Police pushed those people aside and continued with the arrest.

Now that she's behind bars, official charges are expected to be filed within 20 days and a sentencing is expected by Winter.

She is expected to be charged with several counts of bribery and abuses of power. Just one bribery conviction can result in life imprisonment in some cases.

She was reportedly taking millions in ''donations'' from businesses, though the businesses said they felt forced to give it to her.

She was also letting the daughter of an occultist see highly classified information, and that daughter would then make policy decisions despite being unelected.

She was South Korea's first female president and also the first president to be impeached and locked up with the possibility of life imprisonment.

Park Geun-hye often portrayed herself as a champion of progress. Sadly, it was all an act, for behind the scenes she was involved in high crimes designed to enrich herself while leaving people impoverished.

South Korean police are being hailed as heroes for doing the right thing. They wasted no time arresting her, as they feared she would try to destroy the evidence.

Watch the video below:

Original article prior to arrest: Saturday, March 11, 2017

Underneath the friendly blue colors was a toxic maze of corruption, and even bizarre welcoming of ''spirit'' possession.

It's official. A South Korean constitutional court has permanently removed President Park Geun-hye, according to reports.

The disgraced president was impeached after millions of South Koreans took to the streets demanding that she step down.

The protests were a supreme show of force against the president, and she had no choice but to leave.

The rebellion started brewing when it was uncovered that the president had been involved in a secret occult organization. Evidently she invited her body to be under the control of ''spirit'' entities.

Many people allege that political elites would never be involved in dark spiritual activity or rituals, but in this case, at least, that is precisely what occurred.

Choi Soon-sil is the daughter of a cult leader who was involved in what some are calling ''satanic rituals'' in the 1990s. It would be more accurately described as occultic shamanism

Choi Soon-sil developed an intimate relationship with the South Korean president, where she began invoking spiritual beings to possess the president's mind and body '-- and the president, at any rate, believed it was real, took it seriously, and welcomed it.

It is important to understand that the media in South Korea largely downplayed the occult aspects. But that did not stop the protesters, for it also turned out that the president was sharing classified information and state secrets with Choi Soon-sil during their relationship.

Courthouse News Service reports as follows:

Lee accused Park of colluding with longtime confidante Choi Soon-sil to extort tens of millions of dollars from businesses and letting Choi, a private citizen, meddle in state affairs and receive and look at documents with state secrets. Those allegations were previously made by prosecutors, but Park has refused to undergo any questioning, citing a law that gives a sitting leader immunity from prosecution.

Choi Soon-sil would then instruct the president on what decisions to make, making the president a mere puppet.

The president (left) claimed that her mind and body ''were under the complete control'' of the occult practitioner.

Essentially the South Koreans were being governed by an unelected cult practitioner.

Corruption and bizarre occult beliefs were enough for the Sourth Koreans to flood the streets.

Moreover, they are deeply dissatisfied with the impeachment. What they really wanted was for the president to be arrested for her crimes, not merely impeached.

Watch the video below:

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Sat, 01 Apr 2017 06:29

By Joseph Menn | SAN FRANCISCO

SAN FRANCISCO When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange disclosed earlier this month that his anti-secrecy group had obtained CIA tools for hacking into technology products made by U.S. companies, security engineers at Cisco Systems (CSCO.O ) swung into action.

The Wikileaks documents described how the Central Intelligence Agency had learned more than a year ago how to exploit flaws in Cisco's widely used Internet switches, which direct electronic traffic, to enable eavesdropping.

Senior Cisco managers immediately reassigned staff from other projects to figure out how the CIA hacking tricks worked, so they could help customers patch their systems and prevent criminal hackers or spies from using the same methods, three employees told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

The Cisco engineers worked around the clock for days to analyze the means of attack, create fixes, and craft a stopgap warning about a security risk affecting more than 300 different products, said the employees, who had direct knowledge of the effort.

That a major U.S. company had to rely on WikiLeaks to learn about security problems well-known to U.S. intelligence agencies underscores concerns expressed by dozens of current and former U.S. intelligence and security officials about the government's approach to cybersecurity.

That policy overwhelmingly emphasizes offensive cyber-security capabilities over defensive measures, these people told Reuters, even as an increasing number of U.S. organizations have been hit by hacks attributed to foreign governments.

Larry Pfeiffer, a former senior director of the White House Situation Room in the Obama administration, said now that others were catching up to the United States in their cyber capabilities, "maybe it is time to take a pause and fully consider the ramifications of what we're doing.''

U.S. intelligence agencies blamed Russia for the hack of the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 election. Nation-states are also believed to be behind the 2014 hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment and the 2015 breach of the U.S. Government's Office of Personnel Management.

CIA spokeswoman Heather Fritz Horniak declined to comment on the Cisco case, but said it was the agency's "job to be innovative, cutting-edge, and the first line of defense in protecting this country from enemies abroad."

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the CIA and NSA, referred questions to the White House, which declined to comment.

Across the federal government, about 90 percent of all spending on cyber programs is dedicated to offensive efforts, including penetrating the computer systems of adversaries, listening to communications and developing the means to disable or degrade infrastructure, senior intelligence officials told Reuters.

President Donald Trump's budget proposal would put about $1.5 billion into cyber-security defense at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Private industry and the military also spend money to protect themselves.

But the secret part of the U.S. intelligence budget alone totaled about $50 billion annually as of 2013, documents leaked by NSA contractor Edward Snowden show. Just 8 percent of that figure went toward ''enhanced cyber security,'' while 72 percent was dedicated to collecting strategic intelligence and fighting violent extremism.

Departing NSA Deputy Director Rick Ledgett confirmed in an interview that 90 percent of government cyber spending was on offensive efforts and agreed it was lopsided.

"It's actually something we're trying to address" with more appropriations in the military budget, Ledgett said. "As the cyber threat rises, the need for more and better cyber defense and information assurance is increasing as well."

The long-standing emphasis on offense stems in part from the mission of the NSA, which has the most advanced cyber capabilities of any U.S. agency.

It is responsible for the collection of intelligence overseas and also for helping defend government systems. It mainly aids U.S. companies indirectly, by assisting other agencies.

''I absolutely think we should be placing significantly more effort on the defense, particularly in light of where we are with exponential growth in threats and capabilities and intentions," said Debora Plunkett, who headed the NSA's defensive mission from 2010 to 2014.

GOVERNMENT ROLE

How big a role the government should play in defending the private sector remains a matter of debate.

Former military and intelligence leaders such as ex-NSA Director Keith Alexander and former Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter say that U.S. companies and other institutions cannot be solely responsible for defending themselves against the likes of Russia, China, North Korea and Iran.

For tech companies, the government's approach is frustrating, executives and engineers say.

Sophisticated hacking campaigns typically rely on flaws in computer products. When the NSA or CIA find such flaws, under current policies they often choose to keep them for offensive attacks, rather than tell the companies.

In the case of Cisco, the company said the CIA did not inform the company after the agency learned late last year that information about the hacking tools had been leaked.

''Cisco remains steadfast in the position that we should be notified of all vulnerabilities if they are found, so we can fix them and notify customers,'' said company spokeswoman Yvonne Malmgren.

SIDE BY SIDE

A recent reorganization at the NSA, known as NSA21, eliminated the branch that was explicitly responsible for defense, the Information Assurance Directorate (IAD), the largest cyber-defense workforce in the government. Its mission has now been combined with the dominant force in the agency, signals intelligence, in a broad operations division.

Top NSA officials, including director Mike Rogers, argue that it is better to have offensive and defensive specialists working side by side. Other NSA and White House veterans contend that perfect defense is impossible and therefore more resources should be poured into penetrating enemy networks - both to head off attacks and to determine their origin.

Curtis Dukes, the last head of IAD, said in an interview after retiring last month that he feared defense would get even less attention in a structure where it does not have a leader with a direct line to the NSA director.

''It's incumbent on the NSA to say, 'This is an important mission'," Dukes said. "That has not occurred.''

(Reporting by Joseph Menn in San Francisco. Additional reporting by Warren Strobel in Washington.; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Ross Colvin)

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Sat, 01 Apr 2017 06:22

Senate intelligence committee leaders have received reports that Russia hired at least 1,000 trolls to spread fake news stories to hurt Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton during the presidential election.

''What really concerns me [are reports] there were upwards of 1,000 paid internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia, in effect taking over a series of computers which are then called botnets that can generate news down to specific areas,'' said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He appeared Wednesday with GOP intel chair Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) at a press conference before committee hearings began.

The revelations reflect the results of a Huffington Post investigation this month, which found Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) had faced a ''tsunami'' of misinformation during his presidential campaign.

Warner said in the latest case, the paid trolls apparently focused on swing states in an attempt to influence votes there '-- Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania '-- where people were ''reading during the waning days of the election that '''Clinton is sick,' or 'Clinton is taking money from whoever for some source' '... fake news.''

Warner said it's crucial that investigators determine if voting results were actually affected. Each of the three states narrowly fell to Trump.

''An outside foreign adversary effectively sought to hijack the most critical democratic process, the election of a president, and in that process, decided to favor one candidate over another,'' Warner said.

Burr said that he and Warner were committed to getting to the bottom of Russian interference in the election. He accused Russia of blatant attempts to also impact elections in Germany and France. ''We feel part of our responsibility is to educate the rest of the world,'' he said.

By the end of the first day of hearings Thursday, no one had yet testified about the 1,000 trolls, but the investigation is just beginning.

Former FBI agent Clint Watts, now a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, testified that Russian attempts to influence the election started before the party nominees were chosen. Trump's GOP presidential rival Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) appeared to be a particular target, he said.

''Through the end of 2015 and the start of 2016, the Russian-influenced system began to push themes and messages seeking to influence the result of the presidential election,'' Watts said.

''Russian overt media outlets and covert trolls sought to sideline opponents on both sides of the political spectrum with adverse views towards the Kremlin,'' he added. ''They were in full swing during both the Republican and Democratic primary season, and may have helped sink the hopes of candidates more hostile to Russian interests long before the field narrowed.''

Watts said more details about the targeting of Rubio would be included in his written report to the committee.

He also testified that Trump helped spread fake news by embracing the stories that served the Russian agenda against his opponents.

Watts told the committee to ''follow the dead bodies'' to learn more, referring to several Russians connected to Kremlin fake news who have died in the past few months.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday dismissed allegations of Kremlin interference in the U.S. elections as ''fictional, illusory, provocations and lies.''

This article has been updated with more details, including comment from Putin.

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Sat, 01 Apr 2017 05:45

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Source: The Last Refuge

Fri, 31 Mar 2017 10:44

Dr. Stephen Cohen appeared on Tucker Carlson Fox broadcast to discuss the 'vast Russian planetary conspiracy' plot against America:

.

Riddle me this: The Mexican government openly admits to spending millions of dollars to influence U.S. elections; a Mexican billionaire owns the most influential U.S. media outlet (NYT); the Mexican government spends tens of millions to lobby congress; and the Mexican government has dedicated $50 million to pay for U.S. legal services to keep illegal aliens from being returned to Mexico; yet somehow it's the Russian government that is a concern. Odd no?

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Source: ZeroPointNow

Fri, 31 Mar 2017 10:40

I haven't seen a cucking this thorough since the night a binder-wielding Kurt Eichenwald was nearly killed by a post-Tucker tweet'...

Last night, Tucker Carlson effortlessly savaged attention craving Drexel University ''professor'' George Ciccariello '' who made headlines in December after calling for White Genocide over Twitter.

On Tuesday, Ciccariello once again made the news after expressing his disgust when a 1st class passenger gave up his seat to a uniformed soldier on an airplane. Rational minds on the internet did not take too kindly:

In his latest stunt, the ''white genocide'' advocate led a group of feeble-voiced children in a protest of writer Charles Murray on the grounds that he's a racist. The next stop for the Drexel degenerate; out of his safe space and into the lion's den'...

A facially ticking Ciccariello tried his best to match forces with Carlson, who simply kept knocking him on his ass '' over, and over, and over. It was absolutely brutal:

Nobody takes you seriously, I'm trying to take you seriously. You're accusing this guy of racial demagoguery and you called for white genocide, you also applauded the Haitian revolution for killing whites '' look those are your views! I'm not saying you shouldn't be allowed to express them. I'm merely pointing out the irony that you're trafficking in race hatred and yet saying that Charles Murray shouldn't be allowed to speak because he trafficks in race hatred. Are you self aware enough to catch that?

Tucker then goes on to read one of Ciccariello's screeds, concluding ''It's High School writing'... it's crap!''

(that wasn't even the best part'... just watch until you see Tucker use air quotes)

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Fri, 31 Mar 2017 04:16

The European Union has been taking it from all sides lately. The United Kingdom just handed in its divorce papers. A mischievous Vladimir Putin keeps starting up disinformation campaigns . And the union is still fending off the threat of anti-establishment nationalism from the likes of Marine Le Pen. The president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, has decided to deal with U.S. President Donald Trump's Euroskepticism by saying he's going to fight for the secession of Ohio and Texas, which can only end well.

So let's say you're an EU leader. Your union is being tested. You are being tested. The stakes are high, and the year is 2017, so you take to Twitter. What do you say? What do you do?

If you're Federica Mogherini, the EU's high representative on foreign policy, there's only one obvious choice: tweet out a cartoon. A one-minute, not particularly well-rendered cartoon. And make sure it's about how gosh-darned great the EU is.

This cartoon outlines for the laypeople why the EU's 2016 Global Strategy on its foreign and security policy matters to everyone. And it's an absolute delight.

''Europe's foreign policy matters to you,'' a deep, sultry British voice starts out. ''Yes, I am talking to you,'' the voice says, specifying he is indeed talking to you.

Buckle up, because the rest of this cartoon is a wild ride. Their faces say it all:

''When Europe's region is unstable, terrorist groups can spread,'' the voice says, clarifying terrorism is bad. ''A strong European foreign policy can help our region's stability and provide Europeans with great opportunities.'' (Authors' note: Who doesn't love opportunities? We sure as heck do.)

The video clarifies a stable European region can foster entrepreneurship and more exports. As you can see, our unnamed pro-EU heroine and her ne'er do well male friend are thrilled about more exports:

But wait, there's more!

She violently swings her head to the right to learn the EU can also bring freedom to not only travel but also to learn:

Wow. (Her partner in video crime seems less enthused, but let's not focus on that.)

That's the look someone has who just got to page 24 of the 60 page global strategy on enlargement: ''A credible enlargement policy grounded on strict and fair conditionality is an irreplaceable tool to enhance resilience within the countries concerned, ensuring that modernisation and democratisation proceed in line with the accession criteria.''

(Authors' note: This man's face has not moved since we began this journey; if someone could please go make sure he's not about to hold a sneaky referendum, that would be great.)

Anyways, back to the video. ''This is the union we are building. With the global strategy for foreign and security policy,'' our sultry British narrator says. ''This is what Europe can achieve when we act together, the European way.''

So for those Europeans laying awake at night wondering, ''Is the EU good?'' now they have their answer. Or, failing that, this cartoon.

Photo credit: European Union

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Fri, 31 Mar 2017 04:15

President Trump's former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn has reportedly told the FBI that he is willing to testify about the Trump campaign's potential ties to Russia, in exchange for immunity from prosecution, the Wall Street Journal reported.

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Flynn resigned in February, after it was reported that he misled White House staff on his interactions with Russia and had discussed sanctions with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak ahead of President Trump's inauguration.The Journal reported, citing officials familiar with the matter, that the FBI and the House and Senate Intelligence committees that are investigating Russia's attempts to interfere in the U.S. election have not taken Flynn's lawyers up on the offer.

Flynn's lawyer said in a statement that ''General Flynn certainly has a story to tell, and he very much wants to tell it, should the circumstances permit.''

''Notwithstanding his life of national service, the media are awash with unfounded allegations, outrageous claims of treason, and vicious innuendo directed against him. He is now the target of unsubstantiated public demands by Members of Congress and other political critics that he be criminally investigated,'' Flynn's lawyer Robert Kelner said in a statement.

''No reasonable person, who has the benefit of advice from counsel, would submit to questioning in such a highly politicized, witch hunt environment without assurances against unfair prosecution," he added.

Kelner said there have been discussions with the House and Senate Intelligence panels.

Flynn spoke with Kislyak multiple times during the transition, including on Dec. 29, the day then-President Obama retaliated against Moscow for its hacking of Democratic political groups and individuals, which intelligence agencies say was done to aid Trump's campaign.

Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, whose ties to Russia have been under scrutiny, and son-in-law Jared Kushner earlier this week volunteered to be interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee. Former aides Roger Stone and Carter Page, who have also been in the spotlight in the Russian investigations, have also offered to talk with the committees '-- but none with any conditions of immunity.

FBI Director James Comey last week confirmed that the bureau is investigating Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election '-- including any links or coordination between members of Trump's campaign and Moscow.Following his resignation, other revelations have been made surrounding Flynn, including that he was paid tens of thousands of dollars by multiple Russian companies prior to becoming a formal adviser on Trump's campaign.

Flynn received $56,250 in payments for work done for two Russian firms and Kremlin-backed news outlet RT.

He also reportedly discussed ways to take a man wanted by the Turkish government out of the United States without going through the legal extradition process.

The conversation, which took place during the presidential race while Flynn was serving as an unpaid adviser to Trump, centered around Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen.

Intelligence agencies first announced beliefs of possible Russian election interference in October. Since then, the intelligence community has concluded interference from Moscow did occur, and multiple investigations have been launched into the Trump campaign's possible ties to Russia and communications amid the Russian hacks.

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Thu, 30 Mar 2017 21:33

Apple hosts its shareholder meeting at its Infinite Loop campus, likely for the last time.

James Martin/CNET Apple CEO Tim Cook really cares about the company's professional users -- even though Apple's Mac desktop computers are overdue for updates.

"You will see us do more in the pro area," Cook said Tuesday during Apple's shareholder meeting in Cupertino, California. "The pro area is very important to us. The creative area is very important to us in particular. Don't think that [because] something we've done or something we're doing that isn't visible yet is a signal that our priorities are elsewhere. It's very, very important to us."

Apple updated the design of its MacBook computers in October for the first time in four years. But some creative professionals have been upset with the changes and have wanted Apple to revamp its desktop computers. The Mac Pro, for instance, hasn't had a major update since its new design was introduced in late 2013.

This year's shareholder meeting is the last at Apple's Infinite Loop campus. The company plans to start moving 12,000 employees into its new, much larger "spaceship" headquarters,called Apple Park, in April. Apple's headcount has ballooned since its early years, and it has outgrown its current offices at 1 Infinite Loop, which holds about 2,800 employees.

The hot topic at last year's shareholder meeting was Apple's battle with the FBI over unlocking an iPhone used in a terrorist attack. This year's conversation ranged from investor worries about health hazards from wireless technology to questions about Apple's efforts to promote job growth in the US. One shareholder even made a request for Apple to make a "super smart dumb phone" that's round and has a better battery.

"I'm not sure we're going to create a round phone," Cook said.

As usual, Apple didn't provide a video or audio stream of its annual meeting, and reporters weren't allowed in the auditorium with the company's shareholders and executives. Instead, they were required to watch remotely via video in a separate room. Apple executives, like head of software Craig Federighi, and board members, such as former US Vice President Al Gore, watched from the front rows of Apple's Town Hall auditorium.

Each of Apple's eight board members was re-elected, and shareholders approved the company's executive compensation plan. Apple investors also sided with the board and voted against five shareholder proposals. Those proposals included a call by the National Center for Public Policy Research for Apple to disclose more information about its charitable giving and a push to increase the diversity of Apple's board and senior management team. Other shareholder proposals asked Apple to make changes to shareholder proxy access, hire outside experts to reform its executive compensation practices, and require executive team members to hold on to 75 percent of their shares until reaching normal retirement age.

Scott Sherman, an Apple shareholder for the past couple years, said he's confident about Apple's position going forward. "I think it's going to be a good few years ahead, but they need to sort of dust off and jump at it," he said.

Policy, not politicsRev. Jesse Jackson, a leader in the civil rights movement, was in the audience again this year. Cook asked him to make a few comments before Apple kicked off the Q&A from shareholders.

Workers from Apple's Caffe Macs give coffee to investors ahead of the company's shareholder meeting.

Shara Tibken/CNET Jackson thanked Cook and Apple for its support "during this difficult season."

"The content of our character is really at stake," Jackson said. "We cannot submit or surrender to that definition" of America by "white Christian" nationalists, he said.

Apple has been outspoken over the past couple of months about steps taken by President Donald Trump since his inauguration. It joined the dozens of tech companies that opposed the president's executive order that banned immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries. It also criticized Trump's decision to roll back federal protections for transgender students in schools.

On Tuesday, Apple kicked off its shareholder meeting with a short video. It included photos, shot on an iPhone 7, of diverse people with a voiceover talking about the importance of diversity. "We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike," the clip says.

Rev. Jesse Jackson, speaking with CNET after Apple's shareholder meeting, thanked Apple CEO Tim Cook for his support on social issues.

James Martin/CNET Cook said Apple is proud of the efforts it's made to increase diversity at the company. He also said Apple has created 2 million jobs in the US, with 1.4 million of them app developers. And two-thirds of Apple's employees are based in the US.

"Having said all of that, we're always looking for more ways we could help the country," Cook said. "We know Apple could only exist in the US. This company never could have been founded somewhere else. We love this country and we'll continue to look for ways to expand and help in any way that we can."

One shareholder asked Cook whether Apple will fight to preserve net neutrality, something that likely will be changed under Trump's administration. Cook said Apple believes all content should be treated the same, but he said Apple doesn't play the role of a lobbyist.

"We don't like politics," Cook said, which got some applause from shareholders. But "we do know that playing a role in policy discussions is good. And [it's] a very important [role] for us to play. We stay out of politics but into policy."

Does the Mac still matter? Apple execs tell why the MacBook Pro was over four years in the making, and why we should care.

Life, disrupted: In Europe, millions of refugees are still searching for a safe place to settle. Tech should be part of the solution. But is it?

Update at 3:30 p.m. PT:Adds shareholder comment.

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