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His first book, Pan-Europa, was published in 1923, and contained a membership form for the Pan-Europa movement which held its first Congress in Vienna in 1926. In 1927, Aristide Briand was elected honorary president of the Pan-Europa movement. Public figures who attended Pan-Europa congresses included Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann and Sigmund Freud.[5]

Coudenhove-Kalergi was the first recipient of the Charlemagne Prize in 1950. The 1972''1973 academic year at the College of Europe was named in his honour. Coudenhove-Kalergi proposed Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" as the music for the European Anthem. He also proposed a Europe Day, European postage stamp[6] and many artefacts for the movement (e.g. badges and pennants).[7]

Family roots [ edit] Coudenhove-Kalergi was the second son of Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi (1859''1906), an Austro-Hungarian count and diplomat of mixed European origin, and Mitsuko Aoyama (1874''1941). His father, who spoke sixteen languages and embraced travel as the only means of prolonging life, yet died in his forties, had prematurely abandoned a career in the Austrian diplomatic service that took him to Athens, Constantinople, Rio de Janeiro, and Tokyo, to devote himself to study and writing.

Coudenhove-Kalergi's parents met when his mother helped the Austro-Hungarian diplomat after he fell off a horse while riding in Japan. In commenting on their union, Whittaker Chambers described the future originator of Pan-Europe as "practically a Pan-European organization himself." He elaborated: "The Coudenhoves were a wealthy Flemish family that fled to Austria during the French Revolution. The Kalergis were a wealthy Greek family from Crete. The line has been further crossed with Poles, Norwegians, Balts, French and Germans, but since the families were selective as well as cosmopolitan, the hybridization has been consistently successful."[8] The Kalergis family roots trace to Byzantine royalty via Venetian aristocracy, connecting with the Phokas imperial dynasty. In 1300, Coudenhove-Kalergi's ancestor Alexios Phokas-Kalergis signed the treaty that made Crete a dominion of Venice.

During his childhood, Coudenhove-Kalergi's mother had read aloud to him Momotarō and other Japanese fairy tales.[9]

Youth and education [ edit] The Ronsperg castle, his childhood home. Damaged during the Second World War, the repairs were overseen by a German from Japan Masumi Schmidt-Muraki.Coudenhove-Kalergi spent his adolescence on Bohemian family estates in Ronsperg, known today as Poběžovice. His father personally taught his two sons Russian and Hungarian and toughened them both physically and morally. He took them on long walks in all weather, made them sleep on straw mattresses and take cold showers, and taught them to shoot and fence so well that no one would ever dare challenge them. He also took them to Mass every Sunday. On every Good Friday, as the liturgy came to the exhortation "oremus et pro perfidis Judaeis" ("Let us also pray for the faithless Jews"), the old count allegedly rose and walked out of the church in a protest against this supposed expression of antisemitism.[8]

Coudenhove-Kalergi studied at the Augustiner-Gymnasium in Brixen before attending the Theresianische Akademie in Vienna from 1908 until 1913. He obtained his doctorate in philosophy with a thesis on Die Objectivit¤t als Grundprinzip der Moral (Objectivity as the Fundamental Principle of Morals) in 1917 from the University of Vienna.

During his student years, Coudenhove-Kalergi married the famous Viennese actress Ida Roland in April 1915. His marriage to a divorc(C)e thirteen years his senior, and a commoner, caused a temporary split with his family. His mother Mitsuko did not accept Ida, considering her a "beggar living in the riverbank,"[10] a traditional Japanese point of view against actors and performers. His mother, as head of the family, banned him from the family temporarily, but retracted when Coudenhove-Kalergi became renowned for his pan-European concept.

Personal philosophy [ edit] Aristocratic in his origins and elitist in his ideas, Coudenhove-Kalergi identified and collaborated with such politicians as Engelbert Dollfuss, Kurt Schuschnigg, Otto von Habsburg, Winston Churchill, and Charles de Gaulle.[11] His ideal political constituent was a gentleman who must respect and protect ladies, a person adhering to honesty, fair play, courtesy, and rational discourse.[12][13] He strove to replace the nationalist German ideal of racial community with the goal of an ethnically heterogeneous and inclusive European nation based on a commonality of culture[citation needed ], a nation whose geniuses were the "great Europeans" such as abb(C) de Saint-Pierre, Kant, Napoleon, Giuseppe Mazzini, Victor Hugo, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Pan-European political activist [ edit] Ida Roland-Coudenhove-Kalergi and Thomas Mann in the second Pan-European Congress in Sing-Akademie zu Berlin on May 17, 1930.Coudenhove-Kalergi is recognized as the founder of the first popular movement for a united Europe. His intellectual influences ranged from Immanuel Kant, Rudolf Kjell(C)n and Oswald Spengler to Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. In politics, he was an enthusiastic supporter of "fourteen points" made by Woodrow Wilson on 8 January 1918 and pacifist initiatives of Kurt Hiller. In December 1921, he joined the Masonic lodge "Humanitas" in Vienna.[14] In 1922, he co-founded[citation needed ] the Pan-European Union (PEU) with Archduke Otto von Habsburg, as "the only way of guarding against an eventual world hegemony by Russia."[15] In 1923, he published a manifesto entitled Pan-Europa, each copy containing a membership form which invited the reader to become a member of the Pan-Europa movement. He favored social democracy as an improvement on "the feudal aristocracy of the sword" but his ambition was to create a conservative society that superseded democracy with "the social aristocracy of the spirit."[16] European freemason lodges supported his movement, including the lodge Humanitas.[17]Pan-Europa was translated into the languages of European countries (not total; Italian edition was not published at that time[18]), Japanese, Chinese and so on (not even into Russian[18]).

According to his autobiography, at the beginning of 1924 his friend Baron Louis de Rothschild introduced him to Max Warburg who offered to finance his movement for the next 3 years by giving him 60,000 gold marks. Warburg remained sincerely interested in the movement for the remainder of his life and served as an intermediate for Coudenhove-Kalergi with influential Americans such as banker Paul Warburg and financier Bernard Baruch. In April 1924, Coudenhove-Kalergi founded the journal Paneuropa (1924''1938) of which he was editor and principal author. The next year he started publishing his main work, the Kampf um Paneuropa (The fight for Paneuropa, 1925''1928, three volumes). In 1926, the first Congress of the Pan-European Union was held in Vienna and the 2,000 delegates elected Coudenhove-Kalergi as president of the Central Council, a position he held until his death in 1972.

His original vision was for a world divided into only five states: a United States of Europe that would link continental countries with French and Italian possessions in Africa; a Pan-American Union encompassing North and South Americas; the British Commonwealth circling the globe; the USSR spanning Eurasia; and a Pan-Asian Union whereby Japan and China would control most of the Pacific. To him, the only hope for a Europe devastated by war was to federate along lines that the Hungarian-born Romanian Aurel Popovici and others had proposed for the dissolved multinational Empire of Austria-Hungary. According to Coudenhove-Kalergi, Pan-Europe would encompass and extend a more flexible and more competitive Austria-Hungary, with English serving as the world language, spoken by everyone in addition to their native tongue. He believed that individualism and socialism would learn to cooperate instead of compete, and urged that capitalism and communism cross-fertilise each other just as the Protestant Reformation had spurred the Catholic Church to regenerate itself.[19]

Coudenhove-Kalergi attempted to enlist prominent European politicians in his pan-European cause. He offered the presidency of the Austrian branch of the Pan-European Union to Ignaz Seipel, who accepted the offer unhesitatingly and rewarded his beneficiary with an office in the old Imperial palace in Vienna. Coudenhove-Kalergi had less success with TomÅ Masaryk, who referred him to his uncooperative Prime Minister Edvard BeneÅ. However, the idea of pan-Europe elicited support from politicians as diverse as the Italian anti-Fascist politician Carlo Sforza and the German President of the Reichsbank under HitlerHjalmar Schacht. Although Coudenhove-Kalergi found himself unable to sway Benito Mussolini, his ideas influenced Aristide Briand through his inspired speech in favour of a European Union in the League of Nations on 8 September 1929, as well as his famous 1930 "Memorandum on the Organisation of a Regime of European Federal Union."[20]

Coudenhove-Kalergi proposed Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" as the Anthem of Europe in 1929,[6] which he later proposed in 1955 as Anthem for the European Union. In 1930, he proposed a Europe Day in May[6] and in 1932 he proposed to celebrate every 17th of May, the anniversary of Aristide Briand's "Memorandum" being published in 1930.[21] However, his Pan-Europeanism earned vivid loathing from Adolf Hitler, who excoriated its pacifism and mechanical economism and belittled its founder as "a bastard."[22][23] Hitler's view of Coudenhove-Kalergi was that the "rootless, cosmopolitan, and elitist half-breed" was going to repeat the historical mistakes of Coudenhove ancestors who had served the House of Habsburg.[24] In 1928, Hitler wrote about his political opponent in his Zweites Buch, describing him as "Allerweltsbastarden Coudenhove ",[25][26].

Hitler did not share the ideas of his Austrian compatriot. He argued in his 1928 Secret Book that they are unfit for the future defense of Europe against America. As America fills its North American lebensraum, ''the natural activist urge that is peculiar to young nations will turn outward.'' But then ''a pacifist-democratic Pan-European hodgepodge state'' would not be able to oppose the United States, as it is ''according to the conception of that everybody's bastard, Coudenhove-Kalergi'...''[27]

Nazis considered the Pan-European Union to be under the control of freemasonry.[28] In 1938, a Nazi propaganda book Die Freimaurerei: Weltanschauung, Organisation und Politik was released in German.[29] It revealed Coudenhove-Kalergi's membership of freemasonry, the organization suppressed by Nazis.[30] On the other hand, his name was not to be found in masonic directories 10,000 Famous Freemasons published in 1957''1960 by the United States' freemasons.[31] He had already left the Viennese freemason's lodge in 1926 to avoid the criticism that had occurred at that time against the relationship between the Pan-European movement and freemasonry. He wrote about his masonic membership in Ein Leben f¼r Europa (A Life for Europe) published in 1966.[32] In fact, its Nazi propaganda book also described his action in 1924''1925 only. However, this propaganda also stated that "The Grand Lodge of Wien went enthusiastically to work for the Pan European Union in a call to all Masonic chief authorities. Even the Masonic newspaper The Beacon enthused about the thoughts of the higher degree Freemason Coudenhove-Kalergi, and stated in March, 1925: "Freemasonry, especially Austrian Freemasonry, may be eminently satisfied to have Coudenhove-Kalergi among its members. Austrian Freemasonry can rightly report that Brother Coudenhove-Kalergi fights for his Pan European beliefs: political honesty, social insight, the struggle against lies, striving for the recognition and cooperation of all those of good will. In this higher sense, Brother Coudenhove-Kalergi's program is a Masonic work of the highest order, and to be able to work on it together is a lofty task for all brother Masons.""[33]

Paul Henreid as Victor Laszlo in the cinematic trailer of Casablanca.After the annexation of Austria by the Third Reich in 1938, Coudenhove-Kalergi fled to Czechoslovakia, and thence to France. As France fell to Germany in 1940, he escaped to the United States by way of Switzerland and Portugal. When he passed a few days after the successful escape to the United States, he listened to the radio saying the possibility of his death.[34] During the World War II, he continued his call for the unification of Europe along the Paris-London axis. His wartime politics and adventures served as the real life basis for fictional Resistance hero Victor Laszlo, the Paul Henreid character in Casablanca. He published his work Crusade for Paneurope in 1945. His appeal for the unification of Europe enjoyed some support from Winston Churchill, Allen Dulles, and "Wild Bill" Donovan.[35] After the announcement of the Atlantic Charter on 14 August 1941, he composed a memorandum entitled "Austria's Independence in the light of the Atlantic Charter" and sent it to Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In his position statement, Coudenhove-Kalergi took up the goals of the charter and recommended himself as head of government in exile. Both Churchill and Roosevelt distanced themselves from this document. From 1942 until his return to France in 1945, he taught at the New York University, which appointed him professor of history in 1945. At the same university Professor Ludwig von Mises studied currency problems for Coudenhove-Kalergi's movement.[36]

On 22 July 1943, Nazis deprived him of his Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Vienna, 1943 with the racist argument, that he as a "Jew" was not considered dignified an academic degree of a German university ("eines akademischen Grades einer deutschen Hochschule unw¼rdig") - even though he was not Jewish nor was his family Jewish.[37] His doctorate degree was only regranted on 15 May 1955 - a very long time after the end of Nazism.[37]

The end of the World War II inaugurated a revival of pan-European hopes. In the winter of 1945, Harry S. Truman read an article in the December issue of Collier's magazine that Coudenhove-Kalergi posted about the integration of Europe. His article impressed Truman, and it was adopted to the United States' official policy.[38] Winston Churchill's celebrated speech of 19 September 1946 to the Academic Youth in Zurich commended "the exertions of the Pan-European Union which owes so much to Count Coudenhove-Kalergi and which commanded the services of the famous French patriot and statesman Aristide Briand."[39] In November 1946 and the spring of 1947, Coudenhove-Kalergi circulated an enquiry addressed to members of European parliaments. This enquiry resulted in the founding of the European Parliamentary Union (EPU), a nominally private organization that held its preliminary conference on 4''5 July at Gstaad, Switzerland, and followed it with its first full conference from 8 to 12 September. Speaking at the first EPU conference, Coudenhove-Kalergi argued that the constitution of a wide market with a stable currency was the vehicle for Europe to reconstruct its potential and take the place it deserves within the concert of Nations. On less guarded occasions he was heard to advocate a revival of Charlemagne's empire.[40] In 1950 he received the first annual Karlspreis (Charlemagne Award), given by the German city of Aachen to people who contributed to the European idea and European peace. In Japan, a politician Ichirō Hatoyama was influenced by Coudenhove-Kalergi's fraternity in his book The Totalitarian State Against Man. It was translated into Japanese by Hatoyama and published in 1952. Coudenhove-Kalergi was appointed the honorary chairman of the fraternal youth association that Hatoyama, with the influence of his book, had established in 1953.

In the 1960s, Coudenhove-Kalergi urged Austria to pursue "an active policy of peace", as a "fight against the Cold War and its continuation, the atomic war". He advocated Austrian involvement in world politics in order to keep the peace, as "active neutrality". He continued his advocacy of European unification in memoranda circulated to the governments of the Federal Republic of Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Italy. He recommended negotiations between the European Community and the European Free Trade Association towards forming a "European customs union" that would be free of political and military connections, but would eventually adopt a monetary union.

Views on race and religion [ edit] In his attitudes towards race and religion, Coudenhove-Kalergi continued the work of his father. In his youth, the elder Coudenhove-Kalergi was an antisemite. He had expected to confirm his antipathy towards the Jews when he started working on his treatise Das Wesen des Antisemitismus (The Essence of Antisemitism); but, Coudenhove-Kalergi came to a different conclusion by the time he published his book in 1901. Following an ironic critique of the new racial theories, he declared that the essence of antisemitism amounted to nothing more credible than fanatical religious hatred. He traced that fanaticism to religious bigotry that originated in the promulgation of Torah under Ezra. According to the elder Coudenhove-Kalergi, Jewish religious bigotry provoked opposition from the relatively tolerant Greco-Roman polytheists, eliciting their anti-Judaic reaction. Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi credited the Jews with originating religious intolerance, and condemned it as a violation of genuine religious principles. He branded every sort of anti-Judaism unchristian. He further urged liberal Christians and Jews to ally in protecting both of their religions, and religion as such, against the emerging menace of secularism.[42]

Despite his opposition to simplistic racial theory, Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi agreed that Jews are racially distinct. Although he pointed out that there is no Semitic race, because Semitic is a language family, he equivocated by also remarking that the charges that Semites were uncreative were belied by civilizations formed by the Assyrians and Babylonians, who spoke Semitic languages. He further sought to defend the Jews against charges of parasitic greed and cowardice with anecdotal counterexamples of Jewish industriousness and martial courage.[43]

In an interview in the first Pan-European Congress in 1926, Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi expressed the support of Jews by the Pan-European movement and the benefits to Jews with the elimination of racial hatred and economic rivalry brought by the United States of Europe.[44]

In 1932 Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi composed a preface for a new edition of his father's condemnation of antisemitism, reissued by his own publishing house. In 1933 he responded to the ascendance of National Socialism by collaborating with Heinrich Mann, Arthur Holitscher, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Max Brod in writing and publishing the pamphlet Gegen die Phrase vom j¼dischen Sch¤dling (Against the Phrase 'Jewish Parasite').

Journeys to Japan [ edit] First return to Japan [ edit] The Pan-European idea influenced a young Japanese diplomat '' in the future, the president of Kajima Corporation '' Morinosuke Kajima during his residence in Berlin in 1922.[46] Coudenhove-Kalergi formed a friendship with Kajima and then asked him to translate the book Pan-Europa into Japanese.[46] He proposed Pan-Asia to Kajima and promised to give Dutch East Indies as their friendship after the realization of the task to establish Pan-Asia.[46] Kajima published Pan-Europa in Japanese in 1927. In 1930 Kajima retired from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to become MP. His ambition to become an MP was due to Coudenhove-Kalergi's influence.[47] In 1970''1971 he published the complete works of Coudenhove-Kalergi from Kajima Institute Publishing that was established by Morinosuke Kajima. He respected Coudenhove-Kalergi over a lifetime, dreaming of the realization of Pan-Asia.[46]

In Japan, the Pan-European idea also influenced a journalist Yoshinori Maeda, the president of NHK. He became a pioneer of Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union with the image of Pan-Europa that he read in his student days.[48]

In 1953 Ichirō Hatoyama established Yuai Youth Association (later Yuai Association), the fraternal association as the successor of fraternity that Coudenhove-Kalergi mentioned in The Totalitarian State Against Man. The Japanese word yÅai(å‹æ› ) has several meanings but especially the word used by Hatoyama means fraternity and in German br¼derlichkeit.[49] It can also be considered equivalent to "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" (Brotherhood), the motto of the French Republic. An educator Kaoru Hatoyama became the second president of the association after her husband Ichirō, the first president, died in 1959.

In 1967 Coudenhove-Kalergi was awarded the Kajima Peace Award, and was invited to Japan by:: Morinosuke Kajima as the president of Kajima Institute of International Peace, Yoshinori Maeda as the president of NHK, and Kaoru Hatoyama as the president of Yuai Youth Association. Together with his second wife Alexandra in a wheelchair,[50] Coudenhove-Kalergi stayed in Japan from 26 October to 8 November. He was also accompanied by his young brother Gerolf's daughter Barbara.[51] Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi was also awarded First Order of the Sacred Treasure of Japan. He was granted an audience with the Emperor Hirohito, Empress Kōjun, their son Crown Prince Akihito to whom he had presented his book in 1953 in Switzerland, and Crown Princess Michiko. This time, he had returned to Japan for the first time since his childhood 71 years earlier. He gave several lectures and met various leaders. Coudenhove-Kalergi spent 2 weeks in Japan as a guest of Japanese TV, radio, newspaper, magazines and other media.[52] While in Japan, Coudenhove-Kalergi specifically asked for a meeting with the president of Soka Gakkai, Dr. Daisaku Ikeda, as Coudenhove-Kalergi had been interested in Ikeda's work for many years. After their first meeting in October 1967, Coudenhove-Kalergi described Ikeda as "very energetic, life-loving, honorable, friendly and intelligent."[53]

Soka Gakkai invitation [ edit] Coudenhove-Kalergi visited Japan again at the invitation of the Soka Gakkai in October 1970.[54] During his stay, he and Daisaku Ikeda conducted a formal dialogue over the course of several days, a total of more than 12 hours of which was recorded for posterity.[55] He also visited the campus of Soka University in Tokyo, which was under construction at that time.[54]

Two decades later, in 1990, Ikeda proposed that Coudenhove-Kalergi's favorite song, Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," be regularly performed at major Soka Gakkai meetings. It was reported in Japan that this was one cause of the split between the Soka Gakkai and Soka Gakkai International (SGI) from Nichiren Shoshu in 1991, as the Nichiren Shoshu priesthood objected to the song's "Christian origins."

According to a masonic report, Coudenhove-Kalergi died of a stroke.[56] His secretary, however, indicated that Coudenhove-Kalergi possibly committed suicide. In the memoir his secretary wrote, she said his death was kept secret so as not to disappoint those who considered him to be the great visionary of European integration.[57] Coudenhove-Kalergi was the head of the Pan-European Union until his death. The presidency was succeeded by Otto von Habsburg.

Coudenhove-Kalergi is buried at Gruben near Gstaad.[58] His grave, covered with wild grapes, is located in a Japanese rock garden in the Swiss Alps. The grave is unpretentious and upon it is the French epitaph "Pionnier des ‰tats-Unis d'Europe " (Pioneer of the United States of Europe), with none of the other great titles that many supporters believe he had earned.[59]

Coudenhove-Kalergi was married three times: to Ida Roland (1887''1951), to Alexandra Gr¤fin von Tiele-Winkler (1896''1968), and to Melanie Benatzky-Hoffmann (1909''1983). His known children were Ida's daughter Erika and Alexandra's son Alexander, both of whom were his step-children.[60]

Jedes groŸe historische Geschehen begann als Utopie und endete als Realit¤t.

(Translation:) Every great historical event began as a utopia and ended as a reality.

'--'‰Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi, Pan-Europa (Pan-Europe)[61][62]We are experiencing the most dangerous revolution in world history: the revolution of the State against man. We are experiencing the worst idolatry of all time: the deification of the state.

'--'‰Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi, Totaler Staat '' Totaler Mensch (Total State - Total Man)

Publications [ edit] Adel (1922)Ethik und Hyperethik (1922); H(C)ros ou Saint (1929), the Cahiers Internationaux series of the publisher Les Editions Rieder, 7, Place Saint-Sulpice, Paris, translated from German into French by Marcel BeaufilsPan-Europa (1923), Paneuropa Verlag; Pan-Europe (1926), Knopf, with an introduction by Nicholas Murray Butler, and with omitting the inconvenient parts about the economic threat of USAKrise der Weltanschauung (1923)Pazifismus (1924)Deutschlands Europ¤ische Sendung. Ein Gespr¤ch (1924)Praktischer Idealismus (1925)Kampf um Paneuropa (3 Volumes, 1925''28)Held oder Heiliger (1927)Br¼ning '' Hitler: Revision der B¼ndnispolitik (1931), Paneuropa-VerlagStalin & Co. (1931)Gebote des Lebens (1931)Los vom Materialismus! (1931)La lutte pour l'Europe (1931)Revolution durch Technik (1932)Gegen die Phrase vom j¼dischen Sch¤dling (1933), co-authored with Heinrich Mann, Arthur Holitscher, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Max BrodEuropa erwacht! (1934)JudenhaŸ von heute: Graf H. Coudenhofe-Kalergi. Das Wesen des Antisemitismus (1935)Europa ohne Elend: Ausgew¤hlte Reden (1936)JudenhaŸ! (1937)Totaler Staat '' Totaler Mensch (1937), Paneuropa Verlag; Totaler Mensch '' Totaler Staat (1939), Herold Verlag; Totaler Mensch '' Totaler Staat (1965), Herold VerlagThe Totalitarian State Against Man, with an introduction by Wickham Steed, translated by Sir Andrew Mc Fadyean (1938), London, Frederick Muller Ltd.Europe Must Unite, translated by Sir Andrew Mc Fadyean (1939)Die europ¤ische Mission der Frau (1940)Kampf um Europa (1949)Ida Roland: In Memoriam (1951)Die Europ¤ische Nation (1953)Der Gentleman (1953)An Idea Conquers the World, with a preface by Winston S. Churchill (1953)Vom Ewigen Krieg zum GroŸen Frieden (1956)Eine Idee erobert Europa (1958)From War to Peace (1959)Ein Leben f¼r Europa (1966)F¼r die Revolution der Br¼derlichkeit (1968), Zurich, Verlag Die WaageBi no Kuni '' Nihon heno Kikyou(美の国 '' 日æ'¬ã¸ã®å¸°éƒ· ) , translated into Japanese by Morinosuke Kajima (1968), Tokyo, Kajima Institute PublishingWeltmacht Europa (1971)Bunmei '' Nishi to Higashi(æ–‡æŽ '' è¥ã¨æ'± ), interview collection with Daisaku Ikeda (1972), Tokyo, publication branch of Sankei Shimbun Co., Ltd. Awards and honors [ edit] See also [ edit] References [ edit] Notes [ edit] ^ German: Richard Nikolaus Eijiro Graf von Coudenhove-Kalergi (Regarding personal names: Until 1919, Graf was a title, translated as Count, not a first or middle name. The female form is Gr¤fin . In Germany since 1919, it forms part of family names.). Japanese: リãƒ'ャãƒãƒãƒ>>ニã‚"ãƒ(C)ã‚...スãƒ>>æ æ¬éƒŽãƒ>>クーデãƒ"ホーフ¼'ã‚レãƒã‚®ãƒ¼ä¼¯çµ (Rihyaruto Nikorausu Eijirō KÅdenhōfu-KarerugÄ Hakushaku) .^ https://books.google.com/books?id=OW5FAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA34&lpg=PA34&dq=kalergi+european+integration&source=bl&ots=L9ciH4dL6H&sig=Dlo96WF7HBDy05q9NTkAnYs5APQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjYp5rtverPAhUGrD4KHQxjBxY4ChDoAQhKMAg#v=onepage&q=kalergi%20european%20integration&f=false ^ https://www.rienner.com/uploads/53aae65db9769.pdf ^ Tozawa 2013a, chpt. (1) ^ Oca±a, Juan Carlos. "Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi". Spartacus Educational. Archived from the original on 24 October 2012. Retrieved 17 November 2014 . ^ abc "Richard N. de Coudenhove-Kalergi" (in French). Paneurope Suisse on Suisse magazine. Retrieved 31 October 2014 . ^ Persson & Str¥th 2007, p. 99 ^ ab Chambers 1945 ^ NAITO, Tetsuo (2006-03-31). "ç --ç(C)¶ãƒŽãƒ¼ãƒ : 欧州統åã®æå--±è…ãã‚¯ãƒ¼ãƒ‡ãƒ"ホーフãƒ>>ã‚レãƒã‚®ãƒ¼ã®æ'æƒ"とèŒå‹• An Advocate of the European Integration, Coudenhove-Kalergi's Original Idea and Activities"(PDF) (in Japanese). Saitama United Cyber Repository of Academic Resources (SUCRA). p. 169. Retrieved 22 October 2013 . 幼き日ãæ¯è...ªãæ—¥æ'¬ã®ç¥è(C)±ãä¾‹ãã°ãŒæƒå¤ªéƒŽãã‚'読ã‚'でもらったとの彼の回æƒ"がある ^ Tozawa 2013a, chpt. (3): "æ²"原乞食 " ^ Gehler, p. 186 ^ Hilton, Ronald (2004-11-19). "Democracy and the concept of gentleman: Coudenhove-Kalergi". World Association of International Studies (WAIS) at Stanford University. Retrieved 31 October 2014 . for Coudenhove-Kalergi it meant adherence to the ideals [ . . . ]: honesty, fair play, courtesy, rational discourse. ^ "" Yuai" for Understanding". Yuai Association. Retrieved 4 February 2016 . ... the word Gentleman as he used referred to British type Gentleman in the chivalric medieval Europe, who may be characterized by such attributes as elegant, well-educated, polite, honest, humorous, cleanly, etc. ... Gentleman, however, must bear the moral responsibility to respect and protect Lady ... ^ Jajeśniak-Quast 2010, p. 131 ^ Dorril 2000, p. 165 ^ Rosamond 2000, pp. 21''22 ^ Ziegerhofer 2004, chpt. '…¤ '' 3 ^ ab Hewitson & D'Auria 2012, p. 107 ^ Lipgens 1984, p. 712; Johnston 1983, pp. 320''321 ^ Weigall & Stirk 1992, pp. 11''15 ^ Guieu & Le Dr(C)au 2009, p. 176: " il a propos(C) d¨s 1932 une journ(C)e de l'Europe qui serait c(C)l(C)br(C)e chaque 17 mai, jour de la publication du M(C)morandum Briand. " ^ Burleigh 2001, p. 426; Lipgens 1984, p. 37; Coudenhove-Kalergi once again approached Mussolini on 10 May 1933 in a futile attempt to form a union of Latin nations against the Third Reich. (Lipgens 1984, pp. 180''184) ^ Persson & Str¥th 2007, p. 114 ^ Mazower 2013, p. 691 ^ Hitler, Adolf (1928). Zweites Buch (in German). Dieses Paneuropa nach Auffassung des Allerweltsbastarden Coudenhove w¼rde der amerikanischen Union oder einem national erwachten China gegen¼ber einst dieselbe Rolle spielen wie der alt¶sterreichische Staat gegen¼ber Deutschland oder RuŸland. ^ Ziegerhofer 2004, p. 425 ^ Hitler's Secret Book, 1928, (tr. Attanasio, Salvator, New York: Grove Press, 1962), p 107. ^ Levy 2007, p. 394 ^ The book had English edition as Freemasonry: Its World View, Organization and Policies. (English full text: http://der-stuermer.org/freemasonryen.htm) ^ Schwarz 1938, p. 22: "der freimaurer Coudenhove-Kalergi " ^ Denslow 1957''1960 ^ Jajeśniak-Quast 2010, pp. 131''132; Ziegerhofer 2004, p. 57 ^ Web.archive.org ^ Coudenhove-Kalergi 1953, p. 234 (Roy Publishers) ^ Dorril 2000, pp. 166''167 ^ Coudenhove-Kalergi 1953, p. 247 (Hutchinson) ^ ab "Richard Nikolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi". University of Vienna. 2014. Retrieved 2015-01-27 . ^ Tozawa 2013b, chpt. (3) ^ Lipgens & Loth 1988, p. 664; Churchill 2003, pp. 427''430 ^ Lipgens & Loth 1988, p. 537 ^ "Union Paneurop(C)enne"(PDF) (in French). August 3, 1955. Archived from the original(PDF) on November 8, 2008. (digital document by CVCE) ^ Langmuir, pp. 22''24; Johnston 1983, pp. 320''321 ^ Robertson 1999, pp. 198''199 ^ Jews Participate in Pan-europe Congress Sessions in Vienna, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 5 October 1926, retrieved 5 November 2014 ^ Coudenhove-Kalergi 1925, pp. 20, 23, 50 ^ abcd Hirakawa 2011, pp. 40''42 ^ Tozawa 2013c, chpt. (3) ^ Tozawa 2013c, chpt. (2) ^ Pempel & Lee 2012, p. 137 ^ Tozawa, Hidenori (2013). クーデãƒ"ホーフãƒ>>ã‚レãƒã‚®ãƒ¼ã¨æ—¥æ'¬ã®é–ä‚ (in Japanese). Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi Forum (School of Law, Tohoku University). Retrieved 17 November 2014 . ^ Tozawa 2013c, chpt. (5) ^ ab Kajima MONTHLY REPORT DIGEST 2005 ^ Tozawa 2013d, chpt. (1) ^ ab Tozawa 2013d, chpt. (2) ^ Ikeda, Daisaku (1978-11-19). ç'°åƒå ±å‘Šæ›¸2012: ç'°åƒå•éŒã¯å…¨äººéžçšãªèª²éŒ (in Japanese). SEIKYO online (Seikyo Shimbun). Retrieved 17 November 2014 . ^ Zuber 1995 ^ Huseynov, Hasan (2001-11-27). Пан-евÑоÐейское движение: документы (in Russian). Deutsche Welle. Retrieved 31 October 2014 . ^ Jilek, p. 208 ^ Aizpurvit, Katerina (June 2011). "COUNT COUDENHOVE-KALERGI: SWITZERLAND AS THE MODEL OF EUROPEAN UNITY". Business Mir. Retrieved 31 October 2014 . ^ Pernhorst 2008, p. 38 ^ Coudenhove-Kalergi, Richard Nikolaus (1923). Pan-Europe (in German). Pan-Europa-Verlag. Jedes groŸe historische Geschehen begann als Utopie und endete als Realit¤t. ^ Coudenhove-Kalergi, Richard Nikolaus (1926). Pan-Europe. A. A. Knopf (Google Books). Every great political happening began as a Utopia and ended as a Reality. (Knopf's other version in 1926 on Google Books) ^ ab Kosch 2003, p. 374 ^ "Tabellarischer Lebenslauf: Richard Nikolaus Graf Coudenhove-Kalergi" (in German). Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung. Retrieved 2015-01-27 . ^ "Coudenhove-Kalergi, Richard Nikolaus Graf" (in German). Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung. Retrieved 2015-01-27 . ^ Duchhardt 2005, p. 306 ^ "Count Richard Nicolas Coudenhove-Kalergi". Official web site of the Nobel Prize. Retrieved 2015-01-27 . Sources [ edit] Tozawa, Hidenori (2013a). ミãƒã‚"ãƒ>>クーデãƒ"ホーフãƒ>>ã‚レãƒã‚®ãƒ¼ (é''山光子) (in Japanese). Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi Forum (School of Law, Tohoku University). Retrieved 31 October 2014 . Tozawa, Hidenori (2013b). リãƒ'ャãƒãƒãƒ>>クーデãƒ"ホーフãƒ>>ã‚レãƒã‚®ãƒ¼ (in Japanese). Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi Forum (School of Law, Tohoku University). Retrieved 4 November 2014 . Tozawa, Hidenori (2013c). クーデãƒ"ホーフãƒ>>ã‚レãƒã‚®ãƒ¼ã¨é¹å"¶å®ä¹‹åŠ(C) (in Japanese). Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi Forum (School of Law, Tohoku University). Retrieved 17 November 2014 . Tozawa, Hidenori (2013d). クーデãƒ"ホーフãƒ>>ã‚レãƒã‚®ãƒ¼ã¨å‰µä¾å­...会 (in Japanese). Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi Forum (School of Law, Tohoku University). Retrieved 17 November 2014 . 第3è(C)±'‚é¹å"¶å¹"å'Œè"žæŽè"žã®èžå°. Kajima MONTHLY REPORT DIGEST (in Japanese). Kajima Corporation. April 2005. Retrieved 17 November 2014 . Hirakawa, Hitoshi (2011). "English Edition: Dr. Morinosuke Kajima and Pan-Asianism"(PDF) . SGRA Report No. 58. Atsumi International Scholarship Foundation (AISF) / Sekiguchi Global Research Association (SGRA). pp. 37''77. Retrieved 17 November 2014 . Chambers, Whittaker (January 1945), Historian and History Maker, The American Mercury Gehler, Michael. "A Visionary proved Himself to be a Realist: Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi, Austria, and the "United States of Europe", 1923''2003"(PDF) . Europe on its Way to Unity. From Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi's Pan-European Vision to the Treaty of Athens. Tokai University Human Security review [2004/2005], No. 9. pp. 171''186. Archived from the original(PDF) on 2011-09-30. Retrieved 2014-11-04 . Jilek, Lubor. "Pan-Europe de Coudenhove-Kalergi: l'homme, le projet et le mouvement paneurop(C)en"(PDF) (in French). Tokai University Human Security review [2004/2005], No. 9. pp. 205''209. Archived from the original(PDF) on 2011-09-30. Retrieved 2014-11-04 . Dorril, Stephen (2000), MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service, Free Press Rosamond, Ben (2000), Theories of European Integration, Palgrave Macmillan Hewitson, Mark; D'Auria, Matthew, eds. (2012), Europe in Crisis: Intellectuals and the European Idea, 1917''1957, Berghahn Books, ISBN 9780857457288 Ziegerhofer, Anita (2004). Botschafter Europas: Richard Nikolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi und die Paneuropa-Bewegung in den zwanziger und dreissiger Jahren (in German). Wien: B¶hlau Verlag. ISBN 9783205772170. Lipgens, Walter, ed. (1984), Documents on the History of European Integration, Volume 1: Continental Plans for European Union 1939''1945, Walter de Gruyter Lipgens, Walter; Loth, Wilfried, eds. (1988), Documents on the History of European Integration, Volume 3: The Struggle for European Union by Political Parties and Pressure Groups in Western European Countries 1945''1950, Walter de Gruyter Johnston, William M. (1983), The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848''1938, University of California Press Weigall, David; Stirk, Peter M. R., eds. (1992), The Origins and Development of the European Community, Leicester: Leicester University Press Guieu, Jean-Michel; Le Dr(C)au, Christophe (2009). Le " Congr¨s de l'Europe " La Haye (1948''2008). Euroclio series (in French). 49. Bruxelles, Bern, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Oxford, Wien: Peter Lang. ISBN 9789052015736. Burleigh, Michael (2001), The Third Reich: A New History, Hill and Wang Mazower, Mark (2013), Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe, Penguin UK, ISBN 9780141917504 Schwarz, Dieter (1938). Die Freimaurerei: Weltanschauung, Organisation und Politik. Berlin: Franz Eher Nachfolger GmbH. (with an introduction by Reinhard Heydrich)Denslow, William R. (1957). 10,000 Famous Freemasons. Richmond, Virginia: Macoy Publishing & Masonic Supply Co., Inc. (with an introduction by Harry S. Truman)Jajeśniak-Quast, Dagmara (2010), "Polish Economic Circles and the Question of the Common European Market after World War I", Einzelver¶ffentlichungen des Deutschen Historischen Instituts Warschau Bd. 23, Fibre-Verlag, ISBN 9783938400586 Levy, Jonathan (2007). The Intermarium: Wilson, Madison, and East Central European Federalismahren. Universal-Publishers. ISBN 9781581123692. The role of Count Coudenhove-Kalergi in east central European federalism is reexamined.Churchill, Winston S. (2003), Never Give In!: The Best of Winston Churchill's Speeches, Hyperion Langmuir, Gavin I., History, Religion, and Antisemitism Robertson, Ritchie (1999), The "Jewish Question" in German Literature, 1749''1939: Emancipation and Its Discontents, Oxford University Press Pempel, T.J.; Lee, Chung-Min (2012), Security Cooperation in Northeast Asia: Architecture and Beyond, Routledge, ISBN 9781136309847 Zuber, Otto (1995). "RICHARD NIKOLAUS Graf COUDENHOVE-KALERGI als Freimaurer". Jahrbuch der Forschungsloge Quatuor Coronati (in German). 32. Bayreuth: Forschungsloge Quatuor Coronati. Pernhorst, Christian (2008). Das paneurop¤ische Verfassungsmodell des Grafen Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi (in German). Nomos Verlag. ISBN 9783832932022. Kosch, Wilhelm, ed. (2003). Deutsches Literatur-Lexikon. das 20. Jahrhundert'‚Band 5: Butensch¶n '' Dedo (in German). Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 9783110961119. Duchhardt, Heinz (2005). Option Europa: deutsche, polnische und ungarische Europapl¤ne des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts Band 2 (in German). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. ISBN 9783525362877. Coudenhove-Kalergi, Richard Nikolaus (1925). Praktischer Idealismus [Practical Idealism] (in German). Wien-Leipzig: Pan-Europa-Verlag. UBR069031840355. Retrieved 2014-11-07 . Coudenhove-Kalergi, Richard Nikolaus (1953). An Idea Conquers the World. London: Hutchinson. (New York: Roy Publishers)External links [ edit] Media related to Count Richard Nikolaus von Coudenhove-Kalergi (category) at Wikimedia Commons

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Sat, 08 Jul 2017 16:03

Donald Trump has reportedly had trouble getting a hotel room for the upcoming G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany.

His team apparently waited too long to book accommodations for the President and his travelling staff and were told none of the major hotels had vacancies, Buzzfeed reported.

The local newspaper Hamburger Abendblatt reported that the Four Seasons had to turn him away as they were full.

Donald Trump ignoring stuff - a compilation

In an ironic twist for the hotel chain owner, every luxury hotel in town seemed to be booked up. There do not appear to be any Trump-owned properties in the northern German city.

Buzzfeed did some digging and found that King Salman of Saudi Arabia and his massive entourage are staying at the Four Seasons as well two other high-end hotels.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is staying at the Park Hyatt and German Chancellor Angela Merkel will make camp at the Atlantic Kempinski with India and Canada.

However, the Hamburg government's Senate House will reportedly host him, while staff will likely stay at the US Consulate there.

This is not the first time a US official has had trouble with hotels in Germany. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had to stay several miles away - at a sanitarium outside of Bonn - from other leaders at the February G20 ministers' meeting.

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Sat, 08 Jul 2017 16:59

Reuters

Updated:July 8, 2017, 2:53 PM IST Pope Francis meets German Chancellor Angela Merkel at his private library in the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City, Vatican. During the meeting Issues of common interest were addressed, with special regard for the upcoming G20 meeting in Hamburg, and the parties agreed on the need to dedicate special attention to the responsibility of the international community in combating poverty and hunger, the global threat of terrorism, and climate change. (Photo: Vatican Pool/ Getty Images)Milan: Pope Francis warned leaders of the world's top 20 economies meeting in Hamburg against forming dangerous and distorting alliances that could harm the poor and migrants, in an article in Italian daily la Repubblica on Saturday. "The G20 worries me, it hits migrants in countries in half of the world and it hits them even more as time goes by," the Pope was quoted as saying in a conversation with the paper's founder Eugenio Scalfari.Francis, the first non-European pope in 1,300 years, said he was afraid of "very dangerous alliances among (foreign) powers that have a distorted vision of the world: America and Russia, China and North Korea, (Vladimir) Putin and (Bashar al-)Assad in the war in Syria".

He said the greatest danger concerned immigration, with "the poor, the weak, the excluded and the marginalised" juxtaposed with "those who... fear the invasion of migrants".

European Union states are at odds over how to cope with a huge influx of migrants, many fleeing war and poverty in countries Syria, Afghanistan and other countries.

On top of resolving the differences over trade and climate change Angela Merkel, chancellor of G20 host nation Germany, is expected to lead discussions on this issue.

Pope Francis was also quoted as saying Europe should adopt a federal structure as soon as possible or "it won't count for anything in the world"

In May the 79-year old Argentine urged Europe not to see migrants as criminals.

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Sat, 08 Jul 2017 16:06

While President Trump may have been facing a friendly crowd for today's speech in Poland, he did not get such a warm reception from Polish First Lady Agata Kornhauser-Duda, who pointedly refused to shake his hand but instead went right past to greet Melania.

The sulky and petulant look of rage on President Trump's face speaks volumes about the man's character.

President Trump has become infamous for his handshakes '' and the constant gaffes that seem to come with them. His last foreign trip was marked by his wife's constant refusal to hold his hand in public '' and it seems she isn't the only woman who doesn't want to be touched by the vile misogynist and sexual predator we somehow elected to the presidency.

Add your name to millions demanding that Congress take action on the President's crimes. IMPEACH DONALD TRUMP!

Colin TaylorColin Taylor is the managing editor of the Washington Journal. He graduated from Bennington College with a Bachelor's degree in history and political science. He now focuses on advancing the cause of social justice and equality in America.

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Fri, 07 Jul 2017 22:31

Donald Trump is not fit to be president of the United States. He does not possess the requisite intellect and does not understand the significance of the office he holds nor the tasks associated with it. He doesn't read. He doesn't bother to peruse important files and intelligence reports and knows little about the issues that he has identified as his priorities. His decisions are capricious and they are delivered in the form of tyrannical decrees.

He is a man free of morals. As has been demonstrated hundreds of times, he is a liar, a racist and a cheat. I feel ashamed to use these words, as sharp and loud as they are. But if they apply to anyone, they apply to Trump. And one of the media's tasks is to continue telling things as they are: Trump has to be removed from the White House. Quickly. He is a danger to the world.

Trump is a miserable politician. He fired the FBI director simply because he could. James Comey had gotten under his skin with his investigation into Trump's confidants. Comey had also refused to swear loyalty and fealty to Trump and to abandon the investigation. He had to go.

Witnessing an American Tragedy

Trump is also a miserable boss. His people invent excuses for him and lie on his behalf because they have to, but then Trump wakes up and posts tweets that contradict what they have said. He doesn't care that his spokesman, his secretary of state and his national security adviser had just denied that the president had handed Russia (of all countries) sensitive intelligence gleaned from Israel (of all countries). Trump tweeted: Yes, yes, I did, because I can. I'm president after all.

International NewsletterSign up for our newsletter -- and get the very best of SPIEGEL in English sent to your email inbox twice weekly.

Nothing is as it should be in this White House. Everyone working there has been compromised multiple times and now they all despise each other - and everyone except for Trump despises Trump. Because of all that, after just 120 days of the Trump administration, we are witness to an American tragedy for which there are five theoretical solutions.

The first is Trump's resignation, which won't happen. The second is that Republicans in the House and Senate support impeachment, which would be justified by the president's proven obstruction of justice, but won't happen because of the Republicans' thirst for power, which they won't willingly give up. The third possible solution is the invocation of the 25th Amendment, which would require the cabinet to declare Trump unfit to discharge the powers of the presidency. That isn't particularly likely either. Fourth: The Democrats get ready to fight and win back majorities in the House and Senate in midterm elections, which are 18 months away, before they then pursue option two, impeachment. Fifth: the international community wakes up and finds a way to circumvent the White House and free itself of its dependence on the U.S. Unlike the preceding four options, the fifth doesn't directly solve the Trump problem, but it is nevertheless necessary - and possible.

No Goals and No Strategy

Not quite two weeks ago, a number of experts and politicians focused on foreign policy met in Washington at the invitation of the Munich Security Conference. It wasn't difficult to sense the atmosphere of chaos and agony that has descended upon the city.

The U.S. elected a laughing stock to the presidency and has now made itself dependent on a joke of a man. The country is, as David Brooks wrote recently in the New York Times, dependent on a child. The Trump administration has no foreign policy because Trump has consistently promised American withdrawal while invoking America's strength. He has promised both no wars and more wars. He makes decisions according to his mood, with no strategic coherence or tactical logic. Moscow and Beijing are laughing at America. Elsewhere, people are worried.

In the Pacific, warships - American and Chinese - circle each other in close proximity. The conflict with North Korea is escalating. Who can be certain that Donald Trump won't risk nuclear war simply to save his own skin? Efforts to stop climate change are in trouble and many expect the U.S. to withdraw from the Paris Agreement because Trump is wary of legally binding measures. Crises, including those in Syria and Libya, are escalating, but no longer being discussed. And who should they be discussed with? Phone calls and emails to the U.S. State Department go unanswered. Nothing is regulated, nothing is stable and the trans-Atlantic relationship hardly exists anymore. German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel and Bundestag Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Norbert R¶ttgen fly back and forth, but Germany and the U.S. no longer understand each other. Hardly any real communication takes place, there are no joint foreign policy goals and there is no strategy.

In "Game of Thrones," the Mad King was murdered (and the child that later took his place was no better). In real life, an immature boy sits on the throne of the most important country in the world. He could, at any time, issue a catastrophic order that would immediately be carried out. That is why the parents cannot afford to take their eyes off him even for a second. They cannot succumb to exhaustion because he is so taxing. They ultimately have to send him to his room - and return power to the grownups.

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Fri, 07 Jul 2017 16:25

return to updatesStephen Hawkingdied and has been replaced by Miles MathisFirst published April 17, 2015I have written several papers critiquing Stephen Hawking, including a long one on his Brave New World series for the BBC. But this is my first paper really linking my science research with my faked events research. I will use simple photo analysis and facial analysis to quickly show you the current Stephen Hawking is not the same person as the original Stephen Hawking.This should not surprise you too much, especially if you know something about ALS. ALS is Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease. We are told Hawking has had ALS for over 52 years, which is a record by many decades. Jason Becker is the only person I have heard of who has lived more than 20 years with the disease, so there is about a three-decade difference between the longest survivor and the second longest survivor. That is a more than 100% difference between first and second place. It would be like Justin Gatlin running the 100 meters in 9.8 seconds, and Usain Bolt beating him with a time of 4.5 seconds. In other words, statistically it doesn't happen. The average survival time for ALS is four years. When Hawking was first diagnosed in 1963, doctors gave him two years to live. And yet here we are, 52 years later and counting. Should you believe it? Well, no. Like Becker, it appears the real Hawking did beat the odds and live for about 20 years. But at some point he was replaced. I have no proof he died, but I assume that is why they replaced him. He was a very useful public relations entity for physics, and they didn't want to lose him. But rather than speculate on that, let us go right to the evidence. I won't call it proof , since of course you are free to disagree with me. This is an opinion piece, not a court transcript; and even if it were a stamped court finding, you would be free to disagree with it. You don't have to agree with anything anyone tells you, ever . Remember that. This paper is nothing more than presented evidence, evidence

I find compelling. If you also find it compelling, fine. If you don't, also fine. The picture under title is the real Hawking. Notice the longish face and skinny neck. Also notice the dark brown hair. Here is another picture of the real Hawking: Let that etch into your brain. This is also Hawking, a few years later: You see that his hair is turning gray. But the thing to notice here is his teeth. Pretty awful, right?

Well, it gets worse. He is now fully gray, and he has pretty much lost his lower teeth. I am not a dentist and don't know exactly what is going on there, but it looks like those teeth have been filed down or chipped down, with only stub fillings left. The next step would be dentures, right?

Well, no. The next step, apparently, was going from gray to blonde, even in the eyebrows, and a whole new set of old yellow teeth. He also bought some new fat cheeks. Amazing right? Actually, that is the replacement. That isn't Hawking, as I hope you can see now that I point it out. Go back two photos and compare the teeth directly. Not even close. They found a guy with the same nose and big ears, but otherwise they don't look that much alike. This is the guy you have been looking at for the past thirty years. Which means Hawking might not have written A Brief History of Time , which came out in 1988. I haven't pinpointed the date, but that was about the time they made the switch. My current guess is early 80's, which'--if true'--would mean that book was a forgery. You will say, ''That is just a younger Hawking, before he lost those lower teeth.'' No, it isn't. I just showed you the younger Hawking, and he didn't look like that. Compare them side by side.Besides, the first picture is Hawking from the 1970's. The second is Hawking from the 1990's. Amazing that he aged 20 years with a debilitating disease and got younger looking at the same time, isn't it? Hawking was still looking young in 2007, when he went aboard the ZeroG Plane:

See how it says ''zero g'' on his shirt? That is from when he went up in the plane, which was in 2007. He was supposed to be 65 in 2007. Looks great for 65, eh? Unfortunately, he already looked older than that in 1982, 25 years earlier:1982 2007 His face also got shorter. Normally your face will get longer as you age, not shorter. Here is a more recent photo of the impostor:

Again, the teeth are the clue. This may be the same guy as our blonde impostor, but it certainly isn't Stephen Hawking. Go back to the earlier photos. Those four lower teeth were supposed to be gone decades ago, filed down to filling nubs. Are we supposed to believe they regrew? Do those look like caps or dentures to you? Would you pay a dentist to replace your teeth with those? No, we are supposed to believe that is what he has left of his real teeth, obviously. But I have just shown you why that cannot be the case. Here is a photo I found of the blonde impostor where is it really easy to see he isn't Hawking: That picture is from a foreign magazine, I guess, since it seems to have been suppressed in the US and on the internet. I only found one copy of it, and the full-size image is gone. The website has been scrubbed. This makes me think photos of this guy have normally been retouched to make him look a bit more like Hawking. And here is a really weird one, although I bet you won't see it until I point it out:

Well, did you find the problem? This time it is with the hands. Look at the coloration and texture. Those are waxwork hands. If you can't see it there, maybe you can see it here:

Another reason I noticed the hands is that they don't look like ALS hands. In Hawking's biography , they admit that his fingers had already begun to curl in the 1960's. Those with this disease not only can't straighten their fingers, they can't straighten their wrists. In older pictures of Hawking, he has badly curled wrists, with his left hand normally bent sideways. So how did his hands suddenly get so smooth and relaxed in his 70's? Many of the photos of Hawking have been faked, as you might expect given what we just discovered. Take a look at these two, for instance: Those are both sold to us as wedding pictures of Hawking and Elaine Mason. So how many times did they get married, and how many wedding dresses did Mason have? I knew these were faked even before noticing the two wedding dresses, because this is the real Hawking, not the blonde impostor. But Mason married the blonde impostor, so I knew these photos must be faked. How did I know this was Hawking so fast? Look at the photo of him from the side. See how skinny his neck is and how it slopes up quickly to meet his skull? Then he has a protruding rear skull. The blonde impostor doesn't have that. The shape of his skull is entirely different, and it is very obvious from the side. The real Hawking was always much more bony and angular. I also beg you to notice again how old Hawking looks there. That was supposed to be 1995 (but was really 1984-ish). Then how did he look like this in 2007?

dated 1995 but actually ~1984 2007Twelve (actually 23) years later with a debilitating disease, and he looks ten years younger? How does that work? Where did he get those cheeks? If this analysis is true, it would mean that Hawking's recent books are forgeries, unless he wrote them from beyond the grave (or is still alive as a brain in a tank somewhere). And it would mean his recommendation in 2012 that Peter Higgs get the Nobel Prize was a forgery. The only person recommending anything in that case would be this impostor. You may say something like, ''Yes, I see what you are saying, but I am going to withhold judgment until this breaks in the press. If you are right, it can't stay hidden. Someone will sue or something and a judge will decide.'' To this I say, don't hold your breath . These things do stay out of the mainstream press indefinitely, since the press is controlled. For example, the truth about the Lincoln assassination still hasn't come out in the mainstream, 150 years later. Odds are, no one will ever decide this for you, so you have to do your own research. If you doubt my analysis, do your own. This is how things now work, and if you want to know something, you have to research it and make your own decision. Which is why I don't mind putting this on my science site. That is what science is, after all. Not accepting someone else's decision'--which would be belief by hearsay or reputation. Science is studying the facts yourself and coming to your own conclusions. You cannot do science second hand. You can learn from a teacher, but ultimately you have to be your own scientist. But let's not quit there. I would really like to know if Hawking's famous book is a forgery. I have proposed before that the sales numbers for that book were faked, since they aren't believable. But if we can show that Hawking was already gone before the book came out, that would go a long way to proving the sales figures were also faked. If they can fake the author they are hardly going to stick at faking the sales numbers, are they? Since most of the photos of Hawking on the internet are conveniently not dated, this line of research is difficult. So let's go to his biography to see if we can find other clues to the date of the switch. We find the important paragraph at Wikipedia without much effort:During a visit to the European Organisation for Nuclear Research on the border of France and Switzerland

in mid-1985, Hawking contracted pneumonia , which in his condition was life-threatening; he was so ill that Jane was asked if life support should be terminated. She refused but the consequence was a tracheotomy , which would require round-the-clock nursing care, and remove what remained of his speech. [55] [56] The National Health Service would pay for a nursing home , but Jane was determined that he would live at home. The cost of the care was funded by an American foundation. [57] [58] Nurses were hired for the three shifts required to provide the round-the-clock support he required. One of those employed was Elaine Mason, who was to become Hawking's second wife. Wow. It's all there, we only have to unwind it. First of all, if you have had ALS for 23 years and have pneumonia to the point that doctors are recommending life support be terminated, a tracheotomy isn't going to cure you immediately. A tracheotomy is just the procedure of drilling a hole in your windpipe so you can breath through it instead of your nose or mouth. But the problems obviously went far beyond that, or they wouldn't have been recommending life support termination. He was probably losing control of his diaphragm, and couldn't fill his lungs on his own. That is what happens with ALS, you know: you lose control of parts of your body one by one, until you finally lose control of them all. We aren't told why a tracheotomy suddenly allowed him to go off the ventilator, for instance. So none of this makes any sense. If you have any doctor friends, ask them what they think of this paragraph at Wikipedia. They may tell you the truth. This makes the likely date of the switch 1985, which is three years before A Brief History of Time came out. And it looks like Elaine Mason married the blonde impostor, not Hawking. Which brings us to the next clue:By December 1977, [Hawking's first wife] Jane had met organist Jonathan Hellyer Jones when singing in a church choir. Hellyer Jones became close to the Hawking family, and by the mid-1980s, he and Jane had developed romantic feelings for each other.''By the mid-1980's.'' That confirms the date of 1985 as the date of the switch. If Hawking died in 1985, Jane would of course be free to move on to Jones. This would also absolve her of any taint of adultery, so my reading is actually less sordid (and more believable) than the mainstream reading. It explains all the partner switches in the 1980's. To continue to pursue this line of reasoning, let us look at a clue hidden (probably on purpose) here. The cost of his care was funded by an American foundation . That probably didn't jump out at you, since it is written in a language to make it disappear for most people. But that very language acted as a red flag for me. So what American foundation funded this? It took some digging , but it is the MacArthur Foundation. This is a huge red flag, since John T. MacArthur was the owner of Bankers Life and Casualty, one of the largest insurance firms. At the time of his death he was said to have been one of the three richest men in the US. So we should look at his foundation like we look at the Rockefeller Foundation or the Ford Foundation: that is to say, with high suspicion. MacArthur owned Bankers Life from 1935 to 1978. In that year, most of his wealth went into his Foundation, we are told. Curiously, in the next year, 1979, a large financial services holding company called Conseco (now CNO) was born. It immediately began buying up insurance companies, including Bankers Life and Casualty. Get ready for this: it bought Bankers Life in 1986, the very same year the MacArthur Foundation began funding Hawking. Coincidence? We'll see.We are told CNO purchased Bankers Life for 118 million, which seems absurdly low for the company of the 3 rd richest man in the US. How did MacArthur become a multi-billionaire from such a measly company? These are the questions you should be asking.

Forbes listed CNO with a revenue of 4.5 billion in 2007. This despite the fact that CNO had gone through the third largest bankruptcy (after Enron and Worldcom) in US history in 2002. Also despite the fact that CNO is listed with only four subsidiaries, including Bankers Life, Colonial Penn, Washington National, and 40/86. Something doesn't add up here. Neither does MacArthur's Wikipedia page, which is ridiculously short for someone who was recently the 3 rd richest man in the US. In fact, if you Google John MacArthur without the middle initial, it takes you to first to John F. MacArthur, a radio pastor. Yes, I am sure he is more important to US history than the 3 rd richest man in the US, with a Foundation endowed in the amount of 6 billion.But back to MacArthur's Wikipedia page. It says he was born a poor black child in rural Mississippi. Just kidding, that is a line from Steve Martin's The Jerk . But seriously, his official bio says he and his siblings grew up in poverty, the children of an itinerant Baptist preacher. That is a bit hard to believe, considering that all his surviving brothers also became rich and/or famous. They admit that of his older brother Charles MacArthur, the famous playwright who was part of the Algonquin Round Table, dated Dorothy Parker, and married Helen Hayes. But they forget to tell you of Alfred, who also made a mint in insurance; and Lawrence Telfer MacArthur, who was a publisher. So all four brothers just happened to scratch their way out of crushing poverty into wealth and fame? Sure they did. Because America is just that kind of place. A clue may be found by looking at Catherine T. MacArthur's family. Her family name was Hyland, and we are told her father was part of the Irish Catholic political machine in South Chicago, holding several local and state positions. That should be another red flag, and may be a clue as to how the MacArthurs advanced. Chicago politics has long been famous for its corruption, and even Wikipedia says,The political environment in Chicago in the 1910s and 1920s let organized crime flourish to the point that many Chicago policemen earned more money from pay-offs than from the city. This is when Catherine MacArthur's father would have been rising in Chicago politics. We see similar fed flags when we return to John T. MacArthur's page. In addition to his insurance companies, he was also known as a Palm Beach, FL, real estate mogul, buying up large parts of Palm Beach and Sarasota in the 1960's. Even the PalmBeachPost admits their city has long been a bed for organized crime, although they forget to tell you that organized crime was taken over by the Feds decades ago. Private mobsters no longer exist, having been absorbed by the more powerful families that run the US government. As with all other business, the past 50 years has seen a monopolization of all lucrative operations by ''investment firms'', ''holding companies'' and of course banks. Since these banks and other huge companies are fronts for the same few families, there is no longer any room for mobsters or any of the rest of those people. They went extinct some time in the 1960's. All the Godfather movies and Soprano shows are just misdirection to make you think organized crime still exists in the old way. It doesn't. They have found ways to steal much larger sums of money without getting their hands dirty or their names in the paper'--with absolutely no risk of getting caught. They do it by stealing from you under the aegis of the Federal government.Anyway, so that is who funded the Hawking impostor after 1985. But why? Well, we have seen all sorts of weirdness afoot in physics and other science since then. I haven't made up this weirdness, you know, I just circle it and comment on it. See my paper on Hawking's Brave New World , if you haven't already. See my paper on Yuri Milner and the Fundamental Physics Prize. See my paper on the Higgs

Boson announcement, which I show was faked from the ground up. See my paper on Alan Guth and the faked gravity wave research and promotion which preceded his 2014 Kavli Prize. Well, the reason for all this weirdness is the reason for all the other weirdnesses in the Modern world: money. Physics has become a giant cash cow, milked straight from the various national treasuries by the usual suspects. Hundreds of billions of dollars are siphoned from the people of Europe, China, Russia, and the Americas via these fake programs. And Hawking was an important PR personality in the early 1980's, one they didn't want to lose. He was a top salesman of their various boondoggles, and he became an even better salesman once he was replaced by an impostor. Once he was replaced, his puppeteers had complete control over the product they were creating, with no fear that the real Hawking might develop scruples.Remember, this is exactly what they did in art in the 20 th century. They got rid of all the real artists and replaced them with impostors. The scheme was slightly different, in that they didn't replace Rodin and Monet and Whistler with look-alikes in 1900. Instead, they just replaced the entire field with their own manufactured mannequins over a generation or two. But the Modern artists have been impostors one way or the other. They certainly aren't artists by the old definitions, since they can't create anything beautiful or interesting. They are just PR personalities, the faces that front the fakery. In the very same way, physics has been taken over. Just as the Modern artists are incapable of real art, the Modern physicists are incapable of real physics. So instead they manufacture some huge pile of equations that seems (to some gullible people) to resemble physics or math, and then sell it to Congress or Parliament as cutting-edge. The important thing is not that any physics or art gets done, but that money flows from the treasury. It is all a colossal scam, of earth-shattering proportions. And I mean that literally. All the societies of this Earth are being shattered by this rampant fakery. They are coming apart at the seams. Not only are they being milked dry of all revenues'--revenues that could and should be going to real programs'--but they are being milked dry of all inspiration, all creativity, all good will, and all belief in humanity. Human potential is shriveling up like a spider on a hot sidewalk under a magnifying glass, and these rich families are the magnifying glass. It has to stop. It has gotten so bad, the rich are actually undercutting themselves. For money to be worth anything there has to be something worth buying. The rich can no longer collect art, since they have destroyed it. They can no longer have the joy of underwriting real science, since they have destroyed it. They can't collect books or poetry, since they have destroyed both literature and poetry. They can't enjoy the company of innocent youths, since they have destroyed the innocence of youth. They can't enjoy love, because they have destroyed it for profit. They can't enjoy beautiful architecture, because they have destroyed it. And they can't enjoy the feeling of a day well spent, because their days aren't well spent. That is the thing about dirty money and a dirty conscience: no matter how much you spend, you can't hire someone to clean it. [I am rushing this into print with only a few days research, since I predict they will announce his death very very soon.]Addendum, April 22, 2015 : Two days after this paper went up, there was an internet death hoax for Hawking. Someone got over a million hits at Facebook with this hoax. I read that two ways: 1) the widely publicized hoax acts to cover this paper a bit, because some will dismiss my title without reading the paper, thinking it is linked to the hoax. For this reason, I assume the death hoax was started by the same people that are behind the longterm Hawking hoax. 2) We have seen that these internet death hoaxes often now precede a real death announcement. See the strange goings-on before the announcement of Robin Williams' death (which I assume was faked like the rest). This confusion is

created on purpose, because it prevents most people from making any sense of the news. Confusing news prevents questions'--perhaps surprisingly'--because it causes most people's brains to shut down. You would think confusing news would create questions, and in a few people it still does. But in the majority of people, very confusing news acts as its own shield. If enough confusion is created, the reader or viewer will just see a tangled web he has no hope of unwinding, causing him to accept whatever he is told and ''move on.'' For this reason, I will double down on my prediction that the real death announcement of Hawking is coming soon. However, we know they are reading my papers, so they may stall just for the purpose of nixing my prediction. At any rate, my intuition tells me the blonde impostor died recently and they are already stalling. Maybe they are looking for another replacement, who knows. I think it will be hard to find someone who looked like the blonde impostor did at the end. Addendum, April 25 2015 : We already have new evidence for my claim that the Hawking impostor is also dead, in that his current appearances are via hologram. Last night he appeared in Sydney via hologram, but these 3D images cannot be confirmed to be live . Like any other images, holograms can be taped and played back later. I will be told he responds to live questions, but that can be explained in any number of ways, included planted questions. But even if we assume or prove the questions are live and not planted, the responses of Hawking all have to be interpreted , which allows for any amount of trickery. From visual and aural clues alone, there is no way to tell what Hawking is responding to, which you will have to admit is convenient.

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Fri, 07 Jul 2017 03:05

Life & Style has exclusively learned that George Clooney has recently made plans to move back to LA, for the safety of his family, after the latest spate of terror attacks in England.

''He doesn't feel like Amal and the twins are safe living in the English countryside,'' an insider says. ''He's determined to move his family to LA, where he feels much more secure.''

MORE: George Clooney "Really Hurt" That Brad Pitt Let Angelina Jolie Trash Talk His Wife!

George's safety concerns had been growing for years. The Oscar winner ''has been subject to very serious threats in the past,'' reveals the source, because of his humanitarian efforts in Darfur, Sudan. And Amal's work as an international human rights lawyer, along with her public pleas for foreign governments to prosecute terrorists, has made her a potential target.

(Photo Credit: Getty Images)

When George learned that he was going to be a father, those concerns went into overdrive. ''As soon as Amal found out she was pregnant, he hired former Secret Service agents to assess all his properties and make recommendations for improvement,'' the insider adds. ''His mansion in Studio City [Calif.] was deemed the most secure, and it's within minutes of an LAPD station.''

MORE: Is Jennifer Aniston Pregnant? Find out If She'll Welcome a Baby in 2017!

''He's waited so long for this family,'' the insider continues. ''He'll do whatever it takes to keep them safe.''

For more on this, pick up the latest issue of Life & Style magazine, on newsstands now!

Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth '-- the Wedding's Off! (EXCLUSIVE)

Brad Pitt Wants to Reconcile With Angelina Jolie Despite That Whole Super Messy Split

Blue Ivy's Reaction to the Twins Is Absolutely Adorable

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Source: Dave says...

Fri, 07 Jul 2017 03:41

In a fitting but somewhat misguided move, anti-tourism activists in Amsterdam have squatted an apartment building currently owned by Booking.com CEO Gillian Tans.

In a letter delivered to neighbors, the squatters state that they've taken over the building on the luxurious Koninginneweg street because they think ''it's problematic that a large portion of buildings is being used for tourism, with profit as a purpose, while it's so hard to find affordable living space in Amsterdam.''

Gillian Tans' building in Amsterdam. The sign reads ''Housing shortage breaks laws''.Squatting as activism used to be quite common in Amsterdam starting from the sixties, usually to protest real estate developers leaving properties unused to sell or develop for more profit later. It was even legal, because squatters forced real estate speculators to actually do something with buildings in a city that was already short on housing.

This lasted up until 2010, when the Dutch government outlawed squatting and started clearing out the many squatted buildings that often served as cultural spaces for the neighboring communities. Since then, over 330 squatted building have been cleared. But apparently, squatting is back now '' for a different, but remarkably similar new reason. Instead of vacancy, squatters are protesting tourism.

Amsterdam's Red Light District is often so packed with tourists the police are worried about overcrowding. Image: Pierre/FlickrOver the past few years, more and more inhabitants of the city have been bemoaning the influence of tourism on the city. The tremendous growth in hotel accommodations and the rise of Airbnb have made the city unlivable, according to some. Not only are parts of Amsterdam becoming overcrowded to the point of being dangerous, speculators and home owners are making a killing by renting out their apartments on Airbnb '' driving up housing prices and driving out permanent residents.

Amsterdam has taken steps to limit the influence of the platform: Users are allowed to rent out their houses for a maximum of 60 days per year, and require everyone renting their home out through any holiday rental platform to register with the city authorities from October 1. But some fear it's too little, too late '' including the squatters in Tans' apartment building.

I visited the apartment building, but was denied entry by one of the squatters. Leaning out of a first story window, she told me they had deliberately chosen a building owned by Tans, based on information they found in public property registers.

She didn't want to elaborate further, and told me to email some questions. As of time of publishing, they did not answer any of my questions about their motives, the legality of what they're doing, and their long-term goal. I'll update this post if they eventually do.

I also reached out to Gillian Tans, and even though she did not directly comment on the situation, a company spokesperson confirmed Gillian does not plan to use the building for short-term rentals, and has, in fact, been quite active in supporting long-term housing projects across Amsterdam.

According to local newspaper Parool, Tans has notified the police, but the municipality won't evict the squatters until Tans' licensing applications for the apartments are fully processed.

As also seen in cities like Barcelona and Venice, the increasing percentage of the world's population that can afford to visit other countries has consequences on the livability of cities. More tourists means more demand for places for them to stay, and if a city gives in to this demand, it automatically makes a choice that disturbs the precarious balance between temporary living space for tourists and permanent living space for residents.

In the heyday of squatting in Amsterdam, squatters made speculative vacancy and housing shortage visible for the rest of city. It was a bottom-up way of protesting perceived misuse of the city's valuable square meters. The ban on squatting did not only take away this form of protest, it also gave many of the squatted properties to developers seeking to turn them into another form of speculation: hotels and expensive housing.

The building these modern day squatters chose also represents a kind of double-edged sword. On the one hand, Booking.com stimulates tourism '' including to Amsterdam '' by making it more accessible, but on the other hand, they employ thousands of people there as well. Being headquartered in the Dutch capital, they are one of the reasons the city is considered a global tech hub, bringing in more international tech companies and thus more demand for higher quality services in the city.

Ironically, the city needs Booking.com to do well as a company, but not so much by booking hotel stays in Amsterdam.

Read next:June in Africa: Taxi wars, smarter cities and increased investments

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Sat, 08 Jul 2017 04:08

Donald Trump and CNN president Jeffrey Zucker. Photo: David Hume Kennerly/Getty ImagesIt's quite possible that Donald Trump would never have become president were it not for CNN. The network nurtured the reality star's campaign in its infancy, broadcasting entire stump speeches, uninterrupted by correction or commentary. And it is likely that the president would be little more than a cultural artifact '-- a walking reminder of 1980s nihilism '-- were it not for the network's president Jeffrey Zucker, who reintroduced Trump to the American public as a no-nonsense businessman in NBC's The Apprentice.

But CNN is a journalistic enterprise. Or, at least, it plays one on TV. And so when a politician spews vicious, obvious lies on a near-daily basis '-- and directs a good portion of that venom at the free press itself '-- CNN's anchors and reporters feel compelled to correct and condemn such mendacity. And that makes the president feel ''betrayed.''

So, now, his administration is openly threatening to punish the network by sending the Justice Department after its parent company. As the New York Timesreports:

Mr. Trump's allies argue that it is CNN's conduct that is unbecoming. Starting on last year's campaign trail, the president and his aides have accused the network of bias and arrogance, an offensive that heated up again in January after CNN reported on the existence of a secret dossier detailing a series of lurid accusations against Mr. Trump. The network's reporters now routinely joust with Mr. Trump's press aides, and Jim Acosta, a White House correspondent, recently denounced the administration's use of off-camera briefings as an affront to American values.

White House advisers have discussed a potential point of leverage over their adversary, a senior administration official said: a pending merger between CNN's parent company, Time Warner, and AT&T. Mr. Trump's Justice Department will decide whether to approve the merger, and while analysts say there is little to stop the deal from moving forward, the president's animus toward CNN remains a wild card. [my emphasis]

This detail is buried 12 paragraphs into a feature on CNN's combative relationship with Trump. Which is bizarre, given that it's an open confession of corruption by a senior White House official. It hardly matters whether the administration follows through on its threat: The White House is extorting a news network in the pages of the New York Times. The fact that this didn't strike the paper as headline material is a testament to how thoroughly Trump has already succeeded in eroding our expectations for good governance.

Shortly after the mogul's election, Vox's Matt Yglesias posited politically motivated interference in the Time Warner''AT&T merger as a frightening hypothetical '-- a development that would signal America's descent into kleptocracy.

Trump is not going to crush the free media in one fell swoop. But big corporate media does face enough regulatory matters that even a single exemplary case would suffice to induce large-scale self-censorship. AT&T, for example, is currently seeking permission from antitrust authorities to buy Time Warner '-- permission that Time Warner executives might plausibly fear is contingent on Trump believing that CNN has covered him ''fairly.''

It's worth noting that CNN has already allowed the desire to appease Trump (and his voters) to undermine its journalistic integrity. The network literally pays Trump associates Corey Lewandowski and Jeffrey Lord to lie to its audience on the president's behalf '-- even as it cut ties with Reza Aslan for profanely criticizing the president on social media.

While this is the first time the administration has publicly declared its interest in using the Justice Department as a tool for stifling dissent, Trump has been encouraging Time Warner to discipline its news network for months now. In February, the Wall StreetJournalreported that senior White House adviser (and Trump son-in-law) Jared Kushner ''complained to Gary Ginsberg, executive vice-president of corporate marketing and communications at CNN's parent Time Warner, about what Mr. Kushner feels is unfair coverage slanted against the president.''

On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to block Time Warner's desired merger ''because it's too much concentration of power in the hands of too few.''

If that sentiment were genuine, it would be worth applauding. There's considerable evidence that corporate consolidation in general '-- and media concentration, in particular '-- has been bad for our economy and our democracy. But the Trump administration has signaled an appreciation for the virtues of monopolies, appointing a former lobbyist with an affinity for big business as the Justice Department's head of antitrust enforcement.

And the White House is perfectly comfortable with media consolidation '-- when such mergers increase the bandwidth of pro-Trump outlets. Earlier this year, the FCC relaxed rules on how many local stations a single owner can control. Shortly thereafter, Sinclair Broadcast Group purchased Tribune Media '-- thereby gaining ownership of enough local television stations to reach 70 percent of American households. Sinclair is run by a big-dollar GOP donor, and forced its local affiliates to skew their coverage in Trump's favor throughout the 2016 campaign.

If the White House blocks the Time Warner''AT&T deal, it will not be out of a desire to enhance competition, but to limit free speech.

To be sure, there's reason to doubt that Trump will make good on that threat '-- this White House's bark tends to be louder than its bite. In an interview with the Times, Zucker claims that the merger is not something he thinks about and that Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes has never brought that subject to his attention.

But when a president with an ardent, white-nationalist following barks, it's reasonable to fear that someone else might use their teeth. While Zucker isn't worried about antitrust enforcement, he told the Times that he is worried for his staff's personal safety:

The level of threats against CNN employees, he said, has spiked this year. Mr. Trump, he said, ''has caused us to have to take steps that you wouldn't think would be necessary because of the actions of the president of the United States.''

Over the weekend, Trump tweeted a GIF that portrayed him battering a wrestling figure with the CNN logo for a head. The creator of that clip turned out to be a neo-Nazi Reddit user who had posted a list of all the Jews that work at CNN. The network's Andrew Kaczynski tracked down that user and extracted an apology. Kaczynski declined to reveal the figure's identity, but suggested that he retained the right to do so, if the shit-poster resumed his ''ugly behavior on social media.''

That threat did not sit well with the alt-right, who saw it as an attempt to restrict free speech through intimidation. Thus, some Trumpists decided to express their principled opposition to such intimidation, by threatening to kill Kaczynski and his family. As BuzzFeed reports:

For now, according to a source with knowledge of the situation, Kaczynski and his family are the subject of an ongoing harassment campaign that includes the publication of personal information and death threats. And earlier today, the pro-Trump social media personality Michael Cernovich announced a protest outside Kaczynski's New York home.

The White House is openly threatening to punish a (barely) adversarial outlet through selective regulatory enforcement. White nationalist Trump supporters are threatening to kill investigative reporters and assembling outside their homes.

Donald Trump has been president for less than six months.

The nine nations that possess nuclear weapons did not participate in the treaty negotiations.

Congressman Mike Conaway's family bought stock in UnitedHealth the same day that a bill repealing Obamacare's taxes on insurers advanced in committee.

A viral moment from the G20 summit.

An op-ed co-authored by Clinton strategist Mark Penn tells Democrats to emulate a 1996 strategy the actual candidates did not pursue.

The First Lady was sent in to interrupt them during the G20 summit.

One Democrat in Trenton wants to make sure Beachgate stays in the news.

Rioters mixed with peaceful protesters as world leaders gathered in the German city.

At a meeting than ran 90 minutes longer than expected, Trump and Putin discussed Russian interference in U.S. elections, the secretary of State says.

The definition of the Supreme Court's ''bona fide relationship'' is the new battleground.

The vice-president ignored some very large instructions on NASA equipment labeled ''Do Not Touch.''

Competitors in 43 sports from 80 countries have gathered in Tel Aviv for the Maccabiah Games.

At a meeting with Enrique Pe±a Nieto, Trump returns to the topic that drove a wedge between the two leaders.

The German chancellor's husband is shady.

In June, there were an impressive 222,000 new jobs created. How much does Trump's agenda have to do with it?

They may be looking for ways to disrupt the U.S. electric grid, but DHS and the FBI said there is ''no indication of a threat to public safety.''

There were no injuries, but the ''minor'' derailment caused more even delays at the troubled station.

Doctors said the congressman, who was shot last month, ''tolerated the procedure well.''

(C) 2017, New York Media LLC.

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Fri, 07 Jul 2017 23:26

Erik Wemple | Opinion

By Erik Wemple

July 6, 2017 at 6:14 PM

As a matter of timing, it was odd: Last week, the New York Times attached a lumpy correction to a story about the political dynamics of President Trump's various proclamations on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. The story highlighted the president's various ''asterisks, wisecracks, caveats or obfuscation'' about Russian cyberattacks, and made a reference to the consensus among ''17 intelligence agencies'' about Russian interference.

Here's the text:

Correction: June 29, 2017

A White House Memo article on Monday about President Trump's deflections and denials about Russia referred incorrectly to the source of an intelligence assessment that said Russia orchestrated hacking attacks during last year's presidential election. The assessment was made by four intelligence agencies '-- the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community.

News organizations had been repeating that ''17 intelligence agencies'' line for months and months, with no corrections in sight. Why was the New York Times issuing a correction all of a sudden? And why did the Associated Press add a clarification one day later? Who asked for it? The New York Times declined to comment beyond the correction. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence also declined to comment on the record.

What we do know is that the number has been an issue for the president. In a Thursday news conference with Polish President Andrzej Duda, Trump fielded a question from NBC News correspondent Hallie Jackson about his take on Russian meddling. ''I heard it was 17 agencies. I said, '²Boy, that's a lot. Do we even have that many intelligence agencies, right? Let's check it.' And we did some very heavy research. It turned out to be three or four. It wasn't 17. And many of your compatriots had to change their reporting or they had to apologize or they had to correct.''

Trump spoke the truth. The January intelligence-community assessment of Russian meddling stemmed from the findings of three agencies: the FBI, the CIA and the National Security Agency. It was published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Though the ODNI represents all of the various 17 intelligence agencies and elements in the U.S. government, not each one of those agencies contributed intelligence to the report. In testimony before Congress in May, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper put a point on the distinction: ''As you know, the [assessment] was a coordinated product from three agencies: CIA, NSA and the FBI '-- not all 17 components of the intelligence community.'' In either case, the conclusions were unanimous.

Also in remarks before Congress, former CIA director John Brennan spoke to why there weren't ''17 intelligence agencies'' behind the findings: ''It only involved the FBI, NSA and CIA as well as the Office of Director of National Intelligence; it wasn't a full interagency community assessment that was coordinated among the 17 agencies and for good reason, because of the nature and the sensitivity of the information trying to, once again, keep the tightly compartmented.'' The Daily Caller on June 1 wrote a fact-check vacating a more recent claim by Hillary Clinton about the 17-agencies agreement.*

So it's an exaggeration to say that ''17 U.S. intelligence agencies '... blame Russia for election meddling'' (AP, June 22); or that ''the 17 intelligence agencies released a declassified report concluding that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a campaign to influence the 2016 election with the goal of disparaging Hillary Clinton while boosting Trump and undermining the public's faith in the democratic process'' (CNN, June 28); or to ask, ''How stunning is that to you, that the president of the United States disputes the evidence of 17 intelligence agencies in this country?'' (Chuck Todd, ''Meet the Press,'' June 18); or to point out, ''And then, on the broader question, the underlying issue of our relationship with Russia and the fact that Russia, according to our 17 intelligence agencies, interfered in our campaign, James Comey was unequivocal on that point'' (George Stephanopoulos, ABC News, June 11).

The 17-intelligence-agencies shorthand is everywhere, such that off-base iterations far outnumber corrections and clarifications at this point. It's a convenient and powerful number, too: In today's world, it's hard to find 17 people who agree on a single thing, let alone 17 government agencies and offices. So its coinage had to come from someone who had a stake in a strong affirmation of the intelligence consensus on Russian interference. Sure enough: In a Las Vegas debate last October, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said, ''We have 17 '-- 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin and they are designed to influence our election. I find that deeply disturbing.''

Those remarks refer to an Oct. 7 statement from the ODNI and the Department of Homeland Security that starts like this: ''The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow'--the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.''

Following Clinton's debate remarks about the 17 agencies, fact-checkers confirmed her contention. USA Today headlined: ''Yes, 17 intelligence agencies really did say Russia was behind hacking.'' PolitiFact gave Clinton a ''True'' rating:

The 17 separate agencies did not independently declare Russia the perpetrator behind the hacks. Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said that this cuts against Clinton's point, saying, ''It is unlikely that all 16 of the agencies had looked independently at the Russian connection, which is what Clinton seemed to indicate.'' (Cheung said 16 agencies because he omitted the Office of the Director of National Intelligence from his count.)

However, as the head of the 17-agency intelligence community, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, headed by James Clapper, speaks on behalf of the group.

Speaking on behalf of a group, however, doesn't quite equate to ''all'' members of the group ''concluding'' the same thing.

Whatever your take on the fact-checks, the media laundered and recycled a Clinton talking point without too much exploration of the intricacies through which the intelligence community reaches its conclusions. Until the New York Times wrote up a correction, that is.

*Updated to add the line about the Daily Caller's contribution.

Erik Wemple writes the Erik Wemple blog, where he reports and opines on media organizations of all sorts.

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Archived Version

Sat, 08 Jul 2017 03:44

(updated below)

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow devoted the first 21 minutes of her Thursday night program to what she promoted as an ''exclusive'' scoop. The cable news host said that someone had sent her a ''carefully forged'' top-secret NSA document that used a top-secret document The Intercept reported on and published on June 5 as a template. That document '-- from the June 5 Intercept report '-- was from an unknown NSA official, and purported to describe Russian attempts to hack election officials and suppliers.

Maddow said her report should serve as a ''heads up'' to other news organizations that someone is attempting to destroy the credibility of those who report on Trump's connections to Russia by purposely giving them false information. She suggested, without stating, that this may have been what caused CNN and other outlets recently to publish reports about Trump and/or Russia that ended up being retracted.

The grave tone of cloak-and-daggers mystery Maddow used to tell her story was predicated on her timeline of events. If it were the case that MSNBC had received the purportedly forged version of this document before The Intercept published its own version, that would indeed be a major story. That would mean that the person who sent the forgery to MSNBC was one of a relatively small group of people who would have had access to this top-secret document.

But that's not what happened. By Maddow's own telling, MSNBC received the document two days after The Intercept published it for the entire world to see. That means that literally anyone with internet access could have taken the document from The Intercept's site, altered it, and sent it to Maddow.

Despite the fact that she received the document two days after The Intercept published it, Maddow nonetheless suggested that the document may have been forged before The Intercept's publication '-- meaning that the forger had access to the document prior to our publication of it. Her theory, which posits a remarkable scenario, rests exclusively on one claim: that the ''creation date'' in the metadata of the document precedes The Intercept's publication by slightly more than three hours.

Even though Maddow acknowledged what is plainly true '-- that the time stamp could have been easily altered to make it appear that the document was created before The Intercept's publication '-- she showed a graphic of the purported timeline of events, which depicted the forged document's creation as occurring just over three hours prior to The Intercept's publication (12:17:15 p.m. on June 5):

This seems to be a remarkably thin reed on which to base such an improbable yet consequential theory. To begin with, as Maddow acknowledged, the ''creation date'' in the document's metadata could be easily altered. It's also possible that simple time zones explain the discrepancy: that whoever forged the document was in a time zone several hours behind East Coast time, and June 5, 12:17 p.m., in that time zone is after The Intercept's publication, not before.

The story is much sexier and more dramatic if the forger had access to the document before The Intercept's publication '-- and Maddow does a lot of work to suggest this to viewers '-- but the far likelier version, based on what Maddow presented, is that someone among the millions of people in the public who read the story and saw the document on The Intercept's site sent an altered version to Maddow.

But here's the key point, one that guts MSNBC's theory completely. If you look at the time stamp on the metadata on the document that The Intercept published, it reads ''June 5, 12:17:15 p.m.'' '-- exactly the same time and date, to the second, as the one on the document received by Maddow:

That's because time stamps on the documents published by The Intercept designate the creation date included in the PDF we publish on DocumentCloud: In this case, that occurred just over three hours prior to publication of our article. Both versions '-- the one we published and the one Maddow received '-- reflect the same time to the second: literally the exact moment when we created and uploaded the document.

In other words, anyone who took the document directly from The Intercept's site would have a document with exactly the same time stamp as the one Maddow showed. Thus, rather than proving that this document was created before The Intercept's publication, the time stamp featured by Maddow strongly suggests exactly the opposite: that it was taken from The Intercept's site.

Nobody from Maddow's show or MSNBC reached out to The Intercept before running this story. This was odd for many reasons, including the fact that Maddow offered several speculative theories about The Intercept's reporting on the document, including her belief that a crease that appeared on the document sent to her was the same as the crease that the Trump DOJ, in its affidavit, claimed appeared on The Intercept's document.

Had MSNBC sought comment from The Intercept before broadcasting this story, they would have learned that the sole piece of evidence on which their entire theory was predicated '-- the time stamp that preceded The Intercept's publication by a few hours '-- strongly suggests that whoever sent them the document did not have special, early, pre-publication access to it, but rather took it from The Intercept's site.

Prior to publication of this article, The Intercept sent a series of questions to Maddow about all of this. She said MSNBC did not contact The Intercept prior to broadcasting her report ''because we were really only working on the document you published, not in your reporting on it.''

As for the issues of the timeline, Maddow stressed that ''we explicitly *didn't* say it was sent to us prior to your publication. I said '-- and we even showed a calendar graphic to illustrate '-- that it was sent to us *after* you published. No one falsely made it appear that it was sent to us prior to your publication. It came to us afterwards '-- which is what I said on the air.''

Regarding our inquiries about the possibility that the metadata may have been changed, Maddow said: ''yes, like I said on the air, we did look into the possibility of altering the metadata to change the apparent creation date, and, as I said, it could definitely have been altered.''

As for our question that pointed out that the exact same time appears in the metadata on the document sent to her as the one we published, strongly suggesting that whoever sent her the document took it from The Intercept's site, Maddow said: ''We got a document *different* than yours, with no purported connection to yours, except we sussed out that someone appears to have used your doc as a template for ginning up a fake one to sent to us. And yes the timestamp absolutely goes to our whole point '-- someone used the document sent to you as a template for forging the fake document sent to us.''

One can listen to Maddow's original report and draw your own conclusions. That she was strongly suggesting that the forger obtained the document prior to The Intercept's publication '-- and thus must have had special access to it '-- was something heard by numerous people. Here, for instance, is Lawfare's Benjamin Wittes citing Maddow's report to strongly imply '-- falsely '-- that this all happened because of the The Intercept's poor security and that our servers were ''penetrated'':

That is an utter fabrication, but it's what he '-- and many others '-- heard from Maddow's report. All this accusatory innuendo when '-- as the evidence proves '-- the overwhelmingly likely reality is quite mundane: that someone simply took the document from our site after we published it and used it to create a potentially forged document that was sent to Maddow.

None of this is to suggest that there is no newsworthy story here. It appears, at least if one accepts Maddow's descriptions of the document, that someone did send her an altered document. But there is a massive difference in terms of the importance of this story if it was sent by some random person from the public who obtained the document after The Intercept published it, as opposed to someone who had access to it before publication.

And virtually nothing proves the latter, far more explosive timeline that Maddow's graphics suggested. To the contrary, all of the available evidence strongly suggests it was taken from The Intercept's site after we published it.

Maddow is absolutely correct to underscore the critical importance for media outlets to authenticate documents of the type that one receives, particularly when the source is unknown. She also makes the important point that it is ''logistically difficult'' for news organizations to authenticate documents of this type; given the obvious reluctance of government officials to be of help, it is a serious journalistic challenge to obtain the necessary confirmation that such documents are genuine before reporting on them.

While it is of course possible that there is some widespread, coordinated, official effort to feed news outlets false information in order to discredit stories about Trump and Russia, there is no real evidence for that theory, and this story does not offer any. Maddow's warnings about the need for caution and authentication are important ones, but if '-- as seems likely '-- the document MSNBC received was sent by someone who got it from The Intercept's site, then the significance of this story seems very minimal, and the more ominous theories her report raises seem to be baseless.

UPDATE : Ben Wittes, to his credit, apologized for the false claims he made after watching Maddow's report:

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Archived Version

Fri, 07 Jul 2017 22:18

I really respect Sarah Lacy and Paul Carr.

They fight a good fight and bring attention to a lot of important issues. They exhibit clean transparency by disclosing who their investors are'Š'--'Šand they're resented for their brutal tactics'Š'--'Šand yellow journalistic behavior'Š'--'Šas long as their victims deserve it.

So yesterday they decided that I deserved it. And not just me. My wife.

That's when this shit got totally out of control!

From the moment when the NYTimes decided to include me in a piece of sexual harrasment, I had been working on doing something pro-active'Š'--'Šthat would go beyond an apology. I know how lame apologies are and why they're simply not enough.

It was when danah boyd wrote a wonderful piece and laid out these four tenets that I thought: ''I like the tone of danah's appeal'Š'--'Šit seemed completely logical and reasonable to me and that's the tone under which I want to reply.''

But that was never ALL I wanted to do.

In addition to an apology what I had INTENDED on doing was:

launch some sort of affirmative action effort where women's participation and ''seat at the table'' could be ''forced'' or coerced or somehow facilitated in our industryshow real world acion that I was doing something in MY company'Š'--'Šby recruiting female board members to my board and female engineers to our teamdo a public ''call for action'' to 50+ of the major and independent male CEOs in our industry'Š'--'Što ''do the same'''Š'--'Šhire female engineers and recruit female board membersBut that all takes time. I was working ''behind the scenes'' to formulate the right response and line up more than a few examples of'...'... and I just couldn't get it done'Š'--'Šin time. Time ran out. Once Pando starts attacking your wife (for defending me) I knew that the time was NOW to AT LEAST get a sincere apology'Š'--'Šout.

So I did.

But no dear reader'Š'--'Šthat's not enough'Š'--'Šand it won't be. Apologies are never enough. One must be judged on their actions.

People who know me know that I would never do something on purpose to make someone feel uncomfortable. That's not who I am.

I'm not a sexist! In fact I'm very pro-women. One of my former co-founders is transgender, I've helped female run companies and I hang out with some of the most intelligent and strong women we have in this industry.

It's not that I'm a sexist, but I was making some women feel uncomfortable and that is wrong! I've realized that what I perceive of'Š'--'Šas acting ''unfiltered and ourageous'' really puts women on the spot and makes them feel uncomfortable. That's not good thing! I won't do that again. I promise.

I really do.

I act outrageous to get attention. That's what Silicon Valley has taught me'Š'--'Šits all about attention. And now I have it.

Yesterday's Medium article garnered almost 12k reads. So now I'm continuing this ''attention orgy'' with a followup. And I'll do more. As long as I can help achieve change'Š'--'ŠI will.

My bad behavior and false assumptions is based upon this thing I do'Š'--'Šwhich is unfiltered, sarcastic, snarky contrarian logic. I try to turn situations around'Š'--'Što show just how absurd the reality is. That's what I did with Wendy Dent.

But taken out of context'Š'--'Šit looks bad.

The grabbed quote that Katie Brenner decided to use left a lot of the ''supposed'' sexual flirtation'Š'--'Šout. This is not to try and justify my bad behavior, but to point out that I'm not some horrible person who holds sex out as a favor for money or power.

For one'Š'--'ŠI HAVE NO money or power to give!

Secondly'Š'--'ŠI have no intention of making people feel bad'Š'--'Šand that's what really hurts. The women that I've made feel bad.

That's who I want to apologize to.

Thirdly'Š'--'ŠI actually don't have a copy of the thread between me and Wendy Dent. She deleted it. But saved a copy to send to the press. They (NYTimes, USA Today) have copies'Š'--'Šbut not me. So its very hard for me to defend myself'Š'--'Šbut that's NOT what this is about. I'm NOT defending myself or trying to justify my behavior! I just wanna set the context straight for the context. The interacton with Wendy was like 2+ years ago'Š'--'Šthat much I do remember. Taking things OUT of context is what Steve Bannon does.

Finally'Š'--'ŠI'm GLAD that I was included in Katie's piece. I'm going to use all this attention and negativity to do something positive and help move our industry forward.

It was a shock to me to be included in the same article talking about real sexual manipulation and coercement. It was a shock to me to be included with folks who act that way'Š'--'Šand live that way'Š'--'Šon a regular basis.

Katie Brenner's piece in the NYTimes was not intended to JUST reveal VCs bad behavior, but to make a statement on Silicon Valley culture. I am part of that culture'Š'--'Šwhether I like it or not.

I am not an investor. I tried to explain this to Katie and I also pointed this out to Paul Carr. Somehow several reports were made that I'm some investor and important person. I'm not.

I USED to be important and that's all that mattered to the NYTimes.

So here I am:

being hated and reviled for making a crude remarkbeing added to a Blacklist and list of sexual harrassersand then a thread where my wife defended me'Š'--'Šgets highlighted by Pando'Š'--'Šand gets taken out of context!This is classic Steve Bannon yellow journalistic behavioral results. This is how Trump got elected.

As long as we're outting people, lets be clear as to what happened.

Damn straight apologies are not enough! Its about action. So please judge me by my present and future action. That's all I can ask.

Apologies are an easy way to trying to put a story behind you. That's not what I'm going to do.

When we launch our product I'll be taking to the road'Š'--'Šand in every city I visit I expect somebody to Google me and this horrific set of events will come up. I hope that folks will then attend that local event we put on'Š'--'Šand ask me: ''So Marc'Š'--'Šhow have YOU been taking this set of events and taking ACTION for change?''

Hopefully what I'll be able to say is:

we've recruited these women to be on our boardwe've hired these females to be engineers (its easy enough to do that for marketing and sales folks'Š'--'Šbut important to hire technical women as well)we've built a product that women (both young and old) can utilize to express their feelings and beliefs'Š'--'Šin new ways'Š'--'Šutilzing AI and ChatBotsI've personally helped out THESE female run companies'Š'--'Šso please check THEM out!And I've helped out these orgs, these efforts and these principles'.....all real action. Not talk, promises or apologies'...'...'....That's what I'm going to do.

Hopefully people will also ask me: ''And how have you CHANGED towards your attitude towards women?''

That's when I will tell them that: ''I've realized that acting outrageous to get attention is not a good thing. That making women (or men) feel uncomfortable'Š'--'Šis not cool'Š'--'Šand that I have NOT done ANYTHING like that'Š'--'Šever since I was mentioned in a NYTimes article. I've realized that I was wrong and I'm sorry for making anyone feel uncomfortable!''

People who know me know:

that I've hired Blacks and Women'Š'--'Šgoing all the way back'Š'--'Što the 1980'sthat I've worked with people of all ages'Š'--'Šand have never shown any discriminatory policies to any: based upon sex, age or racethat I've put in untold hours and weeks into efforts to fight for user's rights of their data, identity and privacy rights, and built a front-end for people to share their media (ourmedia.org) and an organization to help formulate standards for ''micro-content'' (structuredblogging.org)I wrote a book on how to create an open, distributed ''Open Mesh'' for multiple networks to thrive and interact'Š'--'Šwhile no one network dominates.I support many distributed networking and open source efforts and even supported a nascent standard called FOAF'Š'--'Šwhen it first emerged. FOAF (friend of a friend) was supposed to be a standard for inter-connecting social networks together.So please bear with me. I'm working on change. That takes time. And please don't be attacking my wife or family.

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Archived Version

Fri, 07 Jul 2017 06:51

Their stories came out slowly, even hesitantly, at first. Then in a rush.

One female entrepreneur recounted how she had been propositioned by a Silicon Valley venture capitalist while seeking a job with him, which she did not land after rebuffing him. Another showed the increasingly suggestive messages she had received from a start-up investor. And one chief executive described how she had faced numerous sexist comments from an investor while raising money for her online community website.

What happened afterward was often just as disturbing, the women told The New York Times. Many times, the investors' firms and colleagues ignored or played down what had happened when the situations were brought to their attention. Saying anything, the women were warned, might lead to ostracism.

Now some of these female entrepreneurs have decided to take that risk. More than two dozen women in the technology start-up industry spoke to The Times in recent days about being sexually harassed. Ten of them named the investors involved, often providing corroborating messages and emails, and pointed to high-profile venture capitalists such as Chris Sacca of Lowercase Capital and Dave McClure of 500 Startups.

The disclosures came after the tech news site The Information reported that female entrepreneurs had been preyed upon by a venture capitalist, Justin Caldbeck of Binary Capital. The new accounts underscore how sexual harassment in the tech start-up ecosystem goes beyond one firm and is pervasive and ingrained. Now their speaking out suggests a cultural shift in Silicon Valley, where such predatory behavior had often been murmured about but rarely exposed.

The tech industry has long suffered a gender imbalance, with companies such as Google and Facebook acknowledging how few women were in their ranks. Some female engineers have started to speak out on the issue, including a former Uber engineer who detailed a pattern of sexual harassment at the company, setting off internal investigations that spurred the resignation in June of Uber's chief executive, Travis Kalanick.

Most recently, the revelations about Mr. Caldbeck of Binary Capital have triggered an outcry. The investor has been accused of sexually harassing entrepreneurs while he worked at three different venture firms in the past seven years, often in meetings in which the women were presenting their companies to him.

Several of Silicon Valley's top venture capitalists and technologists, including Reid Hoffman, a founder of LinkedIn, condemned Mr. Caldbeck's behavior last week and called for investors to sign a ''decency pledge.'' Binary has since collapsed, with Mr. Caldbeck leaving the firm and investors pulling money out of its funds.

The chain of events has emboldened more women to talk publicly about the treatment they said they had endured from tech investors.

''Female entrepreneurs are a critical part of the fabric of Silicon Valley,'' said Katrina Lake, founder and chief executive of the online clothing start-up Stitch Fix, who was one of the women targeted by Mr. Caldbeck. ''It's important to expose the type of behavior that's been reported in the last few weeks, so the community can recognize and address these problems.''

The women's experiences help explain why the venture capital and start-up ecosystem '-- which underpins the tech industry and has spawned companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon '-- has been so lopsided in terms of gender.

Most venture capitalists and entrepreneurs are men, with female entrepreneurs receiving $1.5 billion in funding last year versus $58.2 billion for men, according to the data firm PitchBook. Many of the investors hold outsize power, since entrepreneurs need their money to turn ideas and innovations into a business. And because the venture industry operates with few disclosure requirements, people have kept silent about investors who cross the lines with entrepreneurs.

Some venture capitalists' abuse of power has come to light in recent years. In 2015, Ellen Pao took her former employer, the prestigious venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, to trial for allegations of gender discrimination, leveling accusations of professional retaliation after spurned sexual advances. Ms. Pao lost the case, but it sparked a debate about whether women in tech should publicly call out unequal treatment.

''Having had several women come out earlier, including Ellen Pao and me, most likely paved the way and primed the industry that these things indeed happen,'' said Gesche Haas, an entrepreneur who said she was propositioned for sex by an investor, Pavel Curda, in 2014. Mr. Curda has since apologized.

Some of the entrepreneurs who spoke with The Times said they were often touched without permission by investors or advisers.

At a mostly male tech gathering in Las Vegas in 2009, Susan Wu, an entrepreneur and investor, said that Mr. Sacca, an investor and former Google executive, touched her face without her consent in a way that made her uncomfortable. Ms. Wu said she was also propositioned by Mr. Caldbeck while fund-raising in 2010 and worked hard to avoid him later when they crossed paths.

''There is such a massive imbalance of power that women in the industry often end up in distressing situations,'' Ms. Wu said.

After being contacted by The Times, Mr. Sacca wrote in a blog post on Thursday: ''I now understand I personally contributed to the problem. I am sorry.'' In a statement to The Times, he added that he was ''grateful to Susan and the other brave women sharing their stories. I'm confident the result of their courage will be long-overdue, lasting change.''

After the publication of this article, Mr. Sacca contacted The Times again to amend his original statement, adding: ''I dispute Susan's account from 2009.''

Many of the women also said they believed they had limited ability to push back against inappropriate behavior, often because they needed funding, a job or other help.

In 2014, Sarah Kunst, 31, an entrepreneur, said she discussed a potential job at 500 Startups, a start-up incubator in San Francisco. During the recruiting process, Mr. McClure, a founder of 500 Startups and an investor, sent her a Facebook message that read in part, ''I was getting confused figuring out whether to hire you or hit on you.''

Ms. Kunst, who now runs a fitness start-up, said she declined Mr. McClure's advance. When she later discussed the message with one of Mr. McClure's colleagues, she said 500 Startups ended its conversations with her.

500 Startups said Mr. McClure, who did not respond to a request for comment, was no longer in charge of day-to-day operations after an internal investigation.

''After being made aware of instances of Dave having inappropriate behavior with women in the tech community, we have been making changes internally,'' 500 Startups said. ''He recognizes he has made mistakes and has been going through counseling to work on addressing changes in his previous unacceptable behavior.''

Rachel Renock, the chief executive of Wethos, described a similar situation in which she faced sexist comments while seeking financing for her online community site. While she and her female partners were fund-raising in March, one investor told them that they should marry for money, that he liked it when women fought back because he would always win, and that they needed more attractive photos of themselves in their presentation.

They put up with the comments, Ms. Renock said, because they ''couldn't imagine a world in which that $500,000 wasn't on the table anymore.'' Ms. Renock declined to name the investor. Wethos raised the $500,000 from someone else and is still fund-raising.

Wendy Dent, 43, whose company Cinemmerse makes an app for smart watches, said she was sent increasingly flirtatious messages by a start-up adviser, Marc Canter, as she was trying to start her company in 2014. Mr. Canter, who had founded a software company in the 1980s that became known as Macromedia, initially agreed to help her find a co-founder. But over time, his messages became sexual in nature.

In one message, reviewed by The Times, he wrote that she was a ''sorceress casting a spell.'' In another, he commented on how she looked in a blue dress and added, ''Know what I'm thinking? Why am I sending you this '-- in private?''

Mr. Canter, in an interview, said that Ms. Dent ''came on strong to me, asking for help'' and that she had used her sexuality publicly. He said he disliked her ideas so he behaved the way he did to make her go away.

Some entrepreneurs were asked to not speak about the behavior they experienced.

At a start-up competition in 2014 in San Francisco, Lisa Curtis, an entrepreneur, pitched her food start-up, Kuli Kuli, and was told her idea had won the most plaudits from the audience, opening the door to possible investment. As she stepped off the stage, an investor named Jose De Dios, said, ''Of course you won. You're a total babe.''

Ms. Curtis later posted on Facebook about the exchange and got a call from a different investor. He said ''that if I didn't take down the post, no one in Silicon Valley would give me money again,'' she said. Ms. Curtis deleted the post.

In a statement, Mr. De Dios said he ''unequivocally did not make a defamatory remark.''

Often, change happens only when there is a public revelation, some of the women said. In the case of Mr. Caldbeck and Binary, the investor and the firm have apologized, as has Mr. Caldbeck's previous employer, the venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, which had received complaints about him.

''We regret we did not take stronger action,'' Lightspeed said on Twitter on Tuesday. ''It is clear now that we should have done more.''

Lindsay Meyer, an entrepreneur in San Francisco, said Mr. Caldbeck put $25,000 of his own money into her fitness start-up in 2015. That gave Mr. Caldbeck reason to constantly text her; in those messages, reviewed by The Times, he asked if she was attracted to him and why she would rather be with her boyfriend than him. At times, he groped and kissed her, she said.

''I felt like I had to tolerate it because this is the cost of being a nonwhite female founder,'' said Ms. Meyer, who is Asian-American.

But even after she reached out to a mentor, who alerted one of Binary's investors, Legacy Venture, to Mr. Caldbeck's actions, little changed. Legacy went on to invest in Binary's new fund. Binary and Mr. Caldbeck declined to comment.

''We failed to follow up on information about Mr. Caldbeck's personal behavior,'' Legacy said in a statement. ''We regret this oversight and are determined to do better.''

Link to Article

Archived Version

Fri, 07 Jul 2017 06:52

I want to apologize to Wendy Dent for using a sexual innuendo to end our relationship. I should never have done it.

It was stupid and was one of those ''Marc Canter'' moments where my unfiltered flow of sarcastic, unconventional communication and behavior backfired on me.

I'm sorry.

I realize the impression of my statement are being misconstrued and being blown WAY out of proportion, but that doesn't matter. If she didn't like it and the NYTimes thought it was important enought o report'Š'--'Šthan I'll deal with it.

In fact'Š'--'Šall this attention and scrutiny I've been getting has certainly shown me how important every single I say and do'Š'--'Šmatters.

I never intended to hurt Wendy, to betray her or to in anyway'Š'--'Šlead her on or seduce her. This is back 2 years ago when she approached me.

I made it clear to her I wasn't an investor'Š'--'Šso all I could do was give her my honest opinion and feedback. And I did.

But that's just the beginning of this story. By being included in a story about Dave McClure and Chris Sacca'Š'--'ŠI have received a whole lotta attention'Š'--'Šwhether I deserve it or not.

From now on I'll be known as the guy who ''got rid of Wendy Dent by coming onto her.'' That was wrong and I admit it.

It is endemic of the Bro culture that permeates in the Valley'Š'--'Šobviously to NON investors like myself'Š'--'Šwho are just stating our opinion and giving feedback to female entrepreneurs.

The real issue is: ''what comes next?''

As danah boyd wrote: ''The question is whether or not he (Me) will admit that to himself, let alone to others.''

danah was refrring to the fact that when I first met her'Š'--'Š15 years ago'Š'--'ŠI propositioned her for a threesome with my wife. I realize that was stupid and wrong and I certainly NEVER intended to make danah feel uncomfortable, ashamed, and scared!

So I apologize to danah'Š'--'Šas well.

I totally agree that we men'Š'--'Šas a whole'Š'--'Šneed to change and I will be the first one to admit I need to change. So I'm gonna do that!

Here are the four areas that danah suggests we change:

Recognition'Š'--'Šits the small things that matter. I'm helping out various female run companies'Š'--'Šand I hope others will do the same. I'll be very careful in the future to make SURE that all feedback I giveis stripped of anything that even differentiates between female or male. There are great ideas being percolated and dreamed up'Š'--'Ševery day'Š'--'Šand each of them deserve ''the light of day'''Š'--'Šregardless of who dreams them up.

Repentance'Š'--'ŠI hope that this note will communicate properly to Wendy my sincere apology. And to danah. And I wish to extend my apology to any other female I might have offended in the past.

Respect'Š'--'Šall the way. Especially to the female run startups I know of'Š'--'Šand am helping (as we speak): Ariel McNichol of SmartSpark and Lisa Padilla of NewPathVR'Š'--'Šas well as other recent efforts at helping out Theodora Koullias at Jon Lou.

Reparation'Š'--'ŠI am actively seeking to recruit female engineers and board members.

For myself and my current company'Š'--'ŠInstigate.ai we are focused 1,000,000% on positive, move forward actionable efforts to help facilitate change.

That's the best thing I can do'Š'--'Šfocus on real ACTION - rather than just talk which moves us all towards encouraging and supporting behavior change.

Again'Š'--'ŠI sincerely apologize to Wendy and I wish her nothing but the best of luck on her endeavor.

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Archived Version

Fri, 07 Jul 2017 21:56

Perri Chase. Courtesy of Perri Chase

Where to begin. This is such a complicated topic, and I thought to myself: "Just don't get involved. Just get on with your life. You are married. You are pregnant. You aren't even a founder anymore '-- why post this?"

But the last week has been really triggering for me, and I need to write this for myself and for anyone else for whom it may resonate.

First, let me say that most people know me as an opinionated, outspoken, tough as nails, "I don't give a f----" kind of person. Some of what I'll share in this post is nearly paralyzing to write down, let alone post on the internet, particularly when my "honest" blog posts have a tendency of going viral. Some of what I might say may also be unpopular or difficult to hear.

I want to say to anyone reading this that I really don't have the emotional capacity right now to be bullied, so please be kind and compassionate when you respond.

'When you see stories of women saying they met investors at hotel bars and late at night, this is why.'In 2011 I cofounded Unroll.me in New York City. After we got the company off the ground and out into the world, I decided to move out to Silicon Valley solo to work on the startup that was my true passion, Archively. At the time, I had almost no connections in SV, and I had no idea what I was doing.

I had started Unroll.me with cofounders who had secured funding, so starting something alone was a wildly different experience. I had befriended a founder of a VC-backed startup who really believed in my vision, and he told me to go pitch VCs. No cofounder, no engineer, no product. Pure blue sky. He was convinced with the right introductions I could raise $2 million, sight unseen. Let me give you a minute to laugh.

A bar in SOMA in San Francisco. Yusuf C/Flickr

So because I had zero '-- and I mean zero '-- idea what I was doing, I went with it.

He gave me books to read, helped me with my deck, and helped me practice my pitch, and then he made intros to VCs like Redpoint, Battery, Trinity, Kleiner, and Norwest. I will say this: To their credit, they all met with me on his recommendation. They were all incredibly respectful and genuinely engaged with me about what I envisioned.

I never felt any condescension. And there was certainly nothing said or done that was inappropriate. Now, clearly, I did not raise my $2 million on a blue-sky dream. Looking back, I am kind of embarrassed I even had those meetings, but what I learned over the next few years was that those meetings are incredibly hard to get. I was lucky, in a way.

So after I didn't raise that money, I had to figure out how to do it on my own. I was super scrappy and bootstrapped for a year. I tried to network and figure out how I was going to raise money '-- if I even could '-- while also trying to build something as a nontechnical founder.

Having spent over a decade as a headhunter on Wall Street, I consider myself a professional networker, and I found networking in Silicon Valley very hard. There is no central place to meet people. It's elusive. It's all about the back-channel. You rely on founder friends and parties, which can be equally elusive, mostly to get access to investors and helpful people.

So when I happened to meet a well-known angel investor through a friend at a restaurant one night, I was super excited for this casual, warm intro. We exchanged numbers and texted back and forth trying to make plans to meet up for drinks. I spent my 20s in bars recruiting traders, so "bar business" was not new or intimidating to me.

I ended up meeting him at 10 p.m. one night. So when you see stories of women saying they met investors at hotel bars and late at night, this is why. It's so hard to get meetings and raise money that you are willing to meet wherever and whenever to get some air time.

But here is where I have to be really honest with you and myself about what happened.

'There was no "Yeah, come pitch me; I'm interested in your company." I made that up in my head.'I had an agenda, but it was not a shared agenda. I was the one who decided this was a business meeting. At this point, I still hadn't raised any money, but I had a prototype, and I felt more confident pitching. Using femininity to get male attention in business was not new to me, and I had zero shame in using it. Shortly after sitting down, it became pretty obvious he was just hanging with me as a woman who happened to also have a company.

There was no "Yeah, come pitch me; I'm interested in your company." I made that up in my head.

I still tried to talk business, but it was not a focused conversation, and more drinks were poured. Then he said, "I'm taking you home with me tonight."

I think I laughed and said, "Oh, are you?!"

But after a few more drinks, I made a consensual choice. I said OK but followed it up with a clarification: "But then you can never invest in my company."

I don't think he really cared.

Honestly, I didn't see as a big deal until now. Why not?

'Culturally, we are taught as women that our main power is our looks and sexuality.'When I started my career as a headhunter more than a decade earlier, cold-calling traders on Wall Street, I used to take them out for drinks. This was how I did my job. I was not naive or innocent. It was certainly not the first time a guy ever hit on me.

In the early part of my career, guys would say to me, "You have such an incredible voice on the phone that I had to meet you to see if you were hot."

San Francisco. Robert Galbraith/Reuters

Wonderful. Eye roll. Then, without missing a beat, I would take out a piece of paper and have them write down the name of everyone they worked with, team P&L, comp, and any other goodies I could get my hands on.

See? Even back then, I got how female commerce worked.

I understood that letting a man lust after me was the price for entry.

I knew being hot got me in the door and that after that I had to make that work for me. Culturally, we are taught as women that our main power is our looks and sexuality. Then it's a matter of what you do with it. Personally, I used the s--- out of it, and I was more successful than my male colleagues because of it.

However, I had a hard line of not crossing a physical line with men I was actively doing deals with, and I kept that boundary well. And then, as I got more established, men didn't meet with me for my voice or for what I might be wearing. They met with me because they knew my name and because I knew things that they wanted to know.

The meetings became more professional, and I didn't have to play the woman card anymore.

I'm not going to name this investor because what happened with me was consensual. However, in all that has been emerging this week, it dawned on me that I gave him permission to act this way. My sleeping with him is actually part of the problem.

Sure, it was social, it was consensual, but he was, after all, an investor, and I was a female founder. As others have been pointing out, this is part of the professional environment. I was not harmed in any way, but looking back at his behavior that night, I could see where someone not so clear as I was could have really been manipulated or worse. I also imagine I was not the only one.

It would also be so easy to jump on the "inappropriate investor" train here. Had I said no and left the bar offended and appalled, I could have easily overlooked how I created a business meeting in my head that had never existed for the other person.

I could have come out accusing him of being inappropriate, using text messages to back it up. But I have to own my part in that, too. He never gave me any indication it was a professional meeting. That was my agenda, and one he clearly did not share. So who am I to call him out?

It's complicated. Because in an ecosystem where socializing and happy hours are a big way to meet or get to know investors, there are no real clear lines about what is personal and what is professional. I think clarifying this up front has to become a big priority for both men and women. Real talk. I'm also not the first or only woman who has ever used being a woman to get time with a man. This is where we as women need to take more responsibility, too.

I was saying to a friend about the stories coming out that these are not even the worst ones, because these women didn't sleep with these men. And men wouldn't keep behaving this way if it didn't work. They behave this way because it does work. And in a way, I admit to being part of creating and enabling that culture by sending the message it was OK and not a big deal.

Abuse threshold '-- what is a 'big deal'?The topic of "abuse threshold" has come up in the past few days as I have talked to countless women about what has been coming out. While every woman has her own experience, what has been incredibly triggering for me personally is to admit I have an extremely high abuse threshold.

I woke up the other morning nearly catatonic, which is what happens to me when I'm triggered. It's like I can't speak or make eye contact. It's like I am frozen inside, and just on the other side is a deep well of trauma. I've never said this publicly '-- and it's paralyzing '-- but I experienced decades of ongoing abuse. Decades. I do not have the emotional capacity to get into the details, but let's just say that when someone breaks you, you are susceptible to more.

You generally think it's no big deal or that you deserve it. You certainly don't share it. You bury it. Sharing is dangerous. And I felt a lot of terror around all this sharing. It's not rational. It's just paralyzing fear.

My husband was deeply concerned and wanted to know what was going on. I tried to explain how silenced I felt, even after all these years, and that one of the harassment accounts in the press was making me furious because it felt frivolous to me and insulting to actual victims.

Cheryl Yeoh and I both moved to Silicon Valley at the same time, and she was one of my only female founder friends for some time. Her story is deeply upsetting to me because I know her personally and because I have always been a huge fan of Dave's. When you know and like both people, it is just all the more painful to take in.

Cheryl and I were talking about her story, and we were able to have a really open and honest discussion about the complexity of this topic. I said that while I totally agree that what happened to her is 100% wrong, it never would have registered to me personally to call that assault. Let me be clear. I am not saying it isn't '-- it just wouldn't have occurred to me to call it that.

This is where the abuse threshold comes in. For example, when you have had a boyfriend hold your throat to the wall and tell you that "they will never find your body," there is a lot that you are able to just brush off.

The really triggering part was that if what Cheryl experienced is assault, how many times have I (or countless other women) brushed off these experiences because they're not as bad as other things we've experienced?

That really hit home. The context of whether it is in a professional setting or not doesn't even really matter.

I also want to say it is incredibly hard for women to come forward, and most won't. It's not because they don't want the men to be exposed. It's because you have to relive the pain and expose yourself on the internet. The internet is not a nice place when you are emotionally raw.

I also think it's really important that when we expose men, it's real and warranted and not a one-sided story open to interpretation. Once these stories are out, there is nothing a man can do to defend against falsehoods. I think we have a responsibility as women to be introspective and to be honest with ourselves.

Radical personal responsibilityI've done a lot of personal work to heal my own trauma, and when I talk about this topic, I rarely talk about men needing to change. Is it because I don't think it would be nice if men changed? Of course it would be nice. Am I going to wait for men to getting around to fixing my problem? No.

To some, this perspective comes off as victim blame-y, but when you have experienced what I have experienced, you know that you are powerless to change anything or anyone but yourself.

Byron Katie, a great teacher, looks at the world as: "My business. Your business. And God's business."

All I have control over is my business. No one else's behavior falls under "my business." I do control the choices I make and the boundaries I set. That is it. That is all we each have.

So, for me, we can talk about changing men until we are blue in the face, but the only person who is ever truly responsible for my safety is me.

There is a video of a rape survivor talking about how she healed that stands out to me. (I wish I could find this video, but I can't.) She went back through the whole event, moment by moment, and she found the exact moment where she felt something was off and didn't listen to that voice.

Reclaiming that moment where she made the choice to ignore her intuition helped her get her power back. It's not about it being her fault. Healing is not about whose fault it is. It's not pointing the finger of blame at him. It's finding the places where you have control and taking it back.

I've done work with many teachers around this topic, and one of my favorite teachers is Lynne Forrest and her work with the "victim triangle."

She teaches that while we may have been a victim of something, we can learn how to move out of "victim consciousness" (allowing your identity to crystallize around being a victim) to a more empowered place. For all I have been through, I don't identify as a victim, and I'm so grateful for that empowerment and freedom.

In wrapping up, I am deeply sorry to any contribution my actions have had on women in this ecosystem by giving permission to the kind of behavior we are trying to change.

If any women want to talk about anything I have shared, or if you want resources to help heal your own trauma, please feel free to reach out to me at perribchase@gmail.com.

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Archived Version

Fri, 07 Jul 2017 22:15

National security officials across the federal government say they are seeing new restrictions on who can access sensitive information, fueling fears in the intelligence and security community that the Trump administration has stepped up a stealthy operation to smoke out leakers.

Officials at various national security agencies also say they are becoming more concerned that the administration is carefully tracking what they're doing and who they're talking to '-- then plotting to use them as a scapegoat or accuse them of leaks.

Story Continued Below

One U.S. official voiced concern over even talking to superiors about a benign call from a reporter. The agency this official works for had started limiting staff access to information, they said, and it would make it far easier to figure out who was talking to people in the media.

There was suspicion, the official said, that the agency was even tracking what they printed, to keep tabs on what information they were accessing.

''I'm just trying to keep my head down,'' another U.S. intelligence official recently told POLITICO.

A half dozen officials across the national security community described to POLITICO a series of subtle and no-so-subtle changes that have led to an increasingly tense and paranoid working environment rooted in the White House's obsession with leaks.

President Donald Trump has regularly vented about his intense frustration with anonymously sourced stories, and has specifically targeted federal government entities, including intelligence agencies like the CIA and FBI, and the State Department.

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That the White House itself leaks to reporters was something of a joke in the administration's early months in office. But after Trump grew angry about leaks earlier this year, "there was something of a crackdown" inside the White House, one senior administration official said.

There was a particular frustration in the White House about the investigative and national security leaks '-- along with the details of Trump's foreign phone calls '-- that led White House officials to call the FBI and ask for leak investigations.

The reverberations have spread in the weeks since, and several national security officials outside the White House have spoken of a strategic thinning of the ranks '-- limiting the number of people involved in certain sensitive matters, so that if something leaks, the suspects are obvious.

''The circles on this are so small,'' one U.S. intelligence official said of the various Russia investigations that have cast a shadow on Trump's White House.

Information on Trump and Russia has been so limited there would be fewer and fewer sources, the official said, putting those who are talking at risk. ''Confirming [Russia news] is almost impossible,'' the official said.

In some cases, the official added, information has been so ''choked down'' that if something comes out in the press, ''it's either a bogus leak'' or, the official said, the relevant agency will know exactly where it came from. And, the official said, they had heard several other government organizations had started doing the same.

The concern isn't limited to official communication channels. As Trump himself continues escalating his war with the media, how far the administration would go to keep tabs on the workforce is an unsettling unknown.

''There's an increasing concern that they may be moving beyond monitoring official communications,'' the second U.S. official said. It's ''likely the case,'' the official said, that the administration could be tracking the personal communications channels of federal employees '-- especially those close to the White House '-- including personal email accounts.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer declined to comment on fears of a crackdown but said the administration takes leaks seriously.

''This administration understands the importance of safeguarding classified and sensitive information. Those that leak classified and sensitive information threaten our national security,'' Spicer said.

But Steven Aftergood, who runs the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy, said the drive against leaks '-- something that was also prominent under the Obama administration '-- has taken on a more aggressive tone under Trump.

''What's happening now is there seems to be a broader objection not to any individual leak so much as to the fact of independent reporting that is at odds with the White House narrative,'' Aftergood said.

Since taking office, Trump has systematically attacked the U.S. intelligence and national security community, accusing its members of viciously motivated leaks as stories have piled up about his botched phone calls with foreign leaders, his alleged pressure campaign on intelligence leaders to back him in the Russia probe, and his reported disclosure of highly classified material to Russian leaders.

''The real scandal here is that classified information is illegally given out by 'intelligence' like candy. Very un-American!'' Trump tweeted on Feb. 15.

He fired off two more tweets on Feb. 24 that read, ''The FBI is totally unable to stop the national security "leakers" that have permeated our government for a long time. They can't even...... find the leakers within the FBI itself. Classified information is being given to media that could have a devastating effect on U.S. FIND NOW.''

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has apparently heeded Trump's guidance, launching multiple investigations and delivering a public scolding during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on June 13 to ''persons in our intelligence agencies.''

''I fear that some people may find that they wish they hadn't leaked,'' Sessions ominously warned.

While Sessions spoke vaguely of active investigations, several intelligence officials told POLITICO those probes are being closely guarded.

''There's been some [crimes reports] sent over and there's more in the process,'' one intelligence official said they had heard, though the official stressed the majority of the information was unconfirmed rumor.

Traditional leak investigations tend to follow a set path. After a sensitive, anonymously sourced story comes out, the relevant agency conducts an internal assessment into the leak. If it finds sufficient cause, it will send a ''crimes report'' to the National Security Division at the Justice Department, which will review the incident. If the incident is determined to be serious enough, the Justice Department will send it to the FBI to formally investigate.

The FBI declined to comment, citing their long-standing practice of not commenting on whether or not they have open investigations.

As these probes move along and other ones likely crop up, intelligence officials say internal gotcha operations are underway, though it's unclear how many agencies are running probes. The stories that have angered Trump the most involve the FBI and CIA.

Underscoring the anxiety is Trump's well-established penchant for retaliation and the fact that he now sits behind the levers that control the full weight and force of the U.S. government. And the crackdown mentality can be traced back to the West Wing and to Trump's longtime obsession with the sources of media reports.

White House chief of staff Reince Priebus has repeatedly asked aides not to leak information at his 8 a.m. daily meeting, and the request has become something of a joke among other aides. "Reince told us not to leak again this morning," one senior administration official said in May, laughing.

The constant leaking inside the White House, several administration officials say, comes from a president who encourages infighting and factions '-- and aides who see their agenda getting done through stories.

Aides who leaked to the press have become more wary, however, because Trump was asking senior aides who was leaking information about the White House, and some officials were tattling on each other.

Trump senior adviser Jared Kushner has repeatedly complained about chief strategist Steve Bannon leaking damaging information about him to others, according to people who have spoken to him. White House officials say the two now have struck something of a detente, and Kushner no longer feels that way.

Trump himself was a longtime anonymous source for the New York Post and other papers in New York and has often planted stories about himself.

One senior administration official said some people in the White House are accused of leaking more than others, "but some of the people who say they never talk to the press are the ones talking to the press all the time."

"If you're not talking, someone else is talking about you," one administration official said.

The obsession with leaks that is acutely felt in the White House has clearly extended to the national security community. However, there is tentative optimism that the National Security Division is sufficiently insulated from political pressure by career prosecutors, and won't bow to the pressure to be Trump's attack dogs, should such a directive go out.

But as anxiety grows '-- and as the fog surrounding the Trump-Russia question gets thicker '-- there is a tangible fear of the unknown. No one knows how far Trump and his affiliates would go to silence their critics, or the reporters they talk to.

Rumors have ricocheted among national security officials and journalists in recent weeks that Trump- or GOP-related operatives have hired private eyes to try and intimidate reporters, or run rogue operations to find their sources. Some U.S. officials voiced concern to POLITICO that the White House could be seeking amenable employees in different agencies to do its bidding, effectively sanctioning its own, parallel '-- and informal '-- intimidation measures.

The Obama administration was known to be hostile toward reporters' sources, prosecuting more leak investigations than any of the previous administrations combined. But there was a standard '-- though still worthy of criticism '-- that leak prosecutions involved clear and present threats to national security.

''There is an established procedure for initiating leak investigations. And it includes a finding by an agency that not only is the leak accurate, but that it also damaged national security in a way that can be articulated,'' Aftergood said. ''There are many leaks that simply do not meet that standard.''

But that bar, under Trump, appears to be recalculated. There are early indications that the White House considers the release of embarrassing information a transgression tantamount to the unauthorized disclosure of state secrets. Under Trump, there is concern that the full weight of these probes could be used to find political dissidents within the ranks '-- with the violation not being rooted in a criminal statute, but instead in Trump's expectation of loyalty.

And there's a feeling of fundamental unfairness, as leaks continue flowing out of the White House.

''They don't mind the leaking as long as they control it,'' one of the U.S. officials said.

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Archived Version

Fri, 07 Jul 2017 03:06

The maker of opioid painkiller Opana ER is pulling the drug off the market at the request of federal regulators because it's being abused.

Endo International PLC said Thursday it will voluntarily stop selling the pills, approved for use in patients with severe, constant pain, after consulting with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It's the first opioid drug that the FDA has sought to remove from the market due to abuse.

The drugmaker said in a statement that the extended-release opioid is safe and effective when used as intended, and that Endo still believes Opana ER's benefits outweigh its risks.

But last month, the FDA said it had concluded the drug is too risky. The agency said it had seen a "significant shift" from people crushing and snorting the pill to get high to injecting it instead. Besides contributing to overdoses, abuse of Opana ER was blamed for a 2015 outbreak of HIV and hepatitis C in southern Indiana linked to sharing needles, according to the FDA.

Opana ER got U.S. approval in 2006. In 2012, Endo changed the drug's formulation to try to make it harder to abuse. The FDA approved sales of the new version but refused to let Endo market it as abuse deterrent.

The agency asked the company to stop selling Opana ER after its advisers, reviewing its safety at a March hearing, voted 18-8 against keeping it on the market.

Dublin, Ireland-based Endo, which has U.S. headquarters in the Philadelphia suburb of Malvern, said it will work with the FDA to try to minimize disruption for patients, who will need to switch to alternative treatments.

Endo primarily makes generic medicines, as well as a number of brand-name specialty drugs. Endo reported that Opana ER last year posted net sales of $159 million. The company said it will take a pre-tax charge of about $20 million to write off the drug's remaining value.

As of June, there were no generic versions of the reformulated Opana ER on the market, according to the FDA, but two generics of earlier versions are on sale, called oxymorphone.

The agency said it would also review other opioid painkillers and could take further action.

U.S.-traded shares of Endo fell 1.9 percent to $11.17 Thursday, more than twice the rate of decline on a down day for the broader markets. When the FDA urged Endo to pull Opana ER on June 8, company shares plunged 13.4 percent.

___

Follow Linda A. Johnson on Twitter: @LindaJ_onPharma

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Archived Version

Source: newest submissions : inthemorning

Fri, 07 Jul 2017 03:42

Squeeze.

The antidote filled the man's nostril.

The purple faded. Then it came back. Kowalski's heart raced.

"We only gave him one, and he needs another!" she called to a security guard in McPherson Square Park, a tranquil patch of green in one of this city's roughest neighborhoods.

"He's dying," said a bystander, piling on as tension mounted around lunchtime one recent weekday.

"Where is the ambulance?" a woman begged.

Squeeze.

Kowalski dropped the second syringe and put her palm on the man's sternum.

Knead. Knead. Knead.

Nothing.

She switched to knuckles.

Knead. Knead. Knead.

Then a sound, like a breath. The heroin and methamphetamine overdose that had gripped the man's body started to succumb to Kowalski's double hit of Narcan.

With help, the man, named Jay, sat up. Paramedics arrived with oxygen and more meds.

Death, held at bay, again.

Kowalski headed back across the park, toward the century-old, cream-colored building where she works.

"She's not a paramedic," the guard, Sterling Davis, said later. "She's just a teen-adult librarian -- and saved six people since April. That's a lot for a librarian."

Libraries and a public health disaster

Long viewed as guardians of safe spaces for children, library staff members like Kowalski have begun taking on the role of first responder in drug overdoses. In at least three major cities -- Philadelphia, Denver and San Francisco -- library employees now know, or are set to learn, how to use the drug naloxone, usually known by its brand name Narcan, to help reverse overdoses.Their training tracks with the disastrous national rise in opioid use and an apparent uptick of overdoses in libraries, which often serve as daytime havens for homeless people and hubs of services in impoverished communities.In the past two years, libraries in Denver, San Francisco, suburban Chicago and Reading, Pennsylvania have become the site of fatal overdoses.

A discarded heroin needle lays in McPherson Square Park, next to the library.

"We have to figure out quickly the critical steps that people have to take so we can be partners in the solution of this problem," Julie Todaro, president of the American Library Association, told CNN.

Though standards vary by community, the group is crafting a guide for "the role of the library in stepping in on this opiate addiction," she said. It will include how to recognize opioid use -- short of seeing someone with a needle -- and how to address it.

McPherson Square Library, where Kowalski works, has a wide, welcoming staircase punctuated by tall columns. It sits in the Kensington community, where drugs and poverty lace daily life.

Residents drop into the McPherson branch with questions about doctor visits and legal matters. Children eat meals provided by library staff and play with water rockets in a Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics program.

Kensington doesn't host a civic institution, like a university, or a major company, said Casey O'Donnell, CEO of Impact Services, a Kensington community and economic development nonprofit."In the absence of those things, the anchors become things like the library," he said.

In recent months, so-called "drug tourists" -- people who travel from as far as Detroit and Wisconsin seeking heroin -- started showing up in Kensington, which boasts perhaps the purest heroin on the East Coast, library staff and authorities said.

Heroin users camped out in McPherson Square Park and shot up in the library's bathroom, where nearly a half-dozen people overdosed over the past 18 months, said branch manager and children's librarian Judith Moore.

The problem got so bad that the library was forced to close for three days last summer because needles clogged its sewer system, said Marion Parkinson, who oversees McPherson and other libraries in North Philadelphia.

McPherson Square Library sits on the edge of Philadephia's Kensington neighborhood, where drugs and poverty lace daily life.

Since then, patrons have had to show ID to use the bathroom, she said. The library in October hired monitors to sit near the bathroom, record names on a log and enforce a five-minute time limit.

Before the crackdown, library staff last spring discovered one man in the bathroom with a needle in his arm, Moore recalled. He toppled over and started convulsing.

"I heard his head hit the floor," she said.

A city employee had left a dose of Narcan at the library. But the staff didn't know how to use it. After that, Parkinson set out to get them trained.

'It's not normal'

At 33 years old, Kowalski wears oversized sweaters and too-big glasses. She reads nonfiction about World War II and zones out on Netflix. She settles into work mode by listening to pop music on her train ride to work.

She chose to work at the McPherson branch because she thought her own experience could help students who flock there after school.

Kowalski's parents used to use heroin. They've been clean for more than 20 years. Her mother earned a college degree in her 50s; and her father, a Vietnam veteran, worked steadily as a truck driver until retiring, she said.

But before all that, Kowalski lived in the turmoil of addiction. "I understand the things the kids are seeing. ... It's not normal," she said of her library charges. "It's unfortunately their normal."

Now, when a drug user overdoses at or near the McPherson library branch, Kowalski takes a minute to "switch the headset" from librarian to medic, she said.

A notice on the bathroom door informs patrons of rules to use the bathroom at McPherson Square Library.

When she got word that recent day that Jay had collapsed in the grass, Kowalski reached into a circulation desk drawer and pulled out a blue zipper pouch containing Narcan and the plastic components required to deliver it.

Dashing out of the library, she asked if anyone had called 911. Someone had.

The librarian got to Jay, crouched down, noticed his shallow breathing and discoloration.

She tried to focus. Seconds ticked. Prepping Narcan takes four steps: unscrew the vial, put it in the syringe, screw on the nasal mister, squeeze out the medicine.

"You're under a time limit," she recalled. "It's how fast can I do this."

Kowalski recognized Jay's face from the neighborhood. As she walked away from him, she felt relief. He would live.

"I understand where they're coming from and why they're doing it," she said of heroin users. "I just keep faith and hope that one day they get the chance and the opportunity to get clean. A lot of things have to line up perfectly for people to enter recovery long-term."

Back at the library, Kowalski tried to refocus. The phone rang. Just minutes earlier, she'd pulled Jay back from the edge. Now, she was helping a patron find the number for the US Treasury Department.

'We want our libraries to be safe'

When a man overdosed in late February in the bathroom at Denver Central Library, security manager Bob Knowles rushed to his aid.

Just hours earlier, the branch had received its very first delivery of Narcan, which library workers sought after a fatal overdose earlier that month at their branch.

Knowles, the inaugural hero of his team's effort to stem the opioid scourge, lost a brother 40 years ago to an overdose.

"I wish somebody had had Narcan for him," Knowles said.

Security staff, social workers and peer navigators '-- former drug users who help current ones '-- all learned to administer the overdose-reversal drug. The fact that it got used the day the first shipment arrived confirmed "we were on the right path," said Chris Henning, director of community relations for the Denver Central Library.

A woman opens an opioid overdose rescue kit in McPherson Square Park in Philadelphia.

The branch is near Civic Center Park, a haven for homeless people and a market for street drugs. One recent morning, a self-described drug addict who prefers methamphetamine and the synthetic drug "spice" camped out near the library.

Staff members at other Denver library branches are now also being trained to deliver the medicine, library officials said, adding that they've gotten calls about their regimen from libraries in Seattle, small Colorado mountain towns and parts of Canada.

Meantime, a fatal overdose in February at a San Francisco library branch pushed officials there to forge ahead with Narcan training for security officers, social workers and employees who help the homeless, said Michelle Jeffers, a library spokeswoman.

"We want our libraries to be safe for all visitors," she said.

Crisis in Philadelphia

Drug overdoses nationwide more than tripled from 1999 to 2015. Opioid overdoses accounted for 63 percent of the 52,000 fatal cases in 2015 -- or about 33,000 people, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. Across the country, 91 Americans die every day from an opioid overdose.Philadelphia last year saw about 900 fatal overdoses, up nearly 30% from 2015, municipal tallies show. Nearly half the deaths involved fentanyl, the powerful opioid that killed Prince. This year's total could hit about 1,200 fatal overdoses, Drug Enforcement Agency Special Agent Patrick Trainor said."It is among the worst public health problems we've ever seen, and it's continuing to get worse," Philadelphia Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley told CNN. "We have not seen the worst of it yet."

Opioids attach themselves to the body's natural opioid receptors, numbing pain and slowing breathing. They can relieve severe pain -- but also can spur addiction. Almost 2 million Americans abused or were dependent on prescription opioids in 2014, according to the CDC.Naloxone kicks opioids off the body's receptors and can restart regular breathing. Hailed as a miracle remedy, the drug is squirted into the nose or injected into a muscle.

Harm-reduction groups and needle exchanges started distributing naloxone two decades ago, and since then, more than 26,000 overdoses have been reversed, the CDC reports.The drug has become a staple for police, fire and medical professionals, who can buy it for $37.50 per dose. Retail pharmacies sell it over the counter. Coffee shop baristas have been trained to administer it.Philadelphia Fire and EMS used Narcan last year about 4,200 times, mostly in the Kensington neighborhood, Capt. William Dixon said.

'I might need to take a mental day'

Armed with Narcan, McPherson's library employees keep an eye out for overdoses. When he spots one, Davis, the security guard, tries not to alert the children.

Kowalski's first save in the park, back in April, happened when a young woman overdosed on a library bench after school. One dose of Narcan revived her: She got up and walked away.

But when Kowalski turned around, several kids -- all library regulars -- were standing on the steps watching.

"I got really upset because I know what they were seeing," she said.

Teddy Hackett, a volunteer at McPherson Square Library, checks a rose bush for discarded drug needles.

Weeks later, she revived a man who overdosed on fentanyl and fell off a bench in front of the library. "I might need to take a mental day tomorrow," she told Moore afterward.

But then her library regulars arrived after school. She played games with them and helped them on the computer.

By the end of the day, "I felt good again," Kowalski said. The next day, she was back at work.

In the square, once dubbed Needle Park, library volunteer Teddy Hackett uses a grabber to pick up needles in the grass, near benches and in the rose bushes.

"That's my rose bush there," he said one recent day. "I protect that rose bush."

Hackett, who beat drug addiction almost 20 years ago, said he once got mad when he saw a man shooting up on a bench in front of the library. Hackett chased him away, the needle still stuck in his arm.

"God's got me doing this for a reason," he said, laughing. "For the little kids and the animals."

He reports his daily needle tallies to Kowalski. May set a record: 1,197 needles. The previous one, set last fall, was about 897.

Librarian Chera Kowalski keeps a calendar with a daily tally of discarded drug needles found in nearby McPherson Square Park.

The increase might reflect the spike in drug use. It also could mean a redevelopment surge in the city has pushed a long-lingering problem out of the shadows, said Elvis Rosado, the education and outreach coordinator at Prevention Point, a local nonprofit that trained Kowalski and more than 25 colleagues to use Narcan."They've been here for years," Rosado said of drug users. "It's just that they've been in abandoned buildings."

As evidence of addiction has spread, Philadelphia leaders have stepped up to counter it. Mayor Jim Kenney formed a task force to tackle the opioid epidemic.The city's health department launched an ad campaign called "Don't Take the Risk" to remind patients that a drug isn't completely safe just because a doctor prescribes it. Officials mailed out more than 16,000 copies of the addiction warning.In McPherson Square Park, clean-up projects, a new playground and lights have improved the grounds. Police in mid-June increased patrols there and plan to install a mobile command center, which will also offer social services.'Call Chera'

The day after Kowalski's naloxone doses revived Jay, more drug users trickled into McPherson Square Park, where sirens whine like white noise. Nearby, a slender woman shot up heroin, then got up and walked away.

Moments later, a former freight train operator who weeks earlier had overdosed twice in one day, sat down on his cardboard blanket and overdosed again. He'd gotten hooked on prescription pills after a leg injury. A heroin user gave him Narcan that she'd bought from another user for $2.

A heroin user shows off his tattoos in McPherson Square Park. "A lot of these people are good people," he said of fellow users. "They're just stuck making bad choices. If they could, if they were offered any help, they'd take it. We are literally stuck."

An hour later, paramedics carried away a woman who'd overdosed while sitting on a bench, said Davis, the security guard.

"I'm pretty sure we're going to get one or two more people that's going to OD out here today," he said.

An hour later, it happened: A woman who'd earlier been hanging out with the train operator slumped over on the ground.

Davis didn't flinch. Standing at the library door, he told the needle collector to find Kowalski.

"Ted," he yelled, "call Chera!"

CNN's Sara Weisfeldt reported from Denver.

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Sat, 08 Jul 2017 07:15

LISTEN TO TLR'S LATEST PODCAST:By Steve Birr

An Ohio county sheriff revealed Thursday that his officers do not carry the overdose reversal drug Narcan when responding to opioid overdoses, citing risks to officers.

Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones said that, despite the drug's effectiveness at reviving unconscious individuals in the middle of an overdose, his officers do not carry it. The unique policy puts his department at odds with other law enforcement outfits throughout the opioid-ravaged state and the country, reports Cincinnati.com.

Jones argues that having a police officer administer Narcan to an addict can risk their safety, saying people revived from overdoses are often violent and prone to lashing out at police.

''I don't do Narcan,'' Jones said Thursday, according to Cincinnati.com. ''They never carried it, nor will they. That's my stance.''

The sheriff said he often hears residents and even social workers ask why police continue to revive people who repeatedly overdose on opioids. Dan Picard, a councilman in Middletown, recently proposed a three strike rule for repeat heroin offenders in Ohio, requiring community service before first responders will aid in a third overdose.

Heroin abuse is rampant in Ohio, and officials in Middletown have already spent more on orders of Narcan this year than they did in all of 2016. Picard argues that the rate of overdoses is draining the resources for the police and fire departments in the city, and says they simply cannot sustain the cost of Narcan at the current rate it's being used.

The proposal is currently under legal review in Middletown and is stirring up some anger in the community. Nurses and other officials in the town said they have seen addicts turn their lives around after multiple overdoses.

The national opioid epidemic, which claimed a record 33,000 lives in the U.S. in 2015, is hitting Ohio particularly hard. The opioid death rate in the state spiked 13 percent between 2014 and 2015, among the largest increases in the country.

Heroin deaths increased by nearly 20 percent over the same period, claiming 1,444 lives.

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Fri, 07 Jul 2017 03:33

High up in the clear blue noontime sky, the sun appears to be much the same day-in, day-out, year after year.

But astronomers have long known that this is not true. The sun does change. Properly-filtered telescopes reveal a fiery disk often speckled with dark sunspots. Sunspots are strongly magnetized, and they crackle with solar flares'--magnetic explosions that illuminate Earth with flashes of X-rays and extreme ultraviolet radiation. The sun is a seething mass of activity.

Until it's not. Every 11 years or so, sunspots fade away, bringing a period of relative calm.

''This is called solar minimum,'' says Dean Pesnell of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. ''And it's a regular part of the sunspot cycle.''

The sun is heading toward solar minimum now. Sunspot counts were relatively high in 2014, and now they are sliding toward a low point expected in 2019-2020.

While intense activity such as sunspots and solar flares subside during solar minimum, that doesn't mean the sun becomes dull. Solar activity simply changes form.

For instance, says Pesnell, ''during solar minimum we can see the development of long-lived coronal holes.''

Coronal holes are vast regions in the sun's atmosphere where the sun's magnetic field opens up and allows streams of solar particles to escape the sun as the fast solar wind.

Pesnell says ''We see these holes throughout the solar cycle, but during solar minimum, they can last for a long time - six months or more.'' Streams of solar wind flowing from coronal holes can cause space weather effects near Earth when they hit Earth's magnetic field. These effects can include temporary disturbances of the Earth's magnetosphere, called geomagnetic storms, auroras, and disruptions to communications and navigation systems.

During solar minimum, the effects of Earth's upper atmosphere on satellites in low Earth orbit changes too.

Normally Earth's upper atmosphere is heated and puffed up by ultraviolet radiation from the sun. Satellites in low Earth orbit experience friction as they skim through the outskirts of our atmosphere. This friction creates drag, causing satellites to lose speed over time and eventually fall back to Earth. Drag is a good thing, for space junk; natural and man-made particles floating in orbit around Earth. Drag helps keep low Earth orbit clear of debris.

But during solar minimum, this natural heating mechanism subsides. Earth's upper atmosphere cools and, to some degree, can collapse. Without a normal amount of drag, space junk tends to hang around.

There are unique space weather effects that get stronger during solar minimum. For example, the number of galactic cosmic rays that reach Earth's upper atmosphere increases during solar minimum. Galactic cosmic rays are high energy particles accelerated toward the solar system by distant supernova explosions and other violent events in the galaxy.

Pesnell says that ''During solar minimum, the sun's magnetic field weakens and provides less shielding from these cosmic rays. This can pose an increased threat to astronauts traveling through space.''

Solar minimum brings about many changes to our sun, but less solar activity doesn't make the sun and our space environment any less interesting.

For more news about the changes ahead, stay tuned to science.nasa.gov

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Fri, 07 Jul 2017 03:48

After a week full of abysmal news for Tesla, which some have said is rapidly becoming the new Uber on the bad-to-worse news front, the weekend couldn't come fast enough for Elon Musk who by now is begging for the simple company of "a little red wine, vintage record and some Ambien."

But before that can happen, there is even more bad news for the electric car company which today entered a bear market after hitting all time highs just 2 weeks ago: according to Reuters, Tesla registrations in California - by far the largest market of the luxury electric car maker - fell 24% in April from a year ago, based on IHS Markit data. The latest report showing a plateau for Tesla's products comes amid both investor concerns that demand for Tesla's luxury Model S sedan is waning ahead of the mass market Model 3 launch, the sales of its Model X actually declined...

... and follows a scathing Goldman report which effectively said that Tesla can kiss its aggressive growth forecasts goodbye.

The punchline: IHS reported April Tesla registrations fell to 2,177 from 2,867 in California. Nationally they dropped nearly 10 percent to 3,911 from 4,334.

Tesla declined to comment on California registration figures and reverted back to its Monday's press release that second-quarter global deliveries rose 53 percent from a year earlier, to just over 12,000 Model S and just over 10,000 Model X, which incidentally allso missed consensus expectations of 22,900 sales. Inexplicably, Musk blamed battery pack production problems for holding back vehicle output in the second quarter until early June, even though Tesla producted 2,000 more cars than it sold, and also completely forgot to inform investors of this material adverse development for more than two months, and also during its May earnings call.

Willing to give Tesla the benefit of the doubt, IHS analyst Stephanie Brinley said that "if Tesla had an issue with its production for the month, that could explain" the drop in registrations, she said, noting in particular the problems with battery pack output. Still, she said, Tesla's Model S, could be in need of a refresh.

"They haven't changed much on the exterior or much on the package," and it is a high-fashion car, she said. "I can certainly understand where Model S sales may be softening a little bit because it's an older product. That could be contributing to the issue."

The car was launched in 2012 and is unchanged since as Musk has been far too busy looking for taxpayer subsidies and scapegoats on which to pin the ongoing disappointments of his business plan.

Industry data reviewed separately by Reuters showed that the Model S registrations in California were uneven over the first four months of 2017, varying by more than 1,000 units month-to-month. In percentage terms Model S growth peaked in February, decelerated in March and turned negative in April in California.

IHS measures vehicle registration, which comes after a sale. Registration in California and overall in the United States rose sharply for the combined first four months of the year, but April showed steep declines. IHS has not released data for May or June.

While Brinley said it was difficult to assess whether that reflected demand or availability, the fact that Tesla has chornically overproduced more cars than it delivered in any given quarter, we would think the answer should be obvious.

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Fri, 07 Jul 2017 07:03

By Kate Kelland | LONDON

LONDON When Aaron Blair sat down to chair a week-long meeting of 17 specialists at the International Agency for Research on Cancer in France in March 2015, there was something he wasn't telling them.

The epidemiologist from the U.S. National Cancer Institute had seen important unpublished scientific data relating directly to a key question the IARC specialists were about to consider: Whether research shows that the weedkiller glyphosate, a key ingredient in Monsanto's best-selling RoundUp brand, causes cancer.

Previously unreported court documents reviewed by Reuters from an ongoing U.S. legal case against Monsanto show that Blair knew the unpublished research found no evidence of a link between glyphosate and cancer. In a sworn deposition given in March this year in connection with the case, Blair also said the data would have altered IARC's analysis. He said it would have made it less likely that glyphosate would meet the agency's criteria for being classed as "probably carcinogenic."

But IARC, a semi-autonomous part of the World Health Organization, never got to consider the data. The agency's rules on assessing substances for carcinogenicity say it can consider only published research '' and this new data, which came from a large American study on which Blair was a senior researcher, had not been published.

The lack of publication has sparked debate and contention. A leading U.S. epidemiologist and a leading UK statistician '' both independent of Monsanto '' told Reuters the data was strong and relevant and they could see no reason why it had not surfaced.

Monsanto told Reuters that the fresh data on glyphosate could and should have been published in time to be considered by IARC, and that the failure to publish it undermined IARC's classification of glyphosate. The legal case against Monsanto, taking place in California, involves 184 individual plaintiffs who cite the IARC assessment and claim exposure to RoundUp gave them cancer. They allege Monsanto failed to warn consumers of the risks. Monsanto denies the allegations.

The company also goes beyond saying the fresh data should have been published. It told Reuters the data was deliberately concealed by Blair, but provided no specific evidence of it being hidden.

Blair told Reuters the data, which was available two years before IARC assessed glyphosate, was not published in time because there was too much to fit into one scientific paper. Asked whether he deliberately did not publish it to avoid it being considered by IARC, he said that was "absolutely incorrect." He said a decision not to publish the glyphosate data had been taken "several months" before IARC chose to conduct a review of the chemical.

The National Cancer Institute also cited "space constraints" as the reasons why the new data on glyphosate was not published.

AT ODDS

The absence of the data from IARC's assessment was important. IARC ended its meeting in 2015 by concluding that glyphosate is a "probable human carcinogen." It based its finding on "limited evidence" of carcinogenicity in humans and "sufficient evidence" in experimental animals. It said, among other things, that there was a "positive association" between glyphosate and blood cancers called non-Hodgkin lymphoma. IARC told Reuters that, despite the existence of fresh data about glyphosate, it was sticking with its findings.

The agency's assessment is at odds with other international regulators who have said the weedkiller is not a carcinogenic risk to humans. It led to a delay in Europe on a decision on whether to re-license or ban EU-wide sales of pesticides containing glyphosate. That decision is still pending. In the meantime, some countries have tightened restrictions on the weedkiller's use in private gardens and public spaces and on crops before harvest.

In the United States, a California judge took the IARC assessment into account in a separate legal case in March when ruling that the state can require RoundUp to carry a warning label that it may cause cancer. Monsanto is now facing further litigation from hundreds of plaintiffs across the United States who say glyphosate gave them or their loved ones non-Hodgkin lymphoma, citing the IARC assessment as part of their claims.

Yet if the IARC panel experts had been in a position to take into account Blair's fresh data, IARC's analysis of the evidence on glyphosate would have been different, Blair acknowledged in the court documents reviewed by Reuters.

The unpublished research came from the Agricultural Health Study, a large and significant study, led by scientists at the U.S. National Cancer Institute, of agricultural workers and their families in the United States. Asked by Monsanto lawyers in March whether the unpublished data showed "no evidence of an association" between exposure to glyphosate and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, Blair replied: "Correct."

Asked in the same deposition whether IARC's review of glyphosate would have been different if the missing data had been included, Blair again said: "Correct." Lawyers had put to him that the addition of the missing data would have "driven the meta-relative risk downward," and Blair agreed.

Scott Partridge, Monsanto's vice president of strategy, told Reuters the IARC glyphosate review "ignored multiple years of additional data from the largest and most comprehensive study on farmer exposure to pesticides and cancer."

The Agricultural Health Study was particularly pertinent, he said, because it examined real-life human exposure to glyphosate, whereas much of the scientific research IARC analyzed involved laboratory tests on rodents.

IARC told Reuters that its evaluations follow strict scientific criteria and that its carcinogen classification system "is recognized and used as a reference all around the world." It reiterated that in the interests of transparency it considers only published data.

Reuters asked two independent statistical experts to review the data, which has still not been published, though the National Cancer Institute told Reuters researchers are currently working on an updated analysis of it. Neither of the two experts had seen the data before and both said they had no conflict of interest over glyphosate.

David Spiegelhalter, a professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Britain's University of Cambridge, said there was "no apparent scientific reason" for not publishing the data. Bob Tarone, a retired statistician who worked alongside Blair and others at the National Cancer Institute for 28 years before moving to the for-profit International Epidemiology Institute, said he could find "no ready explanation in terms of the available scientific evidence" for the data not to have been published.

Tarone had already raised the issue in a little-noticed paper in the European Journal of Cancer Prevention last year. He wrote that IARC's classification of glyphosate as probably carcinogenic to humans was the result of "a flawed and incomplete summary" of the evidence.

In an email to Reuters, IARC declined to say whether Blair informed IARC staff about the unpublished data, whether he should have, and whether that data might have changed IARC's evaluation of glyphosate had it been published in time. The agency said it had no plans to reconsider its assessment of the chemical.

NON-SELECTIVE HERBICIDE

Glyphosate is what's known as a non-selective herbicide, meaning it kills most plants. Discovered by the Monsanto chemist John E. Franz in 1970, glyphosate is no longer under patent, is supplied by numerous companies and is now the world's most widely used weedkiller, deployed in agriculture, forestry and domestic gardening. Monsanto and other companies have developed genetically engineered seeds that can tolerate glyphosate, allowing farmers to apply it to entire fields without destroying crops.

The safety of the chemical has been under scientific and regulatory scrutiny since the 1980s. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other international bodies, including the European Food Safety Authority, Health Canada's Pest Management Regulatory Agency, New Zealand's Environmental Protection Authority and Japan's Food Safety Commission, have kept it under regular review, and all say glyphosate is unlikely to cause cancer in humans.

But it is not settled science, and researchers across the world continue to study glyphosate - measuring traces of it in water and foods, exposing lab rats to it, and monitoring possible health effects in people who have used it year after year in their work.

One of the largest and most highly regarded studies to examine effects of pesticide use in real life is the Agricultural Health Study, a prospective investigation of about 89,000 agricultural workers, farmers and their families in Iowa and North Carolina. Since the early 1990s, it has gathered and analyzed detailed information on the health of participants and their families, and their use of pesticides, including glyphosate.

AHS researchers have published numerous studies from their data. One paper looking at glyphosate and possible links with cancers was published in 2005. It concluded that "glyphosate exposure was not associated with cancer incidence overall." Since then, more data has been collected, adding statistical power to subsequent AHS analyses.

In early 2013, Blair and other researchers began preparing new papers with updated AHS data on lymphoma and pesticides, including data on glyphosate. Reuters reviewed drafts dated February 2013 and March 2013, and asked Spiegelhalter and Tarone to examine them. They said the papers, while still in the editing process, were in relatively advanced manuscript form. The drafts contain notes in the margin and suggested changes signed "AEB," Blair's full initials.

After studying the draft papers, Tarone said the unpublished figures show "absolutely no evidence whatsoever" of an increased risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma because of exposure to glyphosate.

Spiegelhalter told Reuters: "In the drafts I saw, none of the herbicides, including glyphosate, showed any evidence of a relation" with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. He noted that the study was statistically strong enough to show a relationship for other pesticides - so had there been any link to glyphosate, it should have shown up.

In his legal testimony, Blair also described the Agricultural Health Study as "powerful" and agreed the data showed no link.

But these draft papers were never published, even though Blair told Monsanto's lawyers in March that the Agricultural Health Study was robust and statistically well-powered, and told Reuters the research was important for science and the public. Email exchanges between Blair and his fellow researchers in 2014 also show they were keenly aware there would be scientific and public interest in fresh AHS data.

On February 28, 2014, Michael Alavanja, a co-lead author of one of the draft papers, sent an email to another AHS co-researcher, copying the message to Blair. It noted that the research was "important to science, public health, IARC and EPA" - the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

In the same email, Alavanja referred to the findings on non-Hodgkin lymphoma, or NHL. He wrote: "It would be irresponsible if we didn't seek publication of our NHL manuscript in time to influence IARCs (sic) decision."

Yet the new AHS data on glyphosate and lymphoma did not surface.

Instead, a revised version of one of the 2013 draft papers prepared by Blair and other researchers appeared in a journal called PLoS One in October 2014. It did not include the data on herbicides, of which glyphosate is one.

This was unusual. Since 2003 AHS researchers had published at least 10 papers using different rounds of updated data to explore possible links between pesticides and specific diseases. And each one included all four pesticide classes: fungicides, fumigants, insecticides and herbicides.

Alavanja was one of the authors of the paper published in PLoS One in 2014. He said he and other authors and senior scientists at the National Cancer Institute decided to remove herbicides from that analysis primarily because of "the issue of statistical power and the need for a comprehensive evaluation of glyphosate and all cancers."

Blair told Reuters the data on herbicides, including glyphosate, had been removed "to make the paper a more manageable size." He gave a similar answer to the lawyer acting for Monsanto, who repeatedly asked in the legal deposition why the data was not published. Blair testified that the paper "went through many iterations." He said he could not recall when the glyphosate data was removed, but "we decided to remove it because ... you couldn't put it all into one paper."

Monsanto argues that the data was not published because it showed no link between glyphosate and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Tarone said the absence of herbicide data in the published 2014 paper was "inexplicable," noting that volume of data had not been an issue in any previous published papers. He said updated AHS data and analyses on herbicides "should be published as soon as possible" to allow "a more complete evaluation of the possible association between glyphosate exposure and NHL risk in humans."

Reuters asked nine other scientists listed as authors on the two draft papers of 2013 why these drafts had never been published. Some were unavailable for comment, and others referred questions to Laura Beane Freeman, who was a co-author on the draft papers and on the 2014 PLoS published study, and is the National Cancer Institute's current principal investigator of the AHS.

In an email to Reuters, Freeman and a spokesman for the institute said: "After reviewing early drafts of the manuscript, it became clear that it would be impossible to do a thorough evaluation of all major pesticide groupings due to the sheer volume of information that was important to include."

They said the decision to separate the results for herbicides, including glyphosate, allowed the scientists "to present more thorough evaluations" of the remaining pesticides. An updated study on glyphosate is under way, Freeman said.

CULTURE CLASH

Despite IARC's modest size and budget, its monographs - assessments of whether something is a cause of cancer - often catch the eyes and ears of policymakers and the public. Recent IARC monographs have included judgments that red meat is carcinogenic and should be classified alongside arsenic and smoking, and that coffee, which IARC previously said might cause cancer, probably is not carcinogenic.

The agency takes a different approach to many other regulators in two important ways. First, it says it assesses "hazard" '' the strength of evidence about whether a substance or activity can cause cancer in any way, whether in a laboratory experiment or elsewhere. It does not assess the "risk" or likelihood of a person getting cancer from everyday exposure to something. Second, in general it only considers research that has been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

IARC considered around 1,000 published studies in its evaluation of glyphosate. But only a handful of those were cohort studies in humans '' the kind like the Agricultural Health Study and the most relevant to real-life situations such as people working with glyphosate in agriculture.

The differing judgments on glyphosate by IARC and other regulators have stoked clashes on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States members of Congress have launched investigations into American taxpayer funding of IARC. They have yet to reach any conclusions.

In Europe, the battle centers on the looming decision about whether to re-license glyphosate for use in the European Union. The European Commission has said it wants EU member states to come to a decision by the end of 2017. Politicians will need to weigh the opinions of IARC and other scientific bodies when they decide whether or not to accept a Commission proposal to extend glyphosate's marketing license by 10 years.

It remains unclear whether the AHS data will see the light of day in time to be considered. Blair said he thought publishing the glyphosate data would be important and that his former colleagues at the NCI were working on it. The NCI's Freeman said her team is currently "drafting a manuscript on this topic." She said the new study "will explore the effects of glyphosate exposure in greater depth than a publication that includes multiple pesticides" and would, she hoped, be submitted "to a peer-reviewed journal in the coming months."

Alavanja said a draft paper "should be available for submission to an appropriate scientific journal sometime later this year," but that a publication date "is very difficult to predict."

(Editing By Richard Woods)

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Fri, 07 Jul 2017 22:07

Michael Jackson's final weeks were spent living in fear the music industry Illuminati were going to kill him, according to notes handwritten by the King of Pop.

The intimate notes are among a collection of letters inherited by German businessman Michael Jacobshagen, who was a close friend of Jackson's for over twenty years.

''They are trying to murder me,'' Michael Jackson wrote in a note just one week before his untimely death. In another note, Jackson explained ''the system wants to kill me for my catalogue.''

In an upcoming interview with broadcaster Daphne Barak, Michael Jacobshagen will tell how Michael Jackson called him from Las Vegas in 2009 and tearfully asked his friend to join him.

After flying to the United States, Jacobshagen was given the collection of notes. It is unclear who they were originally intended for, but the content of the notes is clear, and they point the finger of blame for Michael Jackson's death squarely at the music industry Illuminati.

Michael Jackson knew they were out to get him and his days were numbered. His cries for help were ignored. He could only pass messages to friends in the hope that one day the truth would be made known.

While the official cause of Michael Jackson's death was an overdose of the sedative propofol, and his doctor Conrad Murray was sent to jail for involuntary manslaughter, Jackson's family claim the superstar was silenced and murdered by the elite.

Paris Jackson, Michael's daughter, is the latest insider to come forward with information regarding foul play.

In an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine, the 18-year-old daughter of Michael Jackson claimed her father knew that a group ''more powerful than the government'' was planning to kill him '' and that he was eventually murdered in a ''setup''.

''He would drop hints about people being out to get him. And at some point he was like, 'They're gonna kill me one day','' Paris said.

Paris is pointing the finger at the Illuminati, popularly believed to be controlling the music industry and much of Hollywood.

''It's obvious. All arrows point to that. It sounds like a total conspiracy theory and it sounds like bulls***, but all real fans and everybody in the family knows it. It was a setup. It was bulls***.''

Paris was 11 when her father died from cardiac arrest in 2009 caused by a lethal combination of prescription drugs.

Paris blames Dr. Conrad Murray for her father's death but claims he was a pawn used by the sinister organization behind the plot on her father's life '' and she says she has proof.

''I definitely do, but it's a chess game. And I am trying to play the chess game the right way.

And that's all I can say about that right now,'' she said.

Baxter DmitryBaxter Dmitry is a writer at Your News Wire. He covers politics, business and entertainment. Speaking truth to power since he learned to talk, Baxter has travelled in over 80 countries and won arguments in every single one. Live without fear.Email: baxter@yournewswire.com

Follow: @baxter_dmitry

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Archived Version

Sat, 08 Jul 2017 03:46

Last Tuesday, Senior U.S. District Judge William J. Zloch heard oral arguments regarding a Motion to Dismiss filed by attorneys representing the Democratic National Committee and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz in the class action lawsuit filed against them. The lawsuit seeks damages on behalf of Democratic Party donors who made financial contributions to Bernie Sanders and the Party under the presumption the primary would be conducted fairly per the DNC's Charter. The lawsuit was filed in June 2016 following the release of leaked emails showing behind-the-scenes collusion between the DNC, the Clinton campaign, and other entities to ensure Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee prior to Americans casting votes in the party's primary contests.

Transcripts released from the hearing Friday expose numerous shocking revelations presented by the Democrats' counsel arguing in support of the Motion to Dismiss regarding the way the Democratic Party views its obligations and responsibilities in conducting the primary nominating process. Judge Zloch did not issue a ruling from the bench; he will issue a written order in response to the Motion to Dismiss at a later, unspecified date as he considers the merits of the defendants on the Motion.

The following is a list of numerous jaw-dropping statements made by lawyers on behalf of the Democratic National Committee that should be examined as the American public awaits the Judge's order.

1. The crux of the Motion to Dismiss asserts the Judge is not in a position to determine how the Democratic Party conducts its nominating process.

In the first of many galling and naive assertions, the Democrats' counsel advises U.S. Federal Judge William J. Zloch, recently promoted to a Senior bench, that the lawsuit should be dismissed outright because litigating the DNC's business would ''drag the Court right into the political squabbles''. Zloch, appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1985, is told: ''There'd be no way constitutionally to offer redress'', despite this being the Court's ''one job''. City, state, county, and Federal courts review legal issues related to political squabbles big and small on a daily basis, and specifically exist as a separate branch of our government to perform this function independent of political disputes arising in the executive or legislative branches of the government.

https://twitter.com/tedkidd/status/858131737871888385https://twitter.com/ActualFlatticus/status/8580896424779735052. The Democratic Party views itself as having authority to favor a candidate without any legal repercussions.

Without any pretense the Democratic primary nominating process should be expected to be conducted fairly, lawyers for the Democratic Party tell Judge Zloch the lawsuit should be thrown out because the Party has the freedom to determine its nominees by ''internal rule'', not voter interests, and thus the party ''could have favored a candidate''.

https://twitter.com/WindyDane/status/858444746649423872Lawyers for the Democratic Party suggest the lawsuit ''can't be resolved'' by the Court because it is based on an internal rule that ''cannot be enforced''. This statement by lawyers for the Democrats to a Federal judge is a damning indictment the Party may never recover from: the party views itself in no way beholden to voters' interest whatsoever.

https://twitter.com/medellinemil/status/858150486112743428This will play out in further remarks, but in taking this position, the Democrats present themselves as perfectly comfortable with the American public and Court knowing they view the nominating process to be the Party's choice, and they can and do operate under no legal obligation whatsoever to be representative of the interest of American citizens participating in Party activities and nominating contests.

3. Judge Zloch appeared skeptical, noting the Democrats' interest to obscure the guarantee of the Party's impartiality clause.

https://twitter.com/zachhaller/status/858084244890857472/The DNC's Charter clearly articulates it is the responsibility of the party and specifically, its Chairperson, to guarantee a fair Presidential primary process and that all DNC staff conduct business evenhandedly to ultimately assure this. Judge Zloch's correction of the DNC lawyer's language demonstrates the Judge's clear understanding that this element of the Charter's language is central to determining the merits of the DNC's argument, and shows the Judge did not allow the DNC's lawyers to obscure the specificity of this guarantee in the Party's charter.

4. The Democrats insist that ''impartial'' cannot be defined, so the DNC's impartiality clause is akin to a political promise in that it can not be guaranteed.

Despite the implications of this position, lawyers for the DNC repeatedly denied that the terms ''impartial'' and ''evenhanded'' can be defined to the point that a ruling can be issued on what obligations these words carry as they appear in the DNC's Charter.

https://twitter.com/zachhaller/status/858095849380786177/https://twitter.com/ActualFlatticus/status/858082936729554946Zloch also made a pointed question to clarify if the Democratic Party interprets its ability to show favoritism as ''business as usual'', which DNC Attorney Bruce Spiva subsequently denied.

https://twitter.com/zachhaller/status/8580881817023283205. DNC's legal counsel appeared unaware of any procedures in place to determine how the DNC supports state parties as they conduct individual primary nominating contests.

A curious exchange between Judge Zloch and lawyers for the DNC exposed that lawyers for the DNC were either unsure as to how the DNC works to fund state party primaries, or did not have a determined messaging strategy as to how to respond to this critical inquiry from the Judge.

https://twitter.com/zachhaller/status/858086494652608512/Typically, attorneys prepare heavily for oral arguments related to every aspect of a case that may be litigated; particularly in financial disputes, preparation consists of extensive and diligent analysis of all financial relationships in play and the legal obligations related to all parties and transactions in dispute.

While the DNC's attorneys may have been legitimately unprepared as to how to respond to this inquiry, it is also possible they are deliberately avoiding to specify these details to the court at this time, particularly given a scandal that emerged around the same time showing officials trying to hide the fact that Hillary Clinton allowed states to keep only a small fraction of proceeds earned from joint fundraising with the DNC.

Theoretically, all 50 states' primary contests would need to be determined to have been conducted properly to ensure the state delegates are allocated appropriately to competing candidates following the primary contests. The financial relationship between the DNC, state parties, and Democratic party voters in all 50 states would need to be examined by the Court should Judge Zloch seek to ensure financial support entitled to state parties from the national organization were provided equitably and without prejudice. Should additional information come to light that shows funds disproportionately allocated to states that resulted in Clinton wins, this would have further implications on the Judge's ruling on a state-by-state basis.

https://twitter.com/JohnnyTatonka/status/8581432227106816016. The Democrats' lawyers take the position that while the Democrats are not legally obligated to conduct the primary fairly, they did, in fact, conduct the 2016 primary fairly.

Over several hours of oral arguments, counsel for the DNC gave somewhat contradictory statements that make it difficult to determine the exact argument the Party is taking in response to the lawsuit. While admitting repeatedly and in great detail that the party has no legal obligation to conduct the primary impartially, Spiva later insists that the 2016 primary was in fact conducted impartially.

https://twitter.com/zachhaller/status/858095849380786177https://twitter.com/ActualFlatticus/status/8580912423281295367. In closing remarks, U.S. Federal Court district judge emphasized: ''Democracy demands the truth''.

https://twitter.com/zachhaller/status/858089895893454849The lawsuit filed against the DNC seeks damages on behalf of three ''classes'' of Americans who have been arguably disaffected by the DNC's actions: donors to Bernie Sanders and donors to the Democratic Party whose financial donations may have been used fraudulently, and members of the Democratic Party broadly who were allegedly denied the benefit of impartiality offered in exchange for their participation in the Party's electoral processes.

While the U.S. Supreme Court dubiously asserted in Bush v. Gore that ''[t]he individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States,'' the issue at hand is not a matter of voting rights, but a matter of fraud. The lawsuit brought forth against the DNC pertains inherently to the financial transactions that took place, and what laws the DNC may have violated in how they conducted the primary, versus how the primary was expected to be conducted when donations were solicited.

To rule on this Motion, and ultimately the merits of the lawsuit itself, Judge Zloch concluded the hearings identifying the element inherently and ultimately required to guarantee a good faith democratic process: the truth.

https://twitter.com/zachhaller/status/858101739500654592In determining what if any damages are owed to the American public by the Democratic Party and Wasserman-Schultz, Judge Zloch will first rule if the Motion to Dismiss is granted or dismissed. Should the Motion be dismissed, the lawsuit will proceed to a Discovery phase, allowing counsel to conduct depositions (interviews) of relevant parties to solicit responses related to the suit to be given under oath on behalf of the affected citizens claiming damages.

No time frame was given by the Judge as to when the order would be issued.

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Archived Version

Sat, 08 Jul 2017 16:50

1/29 Brexit concerns shrink UK's lead as Europe's top finance hubBrexit concerns have bitten into the UK's lead as Europe's top financial services location for investors, new research shows. The UK's financial services industry has retained its title as Europe's most attractive location for international investment, but its lead has narrowed due to fears over the impact of Brexit, according to a report by professional services firm EY.

Reuters

2/29 Longest squeeze on household incomes since 1970s, says ONSThe aggregate real disposable income of UK households has fallen for three quarters in a row for the first time since the 1970s, according to the Office for National Statistics. The ONS said that the inflation-adjusted compensation of the household sector fell 1.4 per cent in the first three months of 2017, reflecting spiking inflation and weak pay growth.

Macrobond, The Independent

3/29 Brexit worries Wimbledon strawberry farmer who depends on EU workersThe owner of the farm which provides Wimbledon with its strawberries has said she hopes there is a ''mechanism'' for European citizens to work seasonally in the UK after Brexit. Marion Regan, who owns Hugh Lowe Farms in Kent with her husband Jon, relies on seasonal labour to make sure Wimbledon is supplied with fresh strawberries throughout the tournament.

Reuters

4/29 Consumer confidence slips back to post-Brexit vote lowsConsumer confidence is now almost back down to the lows seen in the wake of last June's Brexit referendum, adding to a picture of a wilting consumer in the face of fast rising inflation and weak wage growth. The latest GfK Index slipped to -10 in June, down from -5 in the previous month, its lowest since last July.

5/29 Tobacco giant Philip Morris wants everyone to quit smokingPhilip Morris International, the world's second largest tobacco company, has said it wants people to quit the habit. Peter Nixon, UK and Ireland managing director for the global tobacco giant said ''We are absolutely serious - one day we want to stop selling cigarettes.''

6/29 Alibaba's Jack Ma warns evolving technology could cause World War IIIChinese business magnate Jack Ma said that evolving technologies are likely to pose a threat to more than just the job market and could in fact trigger a Third World War. In an interview with CNBC, the billionaire chairman of Alibaba said that world leaders have a duty to educate people to prevent the pain caused by a rapid rise in automation and artificial intelligence.

Getty

7/29 Japanese bank Nomura chooses Frankfurt for EU headquarters after UK's withdrawalNomura picked Frankfurt as the headquarters for its European Union operations after the UK leaves the bloc, people with knowledge of the matter said. Japan's biggest brokerage will start preparations this month to form a base in the German financial centre, one of the people said, asking not to be identified as the matter is confidential. It will seek regulatory approval and find office space before transferring fewer than 100 employees from London to the city, according to the person.

Getty Images

8/29 will.i.am says artificial intelligence will be more disruptive to UK tech than EU withdrawalThe reckless rise of artificial intelligence is going to be much more disruptive for the London technology scene in the longer run than Britain's departure from the EU, according to musician, entrepreneur and philanthropist will.i.am. Speaking at an event celebrating his collaboration with Atom Bank, an app-based digital-only bank launched last year, the founding member of The Black Eyed Peas said that by 2030, Brexit will be ''an old school thought'' for the UK's rapidly evolving tech industry and AI will present a much more acute challenge.

Getty Images

9/29 How climate change will threaten food security of world's poorest countriesSome of the world's poorest countries will be hit hardest as climate change affects marine fisheries all over the world, according to a new study. The global fishing industry produces a total catch worth of about $90bn (£71bn) but the warming ocean temperatures are causing many valuable species to shift their usual ranges.

Lisa Murray

10/29 Supersonic passenger jet to take off next yearAn American firm is promising the return of supersonic passenger aviation, with transatlantic airfares ''about the same price as today's business class tickets''. Boom, based in Denver, says London-New York will cost £2,000 one-way and take just 3 hours 15 minutes. With a planned cruising speed of 1,451mph, the plane is almost 100mph faster than Concorde.

11/29 Casamigos: George Clooney tequila brand sold for $1bn to drinks giant DiageoGeorge Clooney is selling his US tequila brand Casamigos to British beverage company Diageo for almost $1bn (£790m). The London-based distiller will initially pay $700m (£553m) for Casamigos and possibly an additional $300m (£237m) based on the performance of the brand over the next decade. The purchase will be Diageo's biggest since it bought United Spirits for $3.2 billion (£2.5 billion) in 2014.

Getty Images

12/29 Jaguar Land Rover to create 5,000 new jobsBritain's biggest carmaker Jaguar Land Rover will hire 5,000 staff as it boosts its skills in autonomous and electric technology, a welcome business endorsement as Prime Minister Theresa May starts Brexit talks after a botched election. JLR, which employs more than 40,000 people globally, said it would hire 1,000 electronic and software engineers as well as 4,000 additional personnel including in manufacturing, most of whom will be based in Britain.

13/29 European shares rebound as Emmanuel Macron wins historic majorityInternet giants will face increased pressure to tackle online extremism as European leaders were expected to back a UK-led drive for tougher internet regulation. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson will lead calls to ensure there is ''no safe space for terrorists'' to plot attacks and share radical material online when he attends a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg on Monday.

Reuters

14/29 The real reason UK employers hire European Union workersWhile the end of free movement is presented by politicians as 'taking control', for employers it means quite the reverse '' it means a loss of control, it means new barriers to recruitment and, for some, the risk of irreparable damage. In our research at the National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR) before and after the referendum vote we've detected a gradual change in outlook among employers.

AP

15/29 Boris Johnson calls on internet giants to leave 'no safe space for terrorists'Internet giants will face increased pressure to tackle online extremism as European leaders were expected to back a UK-led drive for tougher internet regulation. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson will lead calls to ensure there is ''no safe space for terrorists'' to plot attacks and share radical material online when he attends a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg on Monday.

Rex

16/29 Amazon to buy Whole Foods for $13.7 billionAmazon, the e-commerce behemoth that sells everything from toothpaste to tennis shoes, has announced it will purchase grocery store Whole Foods for $13.7bn (£10.7bn). The Seattle-based retailer will buy the popular health food chain for $42 per share, pending approval by its shareholders.

Getty

17/29 Workers producing Ivanka Trump's fashion line subjected to verbal abuse and 'poverty pay'Ivanka Trump has come under fire again after workers at a factory making clothes for her brand in Indonesia described an environment of ''verbal abuse'' and poverty wages. More than a dozen workers at the factory in Subang told the Guardian that they regularly work unpaid overtime and are paid one of the lowest minimum wages in Asia, despite production targets that are impossible to meet.

AP

18/29 EU launches antitrust investigation into Nike, Universal Studios and Hello Kitty ownerThe EU has launched antitrust investigations into Nike, Universal Studios and the owner of the Hello Kitty brand, over their licensing and distribution practices within the single market. In a statement, the European commission said that it was looking into whether the three companies were illegally preventing retailers from selling certain goods licensed by them across borders and online, thereby breaking competition rules.

19/29 Morrisons is selling 16oz 'Daddy of all burgers' for Father's DayThe ''daddy of all burgers'' has arrived, just in time for Father's Day. Morrisons launched the huge, one pound, 18cm monster, which should satisfy even the hungriest of dads, on Wednesday. Each one is made by butchers in-store using 100 per cent British beef seasoned with paprika, sage and parsley. Morrisons claims it is the biggest beef burger money can buy in a UK supermarket, and it costs just £3. Shoppers will have to be quick however, as the oversized patties are only available until Sunday.

PA

20/29 Verizon completes Yahoo acquisition and announces CEO Marissa Mayer's resignationVerizon Communications said on Tuesday it closed its $4.48bn (£3.51m) acquisition of Yahoo's core business and that Marissa Mayer, chief executive of the internet company, had resigned. The completion of the acquisition marked the end of Yahoo as a stand-alone internet company, a tech pioneer once valued at more than $100bn.

REUTERS

21/29 Thames Water hit with £8.55m fine after failing to reduce leakagesThames Water has been hit with a £8.55m penalty for failing to reduce leakages, regulator Ofwat said on Wednesday. A ''cluster of significant bursts'' meant that Thames Water's leakages increased by five per cent since last year, according to the company's annual report. This brought the leakages up to 677 million litres per day, exceeding the 630 million target.

PA Wire

22/29 UK General election 2017: Pound sterling hovers near two-week high as voters take to the pollsThe pound traded near a two-week high against the dollar on Thursday morning, as the first voters took to the polls in the UK's general election. Sterling was recently trading little changed against the dollar at around $1.2955, not far off its $1.2970 peak hit on Wednesday, which was the currency's highest level since 25 May.

Reuters

23/29 UK car production slumps by nearly a fifth in April as timing of Easter bites - Thursday May 24UK car manufacturing plummeted by almost a fifth in April, as the timing of Easter ate into the number of production days in the month.

Reuters

24/29 Marks and Spencer reports slump in profit hurt by clothing sales and cost of new food stores - Wednesday 24 MayHigh street stalwart Marks and Spencer has reported a more than 60 per cent fall in pre-tax profit in the year to the end of March, hurt by a decline in clothing sales and higher costs from opening new food stores. Pre-tax profit came in at £176.4m for the year, while sales were broadly steady at £10.6bn. Food revenue was up 4.2 per cent.

Reuters

25/29 Apple named world's most value company in tech-dominated Forbes ranking - Tuesday 23 MayTech behemoth Apple has been named the most valuable brand in the world for a seventh consecutive year. The highly-regarded ranking, compiled by Forbes magazine, puts the iPhone makers' brand value at $170bn, a 10 per cent increase on figure for 2016 and well ahead of second-placed Google, whose brand value has risen $19.3bn from last year to just under $102bn, according to Forbes. Tech peer Microsoft nabbed third spot, with a value of $87bn, followed by Facebook at $73.5bn. Consumer goods giant Coca-Cola rounds out the top five with a value of $56.4bn.

Reuters

26/29 Diamond ring bought for £10 at car boot sale expected to fetch £350,000 at auction - Monday 22 MayA large, diamond ring is expected to fetch £350,000 at auction 30 years after its owner paid £10 for it at a car boot sale, thinking it was a costume jewel. The ''exceptionally-sized'' stone was presumed not to be real because 19th Century diamonds were not cut to show off their brilliance like today's gems. And so the owner, unaware of its value, wore it for decades, while doing everything from the shopping to the chores.

PA

27/29 $110 Basquiat sold by Family who bought it for $19,000 - Friday 19 MayJean-Michel Basquiat's painting of a skull sold for $110.5 million at Sotheby's in New York, setting an auction record for American artists and providing a windfall for the daughter of two collectors who purchased it for $19,000 in 1984.

Getty Images

28/29 Peppa Pig owner Entertainment One announces 117 new episodes - Friday 19 MayThe company that owns the Peppa Pig brand has announced that it is producing 117 new episodes for the popular children's cartoon. The new series will air from spring 2019 and take the total number of Peppa Pig episodes to 381.

Getty

29/29 Property tycoon who banned 'coloured people because of curry smells' faces legal action - Thursday 18 MayA buy-to-let tycoon who banned ''coloured people'' from his properties ''because of curry smells'' is facing legal action brought by the equality watchdog. Millionaire Fergus Wilson, who reportedly owns close to 1,000 properties in Kent, sent an email to a local letting agency informing them of the ban. Commission chief executive, Rebecca Hilsenrath, said: ''We have asked the court if it agrees with us that Mr Wilson's lettings policy contains unlawful criteria and, if so, to issue an injunction. ''As this is now formal legal action we will release further information at a later date.''

Gareth Fuller/PA

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Archived Version

Sat, 08 Jul 2017 16:56

PLAINVIEW - Parents are being warned about a dangerous powdered chocolate that's being snorted by teenagers.

The powder is called Coco Loko. The owner of the company that sells the product says it is a mix of raw cacao and energy stimulants. His website says it gives users a "a steady rush of euphoric energy" and "a sense of calm focus."

Some Long Islanders were shocked to hear the product is legally sold online.

"If you need energy, have some energy bars," said Marisa Ciriello, of Hicksville. "You don't need to snort chocolate."

Company owner Nick Anderson defended the product, saying it should be used in moderation like anything else.

"Follow the instructions and be responsible," Anderson said. "I think it should be sold to 18 and up, it shouldn't be sold to minors."

News 12 spoke with medical professionals on Long Island who said that although they don't know enough about the product, they don't advise anyone to use it.

While some call the new trend disgusting, one Long Islander said they tried Coco Loko in Europe and would do it again.

The company warns on its website that the product "may impair your ability to drive" and "may cause health problems." It has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.

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Archived Version

Sat, 08 Jul 2017 16:00

1/66 8 July 2017US President Donald Trump arrives for another working session during the G20 summit in Hamburg, northern Germany

AFP/Getty Images

2/66 7 July 2017People climb up on a roof to get a view during riots in Hamburg, northern Germany, where leaders of the world's top economies gather for a G20 summit

AFP/Getty Images

3/66 7 July 2017A military helicopter rescues people trapped on the roof of the Ministry of Finance by an intense fire in San Salvador

AFP/Getty Images

4/66 6 July 2017Donald Trump arrives to deliver a speech at Krasinski Square in Warsaw, Poland.

AP

5/66 6 July 2017A firefighter conducts rescue operations in an area damaged by heavy rain in Asakura, Japan.

Reuters

6/66 6 July 2017Anti-capitalism activists protest in Hamburg, where leaders of the world's top economies will gather for a G20 summit.

AFP/Getty

7/66 6 July 2017Crowds gather for the start of the San Fermin festival in Pamplona, Spain.

AFP

8/66 5 July 2017A member of the Iraqi security forces runs with his weapon during a fight between Iraqi forces and Islamic State militants in the Old City of Mosul, Iraq.

9/66 5 July 2017A U.S. MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile is fired during the combined military exercise between the U.S. and South Korea against North Korea at an undisclosed location in South Korea

A.P

10/66 4 July 2017North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un looks on during the test-fire of inter-continental ballistic missile Hwasong-14

Reuters

11/66 4 July 2017Russian President Vladimir Putin (R) shakes hands with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping during a signing ceremony following the talks at the Kremlin

Reuters

12/66 3 July 2017Belarussian servicemen march during a military parade as part of celebrations marking the Independence Day in Minsk, Belarus

Reuters

13/66 3 July 2017Ambulance cars and fire engines are seen near the site where a coach burst into flames after colliding with a lorry on a motorway near Muenchberg, Germany

Reuters

14/66 2 July 2017Protesters demonstrating against the upcoming G20 economic summit ride boats on Inner Alster lake during a protest march in Hamburg, Germany. Hamburg will host the upcoming G20 summit and is expecting heavy protests throughout.

Getty Images

15/66 1 July 2017Protesters carry a large image of jailed Chinese Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo as they march during the annual pro-democracy protest in Hong Kong. Thousands joined an annual protest march in Hong Kong, hours after Chinese President Xi Jinping wrapped up his visit to the city by warning against challenges to Beijing's sovereignty.

AP

16/66 30 June 2017Jockey Andrea Coghe of "Selva" (Forest) parish rides his horse during the first practice for the Palio Horse Race in Siena, Italy June 30, 2017

Reuters

17/66 30 June 2017A man takes pictures with a phone with a Union Flag casing after Chinese President Xi Jinping (not pictured) inspected troops at the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Hong Kong Garrison as part of events marking the 20th anniversary of the city's handover from British to Chinese rule, in Hong Kong, China June 30, 2017

Reuters

18/66 29 June 2017A protester against U.S. President Donald Trump's limited travel ban, approved by the U.S. Supreme Court, holds a sign next to protesters supporting the ban, in New York City, U.S., June 29, 2017

Reuters

19/66 29 June 2017Israeli Air Force Efroni T-6 Texan II planes perform at an air show during the graduation of new cadet pilots at Hatzerim base in the Negev desert, near the southern Israeli city of Beer Sheva

AFP/Getty Images

20/66 28 June 2017A woman gestures next to people spraying insecticide on a vehicle during a mosquito-control operation led by Ivory Coast's National Public and Health Institute in Bingerville, near Abidjan where several cases of dengue fever were reported

AFP/Getty Images

21/66 28 June 2017An aerial view shows women swimming in the Yenisei River on a hot summer day, with the air temperature at about 32 degrees Celsius (89.6 degrees Fahrenheit), outside Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, Russia, June 28, 2017

Reuters

22/66 27 June 2017A Libyan coast guardsman watches over as illegal immigrants arrive to land in a dinghy during the rescue of 147 people who attempted to reach Europe off the coastal town of Zawiyah, 45 kilometres west of the capital Tripoli, on June 27, 2017. More than 8,000 migrants have been rescued in waters off Libya during the past 48 hours in difficult weather conditions, Italy's coastguard said on June 27, 2017

AFP/Getty Images

23/66 27 June 2017Investigators work at the scene of a car bomb explosion which killed Maxim Shapoval, a high-ranking official involved in military intelligence, in Kiev, Ukraine, June 27, 2017

Reuters

24/66 26 June 2017A man leaves after voting in the Mongolian presidential election at the Erdene Sum Ger (Yurt) polling station in Tuul Valley. Mongolians cast ballots on June 26 to choose between a horse breeder, a judoka and a feng shui master in a presidential election rife with corruption scandals and nationalist rhetoric

AFP/Getty Images

25/66 26 June 2017People attend Eid al-Fitr prayers to mark the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan at a play ground in the suburb of Sale, Morocco

REUTERS

26/66 25 June 2017A plain-clothes police officer kicks a member of a group of LGBT rights activist as Turkish police prevent them from going ahead with a Gay Pride annual parade on 25 June 2017 in Istanbul, a day after it was banned by the city governor's office.

AFP/Getty Images

27/66 25 June 2017Pakistan army soldiers stands guard while rescue workers examine the site of an oil tanker explosion at a highway near Bahawalpur, Pakistan. An overturned oil tanker burst into flames in Pakistan on Sunday, killing more than one hundred people who had rushed to the scene of the highway accident to gather leaking fuel, an official said.

AP

28/66 24 June 2017Rescue workers search for survivors at the site of a landslide that occurred in Xinmo Village, Mao County, Sichuan province, China

REUTERS

29/66 23 June 2017Student activists shout anti martial law slogans during a protest in Manila on June 23, 2017

AFP/Getty Images

30/66 23 June 2017A diver performs from the Pont Alexandre III bridge into the River Seine in Paris, France, June 23, 2017 as Paris transforms into a giant Olympic park to celebrate International Olympic Days with a variety of sporting events for the public across the city during two days as the city bids to host the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games

Reuters

31/66 23 June 2017Debris and smoke are seen after an OV-10 Bronco aircraft released a bomb, during an airstrike, as government troops continue their assault against insurgents from the Maute group, who have taken over parts of Marawi city, Philippines June 23, 2017

Reuters

32/66 22 June 2017Russian President Vladimir Putin (C) stands under pouring rain during a wreath-laying ceremony marking the 76th anniversary of the Nazi German invasion, by the Kremlin walls in Moscow, on June 22, 2017

AFP/Getty Images

33/66 22 June 2017Smoke rises following a reported air strike on a rebel-held area in the southern Syrian city of Daraa, on June 22, 2017

AFP/Getty Images

34/66 22 June 2017Iraqis flee from the Old City of Mosul on June 22, 2017, during the ongoing offensive by Iraqi forces to retake the last district still held by the Islamic State (IS) group

AFP/Getty Images

35/66 21 June 2017Girls stand in monsoon rains beside an open laundry in New Delhi, India

Reuters

36/66 21 June 2017People take part in the 15th annual Times Square yoga event celebrating the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year, during classes in the middle of Times Square in New York. The event marked the international day of yoga.

Reuters

37/66 20 June 2017Faroe Islanders turn the sea red after slaughtering hundreds of whales as part of annual tradition

Rex

38/66 20 June 2017A firefighting plane tackles a blaze in Cadafaz, near Goes, Portugal

Reuters

39/66 15 June 2017A person participates in a journalists' protest asking for justice in recent attacks on journalists in Mexico City, Mexico, 15 June 2017

EPA

40/66 11 June 2017Poland's Piotr Lobodzinski starts in front of the Messeturm, Fairground Tower, in Frankfurt Germany. More than 1,000 runners climbed the 1202 stairs, and 222 meters of height in the Frankfurt Messeturm skyscraper run

AP

41/66 11 June 2017A runner lies on the ground after arriving at the finish line in Frankfurt Germany. More than 1,000 runners climbed the 1202 stairs, and 222 meters of height in the Frankfurt Messeturm skyscraper run

AP

42/66 11 June 2017A troupe of Ukrainian dancers perform at Boryspil airport in Kiev, on the first day of visa-free travel for Ukrainian nationals to the European Union

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43/66 11 June 2017A troupe of Ukrainian dancers perform on the tarmac at Boryspil airport in Kiev, on the first day of visa-free travel for Ukrainian nationals to the European Union

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44/66 11 June 2017French President Emmanuel Macron with his wife Brigitte Trogneux cast their ballot at their polling station in the first round of the French legislatives elections in Le Touquet, northern France

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45/66 11 June 2017A Thai worker paints on a large statue of the Goddess of Mercy, known as Guan Yin at a Chinese temple in Ratchaburi province, Thailand. Guan Yin is one of the most popular and well known Chinese Goddess in Asia and in the world. Guan Yin is the Bodhisattva of Great Compassion in Mahayana Buddhism and also worshiped by Taoist

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46/66 11 June 2017A Thai worker paints on a large statue of the Goddess of Mercy, known as Guan Yin at a Chinese temple in Ratchaburi province, Thailand. Guan Yin is one of the most popular and well known Chinese Goddess in Asia and in the world. Guan Yin is the Bodhisattva of Great Compassion in Mahayana Buddhism and also worshiped by Taoists

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47/66 10 June 2017Volunteers spread mozzarella cheese toppings on the Guinness World Record attempt for the Longest Pizza in Fontana, California, USA. The pizza was planned to be 7000 feet (2.13 km) to break the previous record of 6082 feet (1.8 km) set in Naples, Italy in 2016

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48/66 10 June 2017Jamaica's Olympic champion Usain Bolt gestures after winning his final 100 metres sprint at the 2nd Racers Grand Prix at the National Stadium in Kingston, Jamaica

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49/66 10 June 2017Usain Bolt of Jamaica salutes the crowd after winning 100m 'Salute to a Legend' race during the Racers Grand Prix at the national stadium in Kingston, Jamaica. Bolt partied with his devoted fans in an emotional farewell at the National Stadium on June 10 as he ran his final race on Jamaican soil. Bolt is retiring in August following the London World Championships

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50/66 10 June 2017Usain Bolt of Jamaica salutes the crowd after winning 100m 'Salute to a Legend' race during the Racers Grand Prix at the national stadium in Kingston, Jamaica. Bolt partied with his devoted fans in an emotional farewell at the National Stadium on June 10 as he ran his final race on Jamaican soil. Bolt is retiring in August following the London World Championships

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51/66 10 June 2017Police officers investigate at the Amsterdam Centraal station in Amsterdam, Netherlands. A car ploughed into pedestrians and injured at least five people outside the station. The background of the incident was not immediately known, though police state they have 'no indication whatsoever' the incident was an attack

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52/66 10 June 2017Police officers investigate at the Amsterdam Centraal station in Amsterdam, Netherlands. A car ploughed into pedestrians and injured at least five people outside the station. The background of the incident was not immediately known, though police state they have 'no indication whatsoever' the incident was an attack

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53/66 10 June 2017Protesters stand off before police during a demonstration against corruption, repression and unemployment in Al Hoseima, Morocco. The neglected Rif region has been rocked by social unrest since the death in October of a fishmonger. Mouhcine Fikri, 31, was crushed in a rubbish truck as he protested against the seizure of swordfish caught out of season and his death has sparked fury and triggered nationwide protests

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54/66 9 June 2017A man looks on at a migrant and refugee makeshift camp set up under the highway near Porte de la Chapelle, northern Paris

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55/66 9 June 2017Damaged cars are seen stacked in the middle of a road in western Mosul's Zanjili neighbourhood during ongoing battles to try to take the city from Islamic State (IS) group fighters

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56/66 9 June 2017Smoke billows following a reported air strike on a rebel-held area in the southern Syrian city of Daraa

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57/66 9 June 2017Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel gestures next to Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto during a welcome ceremony at the National Palace in Mexico City, Mexico

REUTERS/Carlos Jasso

58/66 9 June 2017Soldiers and residents carry the body of a Muslim boy who was hit by a stray bullet while praying inside a mosque, as government troops continue their assault against insurgents from the Maute group, who has taken over large parts of the Marawi City, Philippines

REUTERS/Romeo Ranoco

59/66 8 June 2017Opposition demonstrators protest for the death on the eve of young activist Neomar Lander during clashes with riot police, in Caracas

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60/66 8 June 2017Neomar Lander, a 17-year-old boy was killed during a march in the Chacao district in eastern Caracas on Wednesday, taking the overall death toll since the beginning of April to 66, according to prosecutors

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61/66 8 June 2017Former FBI director James Comey is sworn in during a hearing before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC

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62/66 8 June 2017Former FBI Director James Comey testifies during a US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC

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63/66 8 June 2017Usain Bolt of Jamaica trains at the University of West Indies in Kingston. Bolt says he is looking forward to having a party as he launches his final season on June 10 with what will be his last race on Jamaican soil. The 30-year-old world's fasted man plans to retire from track and field after the 2017 London World Championships in August

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64/66 8 June 2017Acquanetta Warren, Mayor of Fontana, California, reacts after US President Donald Trump introduced himself before the Infrastructure Summit with Governors and Mayors at the White House in Washington, US

REUTERS/Yuri Gripas

65/66 8 June 2017Frenchman Alain Castany, sentenced to 20 years on charges of drug trafficking in the 'Air Cocaine' affair, leaves the prison in Santo Domingo, on his way to France, where he is being transferred for medical reason

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66/66 8 June 2017A woman reacts at the place where 17-year-old demonstrator Neomar Lander died during riots at a rally against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's government in Caracas, Venezuela, June 8, 2017. The sign reads: 'Neomar, entertainer for ever'

REUTERS/Ivan Alvarado

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The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Explanation It has been enacted into law in 11 states with 165 electoral votes ( CA, DC, HI, IL, MA, MD, NJ, NY, RI, VT, WA). This interstate compact will take effect when enacted by states with 105 more electoral votes. It has passed at least one house in 12 additional states with 96 electoral votes ( AR, AZ, CO, CT, DE, ME, MI, NC, NM, NV, OK, OR) and been approved unanimously by committee votes in two additional states with 27 electoral votes ( GA, MO). Most recently, the bill was passed by a 40''16 vote in the Republican-controlled Arizona House, 28''18 in Republican-controlled Oklahoma Senate, 57''4 in Republican-controlled New York Senate, 37''21 in Democratic-controlled Oregon House, and 26-16 in the New Mexico Senate. Map showing status in states

STATUS: AK AL AR AZ CA CO CT DC DE FL GA HI IA ID IL IN KS KY LA MA MD ME MI MN MO MS MT NC ND NE NH NJ NM NV NY OH OK OR PA RI SC SD TN TX UT VA VT WA WI WV WY

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Sat, 08 Jul 2017 03:57

Hackers working for a foreign government recently breached at least a dozen U.S. power plants, including the Wolf Creek nuclear facility in Kansas, according to current and former U.S. officials, sparking concerns the attackers were searching for vulnerabilities in the electrical grid.

The intruders could be positioning themselves to eventually disrupt the nation's power supply, warned the officials, who noted that a general alert was distributed to utilities a week ago. Adding to those concerns, hackers recently infiltrated an unidentified company that makes control systems for equipment used in the power industry, an attack that officials believe may be related.

The chief suspect is Russia, according to three people familiar with the continuing effort to eject the hackers from the computer networks. One of those networks belongs to an aging nuclear generating facility known as Wolf Creek -- owned by Westar Energy Inc., Great Plains Energy Inc. and Kansas Electric Power Cooperative Inc. -- on a lake shore near Burlington, Kansas.

The possibility of a Russia connection is particularly worrisome, former and current officials say, because Russian hackers have previously taken down parts of the electrical grid in Ukraine and appear to be testing increasingly advanced tools to disrupt power supplies.

The hacks come as international tensions have flared over U.S. intelligence agencies' conclusion that Russia tried to influence the 2016 presidential election. The U.S., which has several continuing investigations into Russia's activities, is known to possess digital weapons capable of disrupting the electricity grids of rival nations.

''We don't pay attention to such anonymous fakes,'' Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, in response to a request to comment on alleged Russian involvement.

It was unclear whether President Donald Trump was planning to address the cyberattacks at his meeting on Friday with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In an earlier speech in Warsaw, Trump called out Russia's ''destabilizing activities'' and urged the country to join ''the community of responsible nations.''

The Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation said they are aware of a potential intrusion in the energy sector. The alert issued to utilities cited activities by hackers since May.

''There is no indication of a threat to public safety, as any potential impact appears to be limited to administrative and business networks,'' the government agencies said in a joint statement.

The Department of Energy also said the impact appears limited to administrative and business networks and said it was working with utilities and grid operators to enhance security and resilience.

''Regardless of whether malicious actors attempt to exploit business networks or operational systems, we take any reports of malicious cyber activity potentially targeting our nation's energy infrastructure seriously and respond accordingly,'' the department said in an emailed statement.

Representatives of the National Security Council, the Director of National Intelligence and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission declined to comment. While Bloomberg News was waiting for responses from the government, the New York Times reported that hacks were targeting nuclear power stations.

The North American Electric Reliability Corp., a nonprofit that works to ensure the reliability of the continent's power system, said it was aware of the incident and was exchanging information with the industry through a secure portal. ''At this time, there has been no bulk power system impact in North America,'' the corporation said in an emailed statement.

In addition, the operational controls at Wolf Creek were not pierced, according to government officials. ''There was absolutely no operational impact to Wolf Creek,'' Jenny Hageman, a spokeswoman for the nuclear plant, said in a statement to Bloomberg News. ''The reason that is true is because the operational computer systems are completely separate from the corporate network.''

Determining who is behind an attack can be tricky. Government officials look at the sophistication of the tools, among other key markers, when gauging whether a foreign government is sponsoring cyber activities.

Several private security firms are studying data on the attacks, but none has linked the work to a particular hacking team or country.

''We don't tie this to any known group at this point,'' said Sean McBride, a lead analyst for FireEye Inc., a global cybersecurity firm. ''It's not to say it's not related, but we don't have the evidence at this point.''

U.S. intelligence officials have long been concerned about the security of the country's electrical grid. The recent attack, striking almost simultaneously at multiple locations, is testing the government's ability to coordinate an effective response among several private utilities, state and local officials, and industry regulators.

Specialized teams from Homeland Security and the FBI have been scrambled to help extricate the hackers from the power stations, in some cases without informing local and state officials. Meanwhile, the U.S. National Security Agency is working to confirm the identity of the hackers, who are said to be using computer servers in Germany, Italy, Malaysia and Turkey to cover their tracks.

Many of the power plants are conventional, but the targeting of a nuclear facility adds to the pressure. While the core of a nuclear generator is heavily protected, a sudden shutdown of the turbine can trigger safety systems. These safety devices are designed to disperse excess heat while the nuclear reaction is halted, but the safety systems themselves may be vulnerable to attack.

Homeland Security and the FBI sent out a general warning about the cyberattack to utilities and related parties on June 28, though it contained few details or the number of plants affected. The government said it was most concerned about the ''persistence'' of the attacks on choke points of the U.S. power supply. That language suggests hackers are trying to establish backdoors on the plants' systems for later use, according to a former senior DHS official who asked not to be identified.

Those backdoors can be used to insert software specifically designed to penetrate a facility's operational controls and disrupt critical systems, according to Galina Antova, co-founder of Claroty, a New York firm that specializes in securing industrial control systems.

''We're moving to a point where a major attack like this is very, very possible,'' Antova said. ''Once you're into the control systems -- and you can get into the control systems by hacking into the plant's regular computer network -- then the basic security mechanisms you'd expect are simply not there.''

The situation is a little different at nuclear facilities. Backup power supplies and other safeguards at nuclear sites are meant to ensure that ''you can't really cause a nuclear plant to melt down just by taking out the secondary systems that are connected to the grid,'' Edwin Lyman, a nuclear expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a phone interview.

The operating systems at nuclear plants also tend to be legacy controls built decades ago and don't have digital control systems that can be exploited by hackers. Wolf Creek, for example, began operations in 1985. ''They're relatively impervious to that kind of attack,'' Lyman said.

The alert sent out last week inadvertently identified Wolf Creek as one of the victims of the attack. An analysis of one of the tools used by the hackers had the stolen credentials of a plant employee, a senior engineer. A U.S. official acknowledged the error was not caught until after the alert was distributed.

According to a security researcher who has seen the report, the malware that activated the engineer's username and password was designed to be used once the hackers were already inside the plant's computer systems.

The tool tries to connect to non-public computers, and may have been intended to identify systems related to Wolf Creek's generation plant, a part of the facility typically more modern than the nuclear reactor control room, according to a security expert who asked to note be identified because the alert is not public.

Even if there is no indication that the hackers gained access to those control systems, the design of the malware suggests they may have at least been looking for ways to do so, the expert said.

Stan Luke, the mayor of Burlington, the largest community near Wolf Creek, which is surrounded by corn fields and cattle pastures, said he learned about a cyber threat at the plant only recently, and then only through golfing buddies.

With a population of just 2,700, Burlington boasts a community pool with three water slides and a high school football stadium that would be the envy of any junior college. Luke said those amenities lead back to the tax dollars poured into the community by Wolf Creek, Coffey County's largest employer with some 1,000 workers, 600 of whom live in the county.

E&E News first reported on digital attacks targeting U.S. nuclear plants, adding it was code-named Nuclear 17. A senior U.S. official told Bloomberg that there was a bigger breach of conventional plants, which could affect multiple regions.

Industry experts and U.S. officials say the attack is being taken seriously, in part because of recent events in Ukraine. Antova said that the Ukrainian power grid has been disrupted at least twice, first in 2015, and then in a more automated attack last year, suggesting the hackers are testing methods.

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Scott Aaronson, executive director for security and business continuity at the Edison Electric Institute, an industry trade group, said utilities, grid operators and federal officials were already dissecting the attack on Ukraine's electric sector to apply lessons in North America before the U.S. government issued the latest warning to ''energy and critical manufacturing sectors.'' The current threat is unrelated to recently publicized ransomware incidents or the CrashOverride malware, Aaronson said in an emailed statement.

Neither attack in Ukraine caused long-term damage. But with each escalation, the hackers may be gauging the world's willingness to push back.

''If you think about a typical war, some of the acts that have been taken against critical infrastructure in Ukraine and even in the U.S., those would be considered crossing red lines,'' Antova said.

For more on cyber security, check out the Decrypted podcast:

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Fri, 07 Jul 2017 03:49

Rather than a meltdown where the Earth's population outstrips the planet's ability to feed everyone, we could be headed toward a more subtle but equally disastrous outcome where our population simply does not replace itself fast enough.

"The world has hit peak child," the late Hans Rosling, a professor at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, said in the article.

Indeed, Japan's fertility rate is 1.4 children per woman, well below what is required to sustain population growth.

While Japan is perhaps the most well-known example of a country's population aging, the article in the London-based magazine also points to Germany and Italy, both of which "could see their populations halve within the next 60 years."

The article spells out some of the problems an older population might bring, including less innovation, cultural shifts and worse and more recession-prone economies.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the nation's population is roughly 325 million with a net gain of one person every 12 seconds.

However, Pearce does point out some silver linings. "Old could be the new young," he writes, adding older societies are less likely to start wars. And, he points out, fewer people on the planet would give Earth's ecosystem a breather:

"Nature, at least, would enjoy the silver lining."

The so-called population bomb has been speculated about for nearly half a century, dating back to at least 1968 when two Stanford University researchers published a book titled "The Population Bomb" that predicted mass starvation in the 1970s and '80s due to overpopulation.

Musk has been known to pontificate on theories outside the mainstream, including famously last June when he said there is only a "one in billions" chance we're not living in a computer simulation.

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Fri, 07 Jul 2017 03:40

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Source: Washington Free Beacon

Fri, 07 Jul 2017 03:32

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