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maddieireland334

Utah Senator says Flint doesn't need aid, blocks lead bill - 0 views

www.usatoday.com/...81359766

US Utah Flint Crisis Funding Policy

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  • A Republican U.S. senator from Utah is holding up a federal funding package worth more than $100 million which could help address the issue of high lead levels found in Flint’s water, saying in a statement on Friday that no federal aid is needed at this time.
  • U.S. Sens. Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters, both D-Mich., represented a “federalizing” of water infrastructure, objected to the bill, arguing the state has not directly asked Congress for any emergency spending and has its own surplus to spend if it needs money.
  • Stabenow, who worked with Peters for weeks to secure a group of Republican and Democratic cosponsors for the legislation, expressed surprise that Lee has placed a hold on the measure, which effectively keeps the Senate from voting on it, even though it is fully paid for.
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  • Stabenow and Peters say federal funding is needed to replace aging pipes in Flint and other parts of the infrastructure to ensure public safety and restore confidence in the water system in the Michigan city.
  • It would authorize the federal Drinking Water State Revolving Fund to make up to $100 million in grants between now and October 2017 "to any state that receives an emergency declaration ... to a public health threat from lead or other contaminants in a public drinking water system."
  • The bill also authorizes $50 million for public health — though that funding is not specific to Flint — including $17.5 million to monitor the health effects of lead contamination in municipal water, along with allowing Michigan to use other funding to repay earlier federal loans taken out by Flint for work on its water system.
  • While Lee said, however, that Gov. Rick Snyder hadn’t asked Congress to authorize emergency funds, that misses some of the nuances of the situation in Flint, where a lack of corrosion-control treatment when the city switched to the Flint River in April 2014 allowed lead to leach from aging water pipes.
  • Snyder initially requested that President Barack Obama declare a major disaster in Flint and provide more than $700 million for infrastructure repairs to pipes and the water system. But Obama turned down that request because federal law only allows for such declarations in the cases of natural disasters, fires or explosions.
  • “What is happening to the people of Flint, Michigan is a man-made disaster,” Lee said. “Congress has special mechanisms for emergency spending when it is needed. But to date Michigan’s governor has not asked us for any, nor have Michigan’s senators proposed any. Contrary to media reports, there is no federal ‘aid package’ for Flint even being considered.”
maddieireland334

Egypt's Parliament Expels Lawmaker Who Dined With Israel's Ambassador - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...d-with-israels-ambassador.html

Egypt Israel relations

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  • Egypt’s Parliament on Wednesday expelled a well-known television personality turned lawmaker over a dinner he had with the Israeli ambassador — a vote that exposed a raw nerve in the mostly tranquil relationship between the two countries.
  • Although Egypt and Israel enjoy close security cooperation, particularly in the struggle against Islamist extremists in Sinai, many Egyptians view Israel with hostility over its policies toward the Palestinians, and public interactions with Israeli officials are considered taboo.
  • That fear, he said, has its basis in a conspiracy theory: that Israel has secretly been helping Ethiopia build the dam as a means of hurting Egyptian interests.
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  • Afterward, the speaker of Parliament, Ali Abdel-Al, said that Egypt respected all of its diplomatic commitments, including those with Israel, and that Mr. Okasha had been punished for meeting a foreign diplomat without permission.
  • After the shoe-throwing episode, Mr. Koren told Israel’s Channel 10 television in a telephone interview that he had spoken with Mr. Okasha, who assured him that he was undeterred.
  • Mr. Koren noted that he had met with Mr. Sisi and other Egyptian officials and that relations between the two countries were “very good.”
maddieireland334

Boko Haram Falls Victim to a Food Crisis It Created - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...boko-haram-food-crisis.html

Boko Haram crisis Nigeria UN

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  • At first, the attack had all the hallmarks of a typical Boko Haram assault. Armed fighters stormed a town on the border with Nigeria, shooting every man they saw.
  • Boko Haram, the Islamist extremist group terrorizing this part of the world, is on the hunt — for food.
  • After rampaging across the region for years, forcing more than two million people to flee their homes and farms, Boko Haram appears to be falling victim to a major food crisis of its own creation.
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  • Across parts of northeastern Nigeria and border regions like the Far North, trade has come to a halt and tens of thousands of people are on the brink of famine, United Nations officials say
  • The hunt for food appears to be part of what is pushing Boko Haram deeper into Cameroon, according to an American State Department review of attacks in the first few weeks of this year.
  • A military campaign by Nigeria and its neighbors has chased fighters from villages they once controlled. Now, officials contend, the militants are left to scrounge for food in the sparse Sambisa Forest during the dry season, or go out raiding for whatever they can find.
  • But while some elements of Boko Haram may be battered, fighters still manage to carry out devastating attacks, the results of which are on full display at the hospital in Maroua, the capital of the Far North. Shrapnel and burn victims from recent attacks across various towns recuperate together.
  • Recent joint operations by the Cameroonian and Nigerian militaries have captured and killed numerous fighters and seized suicide belts, weapons and equipment for making mines. Officials hope to squeeze the fighters from both sides of the border so they have nowhere left to run.
  • The mass displacement caused by Boko Haram — and by the sometimes indiscriminate military campaign to defeat it — has left 1.4 million people in the region without adequate food supplies, the United Nations says.
  • In the Far North of Cameroon, this time of year is a moonscape of bone-dry river beds and clouds of dust so thick they look like misty fog. The region is moving into the so-called lean season, the in-between months when the fruits of the previous harvest are being depleted and next year’s crop is not yet ready.
  • Despite the influx of new people, officials closed the town’s market out of fear that it would be attacked. Boko Haram had struck a satellite village just days before. Residents now worry that the market will remain shut for weeks.
  • The food crisis is part of broader economic devastation in the area, adding to the burdens on Cameroon at a time when it is hosting thousands of refugees fleeing a religious war in nearby Central African Republic.
  • Even a religious leader who attends births and marriages in the Minawao Refugee Camp said the refugees needed to go home.
  • The United Nations accused Cameroon of sending tens of thousands of refugees back to Nigeria at the end of last year. The government has since said it would involve the United Nations in any plans involving the refugees’ return.
  • Tourism has plummeted in Cameroon, which has such diverse ecosystems and a range of wildlife that it refers to itself as Little Africa. Guides who once led visitors to see lions and elephants in Waza National Park in the north now scrape by with occasional work building new homes in the Minawao Refugee Camp
maddieireland334

With Impounding of Ship, Philippines Set to Be First Enforcer of New North Korea Sancti... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ations-cargo-ship-seizure.html

Philippines South Korea UN policy

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  • The Philippines will become the first country to enforce tough new United Nations sanctions on North Korea when it initiates formal procedures on Monday to impound a cargo vessel linked to the reclusive nation, a government spokesman said on Sunday.
  • The MV Jin Teng, which is suspected of being a North Korean ship, arrived Thursday at Subic Bay, a commercial port about 50 miles northwest of Manila.
  • The sanctions are the result of a United Nations Security Council resolution passed Wednesday, following a North Korean nuclear test on Jan. 6 and a long-range rocket test on Feb. 7.
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  • “The world is concerned over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and as a member of the U.N., the Philippines has to do its part to enforce the sanctions,” Manuel L. Quezon III, a member of the president’s communications team, told a government-run radio station on Saturday.
  • The Philippine Coast Guard searched the vessel on Friday and found no prohibited items. Only minor safety violations, including missing fire hoses and exposed wiring, were discovered.
  • In 2008, the police seized 700 kilograms of crystal methamphetamine, with an estimated value of more than $100 million, in Subic Bay that drug enforcement officials at the time said was produced in North Korea.
maddieireland334

In New Economic Plan, China Bets That Hard Choices Can Be Avoided - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rd-choices-can-be-avoided.html

China economy policy

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  • As economic growth has fallen while debts and excess industrial output have risen, Chinese leaders have faced growing questions about whether they will carry out the painful policy surgery many experts say is needed to cut away the financial dead weight on the economy.
  • hinese leaders’ usual two-sided rhetoric about their options — peril is close at hand, but so is a sure cure — was especially striking in Mr. Li’s latest annual report to the legislature, the National People’s Congress.
  • Mr. Li suggested, would help dull the pain from cuts to wheezing state-supported industries that must shed millions of workers, as part of a program that China’s powerful president, Xi Jinping, has promoted as “supply-side structural reform.”
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  • He did not specify how many workers could lose their jobs as part of the government’s plan to close, merge or restructure mines and factories weighed down by excess capacity.
  • A growth rate of 6.5 percent a year is the minimum needed to achieve President Xi’s often-declared goal of doubling the size of the Chinese economy by 2020, relative to its size in 2010.
  • But such financial easing implies more debt, at a time when many Western economists and policy makers are already worried that total leverage in the Chinese economy has far outstripped economic output.
  • he increased debt may help the government achieve its target of 6.5 percent to 7 percent economic growth this year, but at the price of burdening banks with even more loans to struggling businesses, or even effectively insolvent ones. That policy may also water down leaders’ promises to shut companies that are producing unwanted industrial goods.
  • Mr. Li said the government’s policies could help create more than 10 million jobs in towns and cities this year, and more than 50 million by the end of 2020.
  • The government will set aside $15.3 billion to support laid-off workers and hard-hit areas, he said.
  • To a surprising extent, the economic vision unveiled by Mr. Li echoed policies in the United States, the European Union and Japan, all of which have depended heavily on their central banks to expand money supply and keep growth aloft. The International Monetary Fund and many independent economists have strongly called for the world to shift from this reliance on monetary policy.
  • The government’s plan said the target for this year’s fiscal deficit at the national level would rise to 3 percent, from a target of 2.3 percent last year. But by most estimates, the actual deficit last year was already over 3 percent.
  • China’s central government has a fairly low debt by international standards; what are deeply indebted are the country’s corporate sector and local governments. But the Ministry of Finance has nonetheless been reluctant to allow a large, persistent deficit to form, particularly as China may yet face very heavy costs to help banks with the costs of large loans to nearly insolvent state-owned enterprises.
  • One of the most surprising was a proposal to expand China’s value-added tax to financial services. Banks would face a 6 percent tax on the interest that they collect on loans.
  • Since the global financial crisis, there have been many calls in the West for broadening value-added taxes to encompass financial services,
maddieireland334

India Denies Visa Request From Religious Freedom Monitoring Group - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...reedom-uscirf-visa-denied.html

India visa religion freedom US

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  • ndia has denied visas to a team from the United States government responsible for monitoring religious freedom, the group said in a statement this week.
  • The organization, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, had planned a trip to India, scheduled to begin this week, to assess religious liberty in the country.
  • Robert P. George, the group’s chairman, said that the team was “deeply disappointed” by the Indian government’s action.
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  • In a report published last year, the commission said that religiously motivated violent episodes reportedly increased for three consecutive years in India, and that the struggle to provide justice to victims “perpetuates a climate of impunity.”
  • India has had a checkered history with religious violence, and the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in 2014 raised concerns about the potential for increased religious tensions.
  • The group has traveled to China, Myanmar, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam, “among the worst offenders on religious freedom,” he said.
  • The Indian Embassy in Washington said in a statement on Friday that there had been no change in policy regarding such visits and that the Indian Constitution guaranteed freedom of religion for its citizens.
  • A delegation from the commission was denied visas to India during the previous administration in 2009, according to the local news media.
maddieireland334

Taliban Say They Won't Attend Peace Talks, but Officials Aren't Convinced - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...officials-arent-convinced.html

Taliban policy peace talks Pakistan US international

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  • he Taliban said on Saturday that they would not participate in international peace talks, citing what they claimed were increased American airstrikes and Afghan government military operations.
  • The talks, convened by the United States, China, Pakistan and Afghanistan, were expected to start this month in Pakistan.
  • Afghan and Pakistani government officials said the talks would continue despite the Taliban statement, but pushed the start date back to sometime later this month.
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  • In a statement posted on the insurgents’ website, the Taliban denied that a representative would attend the talks.
  • Previous talks have taken place without Taliban representatives present, but Afghan and Pakistani officials had expressed confidence that direct talks between the Afghan government and the militants would resume in March, and they maintained that position on Saturday.
  • The official said the Pakistan military leader, Gen. Raheel Sharif, who visited Kabul last week, had assured Afghan leaders that talks would go ahead.
  • Direct talks began last summer in Pakistan, but quickly fell apart after Afghan officials concerned about the authority of the insurgent delegation leaked word that the Taliban’s longtime leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, had been dead for two years.
  • The leader who took over, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, had been known to favor participation in the negotiations. Since Mullah Mansour took power, the group has been riven by dissension over the leadership change, and fighting off challenges in some areas from insurgents allied with the Islamic State group.
  • The request does not seem to have gone over well with Taliban leaders, who have insisted that their political office in Qatar is the only address for peace talks.
  • While there are no confirmed reports that the United States has increased troop levels in Afghanistan — there are now about 10,000 American service members in the country — the United States military is carrying out airstrikes in support of Afghan government operations and secret American Special Operations missions.
  • Pakistan has leverage over the Taliban because the group enjoys sanctuary in Pakistani territory, and many of its fighters receive medical treatment there.
maddieireland334

Why Was Officer Peter Liang Convicted? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...471687

crisis police conviction US

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  • At the trial of Peter Liang, the jurors kept returning to the 11.5-pound trigger of his New York Police Department standard-issue 9mm Glock.
  • Liang was the officer who killed Akai Gurley, a 28-year-old father, for no reason but that Gurley had walked into a dark stairwell.
  • iang’s defense had been that he kept his finger off the trigger, but that in the dark stairwell a loud sound surprised him. His finger twitched, leading to what Liang’s lawyers called “a tragic accident.”
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  • It takes a lot to indict and convict an officer in New York. The last time it happened was in 2005, with the death of Ousmane Zongo, a West African immigrant shot in a warehouse during a raid on a counterfeit CD operation.
  • A week after the conviction, thousands of protesters said they knew why jurors found Liang  guilty: He’s Asian. Liang was a minority scapegoat, they said, sacrificed to a nation incensed by officers killing black men. Take the case of Eric Garner, the protesters argued.
  • Liang had graduated from the police academy the year before the shooting. In November 2014, he and his partner, another recent graduate, patrolled the eighth floor of the Louis H. Pink Houses in Brooklyn.
  • After Liang fired, Gurley was left on the ground bleeding from his chest, while Liang and his partner walked back into the hallway to debate who would report the shot.
  • Instead, Butler took instructions from an operator over the phone. For failing to try to save Gurley’s life, Liang would be charged with reckless endangerment.
  • And for shooting Gurley, he was charged with second-degree manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, second-degree assault, and reckless endangerment.
  • Before Liang killed Gurley, about six months after Garner died in 2014, the New York Daily News reported that in 15 years, and in at least 179 NYPD officer-involved deaths, only three officers had ever been indicted.
  • He’s a member of the Long Island Chinese American Association, and he protested against Liang’s conviction.
  • The writer Jay Caspian Kang raised similar concerns in a New York Times article after the protests, writing that, “there are many within the Asian-American community, for example, who believe that Liang deserved to be convicted of manslaughter, but who also wonder why it was the Asian cop, among many other equally deserving officers, who took the fall.”
  • Liang and Landau said they hadn’t received proper CPR training from the police academy.
  • In Garner’s case, in July 2014, the officer who jumped on his back omitted the use of a chokehold––or as he preferred to call it, a “takedown technique”––from his first report.
  • By the beginning of 2015, the public's confidence in police had sunk to a 22-year-low. Many white Americans (mostly liberal white Americans) seemed to have caught onto what black Americans have known for a long time: some cops lie.
  • Saltzburg, the George Washington University law professor,  said that after all this “jurors are much more likely now to doubt the credibility of an officer on trial.”
  • The trigger also has what Glock calls its Safe Action System, an extra button designed to keep the gun “always safe and always ready”—free from the sort of accidental slip of the finger that Liang described.
  • Last week a young white officer in Alabama stopped a 58-year-old black man as he walked home at 3 a.m. because he looked “suspicious.”
maddieireland334

How Texas's Campus-Carry Law Poses a Threat to Students' and Professors' Freedom of Spe... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...472296

Guns Censorship education threat crisis

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  • A faculty working group at the University of Houston recently offered these recommendations to professors preparing for Texas’s new campus-carry law, set to take effect August 1.
  • The situation to which these recommendations are alluding—gun violence in response to controversial or otherwise difficult classroom discussions—is at this point only a hypothetical worst-case scenario. But critics of the legislation are still appalled: To abide by the law, and keep everyone safe in classrooms with armed students, faculty may ultimately have to resort to self-censorship.
  • In the eight states that have already enacted such a law, none of the predicted nightmares have taken place—students drawing their weapons on professors who fail them, for example, or students firing on one another in heated classroom arguments.
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  • In fact, campus-carry supporters maintain that the law will keep the peace, enabling students and faculty to defend themselves effectively, and deter would-be shooters.
  • It turns out, for example, there were armed students at Umpqua Community College in Oregon on the day of its shooting last fall. Their presence did not deter the attack, nor did they halt it; the students wisely decided not to jump into the fray for fear it would compound the mayhem.
  • Stand Your Ground laws protect citizens from prosecution in cases where they feel threatened in public, and fire their weapons.
  • It’s unclear whether campus carry does and will in fact undermine the freedom of expression, but if there’s one place in society where the citizenry must not tolerate such threats, it’s the college classroom.
  • Few young adults have put significant thought into these kinds of issues; they must experiment with them to understand them properly and deeply, and to develop mature and critical views.
  • In short, they argued that guns in the classroom pose an intolerable threat to free speech.
  • Will guns encourage speech and invite people to discussion and debate in the classroom?
  • Gun owners have shot and killed unarmed citizens—and sought Stand Your Ground protections—in cases in which they misjudged or overestimated the threats before them.
  • In 2014, a Montana man invoked Stand Your Ground after he shot and killed an unarmed German exchange student trespassing in his garage.
  • One University of Houston professor, Maria Gonzalez, expressed her concerns over campus carry in the context of her own classes, which cover Marxist and Queer Theory.
  • Expansions of civil rights are almost always deeply unpopular at first; this was the case in the fight for women’s rights, suffrage for African Americans, and marriage equality for gays and lesbians.
  • I fear that campus carry will make students and faculty less inclined to engage in the critical intellectual work that must take place in the classroom, the courageous inquiry and experimentation American democracy requires.
  • It’s impossible to measure the cost of campus carry. But I wager that the cost will be evidenced in the mounting silence on college campuses, and the trepidation, timidity, and lack of creativity among new generations of voters. American democracy will be the poorer for it.
maddieireland334

Money Given to Kenya, Since Stolen, Puts Nike in Spotlight - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...kenya-runners-are-drained.html

Kenya Nike agreement economy

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  • When a Chinese clothing company swooped in and offered to sponsor Kenya’s famed runners, Nike panicked, Kenyan officials say.
  • Kenya’s athletics federation — has led to a major scandal in Kenya, a country in the midst of its biggest war against corruption in years.
  • In a contract signed several years ago, Nike agreed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in honorariums and a one-time $500,000 “commitment bonus,” which the former employee called a bribe.
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  • money was supposed to be used to help train and support poor Kenyan athletes who dream of running their way out of poverty.
  • immediately sucked out of the federation’s bank account by a handful of Kenyan officials and kept off the books.
  • does not appear to be under investigation by the United States authorities.
  • all three Kenyan athletics officials accused of taking money from Nike have been suspended
  • For more than 20 years, Nike Inc. has been paying the Kenyan national runners’ association millions of dollars in exchange for the Kenyans wearing Nike’s signature swoosh, superb advertising in the running world.
  • Ethiopian runners, who also excel at middle- and long-distance races, have a sponsorship agreement with Adidas, but an official there said their contract contained no commitment bonus
  • In a sworn statement provided to Kenyan investigators, the former assistant said the $500,000 commitment bonus was “bribe money from Nike” so that the top officials could pay back the $200,000 from the scuttled deal with the Chinese company and then make even more by agreeing to sign up again with Nike.
  • Nearly every day there seems to be allegations of some new scandal: a government ministry buying plastic pens for $85 apiece, a Supreme Court judge taking a $2 million bribe, questions about what exactly happened to the proceeds of a multibillion-dollar bond deal.
  • Kenyan athletes were so outraged when they learned in November that hundreds of thousands of dollars from Nike had been stolen by their bigwigs that they staged a protest at their headquarters in Nairobi, with elite athletes camped out in the grass and holding up signs that read “blood sucers.” (Some of the runners never finished school.) Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • But those complaints may have been a ruse by Kenyan officials to get out of the Nike contract so they could receive a bribe from another company, said a member of the executive board of Kenya’s track and field federation, known as Athletics Kenya.
  • The sports-marketing agent who made the payment, Papa Massata Diack, was recently banned for life by the International Association of Athletics Federations, a global governing body for track and field.
  • After they received a letter from a Nike lawyer saying there were no legal grounds to terminate the contract, the Kenyan officials abruptly changed course.
  • They negotiated a new contract in which Nike agreed to pay Athletics Kenya an annual sponsorship fee of $1.3 million to $1.5 million — plus $100,000 honorariums each year and a one-time $500,000 “commitment bonus.”
  • Nike executives refused to discuss the contract, issuing a short statement that the money paid to Athletics Kenya was supposed to support the athletes. It said that Nike conducted business with integrity and that “we are cooperating with the local authorities in their investigation,” a point the Kenyan detectives dispute.
  • Western nations have threatened sanctions, and the United States government has been especially vocal about corruption, with White House officials unveiling a 29-point plan to root it out.
  • He said corruption in the athletics federation was so ingrained and so brazen that officials routinely extorted money from athletes who failed drug tests. He also said the organization’s chairman, Isaiah Kiplagat, had asked Nike to wire the bonus directly to his personal account, a request that Nike refused.
  • Within days, according to bank records, the $500,000 was withdrawn by Athletics Kenya’s top officials. There were no major track and field activities going on at the time, and the board member and the former administrative assistant said just about all of the money had been concealed from Athletics Kenya’s executive committee, including $200,000 sent to a bank account in Hong Kong.
  • Analysts said this case was especially tricky because it did not appear to fall under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the American law that covers crimes involving American companies and foreign government officials.
  • The Kenyan running association, while it receives some government money, is not a Kenyan government agency.
  • He noted that sports federations, like Athletics Kenya and FIFA, international soccer’s governing body, which is embroiled in its own corruption saga, often fell between the cracks of the rules that governed businesses, public agencies and traditional nonprofit organizations, even though sports federations have qualities of all three.
maddieireland334

Del Berg Obituary: The Last Veteran of the Spanish Civil War's Abraham Lincoln Brigade ... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...472167

Spanish Civil War history last veteran

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  • Del Berg nearly died around 10 a.m. one sunny day in August 1939.The 23-year-old American was staying at a monastery outside Valencia, Spain, when Italian bombers flew over and dropped their payload.
  • Berg was last, and it was only when he’d gotten down he realized his shirt was soaked in blood. Shrapnel had struck his liver.
  • Although the bombardment was not intended for Berg and his compatriots, the Italians wouldn’t have shed any tears. Mussolini’s air force was flying sorties in Iberia on behalf of General Francisco Franco, the Fascist fighting for control in the Spanish Civil War.
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  • After returning to the United States in 1939, he was drafted by the U.S. Army and sent to New Guinea. Discharged in 1942 because of his wounds from Spain, Berg promptly joined the Communist Party USA, and led a life of activism throughout his life.
  • Berg was an old-school leftist—the type who came by his politics not from theory but from life.
  • In Spain, Berg helped install communication lines for anti-aircraft batteries. The war is considered a test-run for the heavy bombardment of the Second World War, and it afforded Adolf Hitler and Mussolini a chance to try out tactics on behalf of Franco. The Soviet Union aided the Republicans.
  • He was vice president of his local NAACP chapter—at a time when he was reportedly the only white member. He worked with Dolores Huerta and the United Farm Workers. Later, he protested nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War.
  • During the McCarthyite 1950s, Berg said federal agents questioned his family and friends, but they didn’t ever question him directly, which he attributed to the place he lived: a trailer between a Pentecostal church and a whorehouse on the wrong side of the tracks in Modesto.
  • In 1966, the House Un-American Activities Committee wanted to question him.
  • In 2014, a reporter for People’s World, the digital offspring of the old Communist paper the Daily Worker, visited Berg at his self-built home. The 98-year-old demanded to hear what had happened at the last AFL-CIO convention.
maddieireland334

Ben Carson Drops Out of 2016 Presidential Race - 0 views

www.newsweek.com/son-drops-out-2016-race-433708

election Carson Republican US

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  • After weeks of speculation and sagging poll numbers, the retired pediatric neurosurgeon made it official that he is leaving the race Friday afternoon. Carson's announcement came at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, taking place outside of Washington, D.C.
  • Earlier in the day, Politico reported that Carson had accepted a job as national chairman of a nonpartisan group called My Faith Votes that aims to get evangelicals to the polls. Carson announced his new position at the same time he told CPAC attendees he would suspend his campaign.
  • Carson and his aides recently admitted to reporters that they "clearly don't know" how Carson could have become the Republican nominee for president.
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  • A series of gaffes—including Carson's insistence that the pyramids were built not as tombs but for grain storage, and his assertion that none of the founding fathers had held elected office before signing the Declaration of Independence—shook voters' confidence in the Tea Party favorite.
  • Carson's background came under scrutiny when Politico attempted to poke holes in his claim that he had been offered a full ride to West Point by General William Westmoreland.
maddieireland334

Dirt-Poor Town Hopes Marijuana Will Bring Boom Times - 0 views

www.newsweek.com/ifornia-legal-marijuana-433559

economy US California marijuana business

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  • Adelanto is a small town (population 31.000) in the deserts of inland Southern California where people are sent to prison
  • It's a fairly poor community, with a median household wage of $37,000, much lower than the state median of $60,000.
  • But when California citizens voted to loosen marijuana laws and allow for medical use, most of these communities resisted and passed ordinances to prohibit pot dispensaries in their neighborhoods.
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  • Home construction boomed in these places, fed by a bubble that put people in freshly built houses they really couldn't afford.
  • Adelanto, which once flirted with bankruptcy, is now seeing a land rush and people willing to spend millions of dollars to secure property and permits to grow marijuana legally, considering a future where millions of Californians will legally be permitted to enjoy weed recreationally.
  • One plot was valued at $1.5 million before the zoning changed to allow cultivation, he said; now it's in escrow for $4 million.
  • Elizabeth Brown, who's with Lee & Associates, said land that was going for 50 cents to 90 cents per square foot is now going for $12 to $14.
  • For a couple of years, solar energy plants were going to save everybody from the recession. Bolstered by money potentially available from the federal economic stimulus, dozens of solar projects were proposed for the desert last decade.
  • In this case, given the lack of competition, the city has to figure out how much it wants to milk from growers for its own coffers. The reporter notes that a tax plan similar to the one in nearby Desert Hot Springs (the other town to permit cultivation) could net Adelanto $6 million per year if all goes well, equal to nearly half of the city's entire annual budget.
  • The big unknown is whether other cities might change their minds and decide to allow pot growers in, something that is bound to happen if Adelanto succeeds and sloughs off its reputation as the poorest small town in the High Desert.
  • And as an interesting touch, it could end up driving out the local representation from General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, the manufacturers of the Predator drone, because their landlords can get more money from the marijuana growers.
maddieireland334

North Korea: Nukes need to be ready for use - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

North Korea crisis US attack nuclear

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  • For a second day, North Korea appeared to be flexing its military muscles in the wake of a United Nations vote meant to cripple the nation's nuclear program.
  • "nuclear warheads need to be ready for use at any time," the North Korean state news agency KCNA reported Friday.
  • The news agency also confirmed the test-fire of a new multiple launch rocket system
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • "We are aware of the reports. We are closely monitoring the situation on the Korean Peninsula in coordination with our regional allies," the Pentagon said in response to Friday's news
  • North Korea is believed to have an untested capability when it comes to nuclear weapons. As one U.S. official told CNN's Barbara Starr, the regime has tested nuclear devices that it says have been miniaturized.
  • "Kim Jong Un has got a large party congress that's going to be happening in May. And this is all about, for him, again, additional consolidation of power. He'll want to get rid and justify getting rid of any enemies he may have.
  • Yun stressed that he does not think the North Koreans are suicidal: "They know that if they did a pre-emptive attack or used nuclear weapons, they would cease to exist.
  • The U.N. resolution that brought about the sanctions aims to cripple the economic factors that fuel North Korea's nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
  • Fu Ying, a spokeswoman for China's Parliament, said it will abide by the Security Council sanctions, but she highlighted the need for six-party talks to resolve the issue.
  • Then, in February, Pyongyang said it had successfully launched an Earth satellite into orbit via the long-range Kwangmyongsong carrier rocket.
  • "And, also bear in mind, we're just a couple of days away now from the joint military drills between the United States and South Korea. These happen every year. Washington and Seoul say they're defensive in nature, but every year they irritate Pyongyang," she said.
maddieireland334

US election 2016: How Donald Trump compares to Ronald Reagan - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...election-us-2016-35703300

election donald trump

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  • maddieireland334 on 05 Mar 16
     
    Donald Trump has been condemned by many on the left and some on the right as being beyond the pale, a toxic virus that exists on the fringes of the political mainstream. But where do his policy views actually fit when compared to his fellow presidential candidates - and past Republican commanders-in-chief?
maddieireland334

Zaman newspaper: Defiant last edition as Turkey police raid - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-europe-35735793

Turkey Zaman crisis court

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  • maddieireland334 on 05 Mar 16
     
    Turkey's biggest newspaper, Zaman, has condemned its takeover by the authorities in a defiant last edition published just before police raided it. Saturday's edition said Turkey's press had experienced "one of the darkest days in its history". Turkish police raided Zaman's offices hours after a court ruling placed it under state control, but managers were still able to get the edition to print.
maddieireland334

Can House Republicans Pass Their Budget? - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...472170

Republicans budget policy Paul Ryan GOP US

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  • maddieireland334 on 05 Mar 16
     
    Speaker Paul Ryan and GOP leaders try out a compromise on conservatives, but the hard-liners aren't impressed. Please consider disabling it for our site, or supporting our work in one of these ways Subscribe Now > If there's one thing that got Paul Ryan to where he is today, it is the budget.
maddieireland334

Free Speech on Campus Is Under Attack - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...471825

rights policy culture education college US free speech

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  • maddieireland334 on 05 Mar 16
     
    A debate at Yale highlighted the disconnect between those who would downplay the problem, and the growing mass of evidence that they're wrong. Please consider disabling it for our site, or supporting our work in one of these ways Subscribe Now > At a recent Intelligence Squared debate, an audience filled an auditorium at Yale University to weigh the timely proposition, "Free speech is threatened on campus."
maddieireland334

What Costco's New Wages Say About the Health of the American Economy - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...472404

economic US policy Costco

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  • maddieireland334 on 05 Mar 16
     
    The company's pay hike might be a sign that employers will start paying their workers more in order to hold onto them. Please consider disabling it for our site, or supporting our work in one of these ways Subscribe Now > Bourree Lam is an associate editor at The Atlantic.
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