Carly, in cowboy boots, waits to takes the stage. pic.twitter.com/qcvvXjWH49
— Alexis Levinson (@alexis_levinson) August 15, 2015
I want to scream so many four-letter words, this story makes me so angry. Man. https://t.co/XCNsKZMtPW
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) August 15, 2015On Friday, it was revealed that ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi had repeatedly raped American relief worker Kayla Mueller while she was in captivity.
Mueller was kidnapped in Syria two years ago and would never get out alive. ISIS claimed she had been killed as a result of Jordanian bombing of ISIS positions in Syria, but this is a most dubious claim. While ISIS was eager to claim she did not die at their hands they were not so eager to say their leader is a sexual sadist.
Baghdadi is hardly the only ISIS leader to engage in such evil. ISIS often kidnaps women, particularly the Yazidis, and forces them into sexual slavery. Earlier this month, 19 brave women who refused to have sex with ISIS leaders were executed.
I don't ever want to hear Democrats accuse Republicans of engaging in a war on women because ISIS is conducting a real war on women. A war in which women are actually raped and murdered. Our energies should be spent fighting the real enemy.
SMYRNA – Confederate flags decorated about a dozen student vehicles at Stewarts Creek High Thursday, including one with the image of an assault rifle and the words “COME AND TAKE IT.”Also at WKRN News 2 Nashville, "Smyrna mom upset students can fly Confederate flags on H.S. campus":
Stewarts Creek High Principal Clark Harrell declined a formal interview about the flags, including the one with the gun image.
“We’re fine,” Clark said from the lobby of the school’s front office, referring other questions to Rutherford County Schools spokesman James Evans.
Displays of the Confederate flag have been an issue since an accused white gunman in June killed nine black worshipers at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, the state where the Civil War started. The accused gunman was known to identify with the Confederate flag and express racists sentiments.
The South Carolina Legislature responded by removing a Confederate flag display from a memorial on its Capitol grounds.
Evans said the mother of an African-American student had complained about spotting a Confederate flag in the bed of a truck headed to the Stewarts Creek campus Wednesday.
“We explained to her that because of the First Amendment, students are allowed to express themselves as long as it’s not causing a disruption at school,” Evans said during a phone interview.
When it comes to the image of a rifle being on one of the flags, Evans said Board of Education attorney Jeff Reed will investigate what the district can do even though no direct threat was made.
“We obviously don’t like having the image of a gun posted on campus like that, and that’s one of the reasons he’s looking into seeing if we can remove it or not,” Evans said...
Still more.
RUTHERFORD COUNTY, Tenn. (WKRN) – A local mother is upset because kids at her child’s school are allowed to fly Confederate flags on campus.
The mom, who would like to remain anonymous, contacted News 2 with concerns about her son’s safety at Stewarts Creek High School in Rutherford County.
She said her 14-year-old son, who is in ninth grade, came home this week and told her that kids were wearing Confederate flag T-shirts to class.
The mother said she saw them herself while dropping off her son Wednesday morning. She said she also noticed students flying Confederate flags in the back of their trucks.
“I felt sad and hurt when I saw that,” she told News 2.
The Confederate flag has remained a controversial symbol since the Civil War, and the mom said, “I just don’t think it should be in schools.”
While driving by Stewarts Creek High School, News 2 counted as many as three Confederate flags on vehicles in the parking lot. There were also some American flags being displayed.
One of the Confederate flags had the message “heritage not hate” printed on it. Still, the mom says she sees the flag as a source of hate and is afraid for her son’s safety...
A Vancouver woman is distressed after a drone appeared to be trying to capture images of her suntanning topless on her private balcony, sparking concerns about irresponsible drone use.Well, I guess that does it for topless sunbathing in Vancouver!
Kathryn Redford, 30, lives on the second floor of an eight-storey apartment near West 4th Avenue and Pine Street in the Kitsilano neighbourhood.
Her secluded balcony is shielded by a brick wall on one side and a large tree on the other side which allows only a “sliver” of sunlight into the otherwise private balcony.
There are no apartment buildings across the street from Redford, and the inside of the balcony is not visible from street level.
Redford was reading and suntanning topless on her balcony floor Wednesday around 2:30 p.m., as she’s done before, when she heard the “unmistakable” sound of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).
A yellow quadcopter with a small flashing light appeared by her balcony, in the “sliver” of space between her building and the tree and hovered for about 10 seconds.
In shock, Redford covered herself with her book and watched as the UAV took off. As she gathered her things to retreat inside, the UAV re-appeared and this time, remained for about 30 seconds...
"Intellectuals have always disdained commerce" says Whole Foods Market co-founder John Mackey. They "have always sided...with the aristocrats to maintain a society where the businesspeople were kind of kept down."More.
More than any other outlet, Whole Foods has reconfigured what and how America eats and the chain's commitment to high-quality meats, produce, cheeses, and wines is legendary. Since opening his first store in Austin, Texas in 1980, Mackey now oversees operations around the globe and continues to set the pace for what's expected in organic and sustainably raised and harvested food.
Because of Whole Foods' trendy customer base and because Mackey is himself a vegan and champions collaboration between management and workers, it's easy to mistake Mackey for a progressive left-winger. Indeed, an early version of Jonah Goldberg's best-selling 2008 book Liberal Fascism even bore the subtitle "The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton and The Totalitarian Temptation from Hegel to Whole Foods."
Yet nothing could be further from the truth—and more distorting of the radical vision of capitalism at the heart of Mackey's thought. A high-profile critic of the minimum wage, Obamacare, and the regulatory state, Mackey believes that free markets are the best way not only to raise living standards but also to explore new ways of building community and creating meaning for individuals and society. At the same time, he challenges all sorts of libertarian dogma, including the notion that publicly traded companies should always seek to exclusively maximize shareholder value (go here to read a 2005 Reason debate about the social responsibility of business featuring Mackey, Milton Friedman, and Cypress Semiconductor CEO T.J. Rodgers). Conscious Capitalism, the book he co-authored with Rajendra Sisodia, lays out a detailed case for Mackey's vision of a post-industrial capitalism that addresses spiritual desire as much as physial need...
Mayor Bill de Blasio today refused to discuss his decision to stay at the gym for nearly two hours in the middle of a six-hour Staten Island stand-off in which a firefighter was shot twice by a man police have identified as a Bloods gang leader.More.
“We’re briefing you all on a very serious situation, and that’s just not a serious question,” Mr. de Blasio curtly replied during a press conference at a Staten Island police station when asked about his gym schedule.
The alleged shooter, Garland Tyree, was killed this afternoon, ending the stand-off that began at 6 a.m. when a task force of federal and NYPD officers tried to serve a federal warrant at the home in Staten Island’s Mariners Harbor neighborhood and were met with heavy smoke coming from under the door—which police now say was due to a smoke bomb they found in the home. Shortly after FDNY Lt. James Hayes entered the apartment to investigate the smoke, Tyree shot him twice in the lower extremities, officials said today during a press conference.
After hours of negotiations, Tyree said that after speaking to his mother—who police flew in on a department helicopter from Delaware—he would exit and surrender, police officials said today. But instead of exiting peacefully, Tyree fired shots from inside the apartment at department vehicles, and then exited while continuing to fire shots from a fully automatic AK-47, Mr. Bratton said. Officers returned fire and killed Tyree.
But despite calling the situation “very serious,” it apparently was not serious enough to interfere with Mr. de Blasio’s morning gym routine, which involves a drive from his Gracie Mansion home in Manhattan to the Park Slope YMCA in his old Brooklyn neighborhood. Mr. de Blasio’s ill-timed work-out was first reported by NY1’s Grace Rauh, who said it appeared the mayor was at the gym for two hours—or at least, his detail was: Mr. de Blasio left through a back door, possibly to avoid Ms. Rauh and her camera.
Mr. de Blasio’s spokeswoman Karen Hinton first said on Twitter that the mayor was at the gym for 80 minutes, then said on Twitter that he arrived at 9 a.m.—about three hours after the stand-off began and the firefighter had been shot—and left at 10:40 a.m, which amounts to 100 minutes. Ms. Hinton clarified that the mayor’s workout was 80 minutes, but he stayed at the gym to make phone calls.
“Mayor de Blasio was on calls with both Fire Commissioner Nigro and Police Commissioner Bratton about the situation on Staten Island throughout the morning, starting at 7 am, and he continued receiving multiple updates until he departed for Staten Island. This includes leaving the gym to make and take a series of calls from approximately 10:40 to 11:15, when he departed for Staten Island,” Ms. Hinton said in a statement. “The mayor has met with the wounded firefighter and his fellow firefighters at the hospital, and will soon update the media on both the situation on the ground in Staten Island and the wounded firefighter’s condition.”
During his press conference, the mayor spoke at length about his time with Mr. Hayes in the hospital, saying the firefighter was in good spirits and making light of his condition and calling him a “proud Staten Islander.” He heaped praise on first responders.
“It’s a day when they all handled their jobs in exemplary fashion. There’s a lot to be proud of today in the way our first responders handled something you just can’t be prepared for,” Mr. de Blasio said.
Before entering the apartment, Mr. Hayes spoke with Tyree about the smoke, Mr. Nigro said.
“Lt. Hayes was speaking with the occupant of the apartment and speaking quite calmly, and then suddenly [Tyree] stopped,” Mr. Nigro said, leaving Mr. Hayes concerned that Tyree may have succumbed to smoke. So Mr. Hayes entered the apartment to check on Tyree, Mr. Nigro said, and was then shot by him.
The incident comes as the mayor has struggled to overcome a growing perception of rising crime and disorder in the city, fueled in part by intense media coverage of homelessness and a 10 percent spike in homicides this summer. A recent Quinnipiac survey found that despite continued record low crime, most New Yorkers ranked quality of life the lowest since 1997. Earlier this summer Mr. de Blasio repeatedly noted that the rise in violent crime was largely isolated to gang disputes—but today’s shoot-out is an example of gang violence spilling beyond gang-member-on-gang-member assaults. Sources speaking to the Staten Island Advance described Tyree as the leader of the Bloods gang on the East Coast, and the paper noted his long rap sheet in the borough...
Obama has done nothing to stave off the rise of the global jihad.
Obama should be impeached on the grounds of depraved indifference.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Neither of the two emails sent to Hillary Rodham Clinton now labeled by intelligence agencies as "top secret" contained information that would jump out to experts as particularly sensitive, according to several government officials.Well, yeah, it might have an effect on the presidential race, heh.
One included a discussion of a U.S. drone strike, part of a covert program that is widely known and discussed. A second conversation could have improperly referred to highly classified material, but it also could have reflected information collected independently, U.S. officials who have reviewed the correspondence told The Associated Press.
Still, it's looking increasingly likely the issue of whether Clinton mishandled classified information on her home-brew email server will have significant political implications in the 2016 presidential campaign.
Clinton, who has been seen from the outset as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, agreed this week to turn over to the FBI the private server she used as secretary of state. And Republicans in Congress have seized on the involvement of federal law enforcement in the matter as a sign she was negligent in handling the nation's secrets.
On Monday, the inspector general for the 17 spy agencies that make up what is known as the intelligence community told Congress that two of 40 emails, in a random sample of 30,000 messages that Clinton gave the State Department for review, contained information deemed "Top Secret," one of the government's highest levels of classification.
While neither of the emails was marked classified at the time they were sent, they have since been slapped with a "TK" marking, for "Talent Keyhole," suggesting material obtained by spy satellites. And they also were marked "NOFORN," meaning information that can only be shared with Americans with security clearances.
The two emails got those markings after consultations with the CIA and other agencies where the material originated, officials said. Some officials said they believed the designations were a stretch — a knee-jerk move in a bureaucracy rife with over-classification.
The officials who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity work in intelligence and other agencies. They wouldn't detail the full contents of the emails because of ongoing questions about classification level.
Clinton didn't transmit the sensitive information herself, they said, and nothing in the emails she received makes direct reference to communications intercepts, confidential intelligence methods or any other form of sensitive sourcing.
The drone exchange, the officials said, begins with a copy of a news article about the CIA drone program that targets terrorists in Pakistan and elsewhere. While that program is technically top secret, it is well-known and often reported on. Former CIA director Leon Panetta and Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, have openly discussed it.
The copy makes reference to classified information, and a Clinton adviser follows up by dancing around a top secret in a way that could possibly be inferred as confirmation, the officials said. Several people, however, described this claim as tenuous.
But a second email reviewed by Charles McCullough, the intelligence community inspector general, appears more problematic, officials said. Nothing in the message is "lifted" from classified documents, they said, though they differed on where the information in it was sourced. Some said it improperly points back to highly classified material, while others countered that it was a classic case of what the government calls "parallel reporting" — receiving information the government considers secret through "open source" channels.
The issue came to light Tuesday after Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said McCullough found four "highly classified" emails on the unusual private server that Clinton used while she was secretary of state...
Salon cheered on the rioters in Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo., accepting as gospel the idea that blacks like Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin were murdered by racist white people running wild. Black violence is routinely dismissed at Salon because it doesn't fit the Left's narrative. Black people are always victims and white people are always evildoers.Keep reading.
David Palumbo-Liu is just one of many Salon writers who spends his time emulating Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Like Farrakhan, Palumbo-Liu seems to embrace genocide against whites.
After two hard-left Democratic presidential candidates were booed at a radical left-wing activists' convention for not toeing the Black Lives Matter line, Palumbo-Liu castigated the politicians for daring to assert that all lives, not just black lives, matter, accusing them of belonging to an evil "cult." He attacked "the disgraceful performances of Mike [sic; read Martin] O’Malley and Bernie Sanders at last week’s Netroots Nation (#NN15) event in Phoenix."
After Black Alliance for Just Immigration national coordinator Tia Oso and Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors occupied the stage where O'Malley was speaking, Cullors said she had to intervene. "We are in a state of emergency. If you do not feel that emergency, then you are not human." De-humanizing opponents is a tactic of a genocidal, totalitarian movement, not of those legitimately advocating for civil rights.
To this political stunt worthy of the Third Reich's Sturmabteilung, O'Malley responded in a restrained and perfectly decent way. He said "of course" black lives matter, just as white lives and “all lives matter.”
Palumbo-Liu rejects this line of thinking because it deviates from the now fashionable leftist view that black lives matter more, much more, than the lives of everyone else. O'Malley's sin lay in "effectively erasing the specific ways black lives in particular are targeted by both structural and informal racist violence in all shapes and forms."
My Instagram and Facebook feeds have been filled with unwitting apologists for racism against Korean-American small-business owners.Keep reading.
Heckuva job, Hollywood!
Here’s how the poison is spreading. A savvy marketing team at Universal/Comcast Corp. developed a web toy that allows social media fans to customize the theatrical poster logo for the media giant’s new biopic, “Straight Outta Compton.” Hundreds of thousands of clueless users have uploaded photos of themselves and substituted “Compton” with the names of their hometowns.
Jennifer Lopez, Serena Williams, LeBron James and Ed Sheeran are among the celebrities who helped make the meme go viral. Youth vote-pandering GOP Florida Sen. Marco Rubio jumped on the cultural bandwagon, too, with two obsequious messages on Twitter featuring the hashtag “#straightouttacompton.”
Update: And, of course, the celebrity dolt-in-chief’s administration used the meme to tweet about the Iran Deal.
It’s a publicity coup for rappers-turned-multimedia moguls Dr. Dre (Andre Young) and Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson) as they pimp the movie — named after their breakthrough 1988 album — glorifying the rise of their band N.W.A. (Niggaz Wit Attitudes) and the hardcore gangsta rap genre.
“Straight Outta Compton’s” cop-bashing, thug-promoting songs — most notably “F-k the Police” — vaulted Young and Jackson into the entertainment stratosphere. Young is a near-billionaire after becoming a producer, promoter and maker of overpriced headphones (the company was bought by Apple for $3 billion last year). Jackson embarked on a successful career as a solo rapper, mainstream actor and comedian.
Their hagiographic movie omits Young’s history of assaults on women and completely whitewashes Jackson’s incendiary attacks on Korean storeowners in South Central Los Angeles.
Shortly before the 1992 L.A. riots, Jackson had penned the hate-filled song “Black Korea” for his best-selling platinum solo album, Death Certificate. He seethed against law-abiding immigrant entrepreneurs in his ‘hood and threated to burn their stores “right down to a crisp”:
Every time I want to go get a f–king brew
I gotta go down to the store with the two
Oriental one-penny-counting mother–kers;
They make a nigger mad enough to cause a little ruckus.
Thinking every brother in the world’s out to take,
So they watch every damn move that I make.
They hope I don’t pull out a Gat, try to rob
Their funky little store, but, b-tch, I got a job.
So don’t follow me up and down your market
Or your little chop suey ass will be a target
Of a nationwide boycott.
Juice with the people, that’s what the boy got.
So pay respect to the black fist
Or we’ll burn your store right down to a crisp.
And then we’ll see ya…
‘Cause you can’t turn the ghetto into black Korea...
A New York City firefighter was shot twice Friday morning during a standoff at a Staten Island apartment that ended with the suspect being killed in a firefight with police, authorities said.More at CBS News New York, "Standoff on Staten Island
The six-hour standoff with Garland Tyree, 38 years old, began when U.S. Marshals attempted to execute an arrest warrant in connection with an alleged federal probation violation. The authorities encountered smoke at the home at 15 Destiny Court, prompting a call to the Fire Department of New York.
Responding firefighters were met with gunfire, and a 53-year-old FDNY lieutenant, James Hayes, was shot in the buttocks and right calf, authorities said. He was in stable condition at Richmond University Medical Center.
Police had been negotiating with Mr. Tyree, who barricaded himself in the apartment with an assault rifle, authorities said. The standoff ended around noon after several shots were fired, setting off screams among neighbors and family members who were trying to help police get Mr. Tyree to surrender.
Mr. Tyree was killed in the shootout, a law-enforcement official said. No one else was in the apartment with Mr. Tyree, police said.
For years, China looked like the principled noncombatant. As other countries, seeking to secure an economic advantage, let the value of their currencies slide on international markets, China held firm on the value of its money.
But this week, China jumped into the fray. In a surprise decision on Tuesday, the country’s authorities began sharply devaluing its currency, the renminbi. While the plunge paused on Friday, the renminbi was still down 4.4 percent against the dollar this week, a huge drop for China.
The abrupt move opens a new phase in what some analysts see as a long-raging global currency war, a development that could leave the United States exposed and undermine efforts to pull the world economy out of the doldrums.
The yen, the euro and several other major currencies have fallen in recent years against the dollar as the Federal Reserve has cut back its stimulus and policy makers elsewhere have sought to obtain gains for their sluggish national economies.
But the countries that don’t join the devaluations, like the United States right now, can end up suffering, if they export less and import more. A steep drop in the value of the renminbi could also intensify some of the forces that, in the view of some economists, have caused the American economy to underperform.
“The risks of a deflationary, secular stagnation in the U.S. would be increased by a large devaluation of the renminbi,” said Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary. Mr. Summers, however, cautioned against overreacting. “One has to be very careful about regarding market fluctuations and uncertainty among market participants as a crisis that demands major government interventions.”
Even so, the Fed faces a dilemma as it contemplates raising interest rates for the first time in more than nine years. A rate increase could drive the dollar up even more against other currencies, creating a vexing obstacle for the American economy at a crucial moment in its recovery.
“We’ve been in a currency war for six years,” said Stephen S. Roach, a senior fellow at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale University. “China is now moving on its currency, and other countries are using their currencies as a tool to relieve distress, and that is potentially destabilizing.”
China’s devaluation stems in part from a desire to let markets influence the price of the renminbi, a shift global policy makers have advocated. If managed well, it may give China a lift and the extra flexibility it may need as it deals with the challenges facing its economy.
At a news conference on Thursday, officials from the Chinese central bank defended the devaluation and said it would be managed carefully. Zhang Xiaohui, an assistant governor at the central bank, said that there was “no basis for the continued depreciation of the renminbi.”
The hope among global policy makers, of course, is that the changes in exchange rates are not excessive and do more good than harm. Still, history shows that currencies often go down too much or go up too far, interrupting the strong trade flows that have underpinned the global economy for decades...
Fuck Cuba. Spend your money at the Jersey Shore, where it won't go to subsidizing terrorism. pic.twitter.com/gZ6XmtoW7s
— Frances Martel (@francesmartel) August 14, 2015Nude in Portugal! - 371 Pictures AND 14:45 Full HD Video! http://www.stacey... http://t.co/bolwkEKQxz pic.twitter.com/q0ZBBQILCb
— Stacey Poole (@StaceyPoole1) August 10, 2015#SexyTuesday @Stacey_poolefan #staceypoole pic.twitter.com/cQdc8X5HkO
— JCG (fan Sophie) (@buquet1000) July 21, 2015Musicians, activists and Black Lives Matter protesters joined the families of people who were killed by police in New York City’s Times Square to protest brutality in the American legal system and the media blackout of the deaths of African-Americans across the nation. Activist Carl Dix was there and talked to RT about how police departments have silenced members of the Black Lives Matter movement.Also at the Blaze, "Top Activist's Response When Asked What He'd Like Obama to Do for the Black Lives Matter Movement."
BEIJING—China’s central bank devalued its tightly controlled currency, causing its biggest one-day loss in two decades, as the world’s second-largest economy continues to sputter.This is literally the highest stakes in the international political economy. The leading great power, the U.S., enjoys enormous privileges with the dollar as the world's reserve currency. Clearly, China would like to knock the U.S. off its pedestal. But the yuan's collapse is showing just how unstable the Chinese economy is.
Chinese authorities said the change would help drive the currency toward more market-driven movements. The move also signaled the government’s growing worry about slow growth. A shift toward a weaker currency could help flagging exports at a time when many other efforts to boost the economy haven’t proven very effective.
China’s yuan has been on an upward track for a decade, during which the country’s economy grew to be the second largest in the world and the currency gained importance globally. The devaluation Tuesday was the most significant downward adjustment to the yuan since 1994, when as part of a break from Communist state planning, Beijing let the currency fall by one-third.
China sets a midpoint for the value of the yuan against the U.S. dollar. In daily trading, the yuan is allowed to move 2% above or below that midpoint, which is called the daily fixing. But the central bank sometimes ignores the daily moves, at times setting the fixing so that the yuan is stronger against the dollar a day after the market has indicated it should be weaker.
With Tuesday’s move, the fixing will now be based on how the yuan closes in the previous trading session. As a result, the yuan’s fixing was weakened by 1.9% Tuesday from the previous day, leaving it at 6.2298 to the U.S. dollar, compared with 6.1162 on Monday. The yuan dropped as much as 1.99% from its previous close to 6.3360 against the dollar in Shanghai and fell as much as 2.3% in Hong Kong in early trading.
The central bank said in a statement posted on its website that the yuan’s midpoint has diverged quite a bit from the market rate for a relatively long time and that it was time to make the midpoint more market-based.
“The PBOC has astutely combined a move to weaken the yuan with a shift to a more market-determined exchange rate,” said Eswar Prasad, a Cornell University professor and former China head of the International Monetary Fund.
China’s leadership has been urging the IMF to declare the yuan an official reserve currency on par with the dollar, euro, the Japanese yen and the British pound—a move that could raise China’s influence on the world stage just as Beijing increasingly challenges Washington in global affairs.
To that end, the leadership has been resisting an outright devaluation of the currency despite the country’s plunging exports, for fears that a move like that could jeopardize the yuan’s chance of joining the elite group of currencies.
Rather, it chose to do so by giving what the longtime critics of China’s currency policy have long been clamoring for: Let the market play a bigger role in deciding the yuan’s value.
In the U.S. movie “The Wizard of Oz,” a mythical figure purported to have great powers suddenly loses his mystique when he is revealed to be no more than an aging silver-haired man pulling levers of a clunky oversized contraption behind a curtain. There is something happening in China which has a Wizard of Oz quality to it right now.
Chinese authorities awed the world during the 2007-2009 global financial crisis when they kept their economy growing at superfast speeds even when the rest of the world was nearing economic collapse. It seemed to be confirmation, after years of growth rates that allowed China to leap past rivals and become the world’s second-largest economy, that the Middle Kingdom and its leaders were special. Now, as the growth rate slows, the levers aren’t working very well and the image is losing its aura.
Chinese authorities on Tuesday effectively devalued the yuan by 2%. As currency devaluations go this was small. In 1994 China let its currency fall by a third, helping to breathe new life into an export explosion. Officials said this latest move was meant to allow the carefully managed currency move more in line with market forces. Yet it looked like a new step – albeit a small one -- by officials to boost flagging economic growth. A weaker currency might help boost exports by making them cheaper. On Saturday the government reported that exports fell 8.3% in July from a year earlier.
While a weaker currency might help exports on the margin (and also annoy China’s trading rivals) it doesn’t fix China’s underlying economic problems. The country’s economy appears to be suffering from the depleting after-effects of not one but three asset booms – an investment boom in industrial capacity which is weighing on global goods prices, a real estate boom which may have stretched domestic banks and more recently a stock market bubble.
Adjustments from bubbles rarely go smoothly and they almost always sap some economic vitality. As the wizard says in the movie, pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
This week, the story broke in a media starved of anything else to write in the silly season. Most outlets had nothing but praise for Kiran’s principled stance against panty pad-related oppression. ‘Bring on the menstruation revolution: “Donald Trump is going to bloody love it”’, crowed the Guardian. ‘26-year-old woman bleeds proudly through her first marathon,’ exulted Cosmo, having apparently mistaken her for someone who’d climbed Everest blindfolded, with a shark strapped to her back. Better still, perhaps, from Kiran’s point of view, the right-wing media wrinkled its nose in typical phallocentric disgust. ‘Latest feminist craze: free bleeding’, thundered the US website Infowars.
But the readers of these publications — not even the righteous, socially conscious ones — weren’t quite so sure. ‘I’m a girl and even I find that what this woman did is just gross,’ said one. ‘Get a grip love,’ said another. ‘I’m going to do a marathon on Viagra to highlight the fact that some people with penile dysfunction don’t have access to the diamond blue wonder drug,’ quipped an unhelpful male.
Then the sorry truth emerged. Poor Kiran, and the liberal outlets which had applauded her gesture, were the victims of a cruel hoax. It originated last year on a mildly notorious website called 4chan — an internet chatroom favoured by the kind of irreverent pranksters and cynical youths who take unseemly delight in countering the pieties of the ‘social justice warriors’ of the earnest new left.
Already, these hoaxers had enjoyed some success with an earlier campaign, designed to cause division within the new feminist movement by trying to pit girls with skinny, attractive fit bodies against less conventionally beautiful diehards. They invented a concept called ‘bikini bridge’ — the phenomenon where bikini bottoms are suspended between a slim woman’s hipbones causing a dangerously revealing gap. ‘If your girlfriend doesn’t have a bikini bridge, why are you with her?’ asked the caption to a fake advert showing a seductive skinny model. Sure enough, this major new threat to the sensitivities of women worried about their bodies received widespread coverage from the Sydney Morning Herald to the New York Daily News.
So in 2014 — inspired by some crazy idea they’d read somewhere on the internet — the pranksters decided to fake an even more ludicrous trend designed to discredit the radical feminist movement. ‘What is free bleeding? It consists of us womyn bleeding with no restriction … Being able to menstruate is something that is a [sic] undeniably female characteristic. How DARE they try and oppress it,’ read their working notes.
A few helpful tweets later from fake Twitter accounts and ‘free bleeding’ had become an urgent new cause of radical feminism. Eventually word got out among some women’s interest websites that they’d all been had: ‘Free bleeding is not a thing,’ warned one. But it appears the memo didn’t get through to everyone. Hence Kiran Gandhi’s marathon protest.
Does this mean we should all feel terribly outraged on behalf of Kiran? Well up to a point, I’d say. Stripped of its broader social context, her humiliation — even though it wasn’t deliberately inflicted on her personally — does seem a bit ugly and callous and deserving of our pity. But then you ask yourself: ‘Hang on, this girl has got a Harvard MBA, so she’s not exactly thick. Can she really not work out the logic of why it is that over the years we’ve developed certain conventions about the public display of bodily fluids and functions? Has she not considered that these might have been designed at least as much for the comfort of women as men?’
The bigger problem is this: even at Ivy League universities — indeed, perhaps especially at Ivy League universities, not to mention Oxford and Cambridge — the lunatic preoccupations of the radical feminists and social justice warriors, from ‘rape culture’ to ‘intersectionality’, have become so fashion-able and all-consuming that stupid has become the new clever.
DES MOINES — For five days, the royal-blue bus rumbled through miles of cornfields alongside a popular annual bicycle trek across Iowa. It showed up at a country music concert in Cherokee and at a bacon festival in Ottumwa.All well and good, but it's worth monitoring. There's more to winning the nomination than taking Iowa.
And when the hulking vehicle with thick white block letters that spell “TRUMP” pulled into a Wal-Mart parking lot in Fort Dodge this week, people flocked to it. It didn’t matter that Donald Trump wasn’t inside. The bus alone — with the “Make America Great Again!” slogan extending across its sides — created an irresistible oasis of celebrity politics amid a desert of minivans and shopping carts.
“One hundred people showing up for a staffer? I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Chuck Laudner, a longtime Iowa organizer who oversees Trump’s efforts here. “They kept saying the same thing: They want something different.”
For many Americans, the Trump presidential campaign amounts to a billionaire talking endlessly, and entertainingly, on television. But here in Iowa, it’s another story. Trump is trying to beat the politicians on their turf, building one of the most extensive organizations in the Republican field.
The groundwork laid by Trump’s sizable Iowa staff, with 10 paid operatives and growing, is the clearest sign yet that the unconventional candidate is looking beyond his summer media surge and attempting to win February’s first-in-the-nation caucuses.
This is becoming a cause of concern for rival campaigns.
“I see them as a major threat to all the other campaigns because of the aggressiveness of their ground game,” said Sam Clovis, an Iowa conservative who leads former Texas governor Rick Perry’s campaign.
“You cannot swing a dead cat in Iowa and not hit a Trump person,” Clovis continued. “It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen. . . . Every event we go to — the Boone County Eisenhower Social, the Black Hawk County Lincoln Dinner, the boots-and-barbecue down in Denison — the Trump people are everywhere with literature and T-shirts and signing people up...
After months of denials and delaying actions, Hillary Clinton has decided to turn over her private email server to the Department of Justice. As this controversy has grown since the spring, Clinton and her campaign operatives have repeatedly denied that she had placed classified information in her personal email while serving as secretary of state during President Obama’s first term. (“I am confident that I never sent nor received any information that was classified at the time it was sent and received,” she said last month.) Her team also denied that she would ever hand over her server to investigators. Now both those assertions have been overturned.Keep reading.
Hillary Clinton has little choice but to hand over her server to authorities since it now appears increasingly likely that someone on her staff violated federal laws regarding the handling of classified materials. On August 11, after extensive investigation, the intelligence community’s inspector general reported to Congress that it had found several violations of security policy in Clinton’s personal emails.
Most seriously, the inspector general assessed that Clinton’s emails included information that was highly classified—yet mislabeled as unclassified. Worse, the information in question should have been classified up to the level of “TOP SECRET//SI//TK//NOFORN,” according to the inspector general’s report.
You may have seen acronym lists like these on declassified documents before—and glazed over them. This is the arcane language of the cleared cognoscenti, so let me explain what this means:
• TOP SECRET, as the name implies, is the highest official classification level in the U.S. government, defined as information whose unauthorized release “could cause exceptionally grave damage to national security or foreign relations.”
• SI refers to Special Intelligence, meaning it is information derived from intercepted communications, which is the business of the National Security Agency, America’s single biggest source of intelligence. They’re the guys who eavesdrop on phone calls, map who’s calling whom, and comb through emails. SI is a subset of what the intelligence community calls Sensitive Compartmented Information, or SCI. And these materials always require special handling and protection. They are to be kept in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, which is a special hardened room that is safe from both physical and electronic intrusion.
• TK refers to Talent Keyhole, which is an intelligence community caveat indicating that the classified material was obtained via satellite.
• NOFORN, as the name implies, means that the materials can only be shown to Americans, not to foreigners.
In short: Information at the “TOP SECRET//SI//TK//NOFORN” level is considered exceptionally highly classified and must be handled with great care under penalty of serious consequences for mishandling. Every person who is cleared and “read on” for access to such information signs reams of paperwork and receives detailed training about how it is to be handled, no exceptions—and what the consequences will be if the rules are not followed...
WASHINGTON—Islamic State militants likely used mustard agent against Kurdish forces in Iraq this week, senior U.S. officials said Thursday, in the first indication the militant group has obtained banned chemicals.Still more.
The officials said Islamic State could have obtained the mustard agent in Syria, whose government admitted to having large quantities in 2013 when it agreed to give up its chemical-weapons arsenal.
The use of mustard agent would mark an upgrade in Islamic State’s battlefield capabilities, and a worrisome one given U.S. intelligence fears about hidden caches of chemical weapons in Syria, where Islamic State controls wide swaths of territory.
It raises new questions about the evolving threat posed by Islamic State and the ability of U.S. allies on the ground to combat it. Frontline Kurdish, Iraqi and moderate Syrian forces say they aren’t getting enough U.S. support now to counter Islamic State’s conventional capabilities.
Officials say these forces may need specialized equipment and training to help protect them against unconventional weapons if they become a fixture on the battlefield.
U.S. intelligence agencies thought Islamic State had at least a small supply of mustard agent even before this week’s clash with Iraqi Kurdish fighters, known as the Peshmerga, U.S. officials said. That intelligence assessment hadn’t been made public.
The attack in question took place late Wednesday, about 40 miles southwest of Erbil in northern Iraq. A German Defense Ministry spokesman said about 60 Peshmerga fighters, who help protect Kurdish areas in northern Iraq, were reported to have suffered injuries to their throats consistent with a chemical attack while fighting Islamic State.
Mustard agent, first employed as a weapon in World War I, can cause painful burns and blisters, immobilizing those affected by it, but it is usually deadly only if used in large quantities.
“These were apparently chemical weapons. What it was exactly we don’t know,” the German ministry spokesman said, adding that experts were on their way to the scene to conduct a fuller analysis. He said German personnel weren’t present at the scene of the attack.
The possibility that Islamic State obtained the agent in Syria “makes the most sense,” said one senior U.S. official. It is also possible that Islamic State obtained the mustard agent in Iraq, officials said, possibly from old stockpiles that belonged to Saddam Hussein and weren’t destroyed.
U.S. intelligence agencies are still investigating the source and how it could have been delivered this week on the battlefield, officials said.
Islamic State has taken control of territory in Syria close to where President Bashar al-Assad’s forces stored chemical weapons, including mustard agent. The regime said in 2013 that all of its mustard stockpiles had been destroyed, either by Syrian forces themselves or by international inspectors.
Inspectors, however, have subsequently said they weren’t able to verify claims by the Syrian government that it had burned hundreds of tons of mustard agent in earthen pits. U.S. intelligence agencies now say they believe Damascus hid some caches of deadly chemicals from the West, possibly including mustard.
Intelligence officials and chemical-weapons experts have expressed concerns in recent months that some of those banned chemicals could fall into the hands of Islamic State or other extremist groups.
U.S. intelligence agencies have also warned the White House that the Assad regime could use chemical agents it still has to defend its remaining strongholds if they come under siege...
An East Canton man was struck and killed by a roller coaster train after hopping a fence at Cedar Point Thursday evening to search for a phone he dropped while riding the Raptor.More.
James A. Young, 45, was pronounced dead at the scene by the Erie County coroner.
Young was at the park with friends, and had just finished riding the Raptor at about 5 p.m., when he decided to jump a fence and head into a restricted area underneath the coaster, according to Sandusky police Assistant Chief Phil Frost.
While Young was trying to retrieve a cell phone he dropped while on the ride, he was struck by a passing train, police said.
Officials continue to investigate the matter, and Frost said it has not yet been determined if Young was struck by the train itself, or by a person riding on the train.
Police declined to disclose specifics about Young's injuries...
Is the 2016 GOP field starting to enter the second stage of dealing with Trump – moving from denial to anger? The latest signs include Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul's new declaration of war against the reality TV star, but that move may say more about how the freshman legislator views his own campaign than it does about how Trump's competitors view his novel candidacy.BONUS: At iOWNTHEWORLD Report, "Rand Paul – “Trump is Not a Conservative”."
A new course at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law titled "Freddie Gray's Baltimore: Past, Present, and Moving Forward" aims a wide lens at the 25-year-old man's death and the "serious recent disturbances" that followed — which it says are "almost certainly not over" and require deep analysis.More.
"The course is not viewed by its organizers as an end in itself," reads the course overview, provided Wednesday by Professor Michael Greenberger. "Rather, it is intended to be a springboard for further and deeper academic teaching and writing efforts, clinical work, and student and faculty involvement in citizen and government efforts to reform law and policy in the subject matter areas" of "policing; criminal justice; housing; health care; education; poverty; and community development and joblessness."
Gray was arrested in April and suffered a severe spinal cord injury while in police custody. His death from the injury sparked demonstrations against police brutality across Baltimore. On the day of his funeral, rioting, looting and arson broke out.
"These events, which are almost certainly not over, have highlighted and/or uncovered serious on-going social and financial dislocations within the City," the syllabus reads.
Six Baltimore Police officers have been criminally charged in Gray's arrest and death; all have pleaded not guilty. The legal process leading to their trials is still in its early stages.
Greenberger, the course administrator, will be joined in teaching or planning the eight-week course by 12 other professors at the law school. The syllabus also lists Sherilynn Ifill, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, as another "tentative" organizer and teacher, of a class on the causes and implications of housing segregation.
The coursework will also be "supplemented by other academics, experts, and officeholders," though the syllabus does not identify those people.
Students, the syllabus reads, will be "apprised throughout the course of volunteer opportunities to work on the issues addressed in the course."
The idea for this course emanates from the recent disturbances in Baltimore arising from Freddie Gray’s arrest and his resulting death. These events have highlighted and/or uncovered serious on-going social and financial dislocations within the City. The course will examine the recent unrest itself and then examine the causes of, and possible solutions to, those dislocations, including an examination of problems in policing; criminal justice; housing; health care; education; poverty; and community development and joblessness.And here's the statement from the university, "New Maryland Carey Law Course Examines Causes and Solutions to Baltimore’s Recent Civil Unrest":
The course is not viewed by its organizers as an end in itself. Rather, it is intended to be a springboard for further student and faculty involvement in citizen and government efforts to reform law and policy in the subject matter areas listed above. Students will be apprised throughout the course of volunteer opportunities to work on the issues addressed in the course.
In response to the recent disturbances in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray, the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law is offering a new course titled, “Freddie Gray’s Baltimore: Past, Present, and Moving Forward.”More.
The eight-week course, which begins in September, will be taught by Maryland Carey Law faculty members as well as other academics, practicing professionals and elected officials. It will be open to students from the law school and the University of Maryland School of Social Work.
The course will examine the unrest in Baltimore as well as its causes and possible solutions by focusing on social, economic and other issues, including policing practices, criminal justice, access to housing, health care, education, joblessness and community development.
“We see this course as an opportunity for our students to grapple with important issues in their backyard” said Dean Donald B. Tobin. “We want not only to educate our students but to inspire them to act on what they’ve learned and work with our neighbors in West Baltimore to strengthen our community and city.”
Throughout the course, students will be apprised of volunteer opportunities to work on the issues addressed in each session.
More like 'die by the beach'.Heh.
Mountain Lion Famous for Crossing LA Freeways Is Killed Crossing a Freeway http://t.co/Du0Ww27ea1
— ECommerce News (@ECommerceNews1) August 13, 2015The journey of a mountain lion that successfully crossed four highways came to an end early Monday when it was struck and killed by a vehicle as it tried to make another run across a major L.A. freeway.
The puma named P-32 is the only known male to venture out of the Santa Monica Mountains and wander north into other habitat areas, said Kate Kuykendall, a spokeswoman for the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.
P-32 was best known for dashing across the 101 Freeway near Thousand Oaks on April 3. He managed to cross Highway 23 near the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and settled into a natural area in the Simi Hills. He had also crossed highways 118 and 126.
But P-32’s journey, deemed to be “a textbook case of successful dispersal," was cut short. The 21-month-old puma headed east and tried to cross the 5 Freeway between 4 and 6 a.m. when he was hit in Castaic.
“This case illustrates the challenges that mountain lions in this region face, particularly males,” wildlife ecologist Seth Riley said in a statement.
“P-32 conquered all kinds of freeways and highways to reach the Los Padres," he continued, "but it was probably another dominant male that made him leave the area and attempt one last crossing, which obviously was not successful.”
P-32 is the first male to be studied that successfully fled the mountains.
He is the 12th mountain lion killed on a freeway or road since researchers began studying the mountain lion population in 2002 to determine how they survive in the city...
QADIYA, Iraq — In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.Keep reading.
He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her.
When it was over, he knelt to pray again, bookending the rape with acts of religious devotion.
“I kept telling him it hurts — please stop,” said the girl, whose body is so small an adult could circle her waist with two hands. “He told me that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God,” she said in an interview alongside her family in a refugee camp here, to which she escaped after 11 months of captivity...
"I didn't hear a reflection on her part in perpetuating white supremacist violence." pic.twitter.com/LV2RdHFx9D
— Gabriel Debenedetti (@gdebenedetti) August 11, 2015In a matter of months, Black Lives Matter has become a powerful enough force in Democratic politics that campaign staffers actually accommodated would-be protesters as both worked the media. But what do activists actually want from Clinton?Ouch.
KEENE, N.H. — Standing beneath the hooded entrance to Keene Middle School, as rain hit the parking lot pavement early on Tuesday evening, the three activists exchanged a round of hugs, first with each other, then with the two videographers along to capture it all: another win for Black Lives Matter.
The small contingent, dressed in matching “Bulletproof” t-shirts, traveled from Massachusetts that morning with plans to stage a demonstration in the middle of a Hillary Clinton campaign event. As it turned out, the protest never happened. Instead, the group got 15 mostly private minutes with the candidate.
The activists — Daunasia Yancey, Julius Jones, and Vonds Dubuisson — declared the meeting a success. One, that is, for Black Lives Matter, not Clinton. Her answers, they told reporters afterward, had not been satisfying or sufficiently reflective.
Other Democrats, mostly Bernie Sanders, have already faced protests from Black Lives Matter on the campaign trail. The idea: to interrupt a candidate’s routine event or stump speech, and shift the conversation to questions about structural racism and police violence. This was Clinton’s first such encounter with the group whose name, often written as a one-word hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter, has become the powerful avatar of a broader social and racial justice movement.
And what played out in New Hampshire over a single three-hour period, from 3:15 to 6:15 p.m., encapsulated the complicated dynamic between campaign, movement, and media that the other candidates have struggled to navigate in recent weeks.
On Tuesday, under the watch of the national press corps, Clinton took her turn at trying, and failing, to meet the expectations of the activists who have become increasingly influential figures in the Democratic primary.
So much so that when Yancey, Jones, and Dubuisson arrived too late to get into the event, a forum on mental health and substance abuse, Clinton aides tried hurriedly to get the activists into the campaign function they wanted to attend only to interrupt — setting off an unlikely sequence of events, shaped as much by the participants on the ground as by the coverage happening about them, in real time, on Twitter.
By 6:15 p.m., the result of this frenetic rush to manage the arrival of the three Black Lives Matter activists was, ultimately, three dissatisfied Black Lives Matter activists.
The organizers “didn’t hear a response” from Clinton to their direct concerns, according to Yancey, the co-founder of the group’s Boston chapter and the organizer leading the group in Keene. Fifteen minutes later, she said, “our time was up.”
Yancey said she and the other activists asked Clinton questions about her role, and Bill Clinton’s, in 1990s drug and crime policy — and “in perpetuating white supremacist violence.” The activists declined to relay Clinton’s answers — but they did express their disappointment with the exchange on the whole. “I didn’t hear a reflection on her part in perpetuating white supremacist violence,” Yancey said.
“I think she gave the answer she wanted to give.”
