Senate Democratic leaders shortly before midnight rejected a House Republican request to appoint conferees to negotiate a short-term government-funding bill.And the GOP press conference earlier:
The move makes it all but certain there will be a government shutdown after midnight.
Samantha Lewthwaite, the Northern Ireland-born woman dubbed the 'White Widow', slipped out of the Kenyan shopping mall after smearing blood over her face, security sources in the country have said.More at that top link.
They also revealed how Lewthwaite, who was born in Co Down, rented a unit at the Westgate Shopping mall months ago in preparation for last week's terror killing spree.
She hung up newspapers around the shop unit to conceal what was going on inside, pretending to be stocking up on goods.
Staff have told police in Nairobi they helped a woman fitting the description of Samantha Lewthwaite lift boxes into the shop unit.
Witness accounts reveal a woman closely resembling the 29-year-old mother of three was seen being led away among panicked survivors, her face and upper clothes splashed with blood.
Interpol has issued a "red flag" international arrest warrant for Lewthwaite, based on intelligence that she led the attack and escaped.
Shocking stories about the brutalities inflicted by the terror gang are beginning to emerge. Children were among those deliberately killed and there are reports that an infant was decapitated and the head thrown at Kenyan soldiers during the four-day siege.
It is now believed Lewthwaite was the leader of the 13 to 17 terrorists who carried out the attack, but slipped away while the others were cornered by Kenyan soldiers.
The reports strongly contradict some of the impressions given last week that Lewthwaite was merely a book-keeper or finance raiser for the al-Qaeda-affiliated Somali group, Al Shabaab.
Kenyan police have been searching for Lewthwaite since it emerged she took up residence there in 2011 after spending three years living under false identities in South Africa. They believe she had already established links with the Somali terror group Al Shabaab and married one of its senior figures. Her second husband was shot dead in a police raid in Mombasa last October, according to sources.
The Kenyan police believe Lewthwaite, who was born in Banbridge, but was brought up in Buckinghamshire where she converted to Islam in her teens, was the prime mover behind the Westgate Shopping Mall attack, a key target for the Islamist terrorists because it is Israeli-owned.
The police named Lewthwaite as an Al-Shabaab member last June after arresting another British-born member of the group, Germaine Grant. They believe Grant was the terror group's financier working under Lewthwaite. The police believe Lewthwaite was behind an attempt to spring Grant from prison in Mombasa where he is currently on trial for terrorist offences.
The Kenyan police believe Lewthwaite may have married another Londoner, Habib Ghani, who also joined the terror group in Somalia.
Ghani and an another US-born member of the group, Omar Hammami, were both shot dead during internal feuding at the start of the month.
In June this year Lewthwaite was named by Kenyan police in connection with a grenade and gun attack on the Jericho Beer Garden in Mombas, while customers were watching a Euro 2012 quarter-final match, killing three and injuring 30.
WASHINGTON—Congress struggled to resolve bitter divisions over spending and the health-care law late Monday as the U.S. government teetered on the brink of the first partial government shutdown in 17 years.More at that top link, and at Memeorandum.
House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) on Monday afternoon advanced a last-ditch proposal—the third of its kind in less than a week—to curb the 2010 health-care law as a condition of funding the government.
Mr. Boehner's move resulted from pressure applied by his party's most-combative conservatives and made it harder than ever to see how Congress could come to agreement on a plan to fund federal agencies before a deadline of midnight Monday. Senate Democrats have rejected every effort by the House GOP to link new funding for federal agencies with efforts to limit the health law.
A House proposal headed for a vote Monday night would delay for one year the Affordable Care Act requirement that most individuals carry health insurance or pay a penalty. It also would limit government subsidies for lawmakers' own health-care premiums and those of their staffs.
President Barack Obama urged Republicans to back away from their plan, asking them to meet with him at another time to negotiate budget differences. "We should avoid this constant brinkmanship,'' Mr. Obama said at the White House.
Mr. Obama said it was a basic function of Congress to fund the government each year. "You don't extract a ransom for doing your job,'' he said.
A White House official said that Mr. Obama placed separate calls Monday evening to Mr. Boehner, as well as to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi.
The showdown has laid bare the elements of the political system that have done much to alienate voters, highlighting the continual air of crisis that has come to surround the most routine tasks of governing. The convoluted jockeying on Capitol Hill has been over a seemingly simple budget measure—a short extension of money for agencies at their current funding levels.
Republican lawmakers decided to pursue their new funding proposal in a 90-minute meeting of the House GOP on Monday afternoon. Afterward, Mr. Boehner began moving toward a vote Monday night, just a few hours before the government was to run out of money at 12:01 a.m. EDT, the start of the new fiscal year.
But many GOP lawmakers emerged from the meeting saying it was unclear that the measure would pass the House. Some Republicans said it didn't do enough to curb the health law; others were concerned about the provision limiting government contributions to health-care costs for lawmakers, aides and some White House officials.
Some also had reservations about the strategy of risking a government shutdown to demand changes in the health-care law that Mr. Obama and fellow Democrats were sure to reject.
The personal is political. And there are few things more personal than your pubic hair. Whether you shave, trim, wax (ouch), epilate (while breathing deeply and after two glasses of wine) or go au naturel, it's a decision. And for young women like me in our twenties, it is one which provokes gut-wrenching anxiety, writes Dina Rickman.Oh brother.
It’s no wonder - we’re living in an era when leaving your pubic hair untamed is so unusual that ‘hairy’ has become a form of niche pornography. One male friend of mine recently boasted that he had never seen a woman with a full bush. Another, 24-year-old Adam, finds pubes so alien that he was unable to perform sexually the last time he was confronted with a hairy woman. “We just ended up cuddling,” he explains.
For him, part of the problem is porn. Adam believes it has “heightened expectations” of how a woman should look. “One of my friends once said 'I 100 per cent need to sleep with a girl before I go out with her. What if she's got a hairy bush?’ It's incredibly off putting. It doesn't take much effort to tame it. I manage to, so I don't think it's a lot to ask."
Sophie Bennett, campaigns officer at the women’s rights group, Object, also believes pornography has changed the landscape - and not for the better. “Because young men often learn about sex and women’s bodies in this way, many feel uncomfortable with women’s bodies as they naturally are”, she says. The result? Low self-esteem, anxiety, and confusion.
Sporting a full bush is considered so subversive that few raised an eyebrow last year when Cameron Diaz told the BBC's Graham Norton Show how she and two accomplices had pinned an anonymous friend to the ground and removed her pubic hair.
But there are the refuseniks, like Rachel, 26. It took her 12 years, two vajazzles and more waxes than it’s polite to mention before she decided she’d had enough. For her, it was about avoiding the hassle of hair removal as well as feminism. “Now, my pubes stick out of the sides of my swimming costume in the leisure centre, but I'd rather look like that than anything else.” As for how men react? “I think most guys are so delighted that they're about to get laid they wouldn't notice if you had a full-on Zach Galifianakis-style beard down there. But there are some men who are probably a little bit more picky and prefer the bald look.”...
WASHINGTON–House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) issued a statement blasting Democrats for not reconvening the Senate sooner, in the latest round of recriminations over a rapidly approaching government shutdown.Keep reading.
If the Senate reconvenes as planned Monday afternoon, Democrats will be engaging in an act of “breathtaking arrogance,” Mr. Boehner said in a written statement early Sunday afternoon.
Dear Graduate Director Prof. Kantrowitz,Continue reading.
Please forgive this sudden e-mail. I am writing to you today about the “diversity” training that new teaching assistants (TAs) are required to undergo. In keeping with the spirit of the Wisconsin Idea, I am also blind-copying on this e-mail several journalistic outlets and state government officials, because the taxpayers who support this university deserve to know how their money is being spent.
CRUISES. Conferences. New forms of advertising. Fancy multimedia storytelling.Continue reading.
The Gray Lady, as The New York Times has long been known, isn’t as sedate as she used to be. The company is innovating like a house afire. Or let’s turn the metaphor around: With the house of print burning down, The Times is quickly building something new, hoping to have a permanent place to live in the digital age.
The innovation is necessary. After all, print advertising — the lifeblood of The Times — has long been in decline. Last year, in a major milestone, consumer revenue (mostly from print and digital subscriptions) surpassed advertising revenue, both digital and print. In the old days, print advertising alone brought in about 80 percent of all Times revenue.
The old business model is fading, and the new one hasn’t quite arrived. The Times is journalistically strong and is profitable, but its future is far from certain. As necessary as innovation is, it comes with risks — ethical risks, journalistic risks and, if those should be compromised, business risks.
Here is a look at what is happening, and some of the implications.
Beauty. “@InsideUSC: I'm told Lane Kiffin told the bus to wait but then #USC administrators told it to go back to campus without him”
— Lane Kiffin's FIRED (@FIRELaneKiffin) September 29, 2013
Fired in the parking lot. Almost poetic if you ask me. #USC means business. #ByeByeKiffin
— Lane Kiffin's FIRED (@FIRELaneKiffin) September 29, 2013
Lane Kiffin, who has coached USC’s football team since 2010, has been relieved of his duties, Athletic Director Pat Haden announced early Sunday.More at that top link.
Kiffin was fired hours after the Trojans lost to Arizona State, 62-41, at Tempe, Ariz. The loss dropped the Trojans’ record to 3-2 overall and 0-2 in the Pac-12 Conference.
Kiffin, who succeeded Pete Carroll as coach, had been under fire since the end of last season, when the Trojans fell from being ranked No. 1 to finishing with a 7-6 record. USC has lost seven of its last 11 games dating to last season.
Kiffin, 38, compiled a 28-15 record at USC. His best season came in 2011, when the Trojans finished 10-2.
The NCAA hit USC with some of the most severe penalties in college football history months after Kiffin was hired. The penalties were related to former Trojans running back Reggie Bush and included a two-year bowl ban and the loss of 30 scholarships over three years.
Haden recently appealed to the NCAA to restore some of the scholarships. The request was denied.
In a four-paragraph news release announcing the move, USC said Haden would hold a news conference Sunday afternoon. It was not known what time.
Late last year, Research In Motion Ltd. chief executive officer Thorsten Heins sat down with the board of directors at the company’s Waterloo, Ont., headquarters to review plans for the launch of a new phone designed to turn around the company’s fortunes.Lazaridis' cultural disconnect seems simply unreal.
His weapon was the BlackBerry Z10, a slim device with the kind of glass touchscreen that had made Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. the dominant names in the global smartphone market.
But one of RIM’s directors was frustrated by what he saw, and spoke out, according to one person who was in the room. There is a cultural problem at RIM, he told the group, and the Z10 was a glaring manifestation of it.
The speaker was none other than Michael Lazaridis, the genius behind the BlackBerry, the company’s co-founder and its former co-CEO. Minutes earlier, he said, he had spoken with Mr. Heins’s newest executive recruits, chief marketing officer Frank Boulben and chief operating officer Kristian Tear.
Mr. Boulben and Mr. Tear had dismissively told Mr. Lazaridis that the market for keyboard-equipped mobile phones – RIM’s signature offering – was dead.
In the board meeting, Mr. Lazaridis pointed to a BlackBerry with a keyboard. “I get this,” he said. “It’s clearly differentiated.” Then he pointed to a touchscreen phone. “I don’t get this.”
To turn away from a product that had always done well with corporate customers, and focus on selling yet another all-touch smartphone in a market crowded with them, was a huge mistake, Mr. Lazaridis warned his fellow directors. Some of them agreed.
The boardroom confrontation was a telling moment in the downfall of Research In Motion.
Once the giant of the smartphone business, RIM, which was renamed BlackBerry Ltd. in the summer, is now on its knees. The company reported a $965-million (U.S.) fiscal second-quarter loss Friday, primarily because of a massive writedown of Z10 phones that sit, unsold and unwanted, about eight months after they first hit the market. The company is cutting 4,500 jobs, 40 per cent of its work force, in a desperate bid to bring costs in line with plummeting revenue.
Investors, who have lived through the destruction of more than $75-billion of the company’s market value over the past five years, are still wondering how BlackBerry managed to blow its runaway lead and became a bit player in the smartphone market it invented.
An investigation by The Globe and Mail, which included interviews with two dozen past and present company insiders, exposes a series of deep rifts at the executive and boardroom levels.
Those divisions hurt the company’s ability to develop products just as it faced its greatest challenge from more nimble and creative rivals – and contributed to the downfall of Canada’s biggest technology company...
House Republicans are (surprisingly) not backing down on the Obamacare/continuing resolution fight. Unfortunately, neither is Harry Reid. The House has a new bill funding government and delaying the implementation of Obamacare for one year. They also have a bill that will fund the military in the event of a shut down. Reid says the Senate will reject the bill.Yes, because "tea party anarchists."
The current phony crisis, in which Sen. Harry Reid has declared that the House must approve the Senate’s spending bill or else the government will shut down, has inspired The Atlantic‘s James Fallows to an extravagant exercise in rhetorical excess:Fallows is a bald-faced liar (and a Democrat-partisan hack, but I repeat myself).
In case the point is not clear yet: there is no post-Civil War precedent for what the House GOP is doing now. It is radical, and dangerous for the economy and our process of government, and its departure from past political disagreements can’t be buffed away or ignored. If someone can think of a precedent after the era of John C. Calhoun . . . let me know.This is as absurd and inappropriate as it is ignorant. To find a recent precedent, we need only go back to the 1990s, when the budget impasse between the new Republican majority in Congress and President Clinton led to a (partial) government shutdown. Or, really, we might consider the extraordinary process by which Reid and Nancy Pelosi shoved ObamaCare through the legislative grinder — “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it,” as Pelosi infamously said — as more truly “radical, and dangerous for the economy and our process of government” than anything Republicans in Congress are doing now.
Having deliberately ignored the made-for-TV dramatics, I am not the least alarmed by this phony crisis, which is neither particularly new nor remotely frightening. Democrats and their comrades in the media (Fallows was a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter) are dishonestly characterizing opposition to ObamaCare as “extremist,” per se.
This is the exact opposite of truth: It is ObamaCare itself that is truly “extremist,” a measure that could only be rammed through Congress with late-night arm-twisting sessions. Were the 34 House Democrats who voted against ObamaCare in March 2010 “extremists”? Or were the millions of voters who elected a Republican House majority in the 2010 mid-term landslide “extremists”?
James Fallows is a partisan Democrat who evidently does not even read conservatives, and who declares illegitimate any reporting that takes seriously the claims of the president’s Republican opponents...
