“Hey, if one of the richest companies in America can get richer by making you a little stupider every time you look at your phone, small price to pay,” Maher said. “And boy, does it make you stupider.”

The app, Maher explained, only focused on the user’s hand-picked interests, relieving them of the “burden” of information that might contradict their worldviews.

“But only seeing the stuff that confirms the opinions you already have isn’t news — it’s Fox News,” Maher said. “The reason so many Americans, for example, think climate change is a hoax is that their only source for science news is Glenn Beck, Fox and Matt Drudge, the cracker trifecta.”

While newspapers are old-fashioned, Maher argued, they tell the reader what’s important in general, not just what’s important to them. Facebook, on the other hand, was good for posting pictures of one’s lunch and their “duck face” (as he demonstrated in the picture above.)

Still, he did extoll some of the virtues of specific news feeds.

“I, for example, might see a lot of stories about pot, American history, and of course, Christian Mingle,” Maher said. “Whereas Ted Nugent just gets ads for Prozac and bullets.”

Watch Maher’s commentary, as posted online on Friday, below.

“He’s not the president,” Maher told Maddow. “He’s not even a guy who ever, himself, said he was going to be running for president. He’s a New Jersey governor who did something bad. He closed lanes on a bridge; bad. But is it really that bad? If it was a Democratic governor not close to New York City, the media capital, would we be covering this?”

“When there are gonzo political corruption stories, you cover them,” Maddow responded. “The most interesting thing about the Christie one is that we still don’t know what happened. It’s still not resolved. We still don’t have an explanation.”

A week ago, Maher published a “break-up note” expressing his dissatisfaction with the network’s across-the-board coverage of the unresolved closures last year on the George Washington Bridge, writing, “Look at yourself. You’re turning into Fox News. Bridgegate has become your Benghazi, and this isn’t easy to say, but you and I are no longer on the same news cycle.”

But Maher reassured Maddow on Friday that he did still watch her network, and clarified his post.

“I should have said that, yes, this is not the same as Benghazi,” Maher explained. “I made that analogy — ‘This is your Benghazi.’ Benghazi is nothing. There is no scandal there. This is an actual scandal. It’s just that it’s not Watergate.”

National Review Online writer Charles Cooke did agree with Maher that the possible actions by the Christie administration did constitute a scandal, he accused Maddow and MSNBC of moving to undermine the governor’s potential as a 2016 Republican presidential candidate.

“Why not come clean?” Cooke asked. “What you’ve been doing over the last two months is trying to get rid of Chris Christie from the race.”

“Why would I be excited to clear Chris Christie from whatever race you mean?” Maddow responded.

“Why would MSNBC want one of the most popular Republicans in the country to be embroiled in scandal for two months or more?” Cooke pressed.

“So you think that I created the bridge story out of whole cloth in order to elect a Democrat in 2016?” Maddow asked, before adding a faux-maniacal laugh.

Watch the discussion, as posted online on Friday, below.

“This a story, Megyn, about monumental and despicable hypocrisy by liberal media and — and– conservative media,” Goldberg told Kelly. “If a conservative like, let’s say Sarah Palin, is slimed by, let’s say, Bill Maher, what happens? Liberals, they play down the story. They don’t care about it. Conservatives are rightly outraged, but liberals aren’t. But when a liberal like the President of the United States is called a ‘subhuman mongrel,’ what happens then? Conservatives in the media — virtually, if not literally, until this show, anyway — ignore that story, too.”

Both Goldberg and Kelly expressed skepticism regarding Nugent’s non-apology on Friday, which the conservative rock star said was “not necessarily to the president, but on behalf of much better men than myself.” Nugent had become a point of criticism for Texas gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott, who accepted Nugent as a surrogate but then refused to take questions about his behavior.

“The story is about the politicians who choose to campaign with him,” Kelly told Goldberg, adding that she has contacted Abbott’s campaign multiple times for an interview. In response, Goldberg agreed with Kelly that that line of questioning was fair game.

“This fake moral outrage you have on either side — that’s all it is, it’s fake,” Goldberg told Kelly. “They only care when they slime somebody on your team. They don’t care when you slime somebody on the other team.”

While conservatives pilloried Maher for calling Palin a “c*nt” in 2011, progressive outlets like Alternet also criticized the Real Time host. In a subsequent interview with Rolling Stone, Maher — who also defended Paula Deen’s use of racial slurs on his show last year — accused Fox News of manufacturing the controversy regarding his anti-Palin insults.

“I don’t just walk out there and say, “Sarah Palin’s a c*nt! Good night!’” Maher said in the interview. “It’s a carefully crafted routine that has been in my act for over a year. This is not a word that we can get along without, because it’s a word that talks about a specific type of person — and it can be a man or a woman.”

Watch Kelly’s interview with Goldberg, as posted online on Friday, below.

Newark archbishop’s future retirement home undergoing a $500K addition (via NJ.com)

The 4,500-square-foot home sits on 8.2 wooded acres in the hills of Hunterdon County. With five bedrooms, three full bathrooms, a three-car garage and a big outdoor pool, it’s valued at nearly $800,000, records show. But it’s not quite roomy enough…

Watch a report on the lavish home expansion, as aired on CNN on Friday, below.

Cherie Rhoades, 44, has been arrested but not charged in the attack and is expected to be arraigned in court in Alturas on Tuesday, said a spokeswoman for the Modoc County District Attorney’s Office.

Rhoades is accused of using two semi-automatic handguns to fatally shoot her 50-year-old brother, 19-year-old niece and 30-year-old nephew in Alturas, about 30 miles south of the Oregon border, said Alturas City Clerk Cary Baker, an acting spokeswoman for the small town of about 2,800 residents.

Rhoades was originally held at the local jail but moved for her protection because the fourth victim was the 47-year-old wife of an employee who works at the jail, Baker said.

Two other people at the hearing were critically wounded and remained hospitalized, officials said. One of those people was alert and talking on Friday, they said.

The names of the victims have not been released.

Rhoades had once been a tribal leader with the Cedarville Rancheria tribe, Baker said.

She lived on tribal property in Cedarville, about 20 miles east of Alturas, and was being evicted from that house along with her son, Baker said. The tribal office in Alturas is where day-to-day business is conducted for the Cedarville Rancheria.

After apparently running out bullets, Rhoades picked up a large kitchen knife and chased one person she had already shot, police said. She was detained outside the building where she opened fire, they said.

(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

[Image: "Semi Automatic Handgun" via Shutterstock]

“I think we’re up to 35 now, and we have our first one in Nevada,” group spokesperson Vicki Gaugler told KPIX. “I hope I’ll be busy updating the list of churches after this news breaks.”

The participating churches have signed a “declaration of inclusion” explaining their position. The statement was authored by members of the Elk Grove, Fair Oaks and St. Park’s United churches, all based out of Sacramento, and cites the United Methodist Book of Discipline, arguing in part, “All persons, regardless of age, gender, marital status or sexual orientation are entitled to have their human and civil rights honored.” Gaugier added that individual clergy members will have the option of performing any same-sex marriages at their churches.

A separate statement on the group’s website urges other congregations to join them, saying, “We must unshackle ourselves from rules reflecting the cultures where same sex marriages are forbidden. We can no longer, in good conscience, deny use of our property to our members and friends at the precious time of marriage requiring them to go somewhere else other than a United Methodist Church to receive ministry.”

However, the United Methodist Church’s Book of Discipline states that it considers homosexuality “incompatible with Christian teaching,” and forbids ministers from performing same-sex marriages or allowing them to be held on church grounds. Changing the policy would require approval from a majority of delegates at the church’s next confrence, scheduled to be held in Portland, Oregon in 2016.

According to the Sacramento Bee, church membership is at about 12 million members worldwide, with more than 30 percent of them hailing from more socially-conservative regions like Africa and the Philippines.

[Image: "Priest Reading From The Holy Bible," via Shutterstock]

Oak Leaves reported that 38-year-old Tim Margis was arrested on Feb. 12, two days after the woman, a fellow Concordia University-Chicago employee, discovered a “clear liquid” inside the shoe.

Two nights earlier, the woman told authorities she saw Margis leave her office while readjusting his pants and belt. When she asked Margis why he was there, he explained that he was checking the office because the door had been left open. But he admitted to pleasuring himself on the shoe while being interviewed by detectives.

A school spokesperson, Eric Matanyi, told Oak Leaves that Concordia disassociated itself with Margis upon learning of his arrest.

“At that point the employee was suspended and banned immediately from campus,” Matanyi was quoted as saying. “We cooperated fully with the investigation and he was terminated on Feb. 13 for misconduct, less than 24 hours later.”

Watch a report from WGN, embedded below.

[Image: "Attractive Young Woman Holding Up An Elegant High Heeled Turquoise Ladies Court Shoe" via Shutterstock]

(Reuters) – The U.S. government on Friday proposed a cut in payments to private health insurers for 2015 Medicare Advantage plans, a move Republican lawmakers said would hurt benefits for the elderly and disabled.

The proposal, released in a document by a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, appeared to cut payments by more than the 6 to 7 percent the insurance industry had expected, one Wall Street analyst said.

“Now the lobbying begins: can the plans get Congress to help make the cut less severe?” CRT Capital analyst Sheryl Skolnick said, adding that her assessment of the hundreds of pages of information was preliminary.

Friday’s notice of proposed rates opens a window for negotiations on the final ruling, due April 7.

Insurers and lawmakers have said cuts will mean smaller networks of doctors and hospitals and higher out-of-pocket costs. Insurers have said they could only maintain benefits if there was no change in payments for 2015 from 2014.

Many factors go into determining the government’s total reimbursement to insurers. These payments are based in part on the assumption that Medicare Advantage spending per person will fall 3.55 percent in 2015. Total reimbursement to insurers, however, is influenced by factors such as payments for patients who are sicker than average.

“These Medicare Advantage cuts are misguided, threaten a successful program for seniors, and must be overturned,” Republican Senator Orrin Hatch said in a statement.

“Medicare Advantage is extremely popular for a reason – run through the private market, seniors gain access to high-quality and coordinated care with additional benefits that they otherwise wouldn’t get,” he said.

The criticism from Hatch and other leading Republicans adds to pressure from the party over President Barack Obama’s healthcare law. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which aims to extend health coverage to millions of uninsured Americans, includes provisions to cut Medicare spending.

UnitedHealth Group Inc, Humana Inc and Aetna Inc are among the insurers who manage private Medicare plans for about 15 million of the 50 million Americans eligible for Medicare.

Shares of insurers were slightly lower in after-hours trading activity. Humana posted the biggest loss with a 2 percent decline.

PLANNING FOR 2015

The proposed payment rates are a key factor in how insurance companies plan their business for the coming year, including in which markets they will offer health plans, what their medical and administrative costs will be and at what level to set premiums and doctor visit co-payments.

Insurers have said that 2014 was a difficult year for Medicare Advantage because of cuts to payments estimated at about 6 percent overall by the industry group, called America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP). Officials for the lobby group were not immediately available for comment on the latest government proposal.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said in a statement that the proposed changes for 2015 are smaller than those implemented in 2014.

It also said in the statement that it planned to calculate risk scores in 2015 with the same methodology as in 2014. It said it would change a part of its risk payment formula to account for the increasing proportion of baby boomers entering Medicare, who tend to have better health.

It was not immediately clear how these and other formula changes in the document would affect the industry overall or specific insurers.

Medicare Advantage and other government paid-healthcare services like Medicaid are among the insurers’ fastest growing businesses.

But if the costs to insurers of providing the healthcare services outpace the payments from the government, the difference is paid by the insurers, undermining their ability to profit from these plans.

“Medicare Advantage plans are fully at risk under this program. So if their estimate is off, for better or for worse, they are at risk for that,” said Anne Hance, a lawyer at McDermott Will & Emery in Washington, D.C. who focuses on regulation.

(Reporting by Caroline Humer; Editing by Michele Gershberg, Jonathan Oatis, G Crosse and David Gregorio)

[Image via C-SPAN]

NEW YORK (Reuters) – New York City’s secret police surveillance of mosques, Muslim businesses and a Muslim student group in New Jersey did not violate the U.S. Constitution, a federal judge ruled on Thursday.

U.S. District Judge William Martini in Newark, New Jersey, threw out a lawsuit brought by several New Jersey Muslims who claimed the New York Police Department illegally targeted them for undercover monitoring solely because of their religion.

The police department’s widespread program was first revealed in a series of articles by the Associated Press, which reported that officers had infiltrated Muslim organizations throughout the region following the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001.

The plaintiffs in the case, led by Syed Farhaj Hassan, a U.S. Army reservist, claimed the program impaired their freedom of expression, caused them to stop attending religious services and threatened their careers.

In a 10-page ruling, Martini said the city had persuasively argued that its surveillance was intended as an anti-terrorism, not an anti-Muslim, measure.

“While this surveillance program may have had adverse effects upon the Muslim community after the Associated Press published its articles, the motive for the program was not solely to discriminate against Muslims, but rather to find Muslim terrorists hiding among ordinary, law-abiding Muslims,” Martini wrote.

Baher Azmy of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represented the plaintiffs along with the organization Muslim Advocates, compared Martini’s decision to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in 1944 that the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II was constitutional.

“The decision gives legal sanctions to broad, undifferentiated racial and religious profiling,” he said, calling it a “dangerous” finding. Azmy said the plaintiffs would appeal the decision.

A spokesman for the city’s law department declined to comment.

Muslim Advocates filed the initial lawsuit in 2012 on behalf of several Muslim individuals and groups and was later joined by the Center for Constitutional Rights.

The New York Civil Liberties Union has filed a similar federal lawsuit against New York City in Brooklyn, which remains pending.

In addition, a group of civil rights lawyers have filed court papers in Manhattan federal court claiming the city’s surveillance runs afoul of a longstanding court order governing how police can monitor certain political organizations.

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and police officials defended the program as vital to anti-terrorism efforts. It is unclear whether the new mayor, Bill de Blasio, will change the city’s legal approach to the surveillance issue.

(This story was corrected to clarify that Muslim Advocates filed the initial lawsuit and the Center for Constitutional Rights joined later as co-counsel)

(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Ken Wills)

The $800 million plant in Celaya, in the central state of Guanajuato, will churn out 200,000 units per year, contributing to Mexico’s race to beat Canada and Japan as top car exporter to the United States.

For Honda, producing the Honda Fit hatchback and a yet-to-be-named compact-sport utility vehicle in Mexico will allow the company to expand its presence in the Mexican and U.S. markets.

Latin America’s second-biggest economy has become an increasingly favored destination for car makers thanks to its lower wages, skilled workforce and participation in a raft of free-trade pacts.

“We have great expectations for growth in the US market as well as the Mexican market,” Honda chief executive Takanobu Ito told reporters, adding that Mexico has good growth potential for small cars.

“In addition to having the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Mexico has free-trade deals with several regions in the world, including Japan and Europe,” he said through an interpreter.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto was on hand to unveil the sprawling factory — which will have 3,200 workers — alongside state officials and Honda executives, including Ito.

Mexico is now the world’s eighth-biggest car maker and the number four exporter after Germany, South Korea and Japan, according to industry figures.

“I am pleased to be here for the inauguration of this Honda factory, which recognizes that we are creating the optimal conditions to attract investments and to generate economic growth in our country,” Pena Nieto said.

Ironically, the investments of Japanese car makers in Mexico is helping the Latin American country gain ground on Japan’s auto exports to the United States.

Mexico is on pace to overtake Japan for second place this year, exporting 1.69 million units to its norther neighbor, almost 200,000 more than the Asian nation, according to IHS Automotive consultancy.

In 2015, Mexico will outpace Canada with 1.9 million units sold in the United States, IHS estimates.

IHS auto analyst Guido Vildozo said Honda’s focus on Mexico — where the firm is also building a $470-million transmissions plant at the same Celaya site, adding another 1,500 jobs — was “a combination of things.”

Honda opened its first factory in the western state of Jalisco in the 1980s to produce motorcycles and later cars.

“People forget that Mexican labor is highly qualified. Mexico has been building for competitive markets in the United States and Europe for years,” Vildozo told AFP.

U.S., European and Asian auto-makers have also flocked to Mexico.

The new Honda plant is near a Mazda factory that began operations last month, attracting auto part makers that are turning Guanajuato into an industry hub.

Audi, the top-of-the-range company owned by German auto giant Volkswagen, is building a factory in the state of Puebla that will produce 150,000 cars per year when it opens in 2016.

[Image via Agence France-Presse]

“I call a dialogue with you, President Obama… between the patriotic and revolutionary Venezuela and the United States and its government. Accept the challenge and we will start a high-level dialogue and put the truth on the table,” Maduro told a news conference with foreign reporters.

With China warning that the meeting would derail ties between the world’s two largest economies, Obama took care to avoid any trappings of an official visit, receiving the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader in the Map Room of the White House residence and not the Oval Office where he usually talks to dignitaries.

The Dalai Lama, usually chatty and playful with foreign audiences, was nowhere to be seen at the White House, which did not allow in reporters.

The administration instead released an official photograph of the robed Buddhist monk gesticulating with one hand and clutching prayer beads in the other as he spoke to a studious-looking Obama over glasses of water.

In Beijing, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Yesui summoned the U.S. charge d’affaires, Daniel Kritenbrink, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

“China expresses strong indignation and firm opposition,” Zhang was quoted as saying.

- Obama’s ‘strong support’ -

The White House in a statement said that Obama expressed “his strong support for the preservation of Tibet’s unique religious, cultural, and linguistic traditions and the protection of human rights for Tibetans in the People’s Republic of China.”

The statement said that Obama backed the Dalai Lama, who fled his homeland for India in 1959, in his “Middle Way” path of peacefully advocating greater autonomy for Tibetans.

Obama called for China to resume talks with the Dalai Lama’s envoys, which broke down in 2010 after making no headway.

The statement rejected Beijing’s charges that the Dalai Lama had a separatist agenda and that his meeting was part of a plot to split China.

In a bid to follow up on Obama’s concerns, Secretary of State John Kerry on Friday tapped human rights official Sarah Sewall to fill the position of US coordinator on Tibet policy.

China calls the Dalai Lama a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying decried the meeting as “a gross interference in China’s internal affairs” which would “seriously impair China-US relations.”

- Growing human rights concerns -

Lobsang Sangay, the Tibetan prime minister-in-exile, dismissed Beijing’s criticism, saying that the Dalai Lama has clearly stated he does not have an “anti-China” agenda and is not seeking independence.

Sangay hailed Obama for holding his third meeting as president with the Dalai Lama. The two Nobel peace laureates last met in 2011.

“It sends a very powerful message to Tibetans inside Tibet because it gives them a sense of hope that their voices are heard, even by the most powerful person in the world,” Sangay told AFP.

China has for decades voiced anger at foreign dignitaries’ meetings with the Dalai Lama, who has developed a global following and addresses standing-room-only crowds across the Western world and India. He flew out later Friday to San Francisco to deliver lectures.

Human rights groups have voiced growing concern since China launched a crackdown on Tibetan demonstrations in 2008. After the unrest, more than 120 Tibetans have set themselves on fire in suicide protests against what they see as political oppression, controls on their religion and discrimination by China’s Han majority.

The visit comes on the heels of a trip to Beijing by Kerry, but well ahead of an Asia-Pacific summit there in November that Obama is expected to attend — meaning that China could not retaliate by canceling a high-profile visit.

Obama is due in Asia in April, but has no stop in China planned — though the visit will be dominated by questions over Beijing’s tense relations with its neighbors.

Obama came under domestic criticism in 2009 when he did not see the Dalai Lama during a visit to Washington, as the new president looked to start on the right foot with China.

But the optimism of the early days of the Obama presidency has dimmed, with the United States pressing China on a range of concerns including its territorial disputes with US allies Japan and the Philippines and Beijing’s alleged cyber espionage campaign.

State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said that the US-China relationship was “very broad” and that the two countries were working together on a number of issues, including Iran and North Korea.

[Image via Agence France-Presse]

FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg briefed reporters after her first official trip to India, where she met with government and industry leaders earlier this month.

India is the second largest U.S. supplier of prescription and over-the-counter drugs, and its big pharma companies Ranbaxy and Wockhardt have been hit with multiple U.S. import suspensions due to safety concerns.

“We are not targeting Indian countries. We are undertaking our required regulatory activities,” Hamburg said.

“When products are sold in the United States for use by American citizens, then those products have to meet our standards.”

Hamburg said the FDA has ramped up inspections at Indian drug plants as part of a global effort to improve safety.

The agency has 12 staff members in India, and plans to expand to 19, she added, describing the nation as “particularly important” to US food and drug trade.

“The fact that we have increased our presence in India is true but it reflects the fact that India is a very significant and growing player in the US marketplace with respect to both pharmaceutical products and food.”

While in New Delhi, Hamburg and Indian health secretary Keshav Desiraju signed their first statement of intent to cooperate in the field of medical products.

Hamburg described as “encouraging” her conversations with senior representatives during her eight-day trip to India, the United States’ third largest trading partner.

At the start of Hamburg’s visit, Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said India’s lower-cost medicines should not be viewed as “cheap and spurious.”

India’s generics industry is a major supplier of lifesaving drugs, including antiretrovirals for HIV, to the United States and over 200 other nations.

Many lower-income countries rely on the generics produced by Indian plants as a key source for affordable medicine.

But Ranbaxy, one of India’s biggest drugmakers, has been hit repeatedly with FDA import suspensions, most recently in January, when a fourth manufacturing plant was cited for violations from expected “good manufacturing practice.”

Roger Bate, an expert at the American Enterprise Institute, said the problem lies with India’s national regulatory body for pharmaceuticals, the Central Drugs Standard Control Organization.

“I believe the Indian generics companies can make the products well, but it is the lack of oversight,” Bate told AFP, describing CDSCO as “corrupt.”

“India does not take drug regulatory matters seriously.”

The FDA issued earlier its first-ever ban on tobacco products on four varieties of hand-rolled cigarettes called bidis by an Indian company headquartered in Illinois, Jash International.

Last year, the United States also raised concern about high rates of contaminants, including salmonella, in Indian spices.

[Image via Agence France-Presse]

The seemingly far-fetched initiative, sponsored by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper, claims “political representation of California’s diverse population and economies has rendered the state nearly ungovernable.”

And on Tuesday, the California Secretary of State’s office gave the movement a boost, saying that proponents “may begin collecting petition signatures.”

At least 807,615 voters will need to sign the petition by July 18 to make it onto the ballot.

The proposal aims to split the state — America’s most populous with around 38 million inhabitants — into “six smaller state governments, while preserving the historical boundaries of the various counties, cities and towns.”

In 2012, California was tied with Russia and Italy — all with a GDP of approximately $2.0 trillion — for eighth place in world GDP rankings, according to the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy.

The proposal would create a state out of Silicon Valley, home to tech giants Google, Facebook and Apple. It would also create South California, which would include Hollywood and the US entertainment industry.

West California, Central California, North California, and Jefferson in the most northern part of the state, would also go it alone.

According to the proposal, voters overwhelming approved dividing California in two in 1859, but Congress did not act due to the Civil War.

Draper, who has funded more than 400 companies including Skype and Baidu, is founder of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson in Menlo Park, California.

[Image via Agence France-Presse]

The Huffington Post reported on Friday that Tucson-based Rocco’s Little Chicago Pizzeria put up a sign reading, “We reserve the right to refuse service to Arizona legislators” in the wake of the passage of SB 1062 on Thursday.

“A customer posted the sign to my Facebook feed, so I printed it up and laminated it,” owner Anthony Rocco DiGrazia told the Post. “The response has been overwhelming and almost all positive from across the globe. I just want to serve dinner and own and work in a place I’m proud of. Opening the door to government-sanctioned discrimination, regardless of why, is a huge step in the wrong direction.”

The caption above the photo of the sign reads, “Funny how just being decent is starting to seem radical these days.”

The bill has yet to be signed into effect by Gov. Jan Brewer (R). Supporters argue that it would protect business owners’ religious freedom, but the measure was quickly criticized by state Democrats.

“SB 1062 permits discrimination under the guise of religious freedom,” state Senate Democratic Leader Anna Tovar was quoted as saying. “With the express consent of Republicans in this Legislature, many Arizonans will find themselves members of a separate and unequal class under this law because of their sexual orientation.”

[Image via Rocco's Little Chicago Pizzeria official Facebook page]

You’ve probably heard about the controversy, even if you don’t live in the Bay Area: Several Silicon Valley businesses provide employees free bus service from San Francisco to their campuses south of the city, a commute that takes about an hour each way. Google is only one of the companies that provide the service — Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, and Genentech also run shuttles — but “Google Bus” has come to stand for all of the large, luxury vehicles transporting employees south to their jobs every day.

Some of the bus riders have admitted that they wouldn’t live in San Francisco if they didn’t have the free service to take them to their jobs. Not only does it save them the costs of a vehicle, they can also use the time stuck in traffic to plug into the on-board wifi and get things done.

The buses are reviled by San Franciscans who say the well-paid employees are driving up rents in a city that’s already among the most expensive in the country. (The bus riders tend to be about 30, childless, and make about $100,000 a year). And worse, the buses for years have used city bus stops illegally, but are never ticketed for it.

The employee we were talking to had heard all of it, of course. But then the employee looked at us sheepishly and said we hadn’t really heard the worst of it.

It wasn’t well known outside Google, we were told, but there were even special buses for the employees who like to take their dogs with them to work.

“We call it the Google dog bus,” the employee told us.

Seriously?

After our conversation, we went right for, well, Google, and the only reference to dogs on the Google bus we found was a 2007 New York Times story which mentioned that the buses had room for dogs. But nothing about a particular vehicle set aside for dogs and their owners.

We fired off an e-mail to Google’s media office, asking for a comment about what the employee had told us. But more than a week later, we’ve had no reply.

We also contacted someone we knew had kept a close eye on the buses — Joseph Mayton, who writes for Occupy.com, and has led Occupy’s coverage of the issue.

Joseph said he hadn’t heard about a Google dog bus, but he was so intrigued by the idea, this week he went to a bus stop to interview Google employees about it on our behalf.

On Friday morning, Joseph says he spoke individually to 16 Google employees who were standing around at 18th Street and Dolores Street in the city, waiting for the bus.

“Every one of them said the company does run it, and they all actually called it the ‘Google dog bus’,” Joseph told us.

Joseph told us he’s determined to stake out bus stops until he actually spots the elusive vehicle, and can photograph dog owners getting on or off.

Being pooch-lovers, we can certainly sympathize with tech workers who want to keep their animal companions with them as they code. But we can also understand how so many San Franciscans have come to see in the Google bus a symbol of corporate privilege that enables the wealthy to get away with behavior that average folks could never even entertain. Bowing to pressure, the city last month came up with an agreement that asked the tech companies to pay a nominal amount — one dollar per stop for each vehicle — which hardly makes up for years of lawbreaking that calls for a $271 fine every time they used a city stop. (And now, that agreement is on hold, but it’s hard to imagine any tickets getting written.)

When Google’s dogs are riding to work in air-conditioned comfort, might Silicon Valley’s companies have mixed up their priorities?

[Image: "Dressed Up Dog At Gay Pride Parade" via Shutterstock]

The Democrat, who has promised to curb New York’s massive social inequality, was accused of presiding over the injustice of one set of traffic rules for him and another for ordinary people.

New York’s local CBS news channel on Thursday filmed his official vehicle as it ran two stop signs, changed lanes without signalling and went over the speed limit.

Questioned by journalists on Friday, de Blasio directed them to the police, who are responsible for his security.

The police department said the mayor’s drivers have “specialized training” based on “security as well as safety”.

“At certain times, under certain conditions, this training… may sometimes include tactics to safely keep two or more police vehicles together in formation when crossing intersections,” it said in a statement.

Just two days earlier an enthusiastic de Blasio had ordered a crackdown on dangerous driving designed to slash traffic deaths.

Not everyone was impressed.

“If Mr. de Blasio were still the righteous public advocate, he would be calling this mayor out for endangering citizens and treating himself above the law,” wrote New York Times editorialist Lawrence Downes.

“The rules haven’t changed now that Mr. de Blasio has a bigger job,” he added.

Twenty pedestrians have been killed in traffic accidents in New York since the start of the year.

[Image via Agence France-Presse]

The men from Turkey, Uzbekistan and Algeria, who are now settled in other countries, alleged Friday at a US appeals court that they were subjected to torture that included forced nudity, sexual harassment and beatings, first in Afghanistan and then at the military jail in Cuba.

Justices will make their ruling in several weeks, but one of them, Judge David Tatel, said military and civilian officials at the Pentagon had failed in their duty.

“Their job is to protect the detainees from abuse, they failed to do so,” he said.

Russell Cohen, lawyer for the men, said in the appeal: “From their earliest interactions with US soldiers and interrogators, Mr Celikgogus, Mr Sen, Mr Mert, Mr Hasam and Mr Muhammad were subjected to physical, mental and religious abuse carried out by US soldiers and/or civilians who were under the command authority of officials in the Department of Defense.”

Cohen said in the appeal that three of the men spent two more years at Guantanamo after they had been cleared for release, and “continue to suffer the physical and mental effects of their detention, abuse and torture, and the stigma of their having been detained in Guantanamo.”

“Plaintiffs were subjected to various forms of religious and cultural abuse,” he said, adding that this included the confiscation of their Korans.

The US government argues that neither US nor international law applies.

“Plaintiffs have no constitutional rights as they are non-resident aliens located outside United States sovereign territory,” it said in response.

Shayana Kadidal, senior staff attorney at the non-profit Center for Constitutional Rights, said the men’s lives had been “irreparably damaged.”

“The US government acknowledges they were wrongly imprisoned for years yet refuses to compensate them and help them rebuild their lives,” said Kadidal.

“Guantanamo may close one day, but as long as the Obama administration refuses to apologize in any way for what happened there, these men will carry their scars forever.”

[Image via Agence France-Presse]

The world’s top platinum miner Anglo American Platinum asked a labour court to rule that leaders of a month-long strike had ignored a court order banning the intimidation of non-striking workers and other activities.

The application seeks to hold officials of the hard-line Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) “in contempt of court for their conduct in breach of the interdict”, said spokeswoman Mpumi Sithole.

If upheld nearly forty AMCU leaders, including leader Joseph Mathunjwa, could face a jail sentence, or a steep fine, a member of the union’s legal team told AFP.

AMCU argues the rules are part of an interim order, that has not yet been finalised by the court.

A Pretoria court hearing the case adjourned the case until early March.

Tens of thousands of AMCU members downed tools on January 23, bringing production to a halt at hitting mining firms hard.

Anglo American Platinum has hit back with an aggressive legal strategy. Aside from the contempt of court charges the firm is seeking damages of $54 million from the union.

Major producer Impala Platinum said a four-week strike had cost the company roughly 1.38 billion ($1.23 million) rand in lost revenue.

Stop-start talks appear to have done little to narrow the gap between workers, who demand pay rises of up to 150 percent and firms willing to offer about seven percent.

This year’s strike action has not led to the levels of violence seen in 2012 — when dozens died — but incidents have been reported in the Rustenburg mining belt.

The National Union of Mineworkers, which AMCU recently ousted as the dominant group in the platinum sector, said one of its workers had been attacked with a machete and set alight on Thursday.

“There is no safety for our members who are going to work in the platinum belt,” the union said in a statement.

“Our members are intimidated and severely assaulted. It is totally unacceptable.”

[Image via Agence France-Presse]

But President Viktor Yanukovych’s dramatic decision to hold early elections and form a new unity government while granting amnesty for those involved in the violence was met with scepticism or even hostility by nearly 40,000 protesters who gathered on central Kiev’s main square — many of them frustrated the leader was not stepping down.

“Elections in December are not enough — he has to leave now,” said 34-year-old Oleh Bukoyenko, summing up the disgruntled mood of the crowd.

Ukraine’s parliament adopted a flurry of opposition-backed that still need the president’s backing before entering into force.

One of the key votes amends a law that could see fiery opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko released from a seven-year jail sentence for “abuse of power” she controversially received after Yanukovych took power in 2010.

The chamber also approved a call for the president to dismiss acting Interior Minister Vitaliy Zakharchenko — a hate figure in the opposition who is blamed for ordering the police to open fire on unarmed protesters.

The new unity government would have the authority to reverse the inflammatory decision Yanukovych made in November to ditch an historic deal promising a path to EU membership in favour of closer ties to former master Russia.

- Pact comes ‘too late’ -

But many protesters told AFP the deal represented too little and did little to repair days of vicious bloodletting in which police used snipers and armoured vehicles against demonstrators who fought back with bats and shields while wearing makeshift protection.

“It was a crime against humanity and Yanukovych should be sent to The Hague (home of the International Criminal Court),” said 58-year-old Sergiy Yanchukov.

One ultranationalist speaker grabbed the stage on Kiev’s iconic Independence Square late Friday to call on protesters to storm the president’s office at 10:00 am (0800 GMT) Saturday should Yanukovych fail to relinquish power overnight.

The call was met with cheers and rounds of applause. Several top opposition leaders meanwhile were whistled at in derision for signing the compromise agreement allowing Yanukovych to keep his post until snap elections are called by December deadline.

Kiev authorities have put the death toll from the past few days at 77.

But opposition medics said more than 60 protesters were shot dead by police on Thursday alone — a toll that combined with the 28 victims on Tuesday put the final count at nearly 100 dead.

Life appeared to be returning to normal in much of Kiev as the city’s vital metro network resumed service after being shut down for most of the week to constrain protesters’ movements.

But the radicalisation of the opposition — furious at the live ammunition used against it — was visceral. Thousands of protesters chanted “death to the criminal” on Independence Square.

- Russia refuses to sign -

The peace deal was worked out after two days of intense mediation by the foreign ministers of European powers France and Germany along with Ukraine’s cultural ally Poland. They were acting on behalf of the European Union, which had earlier imposed travel bans on Kiev leaders responsible for the violence.

“It’s the best that we could have hoped for,” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told reporters after travelling from Kiev to Bejing.

“It was very hard to reach agreement… and in a terrifying atmosphere as there were dozens of dead.”

The pact was signed in the presidential palace’s Blue Hall by Yanukovych and top opposition leaders who included charismatic boxer-turned-lawmaker Vitali Klitschko.

But Russian President Vladimir Putin’s representative pointedly skipped the meeting. Envoy Vladimir Lukin explained on his return to Moscow that it was “because several questions remain unanswered”.

“The consultations will continue,” Lukin said in comments that suggested Moscow still held out hope of somehow revising the deal.

The foreign ministry in Moscow added that Lukin’s lack of signature did not mean that “Russia does not want compromise”. Russia has already blasted the EU sanctions as “bullying”.

The Russian stance underlined tensions between the West and Russia over Ukraine. Each side accused the other of exacerbating problems in a nation whose population is divided in pro-West and pro-Russian camps.

The US government welcomed the deal and commended the “courageous opposition leaders” for their compromise.

A US official said on Friday that President Barack Obama intended to speak to Putin about Ukraine later in the day.

One possible challenge to implementating the peace pact remains the fractured state of the opposition.

It has no one leader and quite disparate goals.

Klitschko is the closest to the deeply fragmented protest movement but limits to his sway over the most militant elements of the opposition has been repeatedly exposed in the course of the standoff.

“Even early elections this December do not guarantee that this crisis is over,” said Penta political research institute analyst Volodymyr Fesenko.

“The big question now is whether the Maidan (Independence Square) support this solution.”

[Image via Agence France-Presse]

“We will be obliged to suspend the supply of fuel to areas under fascist siege in order to preserve the security of all,” Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez warned on Twitter, in the latest move to squelch more than two weeks of growing anti-government demonstrations.

Ramirez, who also heads the state oil company, provided no precise details on when or where gasoline supplies could be withheld.

But such a measure would add another hardship for residents already struggling with shortages of basic necessities, soaring inflation and rampant crime — grievances at the root of the escalating protests.

At least five people have been killed since the unrest started in the western state of Tachira in reaction to the attempted rape and robbery of a university student.

Maduro, who succeeded the late Hugo Chavez, has also threatened to suspend constitutional guarantees in Tachira and on Thursday his government said it was deploying a battalion of paratroopers to the state capital San Cristobal, near the border with Colombia.

The opposition is planning a major march in Caracas on Saturday to demand the disarming of pro-government civilian groups reportedly involved in attacks on demonstrators.

The government has called for a rival rally by “Chavista women” at the same time, the second time this week it has raised the specter of clashes between the two sides.

[Image via Agence France-Presse]

Derrick Grayson, an engineer and minister, regularly uploads videos to YouTube of himself speaking about various topics while driving. Grayson, who is running to replace retiring Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss, describes himself as a “Ron Paul Republican” in his videos, and often attacks the Republican and Democrat “royals.”

In two videos uploaded on February 15, the Senate hopeful lashed out at the Georgia Republican Assembly for excluding him from a recent straw poll, saying it was a symbol of a larger problem within the Republican Party.

“Now this is not the press doing the exclusion,” he said. “Remember, if you listened to me in the last debate in my closing remark… I pointed out the GOP is the one who has a mandate for more inclusion. I said don’t talk to me about inclusion when you have a party that sits silent at the shenanigans of the press at the behest of their corporate owners and these shoe-string-dangled reporters that do their bidding. Here this is an organization, a Republican organization, engaged in the same shenanigans. So, it is not the press.”

“I’d like to see what the GOP is going to say to them. ‘Hey, dammit, didn’t we tell you we had a national mandate to be more inclusive, don’t you know that we lost the last damn race because of the black vote? What are you trying to do? Hurt us even more?’ It makes you wonder.”

Grayson said the Georgia Republican Assembly was probably “full of a bunch of damn bigots” and “racists.” He warned that minority candidates would continue to be sidelined unless people stood up to the Republican Party, the media, and other conservative organizations that engage in “flagrant bigotry and exclusion.”

“I’m coming and they can’t stop me whether they like it or not,” Grayson concluded.

In a second video, the Senate hopeful stated he finds the term “African-American” offense and doesn’t celebrate Black History Month because it was instituted to pacify black people. He then continued his criticism of the Georgia Republican Assembly.

“I don’t go to the press and asked them to cover me,” Grayson remarked. “Only thing I’ve ever said was they ought to tell the damn truth. And I’m not going to go to the GRA and ask them to retract what they did. Now I know who they are and what they are. I can deal with the enemy I can see, and that is that. So I don’t give a damn if you didn’t put my name on the poll, it does not make me matter less.”

He said the situation reflected a problem within the GOP.

“How can you call for a national mandate to be more inclusive, yet you’ve got these organizations running around under the mantle of the Republican Party, the GOP, yet they engage in such nonsense? No wonder many black folk don’t want to have a damn thing to do with you.”

In a statement on its Facebook page, the conservative group insisted it did not purposefully exclude Grayson.

“Let us also be clear we are a separate organization from the Georgia Republican Party. The GRA is a separate grassroots organization with a diverse membership that edifies principled Republican participation by all,” they wrote after Grayson published his videos.

Watch the videos below.

Video of the exchange, which can be seen below, identifies the “Combatants” as the Coalition for Family Values and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), although the real combatants appear to be a Russian LGBT activist and Dr. Scott Lively, who the SPLC identifies as an anti-LGBT activist.

As the video begins, one of the speakers for Defend Family International, which was holding what it called a “Pro-Russian, Pro-Family” press conference, is interrupted by an activist speaking in Russian. Another activist repeats what is held on a pink sign in the background, “Stop killing us.”

“Stop killing speech,” Dr. Lively replies. “This is not your forum.”

A representative for the Southern Poverty Law Center told Raw Story that, given Dr. Lively’s support of the criminalization of LGBT expression in Russia, his claim that this protestor is “killing speech” makes Dr. Lively “a screaming hypocrite.”

A woman then offers to translate what the activist wants to say, but Dr. Lively insists that “we’re not going to take comments until after we’ve had our press conference.”

“We paid a sizable fee for the use of this room, and we are not going to allow our press conference to be overrun by political activists.”

When the activist insists on speaking, Dr. Lively says, “this is what I would like to bring to the attention of everyone in this room — this is what we call ‘homo-fascism.’”

“‘Homo-fascism,’” he continues, “is a hard-left, totalitarian mindset that attempts to suppress all perspectives on the homosexual issue except those that favor their positions.”

“Every time the pro-family people try to tell the truth about homosexuality,” Dr. Lively says, “we are interrupted by homo-fascists. Now, I would like to ask if there is security here…because I would like to ask you to remove these two people from the press conference.”

Lively and Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality were holding the press conference in D.C. to issue a statement in support of Russia’s ban on gay “propaganda” and urge other nations to follow suit.

Watch video of the exchange below.

The teacher in the unsourced video posted to YouTube, is identified as Jason Glicker,  and was filmed as he spoke to a classroom at Grosse Pointe North High School in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.

In the video , Glicker explains that the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI is “funded indirectly by the CIA, so, whether they knew it or not, they were funding the terrorists.”

He then explains that 9/11′s Mohamed Atta couldn’t have been a Muslim extremist because he had been living in the U.S. for years and, “He had an American girlfriend. He was supposedly addicted to cocaine.”

Glick adds, “Muslim’s don’t do drugs, they don’t date American women.”

He then notes that the 9/11 hijackers were “just paid thugs” and that they had probably been “brainwashed by MKUltra”.

MkUltra was a secret CIA program begun back in the 50′s now known for experimenting with biological and chemical agents on American citizens without their knowledge.

Glicker also suggests that 1978 Jonestown massacre was likely an “off-shoot of the MKUltra program” where the plan was, “Oh, let’s see if we can get everyone in the village to kill themselves.”

Further topics discussed include Operation Gladio, how President Franklin Roosevelt let Pearl Harbor happen to allow America to enter World War II, and the Iran-Contra scandal where American generals during the Reagan administration traded guns to South American cartels for cocaine which they , in turn,  sold in America.

Watch the video below:

[Boy in a tin foil hat via Shutterstock]

According to Spin, Cobain “was arrested in the town, never spoke too kindly of it, and, um, wasn’t the most wholesome figure.”

On the occasion of what would have been Cobain’s 47th birthday, Aberdeen debuted the statue, which portrays the singer with a tear running down his cheek. Mayor Bill Simpson told Seattle’s King 5 News that the town’s goal is to become “the next Graceland” and establish itself as a Nirvana tourism destination.

A delegation consisting of Cobain’s first guitar teacher, one of Nirvana’s early drummers, and the statue’s artist, Randi Hubbard were on hand for the unveiling.

Cobain committed suicide in 1994 after struggling with heroin addiction and depression. He was survived by widow Courtney Love and their daughter Frances Bean Cobain.

Watch video about this story, embedded below:

Illinois lawmakers approved same-sex marriage late in 2013, effective on June 1, and several couples had sued Cook County Clerk David Orr for the right to marry immediately.

“There is no reason to delay further when no opposition has been presented to this court and committed gay and lesbian couples have already suffered from the denial of their fundamental right to marry,” said U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman in Chicago.

Coleman in December had ruled that Cook County same-sex couples could obtain an emergency marriage license ahead of June if one partner had a life-threatening illness, and some same-sex couples have been issued a license on that basis.

On Friday, she said the Illinois ban on same-sex marriage until June violated the couples’ rights to equal protection under the U.S. Constitution, but her finding only applied to Cook County, based on the case brought to her.

In all, 17 states, including Illinois, and the District of Columbia recognize gay marriage in a trend that has gained momentum since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that legally married same-sex couples are eligible for federal benefits.

(Reporting by David Bailey in Minneapolis; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Gunna Dickson)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama on Friday singled out New Jersey’s embattled Republican Governor Chris Christie for criticism for balking at a push to raise the minimum wage, a move favored by most Americans.

During a meeting with top advisors and a group of 14 Democratic governors at the White House, Obama said Republican governors were out of touch with their constituents on the issue.

“For example, in New Jersey, even though the Republican governor opposed it, it passed by 60 percent,” he said, referring to Christie’s veto on a state wage hike that later became a ballot initiative approved by voters.

Obama wants to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour from the current $7.25. Polls show three quarters of Americans favor the plan.

The proposal has little chance of approval by Congress. The Congressional Budget Office said it would lead to the loss of about half a million jobs by late 2016, even as it lifts almost a million people out of poverty.

The meeting on Friday focused on state initiatives to raise the minimum wage. Obama made a similar jab at Christie, a potential 2016 Republican presidential candidate, during a dinner on Thursday with the Democratic governors.

“Governor Christie opposed it; it got 60 percent of the vote — because voters understood this is the right thing to do, and it will be good for the economy, not bad for the economy,” he said.

Christie’s national political ambitions have been threatened recently by the disclosure of his aides’ roles in the New Jersey lane closures for the George Washington Bridge, which caused days of traffic in the town of Fort Lee. Emails show that his staff closed the lanes in September after Fort Lee’s Democratic mayor declined to support Christie’s re-election bid last year.

(Reporting by Roberta Rampton)

When Michelle Childress arrived at Washington Elementary School, other teachers noticed the smell of alcohol on her breath and the fact that she could only barely stand up. They called police, and because they did not want her driving, prevented her from returning to her car until they arrived.

Childress, who had once taught full-time at the school, told police that she was at the elementary school because “they asked me to sub today so I did, I subbed, but only for a couple of hours.”

When police asked her what she had taken in addition to alcohol, she claimed that “that’s it, I drank a little bit before I came.”

“So you drank then you came up here to sub? That’s not too good of a decision,” the police officer replied.

“No, but I mean, it’s not a bad decision,” Childress said.

The officer replied, “it is a bad decision. You’re coming to a school intoxicated and trying to sub.”

“No, I’m not intoxicated,” Childress insisted.

“You are intoxicated,” the officer replied. “You can’t even stand up.”

Police then arrested her on public intoxication charges. She refused a field sobriety test, but agreed to have her blood-alcohol level tested when she arrived at jail. Her results indicated that she was three times over the legal limit.

Childress is known locally for having appeared on an episode of The Dr. Phil Show in which she admitted to having a “phobia” that caused her to become violently ill when she saw obese people eating.

Watch KFOR’s coverage of the incident, including footage of the arrest, below.

According to WBTV in Charlotte, North Carolina, officer Thomas E. Allen was arrested by CMPD detectives and charged with four counts of secretly using a photographic device to view another’s body and four counts of possessing photographic images in violation of the peeping statute.

At the time of his arrest Allen was listed as the Internship Coordinator for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Training Academy, working with high school kids attempting to interest them in careers in law enforcement.

According to police, the investigation began in October 2013 and found that Allen possessed four images of juvenile females as they participated at various activities that he allegedly took using a 35 millimeter camera using a zoom lens.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Rodney Monroe said the high school students were doing things like sit-ups and push-ups when the pictures were taken without their consent.

“We’re talking about physical activities where people were wearing loose-fitting clothes,” Chief Monroe told WBTV. “So the pictures were taken during those physical activities where by virtue of them wearing loose-fitting clothes he was able to zoom in.”

“He committed these offenses in the presence of other people,” Monroe added. “So it was not based on him being alone with anyone. It was just based on his unlawful sneaky ways in trying to capture these photographs.”

Allen was hired by the CMPD on March 27, 1996, and was most recently assigned to the Recruiting Division of the Police Training Academy.

Watch the video below from WBTV:

WBTV 3 News, Weather, Sports, and Traffic for Charlotte, NC

According to the Cherokee Tribune, freshman Georgia Rep. Sam Moore (R-Macedonia) said that once they satisfy the terms of their parole, sex offenders have “done their time” and should be allowed to go forth unhindered by intrusive government supervision.

Moore’s HB 1033 would overturn the crime of loitering and loosen restrictions on convicted sex offenders, enabling them to go anywhere they like, including schools, church youth functions, parks and playgrounds. Moore said that the risk of recidivism is outweighed by the increase in freedom.

“I am OK with that,” he told the Tribune. “The reason I’m OK with that is the assumption is they have done their time. If they’re still a danger to society, they should not be free.”

“Am I saying it’s not creepy?” he asked. “It’s definitely creepy,” but worth it to avoid big government’s infringement on personal liberties.

“In my 34 years of law enforcement I have never heard of such an insane law having been introduced,” said Cherokee Sheriff Roger Garrison Friday. “Sexual predators are one of this country’s most violent (type of) offenders. If there’s any equal it would be an out-and-out serial killer.”

Garrison said that to allow sexual predators to “once again lurk around our parks, around our schools, around our swimming pools” is unacceptable.

Cherokee Superintendent of Schools Dr. Frank Petruzielo told the Tribune by email, “The School District is strongly opposed to any legislation that would allow predators the opportunity to endanger our students, which it appears this bill would do.”

Anti-loitering laws are a key law enforcement tool in keeping adult sexual predators away from children, but Moore feels that they are unconstitutional in that they compel suspects to identify themselves to the police. HB 1033 would forbid police from forcing residents to identify themselves under any circumstances.

Moore said that he is protecting the Fifth Amendment, which protects citizens’ right to remain silent.

Sheriff Garrison blasted the bill’s potential to make law enforcement impossible.

“It’s insane,” he said. “If you can’t check them, how are you going to know who they are? They could be wanted for murder down the street.”

One of Moore’s fellow Republican lawmakers unloaded on him at the state House session on Friday morning.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution quoted Rep. John Pezold (R-Fortson) as saying, “I am shocked and appalled anyone would suggest that pedophiles should be allowed to loiter near day care centers, schools — the places where our children learn and play.”

“If Mr. Moore’s mission was to come down to the state Capitol and alienate his colleagues by staking out positions that no one in their right mind could agree with,” Pezold continued, “he can now hang a ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner behind him because he has done just that.”

[image of Rep. Sam Moore via Facebook]

NEW YORK (Reuters) – New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office said on Friday he remained committed to reducing speed limits and cutting down on traffic deaths in the city, a day after a local television news crew captured his convoy speeding and ignoring stop signs.

The driving incident comes after the new mayor rolled out an extensive, 63-point “Vision Zero” plan this week to tackle traffic deaths.

His proposals include reducing many city speed limits to 25 miles per hour from 30 miles per hour, and increasing the number of speed-tracking cameras.

“Our lives are literally in each other’s hands,” de Blasio said in outlining the plan on Tuesday on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where three pedestrians were killed last month.

De Blasio’s caravan was filmed by a crew from WCBS-TV driving up to 15 miles per hour above the speed limit and blasting past two stop signs as the mayor sat in the passenger seat of the lead car.

The convoy was driving through Queens after de Blasio attended an event to speak about road safety and pothole repairs, WCBS-TV said.

The mayor’s office would not confirm that the caravan was flouting traffic laws but said he “remained committed to the traffic safety policies outlined this week.”

De Blasio’s office referred further questions to the New York Police Department.

The police issued a statement saying officers in charge of the mayor’s transportation “receive specialized training in driving, based on maintaining security as well as safety.”

“The handling of police vehicles transporting any protectee is determined solely by police personnel based on their specialized training in executive protection and professional judgment,” it said.

(Reporting by Victoria Cavaliere; Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst and Gunna Dickson)

The Federal Tribunal found in favour of a police officer who had used the slurs when he arrested an Algerian suspected thief.

The incident took place at a trade fair in the northern city of Basel in April 2007, where the Algerian was detained for allegedly snatching a Russian man’s bag.

After checking the suspect’s identity papers, the policeman discovered that he was an asylum-seeker and proceed to insult him.

A court sentenced the officer to a suspended fine for breaking the country’s anti-racism laws.

After the penalty was overturned on appeal, the case worked its way up to the top of the Swiss justice system.

The Federal Tribunal said that while such terms were clearly insulting, they were too broad to fall foul of anti-racism rules because they did not target a particular ethnic group, race or religion.

It also said calling someone “dirty” — even if the individual’s nationality was mentioned — was not against the anti-racism law.

The court ruling was published as the UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) issued its findings from a review of Switzerland’s record, a regular procedure for signatory states.

CERD member Anastasia Crickley, who was in charge of the review, said of the court ruling: “It sounds to me like a very good case for the recommendation that we have made, that what’s needed in Switzerland is a clear definition of direct and indirect racial discrimination and legislation.”

She said the CERD was also concerned about referendums in Switzerland on toughening immigration and asylum rules and banning the construction of Muslim minarets.

On February 9, Swiss voters narrowly approved scrapping rules that gave European Union citizens free access to their labour market, after campaigners argued the neutral country was being “swamped”.

“Migration laws are needed, but we’re concerned at the increasingly protectionist way in which these are being encapsulated and presented, and the xenophobic tone overall that tends to be associated with them,” Crickley said.

[Gavel via Shutterstock]

Border Force units will be tasked with spotting potential victims of so-called modern slavery, collecting intelligence on trafficking victims and disrupting organised crime gangs.

The first specialist team will start working on April 1 at London Heathrow, the world’s busiest airport for international passengers.

Teams will also start operating at Britain’s second and third air hubs — London Gatwick and Manchester — later this year, with further airports to follow.

The measures were announced by Karen Bradley, the new modern slavery and organised crime minister at the Home Office.

“Our frontline Border Force officers are aware that they could be the first authority figure in the UK to have contact with a potential victim of modern slavery,” she said.

“Their role is vital in identifying and protecting victims and ensuring there is no easy route into the UK for traffickers.”

She said they would be supported by the National Crime Agency, Britain’s equivalent of the FBI, “which will bring its child protection expertise to bear in cases involving children”.

Juvenile victims of trafficking would be given specialist support.

Modern-day slavery includes slavery itself, plus slavery-like practices — such as debt bondage, forced marriage and the sale or exploitation of children — human trafficking and forced labour.

The government hopes to get the draft Modern Slavery Bill into law before the general election in May 2015. It would introduce tougher sentences for human traffickers.

The inaugural Global Slavery Index, published in October by the Walk Free Foundation estimated there were 4,200 to 4,600 people in modern slavery in Britain.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said the pact was “consistent with what we have advocated in calling for a de-escalation of the violence, constitutional change, a coalition government, and early elections.”

“We support the efforts of all those who negotiated this agreement, commend the courageous opposition leaders who recognized the need for compromise, and offer the support of the United States in its implementation,” Carney said.

“We call for immediate implementation of the initial steps — an end to the violence, amnesty and security normalization, and passage of the constitutional package in (parliament) — to provide space for the negotiations to begin on formation of a technocratic coalition government.”

Vice President Joe Biden had called Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych on Thursday warning that the United States was ready to impose sanctions if he did not halt attacks by his security forces on demonstrators which have killed nearly 100 people.

President Barack Obama had also earlier warned of “consequences” if the violence did not stop.

Yanukovych’s dramatic decision to hold early elections and form a new unity government was met with caution by tens of thousands gathered on central Kiev’s main square for a protest that began three months ago.

The deal was signed in the presence of EU envoys, Yanukovych and three top opposition leaders who included boxer turned lawmaker Vitali Klitschko.

But Russian President Vladimir Putin’s representative missed the meeting. The White House statement however said the deal had been “witnessed” by Russia.

The constitutional change was approved within minutes of the deal’s signature by 386 deputies in the 450-set Verkhovna Rada parliament.

According to the Sacramento Bee, the attorney-dentist-real estate agent from Orange County, California is attempting to appear on the statewide ballot in a long-shot bid to oust California Attorney General Kamala Harris.

Taitz, who ran as a Republican for California Secretary of State in 2010, and for a U.S. Senate seat in 2012 garnering three percent of the vote, has filed paperwork listing no party affiliation.

According to her platform, Taitz would rein in unconstitutional spying on state residents, and end the “unconstitutional discriminatory Obamacare tax levied on some of the citizens of CA and waived for corporations.”

As that states top lawmaker she would also “prosecute state officials who ignored all evidence brought by law enforcement and experts showing Obama to possess citizenship of Indonesia, fabricated Selective Service certificate, fabricated birth certificate and a CT Social Security number which failed both E-verify and SSNVS.”

In 2010, Taitz was ordered by the US Supreme Court to pay a fine of $20,000 for a ‘frivolous’ suit she filed on behalf on an Army captain who refused deployment to Iraq, arguing that the orders weren’t legitimate because  Obama is not eligible to be President.

According to a press release from the Law Offices of Orly Taitz, she has acquired the necessary amount of signatures to appear on the ballot and is now fundraising to cover the filing fees.

Incumbent Attorney General Kamala Harris, a Democrat with more than $3 million in her reelection war chest, said she isn’t taking anything for granted ahead of next month’s filing deadline.

According to the Courant, Gallo quit his $150,000-per-year job a day after FBI agents established an investigative office in a room inside the House Republicans’ suite of offices at the state legislature. The FBI agents allegedly asked Republican House members and their staffers whether they had ever been “encouraged” to use Direct Mail Systems Inc., of Clearwater, Florida.

The “Political Services” of Direct Mail Systems’s current website claims that information about their involvement in campaigns will be “Coming Soon.” However, archived versions of website indicate that the company encouraged potential clients not to trust radio and television spots, but to rely on printed material to get their message out to voters.

“Even if a candidates budget can support TV or radio spots,” Direct Mail Systems previously claimed, “it is generally advised that, given the ease at which ‘sound-bytes’ are manipulated and taken out of context, positions on important and potentially complex issues are usually best defined in print.”

Connecticut Republicans have paid the company approximately $2 million since 2008 for such services.

When asked about the investigation, Gallo’s former boss, House Republican leader Larry Cafero said, “Folks, we just learned of this investigation yesterday. We are trying to gather some facts. I have a full statement I want to issue to all of you. Right now, I am in the process of speaking with my staff and my caucus.”

In that statement, Cafero wrote that “Our Chief of Staff George Gallo today offered his opinion that he is a person of interest of the investigation. As such, he indicated he did not want to cause unwarranted distractions to the caucus that would take away from their legislative duties.”

The FBI is reportedly investigating whether Republicans and their staffers received illegal kickbacks for the unnecessary services offered by Direct Mailing Systems.

Watch WFSB 3′s report on Gallo’s resignation below.

WFSB 3 Connecticut

“This influenza season was particularly hard on younger and middle-aged adults,” said the CDC is its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. “People ages 18-64 represented 61 percent of all hospitalizations from influenza — up from the previous three seasons when this age group represented only about 35 percent of all such hospitalizations. Influenza deaths followed the same pattern; more deaths than usual occurred in this younger age group.”

“Younger people may feel that influenza is not a threat to them, but this season underscores that flu can be a serious disease for anyone,” said CDC director Dr. Thomas Frieden.

“It’s important that everyone get vaccinated,” Frieden continued. “It’s also important to remember that some people who get vaccinated may still get sick, and we need to use our second line of defense against flu: antiviral drugs to treat flu illness. People at high risk of complications should seek treatment if they get a flu-like illness. Their doctors may prescribe antiviral drugs if it looks like they have influenza.”

The 2014 flu season marks the return of the H1N1 swine flu virus, which killed thousands in 2009. While scientists and physicians are not happy to see the return of the deadly flu strain, the current influenza vaccine is very effective against H1N1 infections.

“The good news is that this season’s vaccine is doing its job, protecting people across all age groups,” said Frieden.

Tara Culp-Resser at Think Progress wrote, “The stories of unexpected deaths have been heartbreaking cautionary tales. In Arkansas, a woman lost her unborn child after coming down with H1N1, only to lose her own life a month later. Another pregnant woman in Los Angeles also recently passed away. In San Francisco, a healthy 47-year-old woman who worked at a local ABC News affiliate died from the flu just a few days after she started feeling sick — and now, her family is urging strangers to get their vaccinations.”

California is bearing the brunt of the H1N1 outbreak so far, with 243 deaths of people under the age of 65. By this point in the 2003 season, only 26 people under 65 had died.

[image of young man getting flu shot from doctor via Shutterstock.com]

Dr. Spencer, a former NASA climatologist who has testified before Congress on climate issues, says that it is “time to push back” against scientists and politicians who use the term ‘denier’.

“When politicians and scientists started calling people like me “deniers”, they crossed the line. They are still doing it. They indirectly equate (1) the skeptics’ view that global warming is not necessarily all manmade nor a serious problem, with (2) the denial that the Nazi’s extermination of millions of Jews ever happened,” he wrote. “Too many of us for too long have ignored the repulsive, extremist nature of the comparison. It’s time to push back. I’m now going to start calling these people ‘global warming Nazis’ .”

Although there is an overwhelming consensus among scientists that anthropogenic global climate change is real, there remain small pockets of skeptics who explicitly deny global warming.

Dr. Spencer claims these voices are not being heard, stating “Dissenting scientific views are now jack-booted through tactics like pressuring scientific journals to not publish papers with which they disagree…even getting journal editors to resign.”

About the “global warming nazis”, he writes , “Like the Nazis, they advocate the supreme authority of the state (fascism), which in turn supports their scientific research to support their cause (in the 1930s, it was superiority of the white race).”

He adds, “Like the Nazis, they are anti-capitalist. They are willing to sacrifice millions of lives of poor people at the altar of radical environmentalism, advocating expensive energy policies that increase poverty. And if there is a historically demonstrable threat to humanity, it is poverty.”

Dr. Spencer, who teaches at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, blames global climate change consensus on “authoritarianism”,  writing, “This authoritarianism tends to happen with an over-educated elite class…I have read that Nazi Germany had more PhDs per capita than any other country. I’m not against education, but it seems like some of the stupidest people are also the most educated.”

[Nazi image via Shutterstock]

The employees, who were working at McDonalds under a cultural exchange program, said they were forced to work shifts that ran longer than a day and pay for housing in the basement of the franchisee, where their rent was nearly in line with what they were paid. They had come to the United States under the State Department’s Summer Work travel program; some had paid $3,000 on the promise of full-time work but were given only a handful of hours a week.

“Nothing that they told me is true, because everything [was] a lie,” onetime employee Luis Fernando Suarez told Salon’s Josh Eidelson last year. He said the program had “like an ugly face of the United States … I didn’t feel safe.”

Most of the students came to the U.S. from Latin America and Asia under the Summer Work program, ”to experience and to be exposed to the people and way of life in the United States.”

Instead, they were put to work at McDonald’s in Pennsylvania, under franchisee Andy Cheung. According to the settlement, Cheung forced the students to work  long hours without paying overtime and deducted money from their paychecks as “rent” for having them sleep on bunkbeds in his basement.

Fifteen students filed complaints with the Labor Department and staged a strike. Cheung was later forced to sell his restaurants by McDonald’s.

“Mr. Cheung is no longer a McDonald’s franchisee, and we have no knowledge of the settlement,” a McDonald’s spokeswoman told MarketWatch following the settlement, which was announced Tuesday. ” We take the well-being of employees working in McDonald’s restaurants, including foreign student workers, seriously.”

But is Cheung an exception?

Salon’s Eidelson suggests not. In interviews with the students and their advocates, he paints a picture of individuals being exploited under U.S. immigration laws.

“The conditions at this McDonald’s were not the exception, but rather an extreme version of the rule,”  he quotes National Guestworker Alliance director Saket Soni as saying. “If the workers didn’t go on strike, I don’t think any of this would have come out.”

“[It's'] a shame that workers have to go that far just to be paid the meager salary that they earned, but that was stolen from them,” Soni added.

Undocumented workers also face retaliation for reporting rights abuses. Antonio Vanegas, 26, told Huffington Post last July that his employer had no problems with his immigration status until he accused him of withholding his wages.

Vanegas said he was paid under the table at $6.50 per hour, well below Washington, D.C.’s $8.25 minimum wage. He claims he worked more than 40 hour weeks but was never paid time and a half, as federal law requires. After taking part in a one-day strike and being featured in an In These Times story, he was stopped by an agent of a Homeland Security division coming to work.

Now the Guatemalan migrant is stuck in deportation proceedings.

“This country is a country of laws,” Vanegas, 26, told the Post. “Regardless of my status, I should have some protections based on the labor laws that have been violated.”

The National Guest Worker Alliance’s Soni agreed. She told Eidelson migrant workers can help the push for raising fast food wages, saying, “workers who are at the bottom … are the most vulnerable, but they can also be ones who move to action and raise the floor for everyone else.”

Of the 291 employees Cheung settled with, 178 were foreign  workers. The Labor Department slapped Cheung with a $5,000 fine.

Video of the students training for a protest on workers’ rights and encouraging other workers to fight for theirs inside a franchise, along with interviews with workers, follows.

[Photo credit: Shutterstock]

The students, who are white, surrounded the black wrestling dummy dressed in a Paulsboro High School t-shirt. According to the 2010 census, 36.7 percent of residents of Paulsboro, New Jersey are African-American, compared to only 7.5 percent of Phillipsburgh.

Attorney Scott Wilhelm, speaking on behalf of the students, said that “[w]hen we spontaneously set the scene and posed for the photograph, our sole purpose was to promote school spirit and portray our wrestling team as victor over two of our archrivals — Paulsboro High School and Kittatinny High School, and not for any other purpose.”

Wilhelm insisted that the dummy was not meant to represent a person of any particular race: “The inanimate figure in the photograph is a wrestling dummy, which is owned by the Phillipsburg High School, and is used in our daily practices, and is used by most high school wrestling teams.”

“It is our understanding,” Wilhelm said, “that the dummies are manufactured in only dark leather. In outfitting the wrestling dummy, we did not give any thought to the physical appearance of the dummy as anything other than an unidentified, generic wrestler – clothed in a Paulsboro T-shirt over a Kittatinny [High School] singlet. Likewise, our dress was standard wrestling uniforms, and our poses were not premeditated, but rather, spontaneous gestures without any forethought.”

According to Wilhelm, the students’ minds were “clouded” by their recent success in a tournament, but now understand that others may have found their celebration offensive, “however innocently intended.”

One Paulsboro wrestler, Zach Richard, told a CBS 2 reporter that there was nothing “innocent” about it, saying “I think they knew what they was doing.”

The Executive Director of the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association (NJSIAA), Steven Timko, said that the photograph “violates the principles of good sportsmanship and is a flagrant violation of the NJSIAA Sportsmanship Rule.” It demonstrated a “fundamental disrespect” for opponents and used “violent imagery that has no place in high school sports.”

Watch a report on the incident from CBS 2 below.

The line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth might easily have been written about the legacy of World War I.

As the guns fell silent in 1918, the victors all agreed on one thing: Germany must pay.

How much was a matter of debate but there was never any doubt that the post-war settlement enshrined in the Treaty of Versailles was going to be punitive.

Germany did pay, but it was not alone. A century on, the world lives with the consequences of a peace accord that, even at the time, was criticised as making another war in Europe inevitable.

The economist J.M. Keynes, then a British Treasury official, resigned rather than be associated with a Treaty he denounced as “Carthaginian” in its harshness. France’s Marshal Ferdinand Foch judged it “not so much a peace as a 20-year armistice.”

The “war to end all wars” turned out to be the exact opposite. By ensuring Germany’s economic ruin and political humiliation, the post-war settlement laid the foundations — or at least provided fertile ground — for the rise of Nazism and the horrors that ensued.

- Famine, Terror and the Cold War -

Just as important, the war served as the incubator for the 1917 Russian Revolution.

Against a backdrop of desperate food shortages, military failure left the Tsarist state crippled and vulnerable to an assault by Lenin’s Bolsheviks.

A civil war ensued in which the Western powers offered backing for counter-revolutionary forces. But war-fatigue restricted the scale of intervention and ultimately Lenin and co. won and established the Soviet Union as an authoritarian Communist state.

Disastrous agricultural policies resulted in more than three million people dying in the famine of the early 1930s, millions more under the Great Terror unleashed by Lenin’s successor, Joseph Stalin.

By the mid-1930s, all the conditions were in place for the post-World War II division of Europe.

That in turn produced the Cold War and its associated carve-up of the rest of the planet into Western or Soviet spheres of influence and an unstable global equilibrium that helped to fuel countless conflicts across the developing world.

- A lasting mark on the Middle East -

The first World War also left a lasting mark on the Middle East. By encouraging an Arab revolt, Britain helped precipitate the collapse of the Germany-allied Ottoman Empire.

A secular Turkey emerged and Britain and France assumed post-war control of much of the Arab world.

By then, Britain had also declared, through the 1917 Balfour declaration, its support for the principle of a Jewish state on land it had pledged to the Arabs.

The creation of Israel might still have never happened but, by the end of WWI, it was a much more realistic prospect than it had been at the start.

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire also resulted in the killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians in what they see as a genocide.

The world’s muted response to the massacres is credited by some historians with inspiring Hitler to think he could get away with annihilating the Jews.

- A new social order -

Events in Russia cast a long shadow over the rest of Europe, generating a fear of upheaval that helped accelerate reforms while also inspiring other revolutionaries, including the nascent fascist movement that was soon to seize power in Italy.

Worker uprisings in Germany and Hungary in the immediate aftermath of WWI were crushed or collapsed internally.

But waves of militancy in other countries — in the Fiat factories of Turin, Italy or the shipyards of Scotland’s Red Clydeside — delivered major advances in terms of working conditions and the rights of trade unions to represent their members.

More broadly, the aftermath of World War I was a period of rapid social progress in much of the industrialised world. This was most notable in terms of women’s right to vote, which, in the popular memory, is often seen as having been “earned” through female participation in war-related activities.

This version of events is challenged by some historians who argue that political moves towards equal voting rights were underway before 1914 and may actually have been delayed by war.

The notion of women entering the industrial workforce for the first time as a result of the war is also one that has been challenged recently.

Less obvious positive legacies of a war which left millions maimed or traumatised were greater social acceptance of people with disabilities and the destigmatisation of mental illness.

Some art historians have described the war as having interrupted a great artistic flowering that occurred in the opening decade of the century.

But it undoubtedly also spurred new waves of creativity.

Poetry was revived as an art form across the world, Dadaism, the avant-garde art movement, was born and led in turn to Surrealism, and Jazz, brought to Europe by American soldiers, became the soundtrack for the escapism and innovation of the “roaring ’20s”.

(Reuters) – Farm workers, children and other people working or living near farm fields would have more protection from hazardous pesticides under changes proposed on Thursday by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“Today marks an important milestone for the farm workers who plant, tend, and harvest the food that we put on our tables each day,” Gina McCarthy, EPA administrator, said in a statement.

EPA is proposing revisions to the agency’s 22-year-old “Worker Protection Standard” that EPA officials say will help protect approximately 2 million U.S. farm workers and their families from exposure to pesticides used to protect crops from weeds, insects, and disease.

The EPA said pesticides are beneficial tools in agriculture when used in proper concentrations and with proper protections.

U.S. scientists are studying how human health is affected by the use of herbicides, insecticides and other farm chemicals in growing a variety of crops. Some consumer and environmental groups have been calling for greater controls on pesticide use.

The EPA, the United States Department of Agriculture, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health have been overseeing an “Agricultural Health Study” of nearly 90,000 people in Iowa and North Carolina tracking the impact of factors including pesticide use.

The studies have linked a series of health problems to pesticide use, including various cancers and Parkinson’s disease.

“Current medical research suggests that while farmers are generally healthier than the general U.S. population, they may have higher rates of some cancers, including leukemia, myeloma, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and cancers of the lip, stomach, skin, brain, and prostate,” the study states.

Among the changes proposed Thursday, the EPA would require annual training in pesticide protection, instead of once every five years. It would expand mandatory posting of signage warning people from entering fields newly treated with pesticides; prohibit children under 16 from handling pesticides unless they are part of a family farm; and set no-entry buffer areas of 25 feet to 100 feet around pesticide-treated fields to limit exposure from overspraying and fumes.

The EPA is seeking public comments on the proposed changes before making a final decision.

Also Thursday, a coalition led by residents of rural Minnesota announced a campaign to convince fast-food restaurant chain McDonald’s to reduce pesticide use on farms where potatoes are grown for its French fries. The group said studies of air quality have shown contamination by the fungicide chlorothalonil, a farming chemical listed by the EPA as a probable carcinogen.

McDonald’s said in a statement that it was working with suppliers to reduce pesticide use along with reduced water and fertilizer use and was making “significant progress.”

And in Hawaii, the state department of agriculture and the U.S. Geological Survey are undertaking a statewide “pesticide sampling” project to check soil and water for pesticide residues.

(Reporting by Carey Gillam; Editing by David Gregorio and Eric Walsh)

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – A carbon tax proposal outlined on Thursday by California Senate leader Darrell Steinberg would raise an estimated $3.6 billion in its first year, revenue he said would go into the pocketbooks of the state’s poorest residents as well as public transportation.

The tax, which would apply to fuels like gasoline, would start at 15 cents a gallon in 2015 and rise to 24 cents a gallon in 2020, Steinberg said in a speech at the Sacramento Press Club.

Poverty in the state is growing and money raised by the tax would be returned to low- and moderate-income working people via a federal tax credit, Steinberg said. It would also help plug funding shortfalls in public transit.

The tax would halt plans to bring fuels under the state’s cap and trade program next year, a policy that since the beginning of 2013 has regulated the emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases from large stationary sources, such as power plants and cement factories.

Cap and trade sets a gradually declining limit on the amount of greenhouse gases businesses can emit and allows for the trading of excess permits on the open market.

A carbon tax is a simper system to administer than cap and trade, but instead of setting an environmental target, it hopes to discourage driving by raising the price of gasoline.

In a speech on Thursday, Steinberg said he fears that the market could produce price volatility at the pump, a result that would hurt consumers and may undermine California’s pioneering effort to combat climate change through its landmark 2006 law,

AB 32.

“If gas prices spike and fluctuate wildly, I am concerned that the climate change skeptics will use the crisis to unravel AB 32 and weaken our essential climate goals,” he said.

Passage of the tax is considered a long shot given that California law requires any new tax to gain the support of two-thirds of members in both chambers of the state legislature.

The proposal was also met with resistance from environmentalists, who believe the current policies are well designed and should not be tampered with.

“We don’t support pulling the rug out from something that has been carefully negotiated for going on seven years,” said Alex Jackson of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

State Senator Fran Pavley, the author of AB 32, called exempting oil companies from the cap and trade program a “nonstarter.”

“Letting oil companies play by different rules than other polluters would undermine all the progress we’ve made on climate change and send mixed signals to businesses investing in clean energy and reducing pollution in disadvantaged communities,” Pavley said on Thursday.

(Reporting by Rory Carroll, editing by G Crosse)

After years of negotiations with Republicans over the U.S. budget, President Barack Obama is setting off on his own course.

Obama’s 2015 budget, due in early March, could make the end of an era for Democrats. In recent years, Democrats have taken up much of the language of Republicans, whose arguments to control government spending have effectively meant the loss of benefits for millions of Americans. The trend began to emerge strongly in the 1990s under President Bill Clinton, and has become a plank of Democratic campaigns when fending off attacks from the right.

Obama’s new budget won’t make the same call for cuts. Instead, it will provide funding for manufacturing institutes, job training, energy efficiency and education for preschoolers. The budget was first reported by The Washington Post.

Specifically, Obama will provide $56 billion for what is deemed an “Opportunity, Growth and Security Initiative,” an influx of capital to be split between defense and domestic programs, particularly manufacturing; awards for states that promote energy efficiency; new job training programs; and expanded educational programs for preschoolers. Most of the president’s priorities will likely face resistance from Republicans over their size, though some Republicans have embraced more funding for tots.

Obama plans to include some elements of a so-called “grand bargain” that lawmakers struggled to pass last year. Notable among them are efforts to force wealthier seniors to pay more for Medicare coverage. He’s also expected to propose corporate tax rules to prevent companies from moving profits overseas to dodge U.S. taxes and limit corporations’ ability to deduct interest expenses from borrowing in the U.S. and then investing the money overseas.

In the Post, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) decried the new budget plan.

“This reaffirms what has become all too apparent: the president has no interest in doing anything, even modest, to address our looming debt crisis,” Boehner spokesman Brendan Buck said. “The one and only idea the president has to offer is even more job-destroying tax hikes, and that non-starter won’t do anything to save the entitlement programs that are critical to so many Americans.”

In fact, however, that deficit “crisis” has become less immediate. According to the Congressional Budget Office, which conducts nonpartisan studies of proposed laws and other programs for the government, the deficit will drop to $514 billion this year and $478 billion the next. But while the near-future looks rosier — the U.S. ran deficits of nearly a trillion during the Iraq war and financial crisis — the U.S. isn’t out of the woods: the deficit is expected to increase after  fiscal 2016.

The national debt, which is different from the deficit, stands at slightly greater than $17 trillion. The debt represents the total the U.S. borrows to support operations, where the deficit is the gap between U.S. spending and borrowing in a given year. Though it has increased significantly under Obama, many of President George W. Bush’s initiatives moved the needle further: the $874 Obama Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed after the financial crisis dwarfed the impact of Bush’s tax cuts, at $1.8 trillion. The Act was also just shy of the total spent during the Bush years on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, at $853 billion.

Obama’s budget will be released by Mar. 4.

 [Photo credit: AFP]

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Former football star Darren Sharper pleaded not guilty on Thursday to charges that he drugged and raped two women in a Los Angeles hotel as investigations continue into similar sex crimes in four other U.S. states, according to police and court documents.

The hearing occurred on the same day police in his home of Miami Beach, Florida, released details on one of the probes against him.

Sharper, who played 14 years in the National Football League and won a Super Bowl title in 2010 with the New Orleans Saints, is accused by prosecutors of giving the prescription sleep medication zolpidem to the women in Los Angeles, causing them to pass out.

In October, he met two women at a West Hollywood night club and brought them back to a Los Angeles hotel room, where he gave a drug-spiked drink to both of them and raped one, prosecutors said in court papers. He did the same to another pair of women in January, prosecutors said.

Sharper, 38, who became an on-air commentator for the NFL Network after retiring from football, wore a dark gray pinstripe suit with no tie in Los Angeles Superior Court. The NFL Network suspended him without pay after his arrest in January.

The five-time Pro Bowl selection was released on bail of $1 million, which the judge increased from $200,000. He declined to speak to reporters when he was leaving the courthouse, as did his attorneys.

Prosecutors had wanted to raise the bail amount even higher, to $10 million, citing sex crime investigations against him in Louisiana, Nevada, Arizona and his home state of Florida. Charges have not been brought against Sharper in those states.

“He’s a danger to the women in our community. He preys on women between 20 and 23 years old. It’s the same story in every single case,” Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Stacy Okun-Wiese told the court.

Judge Renee Korn said the prosecution’s request for such a high bail was excessive.

“It appears there may be far more victims in this case,” Korn said. She did not specify if there might be more victims in the Los Angeles area or other parts of the country.

Sharper’s attorney had argued that prosecutors have not shared with the defense team certain material from investigations in other states, such as video recordings given by alleged victims.

Separately, police in Miami Beach, where Sharper lives, released a report of their investigation into a woman’s allegation that the football star also raped her but prosecutors have not charged Sharper.

A woman told investigators she was intoxicated when she went to Sharper’s condo in 2012 and fell asleep. When she woke up, she realized Sharper was having sex with her and left, according to the police report.

The woman reported the 2012 incident to Miami Beach police two days after Sharper was arrested in Los Angeles on January 17, police said.

(Writing by Alex Dobuzinskis; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Lisa Shumaker)

Reynolds, 62, was arrested at a local hotel on Monday but has denied additional charges of possessing pornographic images and videos. That case was due to continue later on Friday.

Harare magistrate Tendai Mahwe fined Reynolds $100 or five days in prison for the visa misdemeanor. His lawyer Arthur Gurira told the court the former Illinois congressman had suffered a mild stroke earlier this year.

(The story adds dropped word in headline)

(Reporting by MacDonald Dzirutwe; Editing by Stella Mapenzauswa)

KIEV (Reuters) – Ukraine opposition leaders signed an EU-mediated peace deal with President Viktor Yanukovich on Friday, aiming to end a violent standoff that has left dozens dead and opening the way for a early presidential election this year.

Russian-backed Yanukovich – under pressure to quit from the mass demonstrations in Kiev – earlier offered a series of concessions to his pro-European opponents, including a national unity government and constitutional change to reduce his powers, as well as the presidential vote.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said the deal provided for the creation of a national unity government and an early presidential election this year, although no date had been set. The vote had been due in March 2015.

A Reuters correspondent at the signing in the presidential headquarters said Yanukovich did not smile during a ceremony lasting several minutes.

One of the European Union mediators, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, described the agreement as a “good compromise for Ukraine”. In a post on Twitter, he said it “gives peace a chance. Opens the way for reform and to Europe”.

With Ukraine caught in a geopolitical tug-of-war between Russia and the EU, at least 77 people have been killed this week in the worst violence since the independent country emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet Union in 1991.

“There are no steps that we should not take to restore peace in Ukraine,” Yanukovich said when announcing his concessions before the deal was signed. “I announce that I am initiating early elections.”

Yanukovich said Ukraine would revert to a previous constitution under which parliament had greater control over the make-up of the government, including the prime minister.

“I am also starting the process of a return to the 2004 constitution with a rebalancing of powers towards a parliamentary republic,” he said. “I call for the start of procedures for forming a government of national unity.”

Earlier, a Polish foreign ministry spokesman said a council of protesters occupying Kiev’s Independence Square, which is also known as the Maidan, had backed the agreement.

The civic council “has voted in favor of the three opposition leaders signing the agreement with President Yanukovich concerning resolving the conflict”, the ministry’s spokesman, Marcin Wojciechowski, said on Twitter.

The German and Polish foreign ministers were in Kiev to promote the political compromise to end the bloodshed amid a stand-off between riot police and anti-government protesters who have occupied the central square for nearly three months.

SCUFFLES IN PARLIAMENT

Before the deal was signed, armed police briefly entered the parliament building while lawmakers were holding an emergency session but they were quickly ejected, opposition leader Arseny Yatsenyuk said. Members exchanged punches when speaker Volodymyr Rybak tried to adjourn proceedings.

Opposition deputies were angered because it would mean delaying a possible vote on a resolution pressing for constitutional changes to restrict the president’s powers. The speaker left the chamber and debate continued.

The deal would be a setback for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has made tying Ukraine into a Moscow-led Eurasian Union a cornerstone of his efforts to reunite as much as possible of the former Soviet Union.

Putin appointed his own envoy to the talks at Yanukovich’s request on Thursday but it was not clear what role, if any, Russian officials had in the negotiations.

In another sign of the severity of the crisis, ratings agency Standard & Poor’s cut Ukraine’s credit rating for the second time in three weeks on Friday, citing the increased risk of default.

S&P said latest developments in the crisis made it less likely that Ukraine would receive desperately needed Russian aid. Ukraine cancelled a planned issue of 5-year Eurobonds worth $2 billion, it told the Irish Stock Exchange where the debt would have been listed. Kiev had hoped Russia would buy the bonds to help it stave off bankruptcy.

Russia’s economy minister said Moscow was still undecided on the next $2 billion installment and was awaiting clarity on the government in Ukraine.

On financial markets, Ukraine’s dollar bonds and the hryvnia currency firmed against the dollar from record lows hit this week on hopes for a deal.

However, RBS analyst Tatyana Orlova noted the country was still in dire financial straits. “This is not the end of the story. What I am reading is there is a deal but the devil is in the detail … The urgent need is for a technocratic cabinet that could take steps to avert default,” Orlova said.

The health ministry said 77 people had been killed since Tuesday afternoon, which meant at least 47 died in Thursday’s clashes.

On Thursday, EU foreign ministers meeting in Brussels imposed targeted sanctions on Ukraine and threatened more if the authorities failed to restore calm.

(Additional reporting by Richard Balmforth, Alessandra Prentice, Vasily Fedosenko and Pavel Polityuk in Kiev, Sujata Rao in London, John Irish in Paris, Marcin Goettig and Adrian Krajewski in Warsaw, Alexandra Hudson in Berlin and Francesco Guarascio and Adrian Croft in Brussels; Writing by Paul Taylor and David Stamp; Editing by Giles Elgood)

Last week, O’Reilly made the announcement that he would be selling his single page of handwritten notes  – signed by both O’Reilly and Obama — from the contentious Fox interview and donating the proceeds to charity. Colbert followed up by announcing that he too is having an auction for the microwave oven that he purportedly stole from the green room at Fox.

Colbert announced that there has been a “huge misunderstanding” between himself and his “broadcast life partner” O’Reilly. Bill has failed to comprehend that the microwave auction is, Colbert said, “an homage” to Papa Bear O’Reilly.

O’Reilly, on his show, thanked Colbert for the publicity but said that Colbert himself is a “Well,” he said, “I’m not gonna say it.”

Looking shocked and hurt, Colbert responded, “Bill, if you’re watching, you should know that you really hurt me. And if you’re not watching? That hurts me even more.”

“I wasn’t mocking you,” he continued, “I was celebrating you. Just taking some of the weight off of your shoulders. Why does it always have to be you talking about how great you are?”

After Colbert mentioned O’Reilly’s auction on the air, bids skyrocketed for the notes to “an astonishing $9,999,999,” but then dropped back down to around $30,000 when, shockingly, “The Bone Ranger” turned out not to be a legitimate bidder.

“Bill?” said Colbert. “With all due respect, you’re an idiot.”

“But please, Bill,” Colbert asked the Fox pundit, “sign my microwave? Otherwise, you’re going to look like a real…not gonna say it.”

Watch the video, embedded below:

“Let’s suppose,” Chomsky began, “that for some perverse reason we’re interested in ruining an economy and a society…and to make it interesting, let’s select the richest and most powerful society in history, one with incomparable advantages, one that’s fortunately close at hand — namely, our own.”

“There are ample resources,” he continued, to provide employment to all who seek it, “but they’re hidden away where they cannot be accessed, in the overflowing pockets of the super-rich and the corporate sector, particularly the big banks, which have been generously rewarded for having created a crisis serious enough to have almost brought down the domestic and even global economy.”

“The system is so dysfunctional, that it cannot put eager hands to needed work, using the resources that would be readily available if the economy were designed to serve human needs, rather than wealth beyond the dreams of avarice for a privileged few.”

“These things didn’t just happen like a tornado, they’re the results of quite deliberate policies over roughly the past generation, the period of the neoliberal assault on the population,” Chomsky said. “These developments should not be confused with idealized workings of capitalism and free markets, [apologies for which] are designed to protect the Masters from market discipline.”

Chomksy’s first suggestion as to how to ruin an economy would be to “cut back” on the “dynamic state-sponsored research and development” that brought about advances in information technology and medicine.

A second way “to undermine a healthy economy is to encourage the growth of financial institutions, giving them free rein via deregulation and using state power to under-price risk.”

The third way would be to convince the public that behaviors encouraged by these institutions are “rational,” and have no impact upon the future. Chomsky discussed the “euphoria” that surrounds the “century of energy independence,” in which the United States becomes the new Saudi Arabia. Corporations are engaged in a major “propaganda campaign” to convince the people that “climate change, if it exists at all, does not result from human activity.”

In the case of global climate collapse, however, “it goes well beyond just ruining an economy.”

Watch the complete talk, via Leigha Cohen, below.

The woman, pulled to a police car in gym clothes, was captured on video shouting, “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

A University of Texas Student filmed the police capturing the jogger and placing her in an officer’s car.

“I was sitting at the Starbucks at 24th and San Antonio,” the student, Chris Quintero, told the Daily Texan, the student newspaper for the University of Texas-Austin. “Then I hear a cop shout at an innocent girl jogging through West Campus with her headphones on.”

Police told the woman to provide identification, Quintero remarked. When she wouldn’t, the officer grabbed her arm and placed her in handcuffs.

“She repeatedly pleaded with them, saying that she was just exercising and to let her go,” Quintero said. Quintero is heard in the video saying, “I saw you,” after the woman calls across the street, saying, “I was doing nothing wrong. I was crossing the street.”

Police then apparently called for backup. Two additional officers on bicycles arrived as the arresting officers were putting the jogger in the car.

The Daily Texan reached out to the Austin Police Department, where police spokeswoman Lisa Cortinas said police were working on “pedestrian enforcement.” Cortinas maintained that police weren’t targeting jaywalkers specifically, but instead focusing on pedestrian and bike safety overall.

“District representatives were working pedestrian enforcement at 24th Street and Guadalupe,” she said. “[In this case], the call is titled failure to identify.”

“I don’t think there’s any [jaywalking] initiative going on out there,” a second spokeswoman said.

After her arrest, the woman, who is not identified in the Texan, is shown screaming as she is secured in the car.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she shouts. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t fucking do anything wrong. I just crossed the street.”

[Photo credit: Screen capture]

According to Roll Call, King recently sat down for an interview with the Spencer Daily Reporter, where  he defended his comments stating that, despite the criticism directed at him, he changed the debate about the immigration reform.

“I’m not going to apologize. What I’ve said is objectively true, and any time that Republicans have criticized me, it’s not because of what I said, it’s because they disagree with my agenda,” said King.

In his comments to conservative website Newmax last July, King asserted that, “For everyone who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds — and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”

Despite criticism from both the left and right for his comments, King claims that his words were effective in changing how the left discusses the DREAM act and immigration reform.

“I’ve laid out, and sometimes I’ve made the point for years, and they weren’t listening,” King explained. “So I found another way to get them to pay attention. So, for example, [Senate Majority Whip] Dick Durbin, as far as I know, no longer describes the dreamers as valedictorians. We’ve corrected that major flaw and sometimes we have to, otherwise it distorts the public’s understanding.”

House Speaker John Boehner recently said immigration reform is unlikely in 2014.

Emergency medical technicians arrived at a Reno home early on Thursday afternoon to find a baby in distress.

According to Reno Police Lieutenant William Rulla, the baby was taken to Renown Regional Medical Center and placed on life support, but died shortly thereafter, at which point it was transported to the Washoe County Medical Examiner’s Office for an autopsy.

When brought before the medical examiner, the baby showed signs of life. Attendants attempted to stabilize the child until an ambulance could transport the infant back to Renown Regional Medical Center.

In a statement to the Reno Journal-Gazette, police said that “[s]ometime after the infant’s arrival, personnel at the Medical Examiner’s Office believed they heard the infant breathe and they initiated life saving efforts.”

The baby was transported back to the hospital and “initially responded to these [life saving] efforts, [but] was ultimately declared to be deceased.”

Reno police did not release the name of the infant, but indicated that they are investigating the home of the child’s mother and father as a crime scene.

Watch the Reno Gazette-Journal report on the incident below.

["Confused Male Doctor Gesturing With Hands Isolated On White Background" on Shutterstock]

The violin, which was made in 1715 and had an appraised value of $5 million for insurance purposes, was recovered late Wednesday from a Milwaukee residence, where it had been stored in a suitcase in the attic, police said.

Salah Jones, 41, and Universal Knowledge Allah, 36, were charged with felony robbery and Allah was also charged with marijuana possession. A 32-year-old woman arrested in connection with the crime, has not been charged.

Early last week, the thieves took the violin after incapacitating concert musician Frank Almond with a stun gun as he left a concert in suburban Milwaukee, authorities said.

Jones told a witness that stealing a Stradivarius violin “was his dream theft” because of its potential value and it could be “snatched from the hands of a musician as they walk down the street,” the criminal complaint said.

The complaint said Jones had Allah buy the Taser for him last summer because he did not have a permit for it.

A few months later, Jones told Allah that he needed the Taser to acquire an instrument that was rare and one of a kind, the complaint said. Before the theft, Allah retrieved the Taser from a safe, it said.

After his arrest on Monday, Jones told authorities they could find the violin in a black suitcase in an attic in a residence on the city’s south side, according to the complaint.

The so-called Lipinski Stradivarius had been on loan indefinitely to Almond from a private owner. It is one of roughly 600 violins, violas and cellos still in existence that were built by the famed Italian artisan Antonio Stradivari.

Almond said he plans to play the violin on Monday during a performance in suburban Milwaukee.

“We can now celebrate the wonderful resolution of this most recent chapter in the instrument’s storied life,” Almond said in a statement posted on the website of the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts, where he is scheduled to play.

Bond was set at $10,000 for Jones and at $500 for Allah during appearances Friday afternoon in Milwaukee County District Court.

(Reporting By Brendan O’Brien; Editing by Scott Malone, Gunna Dickson and Ken Wills)

“These words that Nugent said, you have to admmit that they are vile,” Blitzer said. “To call the president of the United States a ‘subhuman mongrel, that’s pretty disgusting.”

“They’re pretty tough words,” Perry responded before Blitzer cut him off, telling him that it was okay to call Nugent’s words “disgusting.”

“We agree that that is not appropriate language to use of the United States president.” Perry replied.

Blitzer then asked Perry if it was appropriate for gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott, whose campaign is employing Nugent, to continue to “embrace” him.

“I’m not going to get into this side of whether it’s appropriate or not,” Perry said “There are people who say things all the time. The idea that Ted Nugent has said something that’s outrageous shouldn’t surprise anybody.”

Blitzer responded by calling Nugent’s words “beyond the pale.”

Watch the video below:

Deep in the heart of the Tepito – the traditional home of Mexico City’s black market – Juan’s two mobile phones buzz constantly as he gets closes his deal. He takes the calls with precise and efficient directions, but a certain twitchiness breaks through his clean cut and calm exterior.

“Sure, you make money in this business,” says the marijuana dealer who started out a year ago selling grams on street corners but is now buying kilos direct from suppliers. “But it is a very stressful job.”

That job might be heading for a big transformation after leftwing legislators tabled measures to relax regulations on marijuana possession and sale in the capital, as well as proposals for federal reforms that could increase permitted quantities and encourage other states to follow suit.

The initiatives, proposed by the leftwing Party of the Democratic Revolution – which governs in the capital and represents the third force in the federal congress – are the latest example of a region-wide rethink of the prohibition approach to the war on drugs. In December, Uruguay’s parliament approved a bill to legalise and regulate the sale and production of marijuana, while in the US Washington and Colorado states recently legalised the sale of cannabis under licence.

While comparatively cautious on paper, the Mexican version brings the debate to a country battered by extreme violence unleashed by the government’s attempts to take the war to the drug cartels.

“Seventy thousand dead, 26,000 disappeared, and an incalculable number of internally displaced are more than sufficient reason to look for an alternative model,” federal congressman Fernando Belaunzarán told reporters this week.

Current federal legislation allows people to carry up to 5g of marijuana (about four joints) without legal consequences. In practice those caught with even these amounts are only released after being booked by police, which carries with it a serious risk of criminalisation and extortion by corrupt officers.

If approved, the new rules in the capital would drastically reduce the police’s role and, most significantly, pave the way for regulated and supervised marijuana dispensaries. The capital’s reputation for being relatively progressive, having already legalised abortion and gay marriage, suggests the local legislation has a good chance of getting on the books. The initiative before the federal congress proposes raising the limit to 30g, opens the possibility for defining marijuana as medicinal, and gives states more freedom on how to apply these rules.

“These are concrete, well defined, moderate and plausible proposals to start the kind of serious discussion that has been absent during all these years of war mongering,” says Alejandro Madrazo, an academic who helped draw up the initiatives. “If we are able to move consumers into tolerated spaces then we can expect to start draining the black market.”

He plays down claims others make about the bills’ potential to curb violence by stressing that the capital has been relatively free of the kind of horrors common elsewhere. Even so, the local drug market has been blamed for some horrific crimes, including the abduction of 13 young people in May last year from an after-hours bar in one of the main business districts, a few blocks from police headquarters. The authorities say the abduction was carried out in revenge for the murder of a local dealer.

“I think making marijuana legal is a good idea,” says tourism student Rodrigo Martínez, who adds he would prefer to buy the marijuana he smokes at parties from a regulated dealer rather than on the streets of his own crime-filled neighbourhood in the far south. “Sometimes you feel pretty vulnerable when you buy, and if you get caught by the police you have to pay a bribe.”

With the debate still in its early stages, a poll of Mexico City residents published in the newspaper El Universal suggests such support is rare. Only 16% approved of raising the amount of permitted possession to 30g, though more than half liked the idea of regulated dispensaries.

The capital’s archdiocese has voiced the most vehement opposition to the initiatives so far with an editorial titled “Stoned City” in its weekly publication From the Faith. “Drugs should not be combatted with drugs,” the text stated. “They are promoting an addicted and sick society.”

Back in Tepito, Juan runs through the range of products he buys – from hydroponic marijuana from the northern state of Sinaloa at about 1,000 pounds a kilo to rough and ready weed from the southern mountains at less than 50 pounds. He sells them all, he says, at a considerable profit.

“I would like a permit, but I don’t think I would qualify,” he muses, before his phone buzzes again and he rushes off the clinch the deal.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014

The White House National Security Council said Obama would meet the Dalai Lama, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, at the White House on Friday in a show of concern about China’s human rights practices.

China calls the Dalai Lama a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” who seeks to use violent methods to establish an independent Tibet. The Dalai Lama, who fled to India after a failed uprising in 1959, maintains he only wants genuine autonomy for Tibet and denies advocating violence.

“The United States’ arrangement for its leader to meet the Dalai would be a gross interference in China’s internal affairs and is a serious violation of the norms of international relations,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said in a statement.

“It will seriously damage Sino-U.S. relations. We urge the United States to take seriously China’s concerns, immediately cancel plans for the U.S. leader to meet the Dalai, do not facilitate and provide a platform for Dalai’s anti-China separatist activities in the United States,” she added.

The announcement comes at a delicate time for Sino-U.S. relations. The United States has expressed concern about China’s increasingly assertive behavior in the East China Sea and South China Sea and Obama’s U.S. strategic pivot, or rebalancing, toward Asia, is seen as a reaction to the growing clout of China.

At the same time, both countries are increasingly inter-dependent and have to cooperate on international issues such as Iran and North Korea. China is also the United States’ biggest foreign creditor. As of July 31, China held $1.28 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds, according to Treasury Department data.

A senior Chinese official vowed this week to ignore foreign pressure on human rights, and said foreign leaders who meet the Dalai Lama should “pay a price” for it.

NO SERIOUS CONSEQUENCES

Diplomats in Beijing have told Reuters Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected to meet at a nuclear security summit in the Netherlands next month.

When asked whether China would cancel the meeting, Hua later said at a daily news briefing: “If any country deliberately insists on harming China’s interests, in the end, it will also damage its own interests and will harm the bilateral relations between China and the relevant country.”

“(If) the U.S. president wishes to meet any person, it’s his own affair, but he cannot meet the Dalai,” she said. “The Dalai is definitely not a pure religious figure. He is using the cloak of religion to engage in long-term activities to separate China, he is a political exile.”

But previous meetings between Obama and the Dalai Lama have not had serious repercussions.

In 2011, after the last meeting between the two, China responded with predictably vehement words but stopped short of threatening retaliation, indicating that Beijing was keen to avoid tensions between the world’s biggest economies.

“I think China will send a strong message of protest publicly and privately, trying to warn President Obama to not go too far, because we still have a major, new relationship to build,” said Sun Zhe, director of the Center for U.S.-China Relations at Beijing’s elite Tsinghua University.

Xi has stressed repeatedly that China wants to build “a new brand of relations between major powers”, based on principles of non-conflict, non-confrontation, mutual respect and cooperation.

Friday’s meeting between Obama and the Dalai Lama comes less than a week after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry visited China. It is unclear whether he had briefed China in advance about the planned meeting.

In what appeared to be a small concession to the Chinese, Obama will see the Dalai Lama in the White House Map Room, a historically important room but of less significance than the Oval Office, the president’s inner sanctum.

The United States recognizes Tibet as part of China and does not support Tibetan independence, but supports the Dalai Lama’s approach for more autonomy, said Caitlin Hayden, a spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council.

“We are concerned about continuing tensions and the deteriorating human rights situation in Tibetan areas of China,” Hayden said.

In Tibetan regions of China, including four provinces outside Tibet, more than 120 Tibetans have set themselves on fire since 2009 in protest against Chinese rule. Most have died.

The White House views the Dalai Lama as “an internationally respected religious and cultural leader” and noted Obama had met him twice before, in February 2010 and July 2011.

“We will continue to urge the Chinese government to resume dialogue with the Dalai Lama or his representatives, without preconditions, as a means to reduce tensions,” Hayden said in a statement announcing the 10 a.m.(1500 GMT) meeting.

The Dalai Lama was in Washington on Thursday, meeting the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative organization. In a speech there, he did not address the issue of Tibet, but stressed that there was a general need for “compassion, tolerance and forgiveness” in the world.

Communist Chinese troops took control of Tibet in 1950. China says it “peacefully liberated” the remote region that it says was mired in poverty, exploitation and economic stagnation.

Exiles and rights groups say China tramples on the religious, cultural and linguistic rights of Tibetans and enforces its rule using brutal methods.

(Additional reporting by Steve Holland and David Brunnstrom in Washington and Natalie Thomas and Ben Blanchard in Beijing; Editing by Peter Cooney and Raju Gopalakrishnan)

El Nino – the Spanish word for boy – is a warming of sea-surface temperatures in the Pacific that occurs every four to 12 years. The worst on record in the late 1990s killed more than 2,000 people and caused billions of dollars in damage.

A strong El Nino can wither crops in Australia, Southeast Asia, India and Africa when other parts of the globe such as the U.S. Midwest and Brazil are drenched in rains.

While scientists are still debating the intensity of a potential El Nino, Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology and the U.S. Climate Prediction Center have warned of increased chances one will strike this year.

Last month, the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization said there was an “enhanced possibility” of a weak El Nino by the middle of 2014.

“The world is bracing for El Nino, which if confirmed, could wreak havoc on supply and cause prices of some commodities to shoot up,” said Vanessa Tan, investment analyst at Phillip Futures in Singapore.

Any disruption to supply would come as many crops have already been hit by adverse weather, with the northern hemisphere in the grip of a savage winter.

The specter of El Nino has driven global cocoa prices to 2-1/2 year peaks this month on fears that dry weather in the key growing regions of Africa and Asia would stoke a global deficit. Other agricultural commodities could follow that lead higher if El Nino conditions are confirmed.

BAD BOY

“Production estimates for several crops which are already under stress will have to be revised downwards,” said Phillip Futures’ Tan.

“Wheat in Australia may be affected by El Nino and also sugar in India.”

In India, the world’s No.2 producer of sugar, rice and wheat, a strong El Nino could reduce the monsoon rains that are key to its agriculture, curbing production.

“If a strong El Nino occurs during the second half of the monsoon season, then it could adversely impact the production size of summer crops,” said Sudhir Panwar, president of farmers’ lobby group Kishan Jagriti Manch.

El Nino in 2009 turned India’s monsoon patchy, leading to the worst drought in nearly four decades and helping push global sugar prices to their highest in nearly 30 years.

Elsewhere in Asia, which grows more than 90 percent of the world’s rice and is its main producer of coffee and corn, a drought-inducing El Nino could hit crops in Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines and China.

And it could deal another blow to wheat production in Australia, the world’s second-largest exporter of the grain, which has already been grappling with drought in the last few months.

El Nino could also crimp supply of minerals such as gold, nickel, tin, copper and coal if mines flood or logistics are disrupted.

In North America, crops in the U.S. Pacific Northwest could suffer as El Nino tends to cause rain to the area, with the major white wheat region already abnormally dry.

But El Nino doesn’t spell bad news for all farmers. It could bring rain to drought-hit California’s dairy farms and vineyards.

“El Nino has a bad connotation, undeservedly so in the U.S.,” said Harry Hillaker, state climatologist in Iowa.

“Given the water supply issues they are having in California, more rain would be helpful.”

And in Central America, while dryness associated with El Nino would curb coffee production, it would also help drive back the leaf rust that has blighted crops in the region.

(Additional reporting by Yayat Supriatna in Jakarta, Apornrath Phoonphongphiphat in Bangkok, Ho Binh Minh in Hanoi, Erik Dela Cruz in Manila, Dominique Patton and Niu Shuping in Beijing, Ratnajyoti Dutta in Delhi, Colin Packham in Sydney, Chris Prentice and Marcy Nicholson in New York, Peter Murphy in Bogota and Karl Plume in Chicago; Editing by Simon Webb and Joseph Radford)

The orange level, the second highest, advises schools and kindergartens to cancel outside sports classes, but falls short of ordering school to close and keeping government vehicles off the road, provisions which come into force with the “red” level.

The alert was raised after the Beijing government faced criticism from state media and on the Internet for failing to act against high pollution levels last weekend.

The capital was already shrouded in smoky, white smog by Friday afternoon. Data from the U.S. embassy put levels of PM2.5 particles, those measuring less than 2.5 micrometers across and the most noxious form of air pollution, at 378.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers levels above 300 to be hazardous. Last weekend, the index topped 500.

Forecasters said the smog would persist for three days and authorities urged residents to leave cars at home.

Some residents welcomed the announcement. Others asked why more was not being done.

“Excuse me, but do the PM2.5 measurements have to explode off the charts before we see a red alert?” said a user of weibo, China’s twitter-like microblogging service.

The stability-obsessed government is keen to be seen as tough on pollution as affluent city dwellers grow weary of a growth-at-all-costs economic model that has tainted much of China’s air, water and soil.

Authorities have issued innumerable orders and policies to try and clean up the environment, investing in projects to fight pollution and empowering courts to mete out stiff penalties, including the death penalty in serious cases.

But enforcement has been patchy at the local level, where authorities often rely on taxes paid by polluting industries.

The Beijing government introduced the tiered system last October. But despite several periods of thick smog since then, the plan’s stronger measures have never before been introduced.

Public discontent about Beijing’s dirty air was highlighted on Friday when a Chinese military expert became the object of scorn online after suggesting smog in the city could be a useful defense against a U.S. military laser attack.

(Reporting By Natalie Thomas, editing by Guiqing Koh and Ron Popeski)

Andrew Greene, of New York, also wants the film based on the memoir of stock swindler Jordan Belfort, to be removed from theaters.

Greene claims the character of Nicky “Rugrat” Koskoff in the movie directed by Martin Scorsese was repeatedly ridiculed about his toupee and is shown as a person having no moral or ethical values.

“The motion picture introduces ‘Rugrat’ by referencing his “piece of shit hairpiece,” according to the federal lawsuit filed in New York on Wednesday.

“In another scene, investigators ask whether his hair is real. Characters are also seen attempting to grab the toupee in a scene,” it added.

Greene also takes offense to his character being portrayed “as a criminal, drug user, degenerate, depraved, and/or devoid of any morality or ethics,” according to the court papers.

Viacom Inc-owned Paramount Pictures said it had no comment when contacted about the lawsuit.

Actor P.J. Byrne plays the character based on Greene in the film that has been nominated for five Oscars, including best picture, best director for Scorsese and best actor for DiCaprio, who plays Belfort.

Greene, whose nickname according to the court papers was “Wigwam,” was a childhood friend of Belfort, who made a fortune by defrauding clients during the 1990s.

Greene served on the board of directors of Stratton Oakmont and was the head of its finance department.

Aaron Goldsmith, Greene’s lawyer, said in a interview that his client “attempted to create an environment of compliance and regulatory oversight,” while he was at the company.

(Editing by Eric Kelsey and David Gregorio)

“Kissing Coppers,” a black-and-white stencil of two British police officers kissing in close embrace, was purchased by an anonymous telephone buyer, Fine Art Auctions Miami said. The work originally appeared on the side of the Prince Albert Pub in Brighton, England, in 2005.

The wall is one of several Banksy works removed from their original location and sold to collectors. It was auctioned along with two more Banksy pieces – “Bandaged Heart Balloon” and “Crazy Horse Car Door” – created during the artist’s month-long “street residency” in New York City last year.

Those two pieces, priced at $200,000 and $100,000 respectively, failed to reach their asking price. The Banksy piece that did sell had a winning bid of $480,000 plus $95,000 in fees. It had been expected to fetch between $500,000 and

$700,000.

The auction of 54 works also included a sketch by Jean-Michel Basquiat, which sold for $180,000, and a Keith Haring watercolor, “Roger in the Flowers.”

Banksy, whose graffiti and stenciled paintings appear as social commentary in public spaces and private property around the world, emerged in Bristol, England, in the early 1990s.

Despite having worldwide notoriety and being featured in the 2010 Oscar-nominated documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” the artist has kept his real name a secret.

Collectors over the past decade have increasingly sought the often lewd, brightly colored street art painted, drawn or sprayed on everything from metal gates to concrete walls.

“Young people want to have a message, a dialogue, and they want a way to express themselves,” said Frederic Thut, director of Fine Art Auctions Miami.

“The potential of this market is incredible. I was at the first sales of pop art and it was exactly the same people coming from nowhere and buying immediately,” he added.

The three pieces by Banksy were offered by a private collector who wants to remain anonymous, said Thut, adding they were not owned by Stephan Keszler, owner of a New York City gallery known for dealing in works by Banksy.

Keszler in 2013 represented the owner of “Slave Labour,” a spray-paint image of a young boy kneeling at a sewing machine with Union Jack bunting, which sold for $1.1 million, Keszler said.

“It’s new, it’s more fun, it’s younger, it’s more democratic,” said Keszler.

Critics say the artworks should not be removed from their original locations, as it takes away from the artist’s original intent.

“The people who are buying this stuff, chopping it off walls, and putting it in their homes don’t realize they only have a piece of the puzzle,” said RJ Rushmore, who runs the Philadelphia-based street art blog Vandalog.com.

The auction comes as Miami looks to bolster its image as a global cultural hub. The annual Art Basel Miami Beach in early December, the largest fair in North America, coincided with the opening of Herzog & de Meuron-designed Perez Art Museum Miami on the shores of Biscayne Bay.

Art Wynwood, a contemporary art fair held a short walk away from Miami’s fast-rising arts district, hosted more than 30,000 visitors over the long President’s Day weekend, browsing works by popular street artists Shepard Fairey and Stinkfish, as well as traditional sculptors and painters, such as Fernando Botero and Wifredo Lam.

The Miami art market suffered a black eye on Sunday when police arrested a local artist accused of destroying a $1 million vase, part of an exhibit by Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei at the Perez Art Museum.

Maximo Caminero told police he broke the vase to protest that the museum “only displayed international artists,” according to the police report.

(Editing by David Adams and Lisa Shumaker)

Kansas earned itself two rounds of mockery, as Stewart first poked fun on the Democrat-sponsored bill allowing parents and teachers to spank their children so hard they leave bruises.

“Chew on that for a little bit,” Stewart mused to the audience. “‘My name is [bill sponsor] Representative Gail Finney. Are you holding back from punching the sh*t out of your children because you fear legal repercussions? Well fear no more. Your nightmare is over. Whereas theirs is just beginning.”

Stewart also noted that, while supporting the bill, MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski reminisced warmly about being spanked by their parents — an awkward moment, given that Brzezinski’s father, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was a former National Security Advisor.

“I imagine that was a tasty addition to his normally undervisited Wikipedia page,” Stewart said of the elder Brzezinski.

But not to be outdone, Stewart said, Sunflower State legislators also proposed a bill legalizing anti-LGBT discrimination, though he did frown on MSNBC attempting to explain the bill’s implications with a hypothetical encounter between a gay couple and a supermarket baker.

“You think a gay wedding’s gonna have a supermarket cake? That’s what you think?” Stewart said. “This couple’s been waiting their whole lives for the freedom to marry — they’re not just gonna swing by the Safeway.”

Meanwhile, Stewart seemed to not know what to make of Missouri residents expressing support for a bill that would allow parents to stop their children from learning about evolution, with one person saying, “Evolution is not taught in the Bible, so it shouldn’t be taught in class.”

“The Bible class,” Stewart said after a second. “Otherwise you’re setting a pretty high hurdle if schools can’t teach anything that’s not in the Bible.”

But even if the Kansas state Senate was able to stop that state’s anti-LGBT bill, Stewart did offer a warning to its Arizona counterpart for having no such restraint.

“Careful, Arizona. You turn back history too far, you’ll go back to being that weird patch between New Mexico and California that no one wants to talk about,” he said. “Which really isn’t that big a change, is it?”

Watch Stewart’s take on the spate of extremist legislation, as aired on Comedy Central, below.

The Redding Record Searchlight reported that Sherie Rhoades, a former chairwoman of the Cedarville Rancheria Northern Paiute Tribe, was taken into custody in connection with the multiple shooting, which began during a hearing regarding the eviction of Rhoades and her unidentified 24-year-old son from tribal grounds.

Police did not identify any of the victims, but said that two men and two women were killed in the attack, ranging from 19 to 50 years of age. Another two women were hospitalized and were listed in critical condition. The suspect and her son both reportedly fired at the victims. After she ran out of bullets, Rhoades reportedly stabbed one of them with a butcher knife.

One woman managed to escape the attack, then to Alturas City Hall to notify police. She was described as being “covered” with the blood of the victims. Rhoades reportedly resisted arrest, until a tribe employee tackled her, helping authorities capture her.

The tribe owns a 20-acre property in Alturas. 2010 Census records indicate that 15 people lived in five housing units on the tribe’s property.

[Image: "9 Mm Hand Gun On Glass Table With Reflection" via Shutterstock]

“I don’t think she’s being genuine,” Ron Davis said of Creshuna Miles, who identified herself as “juror No. 8″ in the trial of Michael Dunn. “For her as an African-American female to go into this case, with this type of evidence, with this type of rage, with [Dunn] saying, ‘Thug music’? How can you as a juror not think that this was about race?”

In a separate interview, Miles told CNN, “I never once thought about, ‘Oh, this was a black kid, this was a white guy,’” saying she wanted to bring justice to the case. She stated that she felt Dunn was guilty of second-degree murder, but not first-degree murder. However, she did not indicate whether she voted to convict Dunn.

The jury deadlocked on first-degree murder charges while ruling him guilty on three counts of attempted murder for shooting at three of Davis’ friends inside a vehicle in November 2012. But Miles denied the possibility that Dunn, a white male, had gotten away with murder.

“They should knowledge themselves on the law,” Miles was quoted as saying.

“Do you think she is naive to say that this isn’t about race, or that race wasn’t involved?” Cooper asked the couple.

“I think she didn’t want it to be about race,” Jordan Davis’ mother, Lucia McBath, answered. “I think she really hoped that that was not an element of it. But it’s always been an element of what happened in our case.”

Ron Davis also rejected Miles’ statement that she believed Dunn was a “good guy,” pointing to testimony from Dunn’s fiancee, Ronda Rower.

“If she thought he was a nice guy, that tells me she wasn’t paying attention to the testimony,” Ron Davis said. “Miss Rower testified, he never said that there was a weapon in the car. No gun, no stick, bottle, anything. And he drove to the hotel, ate pizza. Drove home the next day. Not one time did he say there was a weapon, and who would do that?”

CNN also reported that another juror, who identified herself as Valerie, said the vote on the murder charges against Dunn went from 10-2 in favor of a conviction to 9-3 over the course of the 30-hour deliberation period.

“I believed he was guilty,” Valerie was quoted as saying.

Watch Cooper’s interview with Jordan Davis’ parents, as aired on Thursday, below.

It might just be music to the ears of lovelorn geeks prepared to wait another 15 years to meet the love of their lives: a prominent futurologist has claimed that AI girlfriends (and presumably boyfriends) like the one played by Scarlett Johansson in the Oscar-nominated film Her could become a reality by 2029.

Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and Google’s director of engineering makes the claim in a review of Spike Jonze’s much-praised sci-fi romance. In a post on his website, Kurzweil delivered a generally positive verdict on the film, which stars Joaquin Phoenix as a man called Theodore who falls in love with his operating system, Samantha, before moving on to its technological implications.

“I would place some of the elements in Jonze’s depiction at around 2020 … such as the diffident and insulting video game character he interacts with and the pin-sized cameras that one can place like a freckle on one’s face,” wrote Kurzweil. “Other elements seem more like 2014, such as the flat-panel displays, notebooks and mobile devices.

“Samantha herself I would place at 2029, when the leap to human-level AI would be reasonably believable,” he continued.

Kurzweil does not end there: “A lot of the dramatic tension is provided by the fact that Theodore’s love interest does not have a body. But this is an unrealistic notion. It would be technically trivial in the future to provide her a virtual visual presence to match her virtual auditory presence, using lens-mounted displays, for example, that display images onto Theodore’s retinas.

Kurzweil says that artificial intelligence may be able to provide a virtual body with a tactile sense. “These will soon be feasible, and will certainly be completely convincing by the time an AI of the level of Samantha is feasible.”

While Her has received widespread praise, it has not been without criticism. Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis labelled Jonze’s film a “sad male fetish fantasy” following an awkward TV interview with the American director last week.

“OK. Now I can tell you what I thought of #her. Sad, male fetish fantasy of disembodied female who does his bidding,” Maitlis tweeted. “Like Lost in Translation for mood but nowhere near as good.”

The film is nominated for five Oscars, including best picture and best original screenplay (for Jonze). The film was released in UK cinemas on 14 February.

© Guardian News and Media 2014

[Image: Scene from the film, "Her," via official Facebook page]

In contrast to the previous day when their tearful and, in some cases, clearly traumatic meetings were played out in front of TV cameras, they were allowed three hours in their own rooms to try and bridge the decades of separation.

The event, held at a mountain resort in North Korea, was only secured after intense North-South negotiations, and has been seen by many as a possible first step towards improved inter-Korean cooperation.

It is the first such reunion for more than three years, and followed a rare concession from North Korea, which had originally threatened to cancel if the South and the United States pushed ahead with annual joint military drills that begin on Monday.

North Korea’s main ally China, which has come under increased U.S. pressure to push Pyongyang into abandoning its nuclear weapons programme, welcomed the reunion as a moment of “great significance”.

“We believe this is an important and correct step forward taken … with national interests and regional peace and stability in mind,” foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said in Beijing.

In an apparent goodwill gesture, Seoul approved Friday the shipment by two private aid groups for close to $1.0 million worth of tuberculosis medicine and powdered milk to North Korea.

The 82 South Korean participants, with an average age of 84 and some so frail they had to be moved by ambulance, arrived at the resort midday Thursday after crossing the heavily-militarised border in a convoy of 10 buses.

After a brief lunch, they were led into a banqueting hall where they first came face-to-face with the 180 North Korean relatives they had applied to see.

Some simply embraced and sobbed, while others stared and stroked each other’s faces, seemingly unable to believe that they were in the same room.

Photos were exchanged and lovingly pored over, not just old black-and-white ones of the family when it was together, but also brand new colour pictures of husbands, wives, children and grandchildren that neither side knew even existed.

One of the oldest South Koreans, a 93-year-old man who was separated from his pregnant wife during the 1950-53 conflict, met the now 64-year-old son he had never seen.

“So old,” were his first words as they came face-to-face — the resemblance strikingly clear to people watching.

“Let me hug you,” the father said and then, sobbing, they both embraced.

The North Korean women wore traditional hanbok dresses, while the men were mostly dressed in dark suits. All seemed to be sporting badges of former leaders Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il — obligatory accessories in North Korea.

- Clock running out -

Tens of millions of people were displaced by the sweep of the 1950-53 Korean War, which saw the frontline yo-yo from the south of the Korean peninsula to the northern border with China and back again.

The chaos and devastation separated brothers and sisters, parents and children, husbands and wives.

Because the conflict concluded with an armistice rather than a peace treaty, the two Koreas technically remain at war and direct exchanges of letters or telephone calls are prohibited.

The reunion programme began in earnest after a historic North-South summit in 2000, but the numbers clamouring for a chance to participate have always far outstripped those actually selected.

For many people, time simply ran out. Last year alone, 3,800 South Korean applicants for reunions died.

Of the 82 South Koreans attending the current reunion, 14 needed wheelchairs and two were forced to return home a day early for health reasons.

Friday’s private gatherings will be followed by another mass, open reunion in the afternoon.

Then on Saturday, comes probably the most traumatic moment of all: a farewell ceremony that both sides understand — given their advanced ages — marks the last time they will ever see each other.

[Image via Agence France-Presse]

A member of the brain trust that is running Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott’s gubernatorial campaign thought it would be a cool beans idea to invite the former Damn Yankees gee-tar picker to campaign for the governor because, obviously, Abbott needed to shore up his rightward flank lest the if-it-moves-shoot-it, if-it’s-young-hump-it, racist, homophobic, mens rights lunatic base suddenly go wobbly at the first glance of Wendy Davis’ pink shoes.

Presumably, for Nugent, there were no new gun shop ribbon cuttings or swap meet Legends of Rock appearances scheduled  this week, so what the hell. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

Like, everything.

The  Abbott campaign has been spent this not-over-yet week  fending off questions about the Nuge’s hankering for the young ladies and his regurgitation of hip-hop happenin’ Nazi punchlines, and not whatever the hell Abbott is running on, We assume getting ‘gubmint’ out of peoples lives and back into ‘wimmen-folks’ uteruses where it belongs. Also, probably something about the Alamo.

Boss move, you guys. Someone deserves a raise and a yee-haw.

Now we’ve got Wendy Davis fund-raising on Ted Nugent’s camo-clad back, reminding women that he likes to refer to women in office as “varmints,” “fat pigs” and “dirty whores.”

You’ve got Ted, his own bad self, faking illness and running away from Erin Burnett  (“Burnett revealed that Nugent had canceled the interview two hours before it was scheduled to air, citing illness.”)  like she was the draft board.

And you’ve got candidate Greg Abbott going Full Metal Apostle Peter on Ted, denying him and then hopping in  car and peeling out of the parking lot like he just boosted a twelve-pack at the Sip n’ Shop.

And what of Ted?  Well he’s spending this evening  sitting in a duck blind somewhere sadtweeting that there are lots of things that are worse  (like BENGHAZI!!) than having your douchenozzle life dug up and getting slapped in the face with it:

Me thinks, he doth offensivethan’s too much…

Scientists believe they have come a step closer to devising genetic tests that can identify men with prostate cancer who have a high risk of dying from the disease, enabling them to be monitored throughout their lives, and other men to avoid unnecessary treatment.

In some men, prostate cancer is so slow-growing that it will not cause them any harm in their lifetime – they will die with it, rather than of it. But in others, it is aggressive and a killer.

Because side-effects of treatment can include impotence and incontinence, it has long been recognised that there is a need for tests to establish which men are in real danger and which are not.

Scientists at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, who have been screening men from families with a history of prostate cancer, have established that 14 mutations in known cancer genes can predict life-threatening disease. They also found that men with these mutations were likely to have more aggressive disease. Their results are published in the British Journal of Cancer.

The breakthrough means that men with prostate cancer in the family could be screened to assess their risk, in the same way that women with a family history of breast cancer can be screened for the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which gives them a 50% chance of developing it.

The 14 mutations which predict aggressive prostate cancer are in eight genes, which include BRCA1 and BRCA2. The others are ATM, CHEK2, BRIP1, MUTYH, PALB2 and PMS2.

Men with any of these 14 mutations were much more likely than those without to develop an advanced, invasive form of cancer which spread to the lymph nodes or other parts of the body, and to die from the disease.

“Our study shows the potential benefit of putting prostate cancer on a par with cancers such as breast cancer when it comes to genetic testing,” said study co-leader Ros Eeles, professor of oncogenics at the Institute of Cancer Research and honorary consultant at the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust.

“Although ours was a small, first-stage study, we proved that testing for known cancer mutations can pick out men who are destined to have a more aggressive form of prostate cancer.

“We already have the technical capabilities to assess men for multiple mutations at once, so all that remains is for us to do further work to prove that picking up dangerous mutations early can save lives. If so, then in the future, genetic testing may be needed as part of the prostate cancer care pathway.”

Dr Iain Frame, director of research at Prostate Cancer UK, said: “The minefield of prostate cancer diagnosis is one of the biggest hurdles facing treatment of the disease today. Current tests fail to differentiate between aggressive cancers that could go on to kill, and cancers that may never cause any harm. This lack of clarity means that too often men and their doctors are left having to make incredibly difficult decisions on whether to treat the disease or not.

“We urgently need to understand more about which men are at risk of developing prostate cancer and in particular aggressive forms of the disease. Genetic testing to predict risk could revolutionise how we treat the 40,000 men diagnosed with the disease every year in the UK.

“These results are exciting as they add to the growing weight of evidence that men with a family history of prostate cancer who possess certain genes may be at higher risk, providing us with another crucial piece of the jigsaw.”

© Guardian News and Media 2014

[Image: "A Doctor Performing Physical Exam On An Elderly Senior Mature Man" via Shutterstock]

In a post alongside a picture of Maduro on image-sharing social network Instagram, Madonna accused the Venezuelan leader of human rights violations, while also condemning authorities in Russia and Ukraine.

“Apparantly (sic) Maduro is not familiar with the phrase “Human Rights”! Facism (sic) is alive and thriving in Venezuela and Russia,” Madonna wrote. “The Ukraine isn’t far behind!”

Venezuela has been gripped by weeks of protests that have left at least four people dead.

Demonstrators are angry over rampant street crime, runaway inflation, corruption and bleak job prospects in the country with the world’s largest proven oil reserves.

Maduro, who took office after the death of Hugo Chavez last year, has claimed the protests are part of a conspiracy to overthrow his government.

[Image via Agence France-Presse]

How Snowboarders Are Waving Company Logos In The IOC’s Face… And There’s Nothing It Can Do About It (via Techdirt)

The International Olympics Committee has this “branding” thing down cold. (No pun intended. The IOC is just as obnoxious during the Summer Olympics.) Everything that doesn’t belong to an Official Sponsor has its logo covered (including bathroom fixtures…

[Image via Shaun White official Facebook page]

WPLG-TV reported on Tuesday that 33-year-old Brandy Berning spent a night in jail after being arrested by Lt. William O’Brien in March 2013, but was never charged. Regardless, she plans to sue the Broward County Sheriff’s Department for his conduct.

Berning was pulled over for driving in a high-occupancy lane, at which point she began recorded audio of the traffic stop. About 15 seconds into her recording, she informed O’Brien, “I have to tell you, I forgot to tell you I was recording.”

“I have to tell you, you just committed a felony,” O’Brien can be heard saying. “Give me your phone.”

When she refused, O’Brien allegedly entered her car through the passenger-side door and tried to grab the phone from her, saying, “I know the law better than you.” Berning can be heard saying, “Get off of my key right now” in an agitated tone, and telling him, “get off of me.” She was arrested and jailed for one night, though charges of resisting arrest and traffic violations against her were dropped.

“I had a bruise on my cheek, and my leg got cut,” Berning told WPLG. “I had a scar on my leg. Three large wound scrapes down my leg. And there was a rock lodged in my leg. He had sprained my wrist.”

Though state law requires consent from both parties before a conversation may be recorded, the Justice Department has supported individuals’ rights to record official police interactions.

O’Brien’s former colleague at the department, ex-deputy Paul Fletcher, is currently on trial for allegedly attacking a woman while off-duty following a roadside argument. Fletcher allegedly tried to destroy the woman’s cell phone after she began recording the encounter, though authorities later recovered her video. Police said at the time that Fletcher determined the phone could be a “concealed weapon.”

Watch WPLG’s report on Berning’s encounter with O’Brien, as aired on Tuesday, below.

In a bid to become the world’s oldest freshman, Joe Newman announced on his website joenewman101.com that he will present his candidacy to the House of Representatives for the first time on a promise that “all citizens be heard.”

He is 76 years older than the minimum age of 25 required to serve in Congress.

“At 101, my ‘fruit of experience’ far surpasses everyone else in this congressional race,” Newman wrote on his blog.

He said his long-shot bid aims to “inspire citizens of all ages and walks of life to get involved, get engaged and to become active patriot leaders.”

Presenting himself as an “anthropological progressive,” the son of 20th century Russian immigrants as a write-in candidate against Republican Representative Vern Buchanan.

A win would make Newman the oldest currently serving member of Congress by at least a decade, ahead of Ralph Hall, 90.

He told local ABC television affiliate WWSB that his platform includes increasing the minimum wage and guaranteeing health care for all.

“A vote for the old man is a vote for the New Man!” he wrote on Twitter.

The entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate seats are up for grabs in November’s mid-term elections.

[Image via Joe Newman campaign Facebook page]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Obama administration said on Thursday it will seek new limits on overseas tax avoidance by corporations in its forthcoming budget proposal, reprising an approach it has made before to try to raise government revenue via a tighter corporate tax code.

With the U.S. Congress gridlocked over fiscal policy, past efforts by Democratic President Barack Obama to crack down on what he sees as offshore corporate tax loopholes have largely failed. The latest measures could meet the same fate.

In its fiscal year 2015 budget, the administration will move to keep corporations from cutting their bills by playing one country’s tax rules for hybrid securities off against another’s, an administration official said on Thursday.

The budget is scheduled to be released on March 4.

Additionally, under the new budget, some U.S. technology companies would face new limits on their ability to shift profits abroad by housing valuable software overseas, the official said.

Some U.S. businesses move profits into low-tax jurisdictions for reasons that have no economic benefit other than to avoid taxes, said Jason Furman, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, at a conference on Thursday.

“Such profit shifting is extensive,” he said.

For companies that defer their profits by keeping them offshore indefinitely, “the president’s proposal in this regard would be an international minimum tax,” Furman said.

At the moment, big corporations must pay the top 35-percent corporate tax on foreign profits, but not until those profits are brought into the country from offshore. This exception is known as corporate offshore income deferral.

FATCA FINISHED

In related news, the U.S. Treasury Department on Thursday moved to shut the door on further 11th-hour tweaks to a new law set to take effect on July 1 that is meant to fight offshore tax evasion by American individuals.

The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) was enacted in 2010 and has undergone successive delays and revisions. Banks even now say more time is needed to get ready for it.

But a Treasury Department statement said the largely technical reporting changes released on Thursday are “the last substantial package of regulations” needed to implement FATCA.

Treasury officials said the latest fixes would prevent another delay to a law that has already been twice postponed.

An official told reporters: “We’re going full-speed ahead for getting this implemented by July 1. We don’t see any likely event that will cause us to change that.”

Congress passed FATCA in response to a scandal involving Americans hiding money in Swiss bank accounts. The law requires foreign banks to share information about Americans’ accounts of more than $50,000 with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.

Foreign institutions that fail to comply with FATCA face a potential 30-percent withholding tax on U.S. source income that could effectively freeze them out of U.S. financial markets.

The latest changes to the law are highly technical and involve making it easier for some foreign financial institutions to report customer information to the United States, addressing the concerns of both U.S. and foreign banks.

(Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh)

[Image via Agence France-Presse]

Speaking before the UN Security Council, Ban appealed for more military forces to be sent “in the coming days or weeks” and asked that they be equipped “with air mobility.”

The Central African Republic, which has a long history of coups and rebellions since independence from France in 1960, has been gripped by turmoil since mostly Muslim rebels overthrew the government last March.

Rogue rebels went on the rampage against civilians, prompting Christians to set up self-defence militia that have in turn been accused of atrocities against the Muslim minority.

French and African Union forces have struggled to restore security to the capital, Bangui, where they are based, let alone across the rest of the sprawling nation.

“We need more,” Ban said, following weeks of Muslim-Christian bloodshed which has left hundreds dead and hundreds of thousands displaced following a surge in killings, mutilations and rapes.

“The international community must act decisively now to prevent any further worsening of the situation and to respond to the dire needs of the country’s people,” Ban said, describing the violence as a “calamity with a strong claim on the conscience of humankind.”

Ban’s call for more troops, combined with a call for donor countries to give more money to its Central African Republic appeal, came less than a week after France and the European Union pledged to bolster their forces.

The EU last Friday said 1,000 troops from the bloc would be on the ground “very, very soon” while France confirmed it was boosting its presence to 2,000 military personnel.

However senior UN officials on the ground in Bangui on Thursday said even greater numbers were needed.

Troops from France’s Operation Sangaris and the 6,000-strong African Union-backed force MISCA are doing a “good job” but need reinforcements to contain the bloodshed, UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos said at the close of a two-day visit.

“There are not enough troops on the ground. So there are discussions going on right now about how can we further support those forces immediately with additional personnel,” Amos told reporters.

She said there was also a discussion on “whether or not the MISCA mission should become a UN peacekeeping mission in the long term.”

Rocket and grenade explosions had echoed around the capital on Wednesday after clashes between international peacekeepers and militias.

- ‘Misery must end’ -

In his speech to the Security Council, Ban called on nations to show increased generosity toward CAR, noting that the UN has only so far raised 15 percent of the $551 million it proposed in its appeal for 2014.

About one million people have fled their homes because countries of the violence, and the United Nations says 1.3 million — more than a quarter of the population — need immediate food aid.

During her visit, Amos met interim president Catherine Samba Panza, who is tasked with restoring security and a functioning state after taking over last month when coup leader Michel Djotodia was forced to step down under international pressure.

Amos also visited the northwestern town of Bossangoa, where the mainly Christian “anti-balaka” (anti-machete) militia first emerged, and said she was “shocked” by the sight of burnt houses and terrified civilians sleeping in the forest or in camps for the displaced.

The head of UNAIDS, Michel Sidibe, who was also on the trip, described the conditions as “desperate”.

“The human suffering and misery must end,” he said in a statement. “We must ensure the existence of minimum security conditions so that people can return to their homes without fear of violence.”

UNAIDS warned there was also “an alarming number of reports of sexual attacks” on women and girls at camps for the displaced.

[Image via Agence France-Presse]

WVLT-TV aired footage on Wednesday of Katie Nichols approaching the station’s camera crew minutes after interviewing a neighbor concerning her mother’s stabbing earlier that morning.

“The satanic cult in this city has been casting satanic spells on me for three, four days,” Nichols told WVLT. “I’m exhausted. I came home and found out my mom was the ringleader and was trying to kill my daughter.”

Authorities reported that the unidentified victim had suffered stab wounds to the chest, neck, and stomach and was hospitalized. She remains in intensive care.

“When I left, she was still breathing,” Nichols said of her mother. “I stabbed her three times and she should have died. She was still breathing. I don’t know what happened to her afterwards or where they took her, but she was the antichrist — she did not die.”

Nichols said she then took her daughter and hid while waiting for a sign it was safe to return. She was arrested and charged with first-degree attempted murder and especially aggravated kidnapping.

Watch the bizarre interview, as aired by WVLT on Wednesday, below.

[h/t Gawker]

Brian Acton lost a small fortune in the dot-com bust and was rejected for jobs at Twitter and Facebook.

Now, the friends behind the hot mobile messaging startup WhatsApp are the newest tech industry billionaires.

Facebook this week bought WhatsApp in a stock-and-cash deal worth up to $19 billion and gave Koum a seat on the social network’s board of directors.

Koum signed the Facebook takeover contract at the unused building where he and his mother once queued for food stamps in the Silicon Valley city of Mountain View, where WhatsApp is located, according to Forbes Magazine.

Koum, who turns 38 on Sunday, has described growing up as a rebellious Jewish child near Kiev and having little when he immigrated to California with his mother at the age of 16 just after the Soviet Union’s breakup.

His father did not make it to the United States, where the family sought to escape anti-Semitism and oppressive tactics of secret police.

- Soviet childhood -

“Jan’s childhood made him appreciate communication that was not bugged or taped,” Sequoia Capital partner Jim Goetz said in an online post.

“When he arrived in the US as a 16-year-old immigrant living on food stamps, he had the extra incentive of wanting to stay in touch with his family in Russia and the Ukraine.”

Koum’s mother brought with her a cache of pens and Soviet-issued notebooks to save money on school supplies, according to Forbes magazine.

A self-described trouble-maker at school, Koum had a job sweeping the floors in a grocery store. After his mother was diagnosed with cancer, they got by on disability payments, Forbes reported.

Koum learned computer networking from manuals bought from, and eventually returned to, a used book store, according to the account.

He enrolled in a state university in Silicon Valley and was working on the side with a computer security firm when he met Acton while on assignment at Yahoo in 1997.

Acton was employee number 44 at the Sunnyvale, California-based Internet firm and shared a “no-nonsense” attitude with Koum. Within a year, Koum was working as an engineer at Yahoo and the pair were on their way to being close friends.

Koum eventually chose Yahoo over college. When Koum’s mother died of cancer in 2000, his mentor Acton stepped in with support.

Acton, meanwhile, reportedly lost millions investing during the famous dot-com boom that ended with an infamous dot-com bust.

Acton and Koum left Yahoo in 2007 and took a year off, exploring South America and playing the sport of Ultimate Frisbee, according to Forbes.

They both applied for jobs at Facebook after coming home. Both were rejected. In a Twitter post from 2009, Acton said that an effort to win a job at one-to-many messaging service Twitter was rebuffed.

Koum was living off dwindling savings when the iPhone and Apple’s online App Store prompted a certainty that an exciting new frontier was opening.

He tapped into the local Russian immigrant community to pursue his idea of a smartphone messaging service synched to people’s contact lists.

Koum enlisted Acton, who was jobless and devoting energy to a less promising startup.

Koum and Acton in 2009 founded WhatsApp, which took its name from a play on the phrase “What’s Up?”

- No Ads -

They devoted themselves to a credo of “No Ads. No Games. No Gimmicks.”

A note stating just that and signed by Acton remains taped to Koum’s desk, according to venture capital firm Sequoia, which invested in the startup early.

The “contrarian approach” of gathering no information about users for targeting ads was shaped by Koum’s aversion to tactics of secret police in communist countries, Goetz said in an online note.

The formula led to stunning growth to more than 450 million users, with 50 billion messages handled daily

The founders jokingly described themselves at the website as “two guys who spent a combined 20 years doing geeky stuff at Yahoo!”

Koum describes himself in his Twitter account profile with a Kanye West quote, “We on a galaxy the haters cannot visit.”

Koum has nearly 12,000 followers at Twitter but follows only “Jesus Christ, Silicon Valley,” an account devoted to Internet industry humor.

In a conference call discussing the acquisition, Facebook chief and founder Mark Zuckerberg described Koum as being a “valuable thought partner” for several years.

WhatsApp is a platform for sending images, video, audio, or text messages for free over the Internet using data connections of smartphones.

[Image via Agence France-Presse]

The deaths — which brought to nearly 100 the number of people who have been killed since Tuesday — came as EU foreign ministers in Brussels imposed sanctions on Ukrainian ministers and security officials with “blood on their hands”.

Ukraine’s embattled President Viktor Yanukovych appeared ready to concede to one of the protestors’ main demands after the latest wave of violence by suggesting to visiting EU dignitaries that he may be ready to hold early elections.

Emphasising the sense of crisis was a rare joint call for a “political solution” by the US and Russian leaders. Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke to Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin – who have bickered openly over a crisis that has pitted the ex-Soviet country’s future between Russia and the West — by telephone and all three called for a halt to the bloodshed.

Ukraine’s three-month street demonstration has become an orgy of bloodshed since Tuesday night.

Opposition medics said more than 60 protesters had been shot dead by police on Thursday alone. Kiev authorities for their part put the total toll from three days of violence at 75.

Bullet-riddled bodies were scattered on Thursday amid smouldering debris after masked protesters hurling Molotov cocktails forced gun-toting police from the capital’s Independence Square — the epicentre of the increasingly bloody revolt against Yanukovych’s pro-Russian rule.

Both sides accused each other of using snipers in a major escalation of to a standoff that was sparked by Yanukovych’s rejection in November of an EU pact in favour of closer ties with Moscow.

But the White House said bluntly that it was “outraged by the images of Ukrainian security forces firing automatic weapons on their own people”.

Volunteer medics who made a makeshift morgue out of a popular hotel overlooking the square also accused police of killing demonstrators with live rounds.

“They were shot in the head or in the heart by live bullets, not by rubber ones,” said first aid worker Natalia.

Ukraine’s interior ministry said only that it reserved the right to use live munitions “in self-defence”.

The ministry also accused “extremists” of seizing 67 of its troops at gunpoint and holding them hostage in one of buildings near the war-scarred square.

- ‘No deal yet’ -

Events on the ground gave an apparent impetus to political discussion with some hope that Ukraine’s leaders were about to concede ground on the key political issue of early elections

“Among other things it was agreed with Yanukovych that there was a willingness to hold early elections this year – “both presidential and parliamentary” — Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk told reporters after a meeting with the Ukrainian leader in between Kiev that included Warsaw top diplomat and the foreign ministers of Germany and France.

But Ukrainian opposition leader Vitali Klitschko quickly cautioned after his own subsequent meeting with the same EU troika that there was “no deal yet”.

And Tusk himself suggested that the violence seems to have spiralled too far for the shell-shocked country to be satisfied with a simply a move of election a few months ahead of their expected March 2015.

“The only way (the violence) can end is with the physical destruction of the president,” a protester from the predominantly pro-EU western Ukraine named Bogdan said shortly after Thursday’s most brutal violence subsided.

- EU sanctions -

The shocking scale of bloodshed in a strategic nation that serves as a brittle diplomatic bridge between Russia and the West prompted EU officials to follow their US counterparts and slap travel bans against Ukrainians responsible for ordering the use of force.

Italian Foreign Minister Emma Bonino said an agreement was also reached at an emergency EU meeting in Brussels to impose asset freezes on those with “blood on their hands”.

The measures mark a U-turn for Brussels diplomats who until Monday had resisted Ukrainian opposition demands for sanctions.

The United States has already put 20 top Ukrainian officials on a visa blacklist.

“Helping to stop the violence is the immediate priority,” British Foreign Secretary William Hague said in Brussels.

Ukraine’s former master Russia blasted the sanctions as “bullying” and said President Vladimir Putin was sending a representative to Kiev to act as a mediator in talks with the opposition.

- ‘Stay indoors’ -

Ukraine’s crisis has evolved into a broader anti-government movement after initially sparking from the shock of seeing Yanukovych spurn an historic EU trade deal in favour a $15 billion bailout from Kiev’s old masters in the Kremlin.

The unrest has also swept through the pro-Western west of the country and parts of its more Russified east — exposing the deep historical fault lines between the two.

Yanukovych had appeared determined Wednesday to end the crisis by force after the security services announced plans to launch a sweeping “anti-terror” operation.

He also sacked the army’s top general — a powerful figure lauded by the opposition for refusing to back the use of force against protestors.

The president was dealt a further embarrassing blow when Kiev mayor Volodymyr Makeyenko resigned Thursday from the ruling party in protest at the “tragedy” of the unrest.

Ukraine’s police force also appeared to admit an inability to control events as it bluntly advised Kiev residents to “stay indoors”.

[Image via Agence France-Presse]

The California tech giant said its “Project Tango” would provide prototypes of its new smartphone to outside developers to encourage the writing of new applications.

Project leader Johnny Lee said the goal of the project, which incorporates robotics and vision-processing technology, is “to give mobile devices a human-scale understanding of space and motion.”

“What if you could capture the dimensions of your home simply by walking around with your phone before you went furniture shopping?” Google said on its Project Tango web page.

“What if directions to a new location didn’t stop at the street address? What if you never again found yourself lost in a new building? What if the visually impaired could navigate unassisted in unfamiliar indoor places? What if you could search for a product and see where the exact shelf is located in a super-store?”

The technology could also be used for “playing hide-and-seek in your house with your favorite game character, or transforming the hallways into a tree-lined path.”

Smartphones are equipped with sensors which make over 1.4 million measurements per second, updating the positon and rotation of the phone.

Partners in the project include researchers from the University of Minnesota, George Washington University, German tech firm Bosch and the Open Source Robotics Foundation, among others.

Another partner is California-based Movidius, which makes vision-processor technology for mobile and portable devices and will provide the processor platform.

Movidius said in a statement the goal was “to mirror human vision with a newfound level of depth, clarity and realism on mobile and portable connected devices.”

“Google has paved the future direction for smart mobile vision systems and we’re excited to be working with a company that shares our vision to usher in the next wave of applications that fundamentally alter how a mobile device is used to experience the world around us,” said Remi El-Ouazzane, chief executive of Movidius.

“Project Tango is truly a groundbreaking platform and we look forward to seeing the innovation the developer community achieves,” he added.

[Image via Agence France-Presse]

CNN reporter Ed Lavandera attempted to get Abbott to expand on his accepting Nugent as a spokesperson in his gubernatorial campaign against state Sen. Wendy Davis (D), with limited success.

“You know, it’s funny how reactive the Davis campaign is to this,” Abbott was quoted as saying on Thursday. “It shows that he’s driven a wedge and exposed the fraud that they’ve displayed on Second Amendment-based issues. And so, Ted Nugent was a way to expose Wendy Davis for her flip-flopping on gun-related issues.”

However, Abbott did not explain what connection the racially-inflammatory term had to Davis’ position on gun safety. When Lavandera attempted to follow up his question for a second time, an aide for Abbott touched Lavandera on the shoulder and said, “This press conference is over” as Abbott spoke to someone at a campaign stop.

“That’s not a press conference,” Lavandera protested.

“Everybody got to ask a question,” the aide responded.

“One question is not a press conference,” Lavandera insisted. “We told you. We said specifically what we wanted to talk about.”

When Lavandera attempted to ask Abbott whether Nugent would be appearing with him, the aide stopped him again.

“Why would you associate yourself with someone who describes a sitting president as a ‘subhuman mongrel?’” Lavandera asked as Abbott entered a car. “Who describes female politicians in vile ways? Will you use him again during the campaign?”

The face-off between Abbott and Lavandera came two days after the attorney general’s campaign released a statement saying, “The controversy is what [Nugent] said in the past. We are not endorsing Ted Nugent, he is supporting us. It’s easy to criticize some of the language he has used in the past,” the aide continued. “He is protected under the Constitution, like you and I.”

Watch Lavandera’s attempt to interview Abbott, as aired Thursday on CNN, below.

Immigration officials had barred Paul Semugoma, a medical doctor and critic of pending anti-gay legislation in Uganda, from re-entering South Africa on Monday due to a lapsed visitor’s visa.

Semugoma was freed after a court settlement between his legal team and the department of Home Affairs granting him a work permit and allowing him into the country.

“It’s all worked out,” said Ayanda Khumalo, a lawyer acting for the Ugandan.

“The basis of the settlement is that the department will give him an exceptional skills work permit and he will be released today,” she said.

Semugoma was “overwhelmed and overjoyed” after his release, she added.

Uganda’s parliament in December passed a controversial anti-gay law that will see homosexuals jailed for life, which President Yoweri Museveni has said he will sign into law.

The decision on Thursday follows a legal tussle between the authorities and Semugoma’s team.

According to rights groups lobbying for his release, two applications by Semugoma for a work permit had been lost by authorities.

The department said he was barred as his visitor’s visa had expired.

Semugoma has volunteered at the Johannesburg-based Anova Health Institute, which focuses on HIV, for three years.

South Africa upholds same sex rights, including marriage, but was accused of being complicit with the anti-gay sentiment of the government over the matter.

[Image via Agence France-Presse]

During an appearance on John Hagee Ministries’ Global Evangelism Television (GETV) network on Wednesday, host Matt Hagee asked the Texas Republican where the country had gone wrong.

“I think we got off the track when we allowed our government to become a secular government,” DeLay explained. “When we stopped realizing that God created this nation, that he wrote the Constitution, that it’s based on biblical principles.”

“Governments like we have are very easy to destroy,” Hagee later noted.

DeLay recalled that he had closed the Capitol rotunda for three hours as Majority Leader so that members of the House and Senate could get “on our knees seeking the face of God and praying.”

“And I really feel now, Pastor Matt, the Lord has heard us, I see the Holy Spirit moving. And I pray every day for an awakening in this country,” he said, adding that people should get involved.

“Join a group, a tea party or whatever.”

Watch the video below from GETV, broadcast Feb. 20, 2014.

(h/t: Right Wing Watch)

The probe concerns the “possible illegal transportation of persons across the state border”, Vilnius prosecutors said in a statement.

The decision marked a turnaround for Lithuania, which previously refused to probe allegations that 45-year-old Mustafa al-Hawsawi was imprisoned at a secret US Central Intelligence Agency jail there between 2004 and 2006.

A Vilnius court said in January that prosecutors should ask the United States for testimony from Guantanamo detainee Hawsawi before making a final decision on whether to pursue his case.

Human rights activists welcomed the move by prosecutors Thursday, saying it could set an example for other countries facing allegations of hosting secret CIA jails.

“We are pleased with this decision,” Meta Adutaviciute of Lithuania’s Human Rights Monitoring Institute told AFP.

Sarah Fulton, lawyer at the London-based Redress organisation, told AFP that it was “just the beginning of a long process”.

“We certainly hope that it will serve as an example for other countries. And we trust that the investigation will be carried out to get to the bottom of these allegations.”

Rights groups said their claims were based on flight data, transfers of other suspects and information about other alleged CIA secret prisons known as “black sites”.

Hawsawi is the second terror suspect alleged to have been illegally held in EU and NATO member Lithuania, after top Al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah who is being held indefinitely at Guantanamo.

In 2009, a Lithuanian parliamentary enquiry identified two sites that may have been used as CIA black sites in the Baltic nation.

Prosecutors launched a probe but dropped it in 2011 citing insufficient evidence and a statute of limitations.

The Council of Europe has claimed other secret prisons were also set up in Romania and Poland.

[Image: "Hands Of The Prisoner In Jail" via Shutterstock]

Bridge scandal: Republicans push Port Authority reform package (via NJ.com)

TRENTON — Assembly Republicans unveiled a package of legislation today that they said would reform the state’s many independent authorities and prevent occurrences like the George Washington Bridge scandal. The measure would make the agencies more…

[Image via MSNBC]

WTVF reported that William Sewell, a medical service investigator who had been with the state for more than 40 years, told the graphic story to Shun Mullins last summer.

Mullins had filed a complaint claiming that his mother had died when the Algood’s deputy fire chief refused to perform CPR because she was black. The complaint stated that the fire chief covered it up by falsifying medical reports.

Sewell had started the meeting by asking Mullins if he had ever been to prison.

“His very first question was, ‘Mr. Mullins have you ever been to the penitentiary?” Mullins recalled. “That was more than insulting to me.”

Before concluding the meeting, Sewell decided to tell a shocking personal story about his family’s history with racism.

“Mr. Sewell goes into a story about a hanging, that he had been told, about the hanging of a black man,” Mullins explained.

Nashville NAACP member Sheryl Allen and an acquaintance, Judy Mainord, were also present in the room. Mullins, Allen and Mainord all remembered the story the same way in affidavits.

Sewell said that a black man had been lynched in Baxter, Mullins’ hometown.

“They hung him, and they started carving his skin out of his back,” Allen said. “It was like he got excited telling this story.”

“They lowered the body, and all the white men standing around took turns removing the skin from the black man’s back,” Mainord recalled Sewell saying.

In conclusion, Sewell said that he still owned a “strap” of the black man’s skin that had been given to him by his grandfather.

“They made a strap out of his skin, and they used that strap as a knife sharpener,” Allen remarked.

Mainord pointed out that the skin “was like a trophy to him, and that concerns me.”

“It was my impression he still had it at his house,” Mullins noted. “The way he enjoyed telling the story, I thought perhaps he was still using it.”

The Tennessee Department of Health determined that Sewell’s question about prison and the lynching story could have been a “form of intimidation” towards Mullins, according to an internal investigation obtained by WTVF. The report concluded that Sewell may have known the fire chief because of his close ties to other officials in Algood.

And if his plan was to intimidate Mullins, it worked.

“By all means, I felt threatened,” Mullins told WTVF.

For his part, Sewell insisted to the station that he was just trying to convince Mullins and the others in the meeting that he understood what racism was like.

“If they chose to conclude that was an intimidating comment, I’m sorry,” he opined. “It was a gruesome story. I got caught up in the moment trying to convince these people that I understood, and I just went too far.”

Sewell admitted that he had gotten the “back strap” from his grandfather, who was once the mayor of Baxter, but he said it was in “somebody’s landfill” now.

“I went downstairs in my storage, I went through entire boxes, but that strap is gone,” he said.

WTFV confirmed that a black man’s body was mutilated during a lynching in Baxter in 1896.

Even after the death of Mullins’ mother and the intimidation that he suffered, Sewell argued that he was the true victim.

“I am the victim because I made a mistake,” Sewell observed.

The Department of Health has assigned a new investigator to look at Mullins’ original complaint.

Watch the video below from WTVF, broadcast Feb. 18, 2014.

NewsChannel5.com | Nashville News, Weather

The Denver Post reports that Rep. Jonathan Singer, D-Longmont, discovered the black canvas bag sitting under the table where the lawmakers sit.

Inside the bag was a loaded handgun belonging to Rep. Jared Wright, R-Fruita, who sits next to Singer on the House Local Government committee.

“I just immediately notified the Sergeant at Arms and soon we realized it was Jared’s bag,” said Singer.

“The bag was taken to my office where I got it back,” said Wright, who served as a police officer from 2007 until 2011.

Wright, who is in his first term, told The Denver Post that he often carries a concealed handgun when he is inside the Capitol and under state law he has the right to do so as a peace officer.

“I feel it’s my duty to be a first responder wherever I am at,” said Wright. “That’s why I carry it.”

State law prohibits carrying a gun in the Capitol “without legal authority.”

After speaking with Colorado State Patrol and Roxane White, Gov.John Hickenlooper’s chief of staff, Wright said that he had agreed to no longer carry the weapon inside the building and no report was filed.

First elected in 2012, Rep. Wright was endorsed by the NRA, an organization that “has provided generations of Americans with programs focused on safety, education and responsibility.”

[Image from Rep. Wright's Facebook page]

CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuelan security forces and demonstrators faced off in streets blocked by burning barricades in several provincial cities on Thursday as protests escalated against President Nicolas Maduro’s socialist government.

At least five people have died since the unrest turned violent last week, with scores of injuries and arrests.

The demonstrators, mostly students, blame the government for violent crime, high inflation, product shortages and alleged repression of opponents. They want Maduro to resign.

In middle-class areas of Caracas overnight, security forces fired teargas and bullets, chasing youths who threw Molotov cocktails and blocked streets with burning trash.

It was one of the worst bouts of violence the capital has seen in nearly three weeks of unrest across Venezuela, and trouble also flared in other urban centers.

Many Caracas residents banged pots at windows in a traditional form of protest, and knots of demonstrators were out again early on Thursday.

“I declare myself in civil disobedience,” read one banner held up by demonstrators spread across a Caracas road.

The government said a funeral parade for deceased folk singer Simon Diaz, a beloved figure who died on Wednesday aged 85, was held up due to “violent groups” blocking roads.

There was unrest too in the western Andean states of Tachira and Merida that have been especially volatile since hardline opposition leaders called supporters onto the streets in early February demanding Maduro’s departure.

In the city of San Cristobal, which some residents are describing as a “war zone”, many businesses remained shut as students and police faced off in the streets again on Thursday.

Maduro said “special measures” would be taken to restore order in Tachira. “We won’t let them turn it into a Benghazi,” he said, referring to the violence-wracked Libyan city.

Tensions have escalated since opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez, a 42-year-old Harvard-educated economist, turned himself in to troops this week. He is being held in Caracas’ Ramo Verde jail on charges of fomenting the violence.

“Change depends on every one of us. Don’t give up!” Lopez’s wife Lilian Tintori said via Twitter on Thursday.

Local TV channels are providing almost no live coverage of the unrest, so Venezuelans are turning to social media to swap information and images, though falsified photos are circulating.

Both sides rolled out competing evidence of the latest violence on Thursday, with ruling Socialist Party governors showing photos and video of charred streets and torched vehicles, while the opposition posted footage of brutal behavior which they said was by national guard troops.

Caracas was calmer by lunchtime on Thursday, though there was less traffic than normal and some businesses were closed, in a further drag on the already ailing economy.

COUP ALLEGATIONS

Maduro, narrowly elected last year to succeed socialist leader Hugo Chavez after his death from cancer, says Lopez and others are in league with the U.S. government and want a coup.

The latest direct victim of the unrest, college student and local beauty queen Genesis Carmona, 22, was shot in the head during a demonstration in the central city of Valencia.

Maduro says “fascist groups” are trying to create a crisis to topple his administration.

“There is an international campaign to justify a foreign intervention in Venezuela,” he said in a combative, nationally televised address late on Wednesday.

Speaking in Mexico, U.S. President Barack Obama criticized Maduro’s government for arresting protesters and urged it to focus on addressing the “legitimate grievances” of its people.

Street protests were the backdrop to a short-lived coup against Chavez in 2002 before military loyalists and supporters helped bring him back. There is no evidence the military, which was the decisive factor in 2002, may turn on Maduro now.

Detractors call Lopez a dangerous hothead. He has frequently squabbled with fellow opposition leaders and was involved in the 2002 coup, even helping arrest a minister.

Though the majority of demonstrators have been peaceful, an increasingly prominent radical fringe has been attacking police, blocking roads and vandalizing buildings.

Though the Caracas protests began and are still strongest in middle-class neighborhoods, sporadic demonstrations have also spread to poorer areas of the city, residents say.

Rights groups say the police response has been excessive, and some detainees say they were tortured.

Venezuela’s main opposition leader, Henrique Capriles, who was narrowly beaten by Maduro in last year’s presidential election, disagrees with Lopez’s street tactics but backs protesters’ grievances and has condemned the government response.

“How many more deaths do they want?” he told reporters on Thursday, urging opposition activists to avoid violence.

(Additional reporting by Daniel Wallis, Eyanir Chinea and Girish Gupta; Editing by Brian Ellsworth, Kieran Murray and James Dalgleish)

According to Bachmann, the tide of white “guilt” that President Barack Obama rode into office will not be matched by a similar feelings for the former First Lady.

Bachmann announced in 2013 that she is retiring from Congress after her current term, but she did not hesitate to offer Republicans advice about how to defeat Clinton, should she decide to run. The GOP, she said, needs to keep hammering away at the 2012 attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Clinton, Bachmann said, was aware of “deteriorating conditions” on the ground in Benghazi, but chose to do nothing.

“She has a real problem when it comes to Benghazi,” Bachmann said.

Furthermore, Clinton was “the godmother of Obamacare,” working “behind closed doors” during her husband’s term in office to pass her own health care plan, alleged Bachmann.

Ultimately, she said, a lot of people in the U.S. just “aren’t ready” for a woman president.

“I think there was a cachet about having an African-American president because of guilt,” she told Thomas.

“People don’t hold guilt for a woman,” she said, and while voters will vote for women for every other elected office in the country, “I don’t think there is a pent-up desire” to see a woman in the Oval Office.

When Obama came along, she said, he was “new and different.” Having spent more than two decades in the public eye, Bachmann said, Clinton won’t have the same appeal.

The offer made in last year’s budget had been an attempt to gain some Republican support and break through congressional gridlock. Dropping it this year is a sign Democrats are girding for November congressional elections and in no mood to risk supporting proposals that could cost them votes from seniors on Election Day on November 4.

The budget offer, to be issued on March 4, will adhere to spending levels agreed to in a two-year bipartisan budget deal that was achieved at the end of last year, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The Obama budget will include new proposals, including expanded tax credits for the working poor, the official said.

Obama’s budget drops a controversial change in how the government calculates inflation for Social Security and other federal benefits.

The White House official said this proposal had been made last year in an effort to spur Republicans into a compromise by identifying tax loopholes they could close and reach an overall deficit reduction plan.

“However, over the course of last year, Republicans consistently showed a lack of willingness to negotiate on a deficit reduction deal, refusing to identify even one unfair tax loophole they would be willing to close despite the president’s willingness to put tough things on the table,” the official said.

The official said the offer remains on the table “for whenever the Republicans decide they want to engage in a serious discussion about a balanced plan to deal with our long-term challenges” that includes closing tax loopholes for wealthy Americans and corporations.

(Reporting By Steve Holland, Roberta Rampton and Caren Bohan; Editing by Sandra Maler)

Conceived by the team who work on the open source book tool for Wikipedia at publisher PediaPress, the Indiegogo fundraiser is looking to raise $50,000 (£30,000) to bring Wikipedia into print. “We all know that Wikipedia is huge. The English version alone consists of more than four million articles. But can you imagine how large Wikipedia really is? We think that the best way to experience the size of Wikipedia is by transforming it into the physical medium of books,” they write. “Containing the most volumes and edited by the largest number of contributors the printed edition will be a work of record-breaking dimensions. Furthermore the exhibit aims to honour the countless volunteers who have created this fascinating trove of knowledge in little more than 10 years.”

The team, PediaPress’s Heiko Hees, Christoph Kepper and Alex Boerger, believe the complete English Wikipedia would fit into approximately 1,000 books, with 1,200 pages each. “All volumes will have continuous page numbers, so the last article could as well be on page number 1,193,014,” they say. The text, which will include images, will be laid out in three columns across 600,000-odd sheets of paper, which will be “FSC-certified paper that comes from sustainable forestry”, they said.

They envisage the books fitting on a 10m-long book case, which they would hope to display at the Wikimania conference in London this August, alongside “live updates [printed] on continuous paper” to show the update frequency of the website, as “obviously a printed Wikipedia will be outdated within seconds”.

Then, if enough money is raised, they hope to send the exhibition on an international tour, before donating it to a large public library. “To later generations this might be a period piece from the beginning of the digital revolution,” they say.

“The most important reason for starting the project now was that we wanted to show the quantity of information,” said Kepper. “Over the last 10 to 15 years a glacial change has occurred and we have become so used to very large data sources on the internet that their true size seems surprising and unexpected. We are at the crossroads between the Gutenberg age and the information age. We all grew up with books and know this medium very well, but today we are dealing with so much information that books become less and less useful for us. For our kids, the situation might be totally different and the idea of printing something into a book might seem totally absurd.”

So far, they have raised just over $2,000 of their $50,000 goal, but the project has 52 days yet to run, and while saying that there is “something strikingly counterintuitive about the whole project … and with the divide between print and digital widening, the value of such an exercise should be questioned” Wired magazine points out that “Wikipedia does have a huge community that might see the project receive significant support”.

“The Wikipedia community is enormous and tight-knit, so don’t be shocked if the campaign is successful eventually,” said Crowdfund Insider.

“After the first eight days (16%) of our 60-day funding campaign, we reached only 4% of our funding goal,” said Kepper. “Maybe we are already further into the information age than we thought, but we still feel pretty confident that our campaign will find enough supporters.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014

According to NewsChief.com, Willie “Mother” Lewis, 78, and her daughter Ruthena Lewis, 44, ate breakfast at the A&G Restaurant in Winter Haven, Florida, with the bill coming to $18.46

After finishing, Ruthena Lewis took  her mother out to the car and then returned to the restaurant to pay her bill. Lewis presented A&G  cashier  Crystal Henson with her credit card which was subsequently declined. According to the restaurant staff, Lewis held the cancel button down as the Henson attempted to process the charge.

According to the police report, “(Ruthena Lewis) stated to (Henson) that if she gave them the meal for free she would go to heaven. If she ran the credit card again, she would go to hell.”

Lewis then handed the cashier a business card with the name of her church pastor , Bishop Joseph Lewis of the Church of God the Bible Way, on it, saying to call him and he would pay the bill. Lewis is not related to the two women.

Ruthena Lewis then left the restaurant, got into her car with her mother and drove off, however a restaurant employee got her license number and turned it over to Winter Haven police, who arrested the pair soon after.

The mother, Willie Lewis, who was in the car and couldn’t see what had transpired, had $80 cash in her purse at the time of her arrest.

Following the arrest Bishop Joseph Lewis went to the  restaurant and  paid the women’s bill, getting assurances from owner  George Paragios that he would ask police to drop charges against the women.

According to police reports, officers arrived at the restaurant to have Paragios sign a waiver of prosecution and Paragios declined.

“He advised that he wanted to continue with the charges, and refused to sign the waiver,” the report says.

Restaurant staff member, Natasha Anthony,  said the two women purposely left the restaurant without paying for their food.

“The law is the law whether you’re 25 years old or 85 years old.”

Since that time, members of the Church of God the Bible Way have been picketing A&G Restaurant urging customers to stay away.

Willie Lewis and Ruthena Lewis’ next court date is March 4, said Brian Haas, State Attorney’s Office spokesman, although the case may be resolved before that.

[Business woman giving credit card on Shutterstock]

Prostitutes up and down the country are fighting against a tax code that does not recognise their profession, even though paying for sex is legal, leaving them no chance to pay a cut of their earnings to the tax man and qualify for a pension.

“It is the height of hypocrisy that what I do is legal, but I cannot pay tax on it,” said Efe Bal, 36, a Turkish transsexual prostitute who staged a naked protest in the rain outside the offices of Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera on Wednesday, delivering a tirade to two nervous-looking policemen as she barely covered herself with a full-page ad she had taken out in the paper the previous day.

Bal, a sex worker who has written a book called What Husbands Don’t Say, has been plastering Milan, her hometown, with posters for months offering to pay tax.

What has really irked prostitutes is that, in a bureaucratic twist, the tax office has now decided to fine them for tax evasion, even though it has given them no way of paying tax.

Bal said she had decided to step up her protest after receiving fines worth €450,000 (£370,000). “It was calculated on payments into my bank account between 2008 and 2012 but didn’t discriminate between earnings and the sale of property,” she said.

Carol, 54, a Verona-based prostitute born in Ethiopia said she had been treated like an “extraterrestrial” and sent packing when she offered to pay taxes at her local tax office only to receive a bill for €70,000, based on a year’s earnings. “That is an exaggeration since I work on the streets and earn €40,000,” she said.

“I escaped the war in Ethiopia for a better life and now they are massacring me – I will never have a pension,” she added.

Sandra Yara, a Brazilian former prostitute who is now married, said she had been surprised to receive a bill for €50,000 after being told by her local chamber of commerce that her work could not be categorised.

The prostitutes’ campaign to pay tax is stepping up as around 60,000 shopkeepers and artisans descended on Rome’s Piazza del Popolo this week to demand that the incoming government led by Matteo Renzi lower their tax burden.

To identify Italy’s up to 70,000 prostitutes – half of whom are foreign born – tax police are scouring escort websites for names as they try to recoup desperately needed tax revenue, said Pia Covre, head of the Italian Committee for Civil Rights for Prostitutes.

“They have been trying to fit prostitutes into taxable categories and we have heard of women being told they have been classified as working for marriage agencies,” said Covre.

Bal, who speaks four languages, said she had done well from her trade, earning up to €20,000 a month before the current economic crisis halved her income. Transsexual prostitutes are a common sight on Italian streets, a phenomenon Bal put down to “widespread bisexuality” among customers.

Bal proposed a scalable tax structure for prostitutes which would estimate their income based on their age and ask them to pay less as they get older.

“Nobody said anything about this issue until I showed my bottom,” she said. “My dream now is to visit the head of the Italian tax office and tell him ‘I am a prostitute and I want to pay my taxes’.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014

[Money paid to a prostitute for sex. Photo: Shutterstock.com, all rights reserved.]

The San Francisco Chronicle reported this week that Musk met with Apple Inc’s head of mergers and acquisitions in 2013, stoking speculation about Tesla’s future.

But speaking generally about the possibility of another company buying Tesla, Musk said in an interview with Bloomberg TV that he had concerns.

(Reporting by Deepa Seetharaman; Editing by Alden Bentley)

They said the fire started at about 7.30 a.m. CT in the shed at the municipal airport in Northwood. Four people living in the area went to a hospital with respiratory concerns, said Sgt. Scott Bright of the Iowa Highway Patrol.

Bright said the shed stores sulfuric acid and other chemicals used by crop-dusting planes.

Worth County emergency management officials told residents to go to Kensett, Iowa, about six miles south, the county said on its Facebook page.

“I could see the black smoke billowing up,” Northwood resident Susan Mega said by telephone from Kensett. She said an odor similar to rotten eggs filled the air.

(Reporting By Kevin Murphy in Kansas City, Missouri; Editing by David Bailey and Grant McCool)

[Image via Chauncey Davis, Creative Commons licensed]

KIEV (Reuters) – Ukraine suffered its bloodiest day since Soviet times on Thursday with a gun battle in central Kiev as President Viktor Yanukovich faced conflicting pressures from visiting European Union ministers and his Russian paymasters.

Three hours of fierce fighting in Independence Square, which was recaptured by anti-government protesters, left the bodies of over 20 civilians strewn on the ground, a few hundred meters from where the president met the EU delegation.

Riot police were captured on video shooting from a rooftop at demonstrators in the plaza, known as the Maidan or “Euro-Maidan”. Protesters hurled petrol bombs and paving stones to drive the security forces off a corner of the square the police had captured in battles that began on two days earlier.

Kiev’s city health department said 67 people had been killed since Tuesday, which meant at least 39 died in Thursday’s clashes. That was by far the worst violence since Ukraine emerged from the crumbling Soviet Union 22 years ago.

The foreign ministers of Germany, France and Poland met for a marathon four hours with Yanukovich and extended their stay to put a roadmap for a political solution to opposition leaders. Diplomatic sources familiar with the discussions said it involved a temporary government until fresh elections.

“About to start a meeting with the opposition so as to test proposed agreement,” tweeted Polish minister Radoslaw Sikorski.

Meanwhile their EU colleagues agreed at an emergency meeting in Brussels to move ahead with visa bans and asset freezes on those deemed responsible for the violence, Italian Foreign Minister Emma Bonino said.

In a sign of dwindling support for Yanukovich, his hand-picked head of Kiev’s city administration quit the ruling party in protest at bloodshed in the streets.

But core loyalists were still talking tough.

Interior Minister Vitaly Zakharchenko, wearing camouflage as he made a televised statement, said police had been issued with combat weapons and would use them “in accordance with the law” to defend themselves – or to free 67 of their colleagues his ministry said were being held captive.

Russia criticized the European and U.S. actions, calling them “blackmail” that would only make matters worse. President Vladimir Putin dispatched an envoy to Kiev to join the mediation effort with the opposition at Yanukovich’s request.

Ukraine is caught in a geopolitical tug-of-war between Moscow – which sees it as a market and ally and fears protests spreading to Russia – and the West, which says Ukrainians should be free to choose economic integration with the EU.

Raising pressure on Yanukovich to restore order if he wants another desperately needed loan, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Moscow would not hand over cash to a leadership that let opponents walk over it “like a doormat”.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel called Yanukovich to urge him to accept the offer of EU mediation in the crisis.

BOTH SIDES USED GUNS

Thursday morning’s bloodshed, in which both sides used firearms, traumatized many Ukrainians, whose 2004-05 Orange Revolution for democracy passed off largely peacefully.

It heightened concern voiced by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk that Ukraine could descend into civil war or split between the pro-European west and Russian-speaking east.

Video of the clashes on the edge of the Kiev square showed “Berkut” riot policemen firing bursts from automatic rifles on the run as they covered retreating colleagues fleeing past a nearby arts centre just off the plaza. An opposition militant in a helmet was filmed firing from behind a tree.

Other protesters used police riot shields for cover, while some fell wounded as the protest camp became a killing zone. A presidential statement said dozens of police were wounded or killed during the opposition offensive, hours after Yanukovich and opposition leaders had agreed on a truce.

The interior ministry’s website advised citizens to avoid central Kiev because of the danger from “armed and aggressive individuals”. Schools, restaurants and many shops in the normally bustling city of 3 million were closed, the metro was shut down and bank machines were running out of cash.

A statement from Yanukovich’s office said organized gangs of protesters were using firearms, including sniper rifles.

Opposition leader Vitaly Klitschko urged lawmakers to convene in parliament and demanded Yanukovich call an immediate presidential election. “Today is a crucial day,” the former boxing world champion said. “The authorities are resorting to bloody provocations in full view of the world.”

Legislators gathered in parliament, near the main square, but it was not clear any significant decisions could be taken.

“COLD WAR CHESSBOARD”

Wounded protesters were given first-aid treatment in the lobby of the Ukraine Hotel, where many foreign correspondents are staying. Reporters said there were bullet holes in the walls and windows of the hotel overlooking the square.

The crisis in the sprawling country of 46 million with an ailing economy and endemic corruption has mounted since Yanukovich took a $15-billion Russian bailout instead of signing a wide-ranging trade and cooperation deal with the EU.

Russia has held back a new loan installment until it sees stability in Kiev and has condemned EU and U.S. support of the opposition demands that Yanukovich, elected in a broadly fair vote in 2010, should share power and hold new elections.

The United States stepped up pressure on Wednesday by imposing travel bans on 20 senior Ukrainian officials.

“Our approach in the United States is not to see these as some Cold War chessboard in which we’re in competition with Russia,” U.S. President Barack Obama said after a North American summit in Mexico on Wednesday.

Some members of Ukraine’s team decided to leave Russia’s Winter Olympics in Sochi because of the violence back home, the International Olympic Committee said.

In Lviv, a bastion of Ukrainian nationalism since Soviet times, the regional assembly declared autonomy from Yanukovich and his administration, which many west Ukrainians see as much closer to Moscow and to Ukraine’s Russian-speaking east.

Yanukovich, who replaced the head of the armed forces, has denounced the bloodshed as an attempted coup. EU officials said the Ukrainian leader would be left off the sanctions list for now to keep channels of dialogue open.

THREAT TO OLIGARCHS

Diplomats said the threat of sanctions could also target assets held in the West by Ukrainian business oligarchs who have either backed Yanukovich or are sitting on the fence.

Ukraine’s hryvnia currency, flirting with its lowest levels since the global financial crisis five years ago, weakened again on Thursday.

Possibly due to the risk of sanctions, three of Ukraine’s richest magnates have stepped up pressure on Yanukovich to hold back from using force: “There are no circumstances which justify the use of force toward the peaceful population,” said steel and coal “oligarch” Rinat Akhmetov, who bankrolled Yanukovich’s 2010 election campaign.

(Additional reporting by Natalya Zinets, Pavel Polityuk, Vasily Fedosenko and Sabine Siebold in Kiev, John Irish in Paris and Francesco Guarascio and Adrian Croft in Brussels; Writing by Richard Balmforth and Paul Taylor; Editing by Alastair Macdonald)

The video, titled “Putin will teach you how to love the motherland,” is the first music project by Pussy Riot members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina since they were released from prison colonies last year.

The pair have been in Sochi along with other Pussy Riot supporters all week. They were detained by police for several hours on Tuesday and beaten in scuffles on Wednesday which saw them roughly handled and whipped by Cossacks.

They presented the video in public for the first time on a laptop in a district of Sochi, surrounded by reporters but also pro-Kremlin activists who tried to drown them out.

“From the moment we entered this city we have been constantly detained by the security forces,” said Tolokonnikova.

“According to the logic of the authorities, we should spent the maximum amount of time in this city locked up so we got absolutely nothing done,” she added.

The video opens with the Pussy Riot members clad in their trademark coloured balaclavas, tights and dresses swimming in the sea off Sochi.

They are then seen singing and dancing in front of the Olympic rings in the centre of Sochi and trying to taunt a giant Olympic mascot, a furry snow leopard.

The video also shows Wednesday’s footage of the women being beaten with whips and roughly handled in scuffles with Cossacks, who perform the role of vigilantes in southern Russia.

The Russian-language and highly colloquial lyrics slam the human rights situation in Russia, referencing the activists who are still jailed over a Moscow anti-Putin protest in 2012 and the jailed Sochi environmental campaigner Yevgeny Vitishko.

“They will teach you in the prison camps how to cry and how to obey/Salute to the bosses, and hi, il Duce,” the song goes.

“The constitution is lynched, Vitishko’s in prison/Stability, prison gruel, the fence and the watchtower.

“Putin will teach you how to love the motherland.”

-’Unsettling images of whipping’-

The song also refers to the heavy level of security in Sochi, saying “the Olympics are are under surveillance”, as well as the pressure on pro-opposition TV channel Dozhd (Rain).

It also mentions the toilet cubicle with two lavatories at one of the Sochi sports facilities that caused hilarity ahead of the Games. “A two-ass toilet, a priority,” it says.

Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina were sent to penal colonies on a two-year hooliganism sentence for performing an anti-Putin song in a Moscow cathedral in 2012.

However, they were freed early on amnesty in December last year.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) warned the women on Wednesday that it would be “wholly inappropriate” to stage actions outside the Olympic venues.

However central Sochi is some 30 kilometres (18 miles) north of the main Olympic Park. The Adler district where they held the “punk” news conference is closer, around five kilometres away.

IOC spokesman Mark Adams said Thursday that the images of the beating of Pussy Riot were unsettling but reaffirmed that the Games “should not be used as a platform for demonstrations”.

The governor of the local Krasnodar region which includes Sochi, Alexander Tkachev, vowed a full investigation into Wednesday’s incident where the girls were beaten with horsewhips.

“The ideas of this group are not supported by the overwhelming majority of the population of the region,” he stated.

“Nonetheless, absolutely all the guilty in what happened should be punished,” Tkachev added.

Tolokonnikova wrote on Twitter on Thursday afternoon that the pair were at the airport and about to leave Sochi.

Via Gawker, this video above shows what happens when two guys, one white and one black, stand on a busy street, trying to jimmy open a locked car. It’s depressingly predictable. The white guy stands there for a half hour, with the alarm going off, and no one seems to care. The black guy gets arrested in two minutes.

The lesson here is clear: White people are fools if they actually pay for cars.

Just kidding! (White people, please don’t steal cars just because you can.) The real lesson here, of course, is that stereotypes about what a “criminal” looks like go a long way towards determining who gets arrested for what and when. Black people and and white people use marijuana, for instance, at roughly the same rates, but black people are many times more likely to get arrested for marijuana. I have no doubt that the racists online are already trying to discredit this video and suggest there is no possible way that racial stereotypes—which they are interested in denying exist—played a role, but the marijuana statistics are much harder to get around. I’ve had to jimmy open a car I locked my keys inside a couple of time—yes, even while living in a “bad” neighborhood—and not only did the police not bother me, but it never occurred to me that they would. When you’re white, people are happy to assume that you are clearly trying to get into your own car. It’s kind of alarming, actually, because there’s always a chance that the person jimmying open the car is, you know, trying to steal it.

Needless to say, this particular white privilege also means you get to go to convenience stores and purchase stuff—even while listening to loud rap music!—with some crazy dude shooting you dead because he knows he’ll probably get away with it. Unlike being able to fuck with a locked car without the cops at least asking you what you’re doing, this, however, should be a basic human right.

Ahmed Mohammed Ahmed Haza al-Darbi, 39, admitted to planning, aiding and supporting the attack on the MV Limburg, which killed a Bulgarian sailor, injured a dozen other men and caused a large oil spill in the Gulf of Aden.

Wearing a white shirt and a fluorescent yellow tie, the stout Saudi with a sparse beard — long-held at the US military prison in Cuba — admitted to being an “alien unprivileged enemy belligerent.”

His lawyer Ramzi Kassem announced his client was pleading “guilty” to charges of terrorism and to attacking civilians and civilian targets before a US military judge at Guantanamo.

The hearing was retransmitted — with a short delay — for reporters at the US military base in Fort Meade, Maryland, outside Washington.

Prosecutors accuse Darbi of having met with and worked for fellow Saudi Guantanamo detainee Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who faces the death penalty on charges he masterminded the MV Limburg attack and the 2000 attack against the USS Cole in Yemen that left 17 dead.

Darbi, who by pleading guilty could become a key witness against Nashiri, is accused of having bought boats to carry out the attack on the MV Limburg.

Under the terms of the plea deal, Darbi — brother-in-law of Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the September 11, 2001 plane hijackers — could be released from Guantanamo, where he has been detained for more than a decade.

However, no date for his release was given Thursday.