Archived threads in /news/ - Current News - 71. page

>Donald Trump took $19,000 of my money. And I want him to pay.

>I went to Trump University in search of a better life. I was duped — and I want to take Trump to trial.

>Donald Trump took $19,000 of my hard-earned money. I was a student at the now-infamous Trump University, and Trump swindled me and thousands of other people like me. I believe he needs to acknowledge that his business practices were illegal and face a financial penalty that will deter future fraud. So I’m insisting on taking Trump to trial. And soon, a federal appellate court will decide whether I can do just that.

>Prior to Trump U, I spent a great deal of time fighting for homeowners against unscrupulous real estate investors who were stealing people’s homes in Broward County, Florida, where I live. I was not making a lot of money, but the work was important. As the housing market crashed around us, people needed advocates to deter predatory conduct and guide them through financial crisis.

>Still, I was a single mom raising an ambitious 10-year-old daughter who already dreamed of attending an Ivy League college and medical school. I was proud of her drive, but also worried about looming college expenses. I needed to boost my earning potential.

>And so in 2010, I decided to train for a second career as a professional real estate investor. Trump University’s pitch seemed perfect for me. I already had a basic understanding of real estate. I wasn’t looking for a “get rich quick” program. I was willing to roll up my sleeves and learn the finer points of the business. I certainly was familiar with the wrong ways of doing real estate investing and wanted to learn the right way. I wanted mentoring and access to critical resources. And Donald Trump promised exactly that.

>It didn’t take long to realize that Trump University was a classic con, preying on the hunger in people like me

>Trump looked into the cameras and promised year-long mentorships with his “hand-picked” investing experts, trained in his real estate organization. These trained experts and mentors would impart his secrets in a “university” setting, through “Ivy League quality” instruction, along with access to valuable resources like financing, legal support, and a proprietary real estate listings database.

>As a resident of South Florida, surrounded by his opulent properties, the Trump name represented an elite, professional real estate operation. I believed it when Donald Trump — the most famous real estate investor in the world — said I would get all this and more through his “Gold Elite” mentorship program.

>Mr. Putin’s remarks stopped far short of accepting the conclusions of American intelligence agencies that the Kremlin was behind the election campaign cyberattacks. But they opened room for verbal maneuvering by Moscow — and also by Mr. Trump — amid multiple investigations in the United States into Russian meddling, including one by the F.B.I. about the firing of its director, James B. Comey.

>Perhaps worried that, as the investigations make headway, evidence will come to light that the Russian state or at least Russians were clearly involved in the hacking, Mr. Putin appeared to be setting up a pre-emptive line of defense, as the Kremlin did when it became difficult to simply deny initially secret Russian deployments to Ukraine in 2014, and to Syria in late 2015.

>Swamped by evidence of Russian military involvement in Ukraine and then Syria, the Kremlin retreated from categorical denials to claims that Russians fighting in eastern Ukraine were Russian “vacationers” and that burly Russians who appeared in Syria were humanitarian aid workers. It later acknowledged that the supposed aid workers were Russian soldiers.

>The questions of Russian hacking, and interaction between Russian officials and members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle, including his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, have been a huge thorn in the side of the new administration. The furor has led to the dismissal of Michael T. Flynn as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, forced his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to recuse himself from any Russia-tied election investigation and hampered the administration in fulfilling Mr. Trump’s agenda to “make America great again.”

>Mr. Putin’s comments on Thursday about Russian hacking echoed those of Mr. Trump, who has dismissed accusations of Russian meddling in the election and said the person responsible for the attack on the Democratic National Committee “could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.”
...

>Mr. Putin stuck firmly to earlier denials that Russian state bodies or employees had been involved, an accusation leveled by United States intelligence agencies. They concluded in January that Mr. Putin himself had directed a Russian “influence campaign” involving cyberattacks and disinformation intended to tilt the November election in Mr. Trump’s favor.

>“We’re not doing this on the state level,” Mr. Putin said on Thursday.

>The boundary between state and private action, however, is often blurry in Russia, particularly in matters relating to the projection of Russian influence abroad. This provides a measure of plausible deniability for actions that the Kremlin does not want to be linked to publicly.

>Nominally private Russian citizens have fought alongside Russian-speaking rebels in eastern Ukraine and taken part in various campaigns to advance Moscow’s agenda in Eastern and Central Europe.

>While much about Russia’s cyberwarfare program is shrouded in secrecy, there is growing evidence that it, too, has drawn on the skills and enthusiasm of nominally private individuals, including college students, who face mandatory military service, and even criminals.

>In 2013, Sergei K. Shoigu, the Russian defense minister, told university rectors at a meeting in Moscow that he was on a “head hunt in the positive meaning of the word” for coders.
...

>The Obama administration signaled it was worried about Russia’s intermingling of state and private hacking when it struck back at Moscow over interference in the 2016 election. In December, it expelled 35 suspected Russian intelligence operatives from the United States and included among sanctioned Russian companies a private firm set up by a young Russian woman who called herself “mishacker.”

>American intelligence agencies say a team of Russian hackers affiliated with Russia’s military intelligence agency, the G.R.U., stole emails and other data from the Democratic National Committee and then leaked the cache through WikiLeaks.

>An expert at muddying the waters and creating confusion, Mr. Putin advanced a number of alternative theories that could help Moscow address any firm evidence that might emerge as a trail leading to Russia.

>Stating that modern technology can easily be manipulated to create a false trail, he said, “I can imagine that someone is doing this purposefully — building the chain of attacks so that the territory of the Russian Federation appears to be the source of that attack.” He added, “Modern technologies allow to do that kind of thing; it’s rather easy to do.”

>Mr. Putin appeared to be repeating an argument he first made earlier in the week in an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro.

>“I think that he was totally right when he said it could have been someone sitting on their bed or somebody intentionally inserted a flash drive with the name of a Russian national, or something like that,” Mr. Putin told the French newspaper, referring to Mr. Trump. “Anything is possible in this virtual world. Russia never engages in activities of this kind, and we do not need it. It makes no sense for us to do such things. What for?”
...

Good need to be killed

>>144317
They need to go

>bertbart

Ignored.

>>144002
What's up with the DNC and pedophiles?

>>144002
Pedogate is real

Will they denounce???

>“He sought to frame his policies as a personal conflict between the two of us and has made me the target of his unrelenting propaganda campaign,” Mr. Soros said of the Hungarian prime minister. “He cast himself in the role of the defender of Hungarian sovereignty and me as a shady currency speculator who uses his money to flood Europe — particularly his native Hungary — with illegal immigrants as part of some vague but nefarious plot.”

>Mr. Soros added, “This is the opposite of who I am.”

>Opponents of the law have said it threatens not just C.E.U. but academic freedom in Hungary. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Budapest in April to protest the law. The European Commission took legal action and the European Parliament voted to begin a procedure that would penalize the Hungarian government for violating the bloc’s fundamental values.

>The situation had been at a standstill for months until last week, when Andrew M. Cuomo, the governor of New York, where the university is registered, said in a statement that the state was open to negotiations. Hungary has said the same, and the government sent responses to the European Commission’s legal concerns in the case.

>Mr. Orban, once a recipient of a Soros-funded scholarship, has repeatedly criticized Mr. Soros for his pro-democracy efforts in Hungary and elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe. Populist leaders across the continent, echoing President Trump’s criticism of Mr. Soros, who supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race, have accused Mr. Soros of trying to manipulate politics in their countries.

>Mr. Orban’s chief of staff, Janos Lazar, said Thursday that accusations of a “mafia state” apply better to the nongovernment organizations that receive funding from Mr. Soros’s Open Society Foundations.
...

>“These organizations, financed by George Soros, have operated like mafia,” Mr. Lazar said at a news briefing in Budapest on Thursday, repeating allegations of lack of transparency.

>Defenders of human rights, refugees and those who promote the fight against corruption that sometimes get support from Mr. Soros have in recent years been the targets of government scrutiny. One such organization, the Hungary branch of Transparency International, which receives less than 10 percent of its funding from grants supported by Mr. Soros, lauded his comments Thursday.

>“Open Society foundations is a very important partner, and we take Mr. Soros’s words as encouragement,” Miklos Ligeti, the group’s legal director, said in a phone interview from Budapest.

>Mr. Soros, whose speech was focused more broadly on changes to the European Union, called on the bloc’s institutions to act against the challenges to democracy posed by Hungary and Poland, where the governing party, led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, has taken a similar course against N.G.O.s.

>European legal experts have said that the European Union’s efforts to counter the Hungarian law are unlikely to lead to effective sanctions, or change the course of Mr. Orban’s government.

>In his speech Thursday, Mr. Soros said, “Democracy cannot be imposed from the outside; it needs to be asserted and defended by the people themselves.”

>He acknowledged that in responding to challenges to its core values, the European Union “is cumbersome, slow-moving and often needs unanimity to enforce its rules.”

>“This is difficult to achieve when two countries, Poland and Hungary, are conspiring to oppose it,” he said. “It will require resolute action by European institutions and the active engagement of civil society.”

>>146128
>Soros funded school shut down for insiting anti government sentiment and pro Globalist stances

You can't do that!!! Soros always gets what he wants!!

>>146053
>despite Mr. Trump’s campaign vow
Lmao

This is what the 30th time?

>>146053

Nytimes, please...

Also duplicate thread

Religion of peace. Isis has already called it.
This years ramadan bomb-a-thon has had a great start. Six days in and already -atleast- 345 people dead.

>>145763
News makes bigger deal about covfefe than terror attacks

>>145790
But dude he did a typo lol, what an IDIOT lol

A senior administration official defended Trump's use of the findings. "It's not just MIT. I think there is a consensus, not only in the environmental community, but elsewhere that the Paris agreement in and of itself will have a negligible impact on climate," the official told reporters at a briefing.

The dispute is the latest round of a years-long battle between scientists and politicians over how to interpret facts about the effects of burning fossil fuels on the global climate, and translate them into policy.

Trump has repeatedly cast doubt on the science of climate change and once called it a hoax perpetrated by China to weaken U.S. business.

Is the food situation down there so bad that they're going to start literally eating the rich?

thanks but we already have a cure for diabetes, it's called don't be fat.

why don't they just skip the middle man and cure fatness.

>>137970
don't be a fuckwit

>>137971
Isn't he right?

>In a 2016 appearance on CNN that went viral, the stone-faced attorney flashed anger when anchor Brianna Keiler said the Trump campaign was “down.”

>“Says who?” he challenged. When she cited polls, he countered, “Which polls?” She replied, “All of them.” His final response in that exchange proved prescient: “You’re going to all be very surprised when he polls substantially higher than what you all are giving him credit for.”

>After the 2016 campaign, Cohen left the Trump Organization to become the president’s personal attorney, a job he still holds. From that post, he has continued to weigh in on Trump’s behalf on Twitter and during occasional television appearances.

>After Trump dismissed FBI Director James Comey, for example, Cohen tweeted, “I believe @POTUS was justified in terminating #Comey as @FBI director. #RT if you agree with me!”

>Cohen was also made a deputy national finance chairman of the Republican National Committee — a position that gives him some sway on how money will be allocated to Republican candidates. And in April he announced he formed a “strategic alliance” with the powerful D.C. lobbying firm Patton Boggs, a firm whose clients include Russia’s third-largest bank, Gazprombank. The arrangement enables him to work out of Squire Patton Boggs’ offices in New York, Washington and London, according to the announcement.

>The emergence of Cohen as a subject of the Senate probe brings renewed attention to a strident Trump advocate who was named in the unverified dossier prepared by a former British intelligence agent during the 2016 campaign and provided by the FBI to Sen. John McCain, which contains a number of unconfirmed allegations that Cohen played a role in working with the Russians on the hacking of Democratic National Committee computers during the campaign.

>In January, Cohen told ABC News the allegations in the dossier were “laughably false.” His wife is Ukrainian, and he once worked with her family in Ukraine to establish an ethanol business. ABC News was able to debunk some references to him in the unverified document, such as the assertion in the that his Ukrainian-born father-in-law had a vacation home, or dacha, near Russian President Vladimir Putin’s.

>“I don’t even think my father-in-law has ever been to Moscow,” Cohen told ABC News earlier this year. “I wonder who’s living in the dacha.”

>Another suggestion in those documents — that Cohen supposedly met with the Russians in Prague last August — is also false, he said. Then-President-elect Trump pushed back against the claim in a wide-ranging news conference held in January, saying that he saw Cohen’s passport.

>“I said, ‘I want to see your passport.’ He brings his passport to my office. I say, ‘Hey, wait a minute. He didn’t leave the country. He wasn’t out of the country.’ They had Michael Cohen of the Trump Organization was in Prague. It turned out to be a different Michael Cohen,” Trump said. “It’s a disgrace what took place. It’s a disgrace, and I think they ought to apologize to start with Michael Cohen.”

>Democrats in Congress have argued it is conceivable he entered Europe through another country — he was in Italy on vacation around the time the dossier alleges he was in Prague — and his passport would not receive a stamp for crossing the border, but no proof of any such trip has been produced.

>“I’ve never actually walked the land in Prague,” Cohen told ABC News. “And last August I was not in Prague.”

>Congressional investigators involved in the widening probe have already identified four Trump campaign advisers as people of interest because of their interactions with Russian officials. Only one of them, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, has received a subpoena for records. Flynn, who served briefly as Trump’s national security adviser, declined to provide them, citing his Fifth Amendment rights.

>Lawmakers have also asked former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, informal adviser Roger Stone and former foreign policy adviser Carter Page to voluntarily hand over relevant records. All three men have said publicly they are producing records and cooperating with investigators.

4:35 p.m.

John Kerry says President Donald Trump has taken "a self-destructive step" that puts America last.

The former secretary of state is a co-signer of the Paris climate accord. He released a statement Thursday following Trump's decision to withdraw the U.S. from the agreement.
Kerry says it's "an unprecedented forfeiture of American leadership which will cost us influence, cost us jobs and invite other countries to walk away from solving humanity's most existential crisis."

Kerry called the decision "an ignorant, cynical appeal to an anti-science, special-interest faction far outside the mainstream."

Kerry signed the agreement at the U.N. in 2016 with his granddaughter seated on his lap.
He says, "That is no basis for a decision that will affect billions of lives."

4:35 p.m.

Former Mexican President Vicente Fox is harshly criticizing President Donald Trump for withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement.

Fox has clashed with Trump since last year's presidential campaign, and he let loose Thursday with a series of tweets saying the decision "condemns this generation and those to come."

Fox tweets of Trump: "He's declaring war on the planet itself."

He accused Trump of "leaving a dark legacy just to satisfy your greediness" and surrendering the nation's future.

Fox concludes: "United States has stopped being the leader of the free world. @realDonaldTrump, single handed, took care of that."

4:20 p.m.

Mayors from major cities around the world say they remain committed to the Paris climate accord despite President Donald Trump's decision to pull out of the deal.

In a statement Thursday, mayors of the world's megacities committed to addressing climate change said that despite the U.S. move, American cities can continue to play a role in trying to prevent catastrophic global warming.

The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, says climate change "poses a unique threat to the future of our planet, and puts in peril the health, prosperity, security and the very survival of our children and grandchildren."

Hidalgo says she's urging the Trump administration to reconsider the decision.
Steve Adler, the mayor of Austin, Texas, said his city won't stop fighting climate change.

4:20 p.m.

The European Union's top climate change official says President Donald Trump's decision to pull out of the Paris accord makes it "a sad day for the global community."

The EU's climate action commissioner, Miguel Arias Canete (cah-NEY'-tey), said in a statement Thursday that the bloc "deeply regrets the unilateral decision by the Trump administration."

Canete says the 2015 accord is "ambitious yet not prescriptive."

He says the agreement will endure, and he pledged that "the world can continue to count on Europe for global leadership."

Canete also predicted that the EU would seek new alliances from the world's largest economies to the most vulnerable island states, as well as U.S. businesses and individuals supportive of the accord.

He added: "We are on the right side of history."

4:20 p.m.

Norway's largest pension fund, Storebrand, says it will continue to invest in renewable energy despite President Donald Trump's decision to pull out of the Paris climate accord.

Storebrand says "the transition toward a greener economy in the U.S. will not stop due to withdrawing from the Paris agreement."

The fund, which has 53 billion euros ($59.5 billion) in assets under management, said in a statement Thursday that "Donald Trump is jumping off a train that has already left the station."

Chief executive Odd Arild Grefstad cited the growth of renewable energy in states such as Texas, New York and California as signs that "the world has started the transition from fossil to a renewable economy."

He added: "We will continue to invest accordingly."

4:15 p.m.
Former Vice President Al Gore is calling the decision to exit the Paris agreement "a reckless and indefensible action."

Gore says the move "undermines America's standing in the world." He released the statement as President Donald Trump was speaking at the White House Rose Garden.

The former vice president has defined his postgovernment life as a climate champion. He urges mayors, governors and the business community to take up where Trump is leaving off, especially by focusing on clean energy.

Gore says: "We are in the middle of a clean energy revolution that no single person or group can stop. President Trump's decision is profoundly in conflict with what the majority of Americans want from our president."

>A U.S. official with knowledge of the matter told NBC News that the FBI also is scrutinizing the Mayflower event, which was sponsored by a pro-Russian think tank. The official said the FBI is interested in who was at the event and what was said, in the context of the counter-intelligence investigation into Russian election meddling. That official said there was no indication the bureau is zeroing in on Sessions.

>Sen. Al Franken, D.-Minnesota, who originally questioned Sessions about his Russian contacts during a confirmation hearing for Sessions' appointment as attorney general, discussed the matter Wednesday night on MSNBC's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell

>"It had been characterized one way, but we had some reason to believe that wasn't the case," Franken said about the event. "It had been described in a way that he could say, 'I don't remember that.'"

>It has long been known that Trump briefly met Ambassador Kislyak that day at a VIP reception shortly before he gave a foreign policy address at the hotel. But witnesses said it wasn't a private meeting, and White House officials dismissed it as inconsequential.

>"Mr. Trump warmly greeted Mr. Kislyak and three other foreign ambassadors who came to the reception," the Wall Street Journal reported in May 2016.

>Kushner and Sessions were also in the room, contemporaneous news reports say. Sessions' aides have insisted he did not speak to Kislyak.

>Congress is investigating the credibility of intelligence seeming to contradict that account, current and former U.S. officials say. And Franken, in a March letter to the FBI with Judiciary Committee Democrat Patrick Leahy, asked the bureau to investigate any contacts between Sessions and Russian officials, and to brief him on the results. He has not yet received an answer, an aide said.

>The FBI investigation into Russian election interference is now supervised by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and Sessions is walled off from it, having recused himself.

>In March, the Center for National Interest, the right-leaning, Russia-linked group that hosted the event, said that the receiving line "moved quickly and any conversations with Mr. Trump in that setting were inherently brief and could not be private. Our recollection is that the interaction between Mr. Trump and Ambassador Kislyak was limited to the polite exchange of pleasantries appropriate on such occasions."

>Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation after it emerged that he had met twice with Kislyak after telling senators under oath during his confirmation hearing that he had not met with Russian officials about the Trump campaign.

>"In retrospect," Sessions told reporters, "I should have slowed down and said, 'But I did meet one Russian official a couple of times, and that would be the ambassador.'"

>Lawmakers involved in the Russia investigation would not discuss the April meeting.

>"I can't comment on any of that," Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence committee, told NBC News.

>"Can't talk about it," said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, a member of the committee.

>In a little noticed portion of a March congressional hearing on the Russia investigation, Rep. Mike Quigley, a Chicago Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, accused Sessions of having committed perjury about an alleged undisclosed third meeting in April.

>He noted that Sessions had failed to disclose meetings with Kislyak in July and September, during a time the Russians were "hacking and dumping" stolen emails in the election campaign.

>He added, "Unfortunately, what we're reading now is that there was a third meeting as early as April of last year in Washington, D.C., a meeting at which Candidate Trump was present and the Russian ambassador was present. At some point in time, this goes well beyond an innocent, under the best of circumstances, 'Oh I forgot' sort of thing, or `That doesn't count.' When you correct your testimony in front of the United States Senate, you're still under oath and you're swearing to the American people that what you're saying is true. Well, the third time is well beyond that and is quite simply, perjury."

>Quigley said he could not discuss the basis of his remarks about the April event, other than to say he wasn't relying solely on news reports.

>Any confirmation of a private meeting with Kislyak in April would raise a host of questions, most particularly for Sessions.

>April 2016 is when officials at the Democratic National Committee first noticed suspicious activity on their network — activity they would later learn was part of a Russian hack.

>At Sessions' confirmation hearing in January, Sen. Franken asked him, "If there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do?"

>Sessions replied: "Senator Franken, I'm not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians, and I'm unable to comment on it."

>In March, the Washington Post reported that Sessions had met twice with Kislyak — once in the senator's office in September, and once in July at a Heritage Foundation event.

>>145732
We already knew that at least some of the hackers were Russian due to using the fancy bear program. The big question is whether they were ordered to do it or were just trying to fish for info to make a quick buck.

Honestly I am not sure if Putin is just trying to fuck with people right now and sow discontent in the US. It would be easier to goad liberals and conservatives into a civil war, weakening the US then it would be to get Trump to hand the country over. Especially since we are doing such a bang up job jumping at each other's throats without any help.

>>145743
Welcome to the Red Scare version 3.0 this time in ultra 4k HD.

>>145743
>We already knew that at least some of the hackers were Russian due to using the fancy bear program.
If you seriously believe "Russian" hackers knowingly used and left behind evidence of a program called "fancy bear", an animal stereotypically associated with Russia, you are beyond all help.

it seems china has learned its lesson after polluting their own cities to the point you can't even see more than a few meters ahead on bad days and even infants developing lung cancer

>>145671
Seriously. Buddy of mine lived there for 3 years. Every picture in every part of the country is smog. People need to wear masks or excersise indoors.

China is and will continue to be the prominent smog creator well into the future.

It's really heartening to hear that. China seems to have a serious lack of objective EPA. But this is an important step in its own development for exactly that reason. Even as a developing country, it needs to take both science and economic expert opinion seriously to counterbalanced economic growth in the immediate future with the sort of conditions they leave to successive generations of their people. I only wish the culture in our country were so meritocratic and respectful of education and intellectualism, and that we weren't a place where elitism were a dirty word. I'm sure fault is roundly shared by everyone for letting us get to this place.