Archived threads in /news/ - Current News - 101. page

>>129329
Apparently it was a suicide attempt that she changed her mind about. The Kuwaiti woman claimed she filmed the event in order to try and prove she did not murder the woman if she died. Still a really shitty thing to happen and shows just how poorly the immigrants are regarded.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-39456558

>>129331

I'd be suspicious of that kind of claim personally, even though it would fit well with the conditions they suffer under.

>>129331

Apparently the maid later claimed in hospital that her boss was trying to kill her, and she climbed to the balcony in attempt to escape. Apparently people abusing and killing their maids isn't uncommon there.

The Trump administration was sued in federal court earlier this week by a coalition of watchdog groups to compel the release of the White House visitor logs. Under Obama, such records, which were published on a White House-maintained Web page, were typically disclosed 90 to 120 days after the visit.

Since Trump took office in January, the page where the visitor logs had been publicly available has gone dark, and Trump administration officials said Friday that they will no longer maintain it, which the White House said would save taxpayers $70,000 by 2020.

After initial resistance, Obama's policy was crafted in 2009 in response to earlier lawsuits by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, one of the groups now part of the new lawsuit against Trump.

The policy permitted some exceptions to disclosure, including private visits to the Obama family. The Obama White House also maintained the prerogative not to release records of particularly "sensitive" meetings, such as interviews with potential Supreme Court nominees.

Obama at times drew criticism for such carve-outs, as well as for other ways for skirting the agreement, including meetings between White House officials and lobbyists at a coffee shop near the White House that didn't show up in the logs.

Trump aides highlighted such loopholes under Obama and said the new policy is consistent with a legal distinction that Obama officials drew in a 2012 lawsuit. Despite the voluntary disclosure of visitor logs, the Obama administration maintained that the logs were White House records and therefore not required to be disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act.

Others have argued that the records are subject to disclosure under the FOIA because they are created by the Secret Service, which is an agency covered by the law.

As a private citizen, Trump was highly critical of the Obama administration's position in 2012, writing on Twitter: "Why is @BarackObama spending millions to try and hide his records? He is the least transparent President - ever - and he ran on transparency."

The existence of the visitor logs burst back into the news last month when House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., went to the White House grounds to review intelligence reports on which he later briefed the president. Both Nunes and White House officials initially declined to say whom Nunes had visited and who had cleared him onto the grounds, information that is typically contained in the logs, along with the length of the stay.

White House communications director Mike Dubke said Friday that the Trump administration has taken several steps to ensure the government "is both ethical and accessible to the American people." Among those he mentioned were new restrictions on lobbyists and allowing journalists to participate remotely in White House briefings via Skype.

"Given the grave national security risks and privacy concerns of the hundreds of thousands of visitors annually, the White House Office will disclose Secret Service logs as outlined under the Freedom of Information Act, a position the Obama White House successfully defended in federal court," Dubke said in a statement, referring to the 2102 lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch, a conservative organization.

Judicial Watch was among the organizations critical of Trump on Friday.

"This new secrecy policy undermines the rule of law and suggests this White House doesn't want to be accountable to the American people," the group's president, Tom Fitton, said in a statement.

With the new policy, the White House officials made clear Friday that they believe Trump is under no legal obligation to disclose visitors to the complex. As a matter of practice, the White House has disclosed the names of many of those who meet directly with the president on the days the meetings take place. There has been very little disclosure of meetings with staff.

Some past and present government officials have argued that White House officials should be permitted to conduct meetings outside the public eye as a matter of policy.

"I tend to feel it's the prerogative of the White House to have people come visit, and the public doesn't need to know who they are," Andrew Card Jr., chief of staff under President George W. Bush, said in an interview last week. "We don't have a log on everybody who visits Congress, and they're a coequal branch of government."

Christina Reynolds, who served as director of media affairs under Obama, said Trump had made "the wrong call" but that it was somewhat understandable why he made the call he did. Despite being the first to open up the logs, the Obama administration was criticized for not going far enough and endured negative news stories about some of its visitors.

"If your only guide is whether you're going to get bad stories, it's more understandable," Reynolds said, saying that the Trump White House may have decided to "take its lumps" Friday but be spared criticism based on what would later be disclosed in the logs.

In its criticism of Trump on Friday, American Civil Liberties Union, whose political director, Faiz Shakir, noted the timing of the announcement heading into Easter weekend.

I'll tell you this: the best thing about the placenta is cold placenta sandwiches the next day.

>>132817
Are you by chance from New Zealand?

>wanting to rip good meat from some homeless street rat's mouth just to bury it for muh feels
This is housed privilege in action.

>Burger King’s tactic, while novel, raised eyebrows, particularly as more Americans use smart speakers at home, a trend led by Amazon’s Echo device and its virtual assistant, Alexa. While internet-connected gadgets have been praised for the screen-free convenience they offer, they have also raised questions about security and privacy.

>Bob Gilbreath, chief of Ahalogy, a marketing technology company in Cincinnati, said Burger King’s stunt posed a risk to Google, which introduced Home in November, given that such appliances are “new and unknown to the vast majority of people.”

>“Most people don’t trust advertising, and having advertisers continually listen to what happens in our homes is scary,” he said.

>Amazon and Google have said that their speakers only process people’s speech after registering certain “wake words,” such as “Alexa” or “O.K. Google,” which is what Burger King exploited.

>“With the onset of consumers buying intelligent system devices and using them at home, we thought this was a good way to make a connection and go directly to guests and tell a story about our product,” José Cil, president of Burger King, said in an interview Wednesday morning.

>Asked whether he was concerned that consumers might find the advertisement invasive, Mr. Cil said, “We think about our guests’ perception and their perspective on how we interact with them, but on balance we felt this was a really positive way to connect with them.”

>The Whopper ad was the second example of a marketer using Home in the last month, which is of note because Google is the largest seller of advertising on the internet. A few weeks ago, some devices apparently played brief, unexpected promotions for “Beauty and the Beast,” a new Disney movie, after the weather forecast and commuting conditions
...

>A Google spokeswoman said the Disney promotion “wasn’t intended to be an ad,” and was part of a feature that provides daily information to Google Home users and sometimes shares “timely content.” She added, “We’re continuing to experiment with new ways to surface unique content for users, and we could have done better in this case.”

>More often, companies are trying to avoid waking devices through the television. Google accidentally set off some speakers recently with its Super Bowl commercial. In January, a television news station’s report on a 6-year-old girl’s accidental purchase of a dollhouse through Amazon Echo used the name “Alexa,” and inadvertently set off its own round of attempted orders from viewers.

>Amazon, which has run many TV ads that use the name “Alexa,” said by email, “Given the nature of far-field wake-word technology, live discussions about Echo and Alexa can trigger an on-device response.” It said it alters Alexa ads to “minimize Echo devices falsely responding in customer’s homes.”

>>131565
>Google accidentally set off some speakers recently with its Super Bowl commercial.
When this happened I knew it was only a matter of time before advertisers started exploiting it.

>>130416
Bruce Tarr is a RINO and a RAT (Republican Against Trump).

>>130430
That's a good thing though.

>>130416
>trumpets sucking down whatever Trump signs off on, even if it obviously fucks them over
It's okay to criticize daddy every once in a while you fucking cucks.

>A sociopath and narcissist using and dropping someone when he doesn't need them anymore

Looks like Trump is a true politician after all.

>>132086
Trumps largely Zionist team is a bad fit for Bannon. People like Sheldon Adelson are more valuable to Trump.

>>132475
Sheldon and Donald don't get along that well. They never met before the campaign last summer despite both being in the casino business. The Mercer family (who owns Breitbart.com) has all the money Trump needs anyway, and they like having their man Bannon in the White House.

>How much can California do on its own?

>“I am not the president. So there’s a limit there. But I think there’s quite a lot California can do in alliance with other states.”

>Is enough being done to stop global warming?

>“The country and the world is not yet on the proper trajectory. That’s true . . . . I’m using all the resources at my command to increase the commitment.”

>[Note: The governor has been pushing more states, provinces and cities to sign an international agreement setting tougher targets for reducing emissions. Here’s our story from December 2015, when Brown was in Paris for the United Nations conference on climate change.]

>How does Trump affect the debate over fighting global warming?

>"President Trump is boldly moving in what I would call rather extreme directions. And that is going to set into motion a reaction, and it already has . . . He builds the strength on the other side to combat climate change.”


>What happens if the United States doesn’t pursue clean energy technology?

>“America will be disadvantaged, just like Detroit was disadvantaged when they couldn’t build smaller cars in the ’70s or ’80s. The world shifts.”

>Will people's minds change on climate change?

>“We need the science to continue. The heat, the storms, the sea level rise, the Arctic melting. These are all real facts that over time will sink in. The question is, will that be two years, or five years or 10 years?”

Republicans only care about making money. That's literally all they care about except for maybe Jesus.

>>132622
Not true at all, Anon. They care very much about saving unborn babies and executing criminals and other times they try to legislate morality.

>There are people who unironically read hotair.com here
Not really a valid news source. That's like liberals posting DailyKos articles.

>>132581
From BBC:
A huge car bomb has blasted a convoy of coaches carrying evacuees from besieged government-held towns in Syria, killing at least 45 people.

It shattered coaches and set cars on fire, leaving a trail of bodies including children, as the convoy waited in rebel territory near Aleppo.

There were fears of revenge attacks on evacuees from rebel-held towns, being moved under a deal.

But the exchange later resumed, with coaches reaching safety on both sides.

The "Four Towns" deal brokered by Iran and Qatar was meant to relieve suffering in besieged towns - Foah and Kefraya in the north-west which are under government control, and rebel-held Madaya and Zabadani, near Damascus.

Some 20,000 besieged people would be taken out in all. According to AFP news agency, up to 5,000 government evacuees and 2,200 from rebel towns had been stranded in transit on Sunday.

Last month, the UN described the situation in the besieged towns as "catastrophic". More than 64,000 civilians are "trapped in a cycle of daily violence and deprivation", it said.

What do we know of the bombing?

The bomb reportedly went off at Rashidin, west of government-held Aleppo, at around 15:30 local time (12:30 GMT) at the checkpoint where the handover was due to take place.

A suicide bomber driving a van supposedly carrying aid supplies blew it up near the coaches, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reports.

"A van was distributing crisps," one civilian evacuee told @ZamanEnglish News. "Children started running after it. It then exploded."

At least 45 body bags were counted at the scene of the blast, while White Helmets rescuers, who operate in rebel-held areas, said at least 100 people had been killed. Many were also injured.

Images from the scene show bodies lying on the ground outside blackened and devastated vehicles.

Most of the dead were evacuees but they also included several rebels who had been guarding the buses, the Observatory says.

...see next comment

>>132582
continuing BBC news:
Convoys on both sides had been held up overnight, but by Saturday evening 15 coaches from the government towns had arrived at their destination in Ramouseh while between 25 and 30 carrying evacuees from the rebel towns had reached Rashidin.

Rebels had accused the government of breaching the terms of the deal, accusing it of trying to bring out more loyalist fighters than agreed, along with civilians.

Where does this leave the rebel evacuees?

According to a 24Aleppo tweet, a special unit of the Russian army surrounded the convoy from the rebel-held towns after the bombing and closed the road there to "prevent any reaction".

Evacuees from Madaya heard the blast from a bus garage where they had been waiting in Ramouseh, just a few miles away, Reuters news agency reports.

They called on international organisations to protect them from any possible retaliation, saying they condemned the attack on the other convoy.

Madaya resident Ahmed, 24, told Reuters earlier that evacuees had been waiting without drinking water or food at a since Friday night.

The Madaya and Zabadani evacuees are going to rebel-held territory in Idlib province.
Why are the evacuations needed?

Many people are reported to have died as a result of shortages of food or medicine in the four towns.

Foah and Kefraya, most of whose residents are Shia Muslims, have been encircled by rebels and al Qaeda-linked Sunni Muslim jihadists since March 2015.

Madaya and Zabadani, which are predominantly Sunni Muslim, have been besieged since June 2015 by the Syrian army and fighters from Lebanon's Shia Muslim Hezbollah movement.

A previous attempt at mutual evacuations failed in December when rebels burnt coaches due to be sent to the towns.
How desperate is Syria's war?

More than 300,000 people have lost their lives and millions of people have been displaced since a peaceful uprising against President Bashar al-Assad six years ago turned into a full-scale civil war.
...

>>132583
last bit from BBC:
More than 80 people were killed in a suspected chemical attack on the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun, in the north-west, on 4 April, prompting the US to bomb a government air base with missiles.

Russia and Iran also have military forces deployed in the country, backing President Assad.

Rescue workers from both the government and rebel sides worked at the scene of Saturday's attack.

"Today, rebels and regime, Sunnis and Shias shed blood, sweat and tears together to save #Syria children," tweeted BBC producer Riam Dalati. "Maybe not all is lost, yet."

>During an interview with the Washington Post editorial page staff in March 2016, Trump identified Page, who had previously been an investment banker in Moscow, as a foreign policy adviser to his campaign. Campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks later described Page’s role as “informal.”

>Page has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in his dealings with the Trump campaign or Russia.

>“This confirms all of my suspicions about unjustified, politically motivated government surveillance,” Page said in an interview Tuesday. “I have nothing to hide.” He compared surveillance of him to the eavesdropping that the FBI and Justice Department conducted against civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

>The White House, FBI and Justice Department declined to comment.

>FBI Director James B. Comey disclosed in public testimony to the House Intelligence Committee last month that the bureau is investigating efforts by the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

>Comey said this includes investigating the “nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.”

>Comey declined to comment during the hearing about any individuals, including Page, who worked in Moscow for Merrill Lynch a decade ago and who has said he invested in Russian energy giant Gazprom. In a letter to Comey in September, Page had said he had sold his Gazprom investment.
...

>During the hearing last month, Democratic lawmakers repeatedly singled out Page’s contacts in Russia as a cause for concern.

>The judges who rule on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) requests oversee the nation’s most sensitive national security cases, and their warrants are some of the most closely guarded secrets in the world of U.S. law enforcement and intelligence gathering. Any FISA application has to be approved at the highest levels of the Justice Department and the FBI.

>Applications for FISA warrants, Comey said, are often thicker than his wrists, and that thickness represents all the work Justice Department attorneys and FBI agents have to do to convince a judge that such surveillance is appropriate in an investigation.

>The government’s application for the surveillance order targeting Page included a lengthy declaration that laid out investigators’ basis for believing that Page was an agent of the Russian government and knowingly engaged in clandestine intelligence activities on behalf of Moscow, officials said.

>Among other things, the application cited contacts that he had with a Russian intelligence operative in New York City in 2013, officials said. Those contacts had earlier surfaced in a federal espionage case brought by the Justice Department against another Russian agent. In addition, the application said Page had other contacts with Russian operatives that have not been publicly disclosed, officials said.

>An application for electronic surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act need not show evidence of a crime. But the information obtained through the intercepts can be used to open a criminal investigation and may be used in a prosecution.

>The application also showed that the FBI and the Justice Department’s national security division have been seeking since July to determine how broad a network of accomplices Russia enlisted in attempting to influence the election, the officials said.
...

>Since the 90-day warrant was first issued, it has been renewed more than once by the FISA court, the officials said.

>In February, Page told “PBS NewsHour” that he was a “junior member of the [Trump] campaign’s foreign policy advisory group.”

>A former Trump campaign adviser said Page submitted policy memos to the campaign and several times asked to be given a meeting with Trump, though his request was never granted. “He was one of the more active ones, in terms of being in touch,” the adviser said.

>The campaign adviser said Page participated in three dinners held for the campaign’s volunteer foreign policy advisers in the spring and summer of 2016, coming from New York to Washington to meet with the group. Although Trump did not attend, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), a top Trump confidant who became his attorney general, attended one meeting of the group with Page in late summer, the campaign adviser said.

>Page’s role as an adviser to the Trump campaign drew alarm last year from more-established foreign policy experts in part because of Page’s effusive praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his criticism of U.S. sanctions over Moscow’s military intervention in Ukraine.

>In July, Page traveled to Moscow, where he delivered a speech harshly critical of the United States’ policy toward Russia.

>While there, Page allegedly met with Igor Sechin, a Putin confidant and chief executive of the energy company Rosneft, according to a dossier compiled by a former British intelligence officer and cited at a congressional hearing by Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Officials said some of the information in the dossier has been verified by U.S. intelligence agencies, and some of it hasn’t, while other parts are unlikely to ever be proved or disproved.

>On Tuesday, Page dismissed what he called “the dodgy dossier” of false allegations.
...

>Prof Hughes has warned Australia now faces a closing window to save the reef by taking decisive action on climate change.

Other stresses

>The 2017 bleaching is likely to be compounded by other stresses on the reef, including the destructive crown-of-thorns starfish and poor water quality. The category-four tropical cyclone Debbie came too late and too far south for its cooling effect to alleviate bleaching.

>But Prof Hughes said its slow movement across the reef was likely to have caused destruction to coral along a path up to 100km wide. “It added to the woes of the bleaching. It came too late to stop the bleaching, and it came to the wrong place,” he said.

>The University of Technology Sydney’s lead reef researcher, marine biologist David Suggett, said that to properly recover, affected reefs needed to be connected to those left untouched by bleaching.

>He said Prof Hughes’s survey results showed such connectivity was in jeopardy. “It’s that connection ultimately that will drive the rate and extent of recovery,” Mr Suggett said. “So if bleaching events are moving around the [Great Barrier Reef] system on an annual basis, it does really undermine any potential resilience through connectivity between neighbouring reefs.”

>Some reef scientists are now becoming despondent. Water quality expert Jon Brodie said the reef was now in a “terminal stage”. Mr Brodie has devoted much of his life to improving water quality on the reef, one of a suite of measures used to stop bleaching.

>He said measures to improve water quality, which were a central tenet of the Australian government’s rescue effort, were failing.

>“We’ve given up. It’s been my life managing water quality, we’ve failed,” Mr Brodie said. “Even though we’ve spent a lot of money, we’ve had no success.”

>Mr Brodie said the compounding effect of back-to-back bleaching, Cyclone Debbie, and run-off from nearby catchments should not be understated.

>“Last year was bad enough, this year is a disaster year,” Mr Brodie said. “The federal government is doing nothing really, and the current programmes, the water quality management is having very limited success. It’s unsuccessful.”

Optimism

>Others remain optimistic, out of necessity. Jon Day was a director of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority for 16 years until retiring in 2014.

>Mr Day, whose expertise lies in protected area planning and management, said the federal government’s approach to protecting the reef was sorely lacking. He said it was taking too relaxed an approach to fishing, run-off and pollution from farming, and the dumping of maintenance dredge spoil.

>The government was far short of the $8.2 billion (€5.8 billion) investment needed to meet water quality targets, he said, and Australia was on track to fail its short-term 2018 water quality targets, let alone achieve more ambitious long-term goals.

>“You’ve got to be optimistic, I think we have to be,” Mr Day said. “But every moment we waste, and every dollar we waste, isn’t helping the issue. We’ve been denying it for so long, and now we’re starting to accept it. But we’re spending insufficient amounts addressing the problem.”

>The Queensland tourism industry raised questions about the reliability of the survey, saying scientists had previously made exaggerated claims about mortality rates and bleaching.

>“There is no doubt that we have had a significant bleaching event off Cairns this time around,” said Col McKenzie, of the Association of Marine Park Tourism Operators.

>“The far north probably did a little bit better, Port Douglas to Townsille has seen some significant bleaching,” he said. “Fortunately we haven’t seen much mortality at this time, and fortunately the temperatures have fallen.”

>Mr McKenzie said more money needed to be invested in water quality measures, and criticized what he saw as a piecemeal and uncoordinated approach to water quality projects up and down the coast.

*claps*

Yanks will like this.

>>132231
here is a back up stream incase first one goes down https://www.pscp.tv/w/1yoJMeovmZwJQ

>>132229
>nothing is blowing up

BORING

what a load of bullshit.

can we say trump was right about the illegal voters now?
> or he will be, soon

>>131047
Overturned by Supreme Court.

>>123400
How about something more practical, like encouraging citizens to gang up on a person of any demographic physically assaulting a person of any demographic.

>>123403
Hate on hate.
Now thats what i call a hate crime

>>123411
Do you have a strategy that would work better?

>>128615
Mediabiasfactcheck.com
That's all.

>>128619
listen to this man, he is wise

also, spidr.today is /news/ approved

>>128619
Great stuff, thanks a million.