A lot has changed on the Korean peninsula in just matter of months — threats of fire and fury have been replaced with handshakes and optimism — but for the military organization that monitors threats to North America, it might as well be 2017 when it comes to North Korea.
North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the joint Canada-US organization tasked with warning of incoming threats from the sky, continues to monitor North Korea’s nuclear program with the same intensity it did at the height of North Korea’s missile testing. In fact, NORAD and US Northern Command Center Director Col. Travis Morehen, a Canadian, says the organization still gets three or four intelligence reports on the country’s nuclear program every day.
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“We’ve been watching the same as we were previously, the same as we watch any other nation that poses a threat to the United States and Canada,” he said.
There was a pool of blood, a look of panic on her husband’s face — and then everything went black.
Alia McCants was back at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, where nine days earlier, she had given birth to healthy twins. She and her husband had brought the babies home to their apartment in Harlem, and everything seemed all right — until complications from her cesarean section caused her to hemorrhage.
She rushed to the emergency room, where her vision went dim.
“My husband said, ‘You have to stay here, you have to stay here.’ And then I thought: I’m going to die,” she said.
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Alia McCants in her home in White Plains, New York. Nine days after giving birth to her twins, McCants nearly died from a hemorrhage that resulted from an unexpected complication following her cesarean section.Idris Talib Solomon / for NBC News
When Caleigh Haber was 22, she was told she was too sick for a lung transplant and would die. Her doctors recommended focusing on quality of life with her limited time remaining, and she was given do-not-resuscitate forms. She quit her job as a pastry chef and her mother and brother moved nearby to be with her.
“I felt completely hopeless,” she recalled. “To me, it wasn’t so much facing death as it was leaving my family.”
Pictures from the time show a petite young woman in an oxygen mask, under five feet tall and weighing as little as 66 pounds. She had a habit of showing off for pictures: one arm flexed, the other tethered to an IV pole.
To her doctors’ surprise, she grew stronger and was eventually listed for a transplant, adapting to the fraught routine of waiting for a lung to become available.
Three Americans held captive for more than a year in North Korea arrived at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington well before dawn Thursday to a hero’s welcome featuring President Trump, Vice President Pence and first lady Melania Trump.
Shortly before 3 a.m., in pitch black skies, a U.S. government plane made its approach to the runway with Kim Dong-chul, Tony Kim and Kim Hak-song, having been preceded by a jet carrying Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. A large American flag suspended by two fire engine cranes was arranged on the tarmac, which was lit by banks of spotlights.
The plane carrying the three Americans pulled up in front of the giant flag. The president and first lady boarded the plane, while Pence, his wife, Karen, and Pompeo waited on the tarmac. Then Trump emerged followed by the three men, two of whom raised their arms in triumph and relief as they exited the plane.
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President Trump, Vice President Pence and first lady Melania Trump greet the three American prisoners who were freed from North Korea.(Amber Ferguson/The Washington Post)
Richard Cordray, the former head of the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, won the Democratic nomination for governor of Ohio on Tuesday, fending off a challenge from former presidential candidate and House member Dennis Kucinich.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) hand-picked Cordray, a former Ohio attorney general, to run the CFPB and raised money for his campaign. Cordray will face Ohio’s current attorney general, Republican Mike DeWine, in the general election race for the governor’s job. Incumbent John Kasich (R) is term-limited.
Kucinich ran heavily on his support of Medicare-for-all and won the support of the progressive group Our Revolution, which grew out of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. (Sanders himself did not endorse Kucinich.)
In March 2010, then-state Sen. Eric Schneiderman held a press conference to announce his new bill, which would make strangulation ― a uniquely terrifying form of violence common in abusive relationships ― a serious crime in the state of New York.
“This is an important moment for us and for the struggle to make sure that crimes of domestic violence are treated as effectively and seriously as they need to be,” he said, flanked by law enforcement and advocates. “Our approach to domestic violence has to be an approach that says ‘hands off.’”
On Monday, eight years later, Schneiderman resigned his post as New York’s attorney general after two ex-girlfriends came forward with claims that he strangled and physically abused them while serving as the state’s top law enforcement official. In a statement, Schneiderman denied the allegations, saying: “In the privacy of intimate relationships, I have engaged in role-playing and other consensual sexual activity. I have not assaulted anyone. I have never engaged in nonconsensual sex, which is a line I would not cross.”
On Wednesday, Gina Haspel, a veteran CIA officer who reportedly oversaw a secret prison in Thailand where an alleged terrorist was waterboarded and later helped destroy videotapes documenting interrogation sessions, will make the case to a Senate committee that she should be confirmed to be the director of the spy agency.
It will be the first time that Haspel, who has spent years undercover, will speak publicly about her career, and some lawmakers are urging the CIA to declassify documents that explain her role in the torture program. Haspel, the current acting director of the CIA, has never publicly atoned for her involvement in the now-defunct interrogation operation and the subsequent cover-up. If confirmed, she will serve under a president who campaigned on bringing back “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.”
When Haspel appears before the Senate committee for her confirmation hearing, lawmakers will not just be evaluating her record. They will be deciding whether overseeing torture is disqualifying. Because most of the people who were tortured by CIA officials, at times under Haspel’s watch, cannot tell their stories, HuffPost asked several people who have been waterboarded as part of mock interrogations or military training to describe the experience. (The military quietly banned the use of waterboarding in training in 2007 because it was too brutal, HuffPost reported in March.)
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Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
Demonstrator Maboud Ebrahimzadeh is lowered onto the board during a simulation of waterboarding outside the Justice Departement in Washington November 5, 2007.
Fair-housing advocates planned to file a lawsuit early Tuesday against the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and HUD Secretary Ben Carson for suspending an Obama-era rule requiring communities to examine and address barriers to racial integration.
The 2015 rule required more than 1,200 communities receiving billions of federal housing dollars to draft plans to desegregate their communities — or risk losing federal funds.
After nearly 50 years of inaction, the rule was seen as a belated effort by HUD to enforce the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which compelled communities to use federal dollars to end segregation in residential neighborhoods.
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Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson in Los Angeles last month. (Jae C. Hong/AP)
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D) announced his resignation on Monday, just hours after a shocking report in The New Yorker detailed four of his former romantic partners’ accusations of physical abuse.
“It has been my great honor and privilege to serve as Attorney General for the people of the State of New York,” Schneiderman said in a statement late Monday. “In the last several hours, serious allegations, which I strongly contest, have been made against me. While these allegations are unrelated to my professional conduct or the operations of the office, they will effectively prevent me from leading the office’s work at this critical time.”
He said he would officially resign at the close of business on Tuesday.
On Monday, Michelle Manning Barish and Tanya Selvaratnam went on the record to say that Schneiderman, 63, “repeatedly hit them, often after drinking, frequently in bed and never with their consent.” In one instance, Manning Barish said Schneiderman told her that “if you ever left me, I’d kill you.”
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Brendan McDermid/Reuters
Four women accused Eric Schneiderman of physically abusing them in their relationships with him.
She was watching the final presidential debate of 2008, and John McCain had just said something insane. “We need to know the full extent of Senator Obama’s relationship with ACORN, who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy,” the Arizona Republican proclaimed.
Lewis had been leading ACORN ― the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now ― for about five months. ACORN advocated for the poor. In addition to helping families navigate federal aid programs, the group ran campaigns to improve city sanitation, protested against predatory lenders and registered people to vote. The nation’s top Republican politician had just declared this body of work tantamount to stealing an election.
“It was absurd,” Lewis said in a recent interview. “Those words had no meaning.”
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
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Alia McCants in her home in White Plains, New York. Nine days after giving birth to her twins, McCants nearly died from a hemorrhage that resulted from an unexpected complication following her cesarean section.
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Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson in Los Angeles last month. (Jae C. Hong/AP)
James' World 2 