The men packing the boat with rice, cigarettes and medicine had fled war and persecution in their home countries.
Now, at 1 a.m., off the coast of a remote island in Papua New Guinea, they were speeding back to the detention camp they hated.
Why, I asked, would they return to the prisonlike “refugee processing center” where they had been trapped for nearly five years?
“We have brothers to feed,” said Behnam Satah, 31, a Kurdish asylum seeker, as we cruised over moon-silvered waves on a hot November night. “We have brothers who need help.”
The Trump Organization has been paid to walk away from its prized Trump SoHo hotel, severing a management contract and ending the company’s ties to the struggling Manhattan establishment.
A deal was reached on Wednesday in which CIM Group, the California-based investment company which owns the building, bought the Trump Organization out of the remainder of their contract to manage the hotel.
The buyout means that, at the end of December, the Trump Organization will walk away.
CIM will then be entitled to rebrand the hotel and try and turn its fortunes around.
The rich are getting richer. But not Donald Trump.
The Forbes list of 400 richest Americans shows that the billionaire-in-chief’s fortune fell by $600 million to $3.1 billion. As a result he dropped to #248 on the list, after coming in at #156 last year.
The magazine attributed his decline in wealth to “a tough New York real estate market, particularly for retail locations; a costly lawsuit and an expensive presidential campaign.” Trump reached a $25 million settlement in a suit that claims that his Trump University real estate seminars defrauded students.
.
But overall the richest Americans are richer than they were a year ago. In fact it now takes a record $2 billion to make the cut of the richest 400 Americans. The magazine estimates there are 169 billionaires who were too “poor” to make the cut, including Facebook (FB, Tech30) Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.
NBC News reports Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Donald Trump a “moron” after a July 20 meeting at the Pentagon. Mike Pence allegedly talked Tillerson out of resigning that week.
Once again, Donald Trump’s own Twitter history has provided the perfect response to the news reports his own secretary of state thinks he’s a “fucking moron.”
.
(L-R) Fucking moron, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson
The top nuclear commander in the U.S. said Saturday that he would reject an “illegal” nuclear attack order from President Donald Trump, and would instead steer the commander in chief to other “options.”
“If you execute an unlawful order, you will go to jail,” Air Force Gen. John Hyten told an audience at the Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia. “You could go to jail for the rest of your life.”
Hyten, the commander of the U.S. Strategic Command who oversees America’s nuclear arsenal, spoke at a forum titled “Nukes: The Fire and the Fury,” as recorded in a video on the event’s Facebook page. He didn’t define what exactly would constitute an illegal launch order. But Hyten said he has been trained for the past 36 years in the law of armed conflict, and mentioned the consideration of such elements as proportional response and unnecessary suffering that would be caused by such a conflagration.
In the event Trump suggests an illegal strike, Hyten described a scenario in which he would present Trump with legal choices.
Rachel Tudor, a transgender professor whose tenure and promotion was denied at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, was awarded $1.1 million by a federal jury on Monday in a landmark Title VII case.
Tudor was hired by the university in 2004 as a tenure-track assistant professor in the English department and presented as male at the time. She began transitioning in 2007, becoming the university’s first openly transgender professor.
According to the lawsuit, after notifying the university that she would be presenting as a woman at work for the 2007-2008 academic year, Tudor received a phone call from an unnamed human resources staffer who told her the school’s vice president for academic affairs, Douglas McMillan, had inquired about firing her because her identity as a transgender woman offended his religious beliefs.
The Keystone XL pipeline cleared a major hurdle on Monday after a Nebraska regulator approved an alternate route for the $8 billion project.
The Nebraska Public Service Commission voted to approve TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL pipeline in a 3-2 decision that cleared a regulatory hurdle for the proposed 1,179-mile pipeline that would link Canada’s Alberta oil sands to U.S. refineries.
Nebraska was the only state that had yet to approve the pipeline’s route, and Monday’s decision appeared to pass that final regulatory challenge. But the move could still be challenged in court.
The five-member commission rejected TransCanada’s preferred route and opted for one of the alternative routes that moves the pipeline farther east.
. A TransCanada Keystone Pipeline pump station operates outside Steele City, Nebraska March 10, 2014. Lane Hickenbottom / Reuters file
The Keystone pipeline running from Canada across the Great Plains leaked Thursday morning, spilling about 5,000 barrels of oil — or 210,000 gallons — southeast of the small town of Amherst in northeast South Dakota.
The spill comes just days before a crucial decision next Monday by the Public Service Commission in Nebraska over whether to grant a permit for a new, long-delayed sister pipeline called Keystone XL, which has been mired in controversy for several years. Both are owned by Calgary-based TransCanada.
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.
.
.
.
Keystone pipeline spill
.
James' World 2 