Marking an impassioned return to the campaign trail, former President Barack Obama made a plea Thursday night to Virginia voters to vote for Democratic candidates in the state’s first elections to be held since last year’s presidential contest.
“We need you to take this seriously, because our democracy is at stake, and it’s at stake right here in Virginia,” Obama told a crowd of 7,500 people at the Richmond Coliseum. “You can’t sit this one out.”
As Obama spoke, Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam — the Democratic nominee for governor in the commonwealth — sat on a barstool next to the 56-year-old former two-term president, basking in the glow of the former president’s political star power.
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Former President Barack Obama with Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam during a rally in Richmond, Va., Oct. 19, 2017. (Photo: Steve Helber/AP)
A senior congressional aide who has been briefed on the deaths of four U.S. servicemen in Niger says the ambush by militants stemmed in part from a “massive intelligence failure.”
The Pentagon has said that 40 to 50 militants ambushed a 12-man U.S. force in Niger on Oct. 4, killing four and wounding two. The U.S. patrol was seen as routine and had been carried out nearly 30 times in the six months before the attack, the Pentagon has reported.
The aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly, said the House and Senate armed services committees have questions about the scope of the U.S. mission in Niger, and whether the Pentagon is properly supporting the troops on the ground there.
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Myeshia Johnson cries over the casket of her husband, Sgt. La David Johnson, who was killed in an ambush in Niger, upon his body’s arrival in Miami, on Oct. 17, 2017. WPLG / AP
Let’s be blunt: With U.S. and U.K. complicity, the Saudi government is committing war crimes in Yemen.
“The country is on the brink of famine, with over 60 percent of the population not knowing where their next meal will come from,” the leaders of the U.N. World Food Program, Unicef and the World Health Organization said in an unusual joint statement.
Yemen, always an impoverished country, has been upended for two years by fighting between the Saudi-backed military coalition and Houthi rebels and their allies (with limited support from Iran). The Saudis regularly bomb civilians and, worse, they have closed the airspace and imposed a blockade to starve the rebel-held areas into submission.
That means that ordinary Yemenis, including children, die in bombings or starve.
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Buthaina is the only member of her family not killed in a Saudi-led airstrike last week.Khaled Abdullah/Reuters
Former President George W. Bush on Thursday chastised Russia for alleged cyberattacks during the 2016 election, charging it was an effort to turn “Americans against each other” and “exploit our country’s divisions.”
Bush urged America to “harden its own defenses” in the face of “external attacks on our democracy.”
In remarks at a forum in New York held by the organization that runs his presidential library, Bush said the Russian cyberattacks amounted to a “sustained attempt by a hostile power to feed and exploit our country’s divisions.”
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Bush Slams Russia for Attempts to ‘Exploit Our Country’s Divisions’
President Donald Trump said Thursday that he’d give himself “a 10,” on a scale of 1 to 10, for how he has responded to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria hit the island.
“I’d say it was a 10,” Trump told a reporter at a White House event with Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló. “I give ourselves a 10. … We have provided so much, so fast. We were actually there before the storm hit.”
The president’s remark conveys a different reality than what’s going on in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory that is home to 3.4 million Americans. As of Thursday ― more than a month after Hurricane Maria hit ― 30 percent of the island still has no drinking water and 80 percent doesn’t have power. That’s according to government data updated daily, which some volunteer workers on the ground say is inaccurate. They say the situation is far more grim.
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Trump Gives Himself ‘A 10’ Out Of 10 On His Response To Puerto Rico
After Hurricane Maria toppled the bridge that connects him to the rest of civilization and ripped the roof and walls off his house here in the central mountains of Puerto Rico, Ramón Sostre raised a weathered American flag above the wreckage.
His message to the world: I’m alive, and I’m American.
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It worked, if temporarily. Helicopters came. So did a tarp, food and bottled water.
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Yet little else has changed. His roof is still missing, as are some walls. He and his cat, Tipo, sleep in the kitchen. When the wind blows at night, rain soaks them. The power is out, as it is for roughly 3 million Puerto Ricans, or more than 80% of the island’s residents. More than a third of households in the US territory, including much of Sostre’s community, are without reliable drinking water at home. That’s roughly 1 million American citizens.
The father of a slain U.S. Army corporal says President Donald Trump offered him $25,000 over the phone earlier this year while calling to offer his condolences and then never followed through, according to The Washington Post.
Chris Baldridge told the publication that a few weeks after his 22-year-old son, Army Cpl. Dillon Baldridge, was gunned down by an Afghan police officer on June 10, he had a 15-minute phone call with the president. Baldridge said he told Trump of “his struggle with the manner in which his son was killed,” according the Post story, and was offered $25,000 after telling the president about his frustration with the military’s survivor benefits program.
Baldridge said he “can barely rub two nickels together,” and that his ex-wife would receive the Pentagon’s $100,000 death gratuity because she was his son’s beneficiary.
A Florida congresswoman described President Donald Trump’s phone call to the widow of a soldier killed during an ambush in Niger as “insensitive” after the president reportedly said the man “must’ve known what he signed up for.”
Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.) was in the car with Myeshia Johnson, the pregnant widow of Army Sgt. La David Johnson, when Trump called her Tuesday and spoke for about five minutes, according to South Florida’s NBC affiliate.
“Sarcastically he said: ‘But you know he must have known what he signed up for,’” Wilson recounted to NBC6. “How could you say that to a grieving widow? I couldn’t believe… and he said it more than once. I said this man has no feelings for anyone. This is a young woman with child who is grieved to her soul.”
David Cay Boyle Johnston (born December 24, 1948) is an American investigative journalist and author, a specialist in economics and tax issues, and winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting.
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From 2009 to 2014 he was a Distinguished Visiting Lecturer who taught the tax, property, and regulatory law of the ancient world at Syracuse University College of Law and the Whitman School of Management. From July 2011 until September 2012 he was a columnist for Reuters, writing, and producing video commentaries, on worldwide issues of tax, accounting, economics, public finance and business. Johnston is the board president of Investigative Reporters and Editors. He has also written for Al Jazeera English and America in recent years.
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Johnston covered “student radicals, black politics and development” at the San Jose Mercury News from 1968 to 1973.[3] Although he “earned enough credits for at least one master’s degree,” his formal educational credentials are limited to a “night high school diploma” as he “skipped most general education requirements in favor of upper division and graduate study at seven schools,” including San Francisco State University (1972), the University of Chicago (where he studied under a five-month fellowship in 1973) and Michigan State University (1973-1975).[4][3] At Michigan State, he wrote an internal textbook (A Guide to Public Records) for the University’s journalism department.[4] From 1973 to 1976, he was an investigative reporter at the Detroit Free Press in its Lansing bureau. In 1976, he joined the Los Angeles Times, where he remained until 1988. Johnston subsequently worked as a reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer from 1988 to 1995. He joined The New York Times in February 1995.
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As a reporter Johnston investigated Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) political spying and other abuses, the hotelier Barron Hilton, misuse of charitable funds at United Way, news manipulation at WJIM-TV in Lansing, Michigan, and Donald Trump’s financial dealings.
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Johnston has been critical of news media coverage of the 2008 $700 billion bailout of Wall Street. In a letter to American journalist and blogger Jim Romenesko, Johnston wrote, “In covering the proposed $700 billion bailout of Wall Street don’t repeat the failed lapdog practices that so damaged our reputations in the rush to war in Iraq and the adoption of the Patriot Act. Don’t assume that Congress must act instantly, as so many news stories state as if it was an immutable fact. Don’t assume there is a case just because officials say there is.” Johnston has been cited favorably by Glenn Greenwald as well as other bailout critics.
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Johnston is the author of best-selling books on tax and economic policy. Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense and Stick You With The Bill, is about hidden subsidies, rigged markets, and corporate socialism. It follows his earlier book Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich—and Cheat Everybody Else, a New York Times bestseller[16] on the U.S. tax system that won the Investigative Reporters and Editors 2003 Book of the Year award.
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Johnston’s first book, the 1992 Temples of Chance: How America Inc. Bought Out Murder Inc. to Win Control of the Casino Business is an account of how the junk-bond kings usurped mob control of the casino industry in the 1980s. The book discusses corruption in the industry and the role of the federal and state governments in that corruption.
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In 2014 Cay Johnston released Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality. Cay Johnston shows most Americans, in inflation-adjusted terms, are now back to the average income of 1966. Post-recession (from 2009 to 2011) the top 1 percent of households took in 121% of the income gains while the bottom 99% saw their income actually fall.
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In 2016, Johnston released The Making of Donald Trump, a journalistic account of the rise of businessperson-turned-presidential candidate Donald Trump, with Melville House Publishing.[17] At the time he wrote the book, Johnston had known Trump for 28 years. The book soon became a New York Times bestseller.
Maribel Casas was in the middle of a dialysis treatment when she got an unexpected text message from her sister saying she had to be at Isla Grande Airport, a small airfield in San Juan, Puerto Rico, by 2 p.m. Her relatives in Miami had managed to get her a seat on a humanitarian flight off the island.
Casas ended her treatment two hours early. “I told the nurse: ‘I have to go. I’m leaving,'” she said.
Only after she landed in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, did she learn that the private plane she had traveled on belongs to the rapper Pitbull, who lent his jet to evacuate cancer patients and others like Casas, who need constant treatment to live.
. Elderly and ill evacuees from Puerto Rico arrive at Opa Locka Executive Airport in Miami. Their evacuation was coordinated by Fundacion Stefano. Courtesy Fundacion Stefano
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.
Trump Gives Himself ‘A 10’ Out Of 10 On His Response To Puerto Rico
About 1 million Americans without running water
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James' World 2 