An episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live” last year featured emergency tones in a sketch mocking the presidential alert system. And it’ll cost parent company ABC dearly.
In a statement Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission said it hit the show with a $395,000 fine for misusing the tone from the emergency alert system.
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The emergency alert system (EAS) tone is used on television and cellphones to warn people of impending emergencies such as tornadoes and floods.
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To protect the purpose of the warning system, the agency has a rule against use of EAS tones or their simulations — except in actual emergencies, authorized tests or qualified public service announcements.
In his search for examples of a more equitable society, Bernie Sanders has long looked north … to Northern Europe, that is.
The “Nordic model” consists of strong welfare states funded by relatively high levels of taxation, which enable governments to provide high-quality education and health care for all. Sanders, an independent US senator from Vermont who’s a candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, says the United States could learn from this.
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“I want to thank the Finnish people not just for what they are doing but for giving us a vision, and a model that we in this country can attain to as well,” he told a crowd in Vermont back in 2008.
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In 2017, Sanders, who describes himself as a democratic socialist, praised neighboring Denmark’s health care system, saying, “They are able to run a high-quality health care system — probably better than ours — at half the cost. Because it’s a public health care system.”
My dad always flew an American flag in our front yard. The blue paint on our two-story house was perennially chipping; the fence, or the rail by the stairs, or the front door, existed in a perpetual state of disrepair, but that flag always flew pristine. Our corner lot, which had been redlined by the federal government, was along the river that divided the black side from the white side of our Iowa town. At the edge of our lawn, high on an aluminum pole, soared the flag, which my dad would replace as soon as it showed the slightest tatter.
My dad was born into a family of sharecroppers on a white plantation in Greenwood, Miss., where black people bent over cotton from can’t-see-in-the-morning to can’t-see-at-night, just as their enslaved ancestors had done not long before. The Mississippi of my dad’s youth was an apartheid state that subjugated its near-majority black population through breathtaking acts of violence. White residents in Mississippi lynched more black people than those in any other state in the country, and the white people in my dad’s home county lynched more black residents than those in any other county in Mississippi, often for such “crimes” as entering a room occupied by white women, bumping into a white girl or trying to start a sharecroppers union. My dad’s mother, like all the black people in Greenwood, could not vote, use the public library or find work other than toiling in the cotton fields or toiling in white people’s houses. So in the 1940s, she packed up her few belongings and her three small children and joined the flood of black Southerners fleeing North. She got off the Illinois Central Railroad in Waterloo, Iowa, only to have her hopes of the mythical Promised Land shattered when she learned that Jim Crow did not end at the Mason-Dixon line. tangie
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A demonstrator at the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to fight for black suffrage.Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos
Jeffrey Epstein’s apparent suicide inside the federally run Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan shocked the country. How could officials allow one of the most high-profile prisoners in the U.S. to end his life, especially since he had just tried and failed less than a month ago? Conspiracy theories are everywhere: It must be murder at the hands of one of Epstein’s powerful and as-yet-unnamed co-conspirators in his allegedly widespread child sex trafficking operation.
But the truth is almost certainly more mundane. “When there’s more than one possible explanation for an occurrence, the simplest one is usually correct,” said Erik Heipt, an attorney who has litigated a number of jail death lawsuits. “People commit suicide in jails, in prisons, all the time.”
Jail suicides ― which are almost always preventable ― have been the No. 1 cause of jail deaths each year since at least the turn of the century.
In January, as the Senate debated whether to permit the Trump administration to lift sanctions on Russia’s largest aluminum producer, two men with millions of dollars riding on the outcome met for dinner at a restaurant in Zurich.
On one side of the table sat the head of sales for Rusal, the Russian aluminum producer that would benefit most immediately from a favorable Senate vote. The U.S. government had imposed sanctions on Rusal as part of a campaign to punish Russia for “malign activity around the globe,” including attempts to sway the 2016 presidential election.
On the other side sat Craig Bouchard, an American entrepreneur who had gained favor with officials in Kentucky, the home state of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Bouchard was trying to build the first new aluminum-rolling mill in the United States in nearly four decades, in a corner of northeastern Kentucky ravaged by job losses and the opioid epidemic — a project that stood to benefit enormously if Rusal were able to get involved.
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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) heads toward his Capitol Hill office in January. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
Eleanor Pelta has secured Polish passports for herself and her two sons. Stephanie Schwab is planning an escape route via Spain. Elie Jacobs has begun to keep enough cash on hand to buy last-minute plane tickets to Israel for his family. Alex and Aussa Lorens are applying for work visas in Australia, while Josh Lewin is aiming for New Zealand.
And Kami Lewis Levin already has her bags packed and tickets purchased. She leaves next week, with her husband, three children and a dog, for a new home in Costa Rica.
Americans are not flocking to the exits, but some of them are thinking about it, and some are talking about it, and at least a few are acting on the idea. Google searches for terms like “how to move out of America” spiked this past weekend to levels not seen since November 2016, right after the presidential election, and last seen a decade ago during the Great Recession. And in dozens of interviews after the massacres in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, people who were born here spoke of their crystallizing desire to leave.
The Falkirk Wheel is a rotating boat lift in Scotland, connecting the Forth and Clyde Canal with the Union Canal.The lift is named after the nearby town of Falkirk in central Scotland. It opened in 2002, reconnecting the two canals for the first time since the 1930s as part of the Millennium Link project.
The Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America (FDRA) is breathing a small sigh of relief as President Trump delays the implementation of additional tariffs on $300 billion of Chinese Goods.
“The announcement today that the Trump Administration will be delaying the additional 10% tariff on some footwear until December 1 is an acknowledgment that tariffs are indeed paid by Americans,” the group’s president and CEO Matt Priest said in a statement. “It is no coincidence that the Administration is allowing certain shoes to come in without raising taxes in hopes that prices do not rise at retail during the holidays. Our industry’s loud unified voice left a clear impression that shoe tariffs are already extremely high, upwards of 67.5%, and any further tariffs would directly raise costs on consumers and cost footwear jobs.”
Priest, also says while the FDRA is pleased with the decision to delay new tariffs on certain shoes, they are not satisfied.
“We will continue to fight for any exclusions on new tariffs and we will fight to delay new tariffs on shoes until the entire tariff threat is lifted off the backs of American families,” he said.
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.
Jimmy Kimmel
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An image of the Falkirk Wheel canal at night
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