| High school cheerleader cleared of murdering her baby to maintain ‘perfect life’ Posted: 13 Sep 2019 12:49 AM PDT  A woman who gave birth as a teenager and buried her newborn child in a garden has been acquitted of murder.Brooke Skylar Richardson was found not guilty on charges of aggravated murder, involuntary manslaughter and child endangerment by a jury on Thursday.
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| In a sign of what’s to come, Trump trolls Democrats as they debate Posted: 13 Sep 2019 08:44 AM PDT  An airplane above Thursday's Democratic debate venue trailed a banner: "Socialism will kill Houston's economy! Vote Trump 2020." The plane was hired by the Trump campaign in a likely preview of how the president will treat his opponent: as a dangerous leftist.
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| Venezuela investigates Guaido over photo with suspected Colombian criminals Posted: 13 Sep 2019 12:29 PM PDT  Venezuela's state prosecutor's office said on Friday it would open an investigation into Juan Guaido after the interior minister presented photos on state television showing the opposition leader in the company of two suspected members of a Colombian drug-trafficking group. Guaido on Friday said the two men had asked to take a photo with him when he secretly crossed into Colombia from Venezuela in February via an informal border route after a Venezuelan court had barred him from leaving the country. "We didn't ask for their criminal record to take a photo," he told reporters in Caracas.
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| Tomi Lahren: We Need Guns to ‘Defend Ourselves’ From Immigrants Posted: 13 Sep 2019 11:31 AM PDT  Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren declared on Friday that Americans need guns in order to potentially fight off unlimited immigrants coming into the United States, adding that citizens need the ability to "defend ourselves" because "we don't know" who is coming into the country.Appearing on Fox Business Network's Varney and Co., the conservative firebrand reacted to Democrats' calls for stricter gun control in the wake of several mass shootings. Specifically, she took issue with Democratic presidential hopeful Beto O'Rourke's call for mandatory buybacks of assault-style weapons like the AR-15 and AK-47."I would also remind those that might not have a use for a gun or don't feel they have a use for a gun, many Americans do," Lahren told Fox Business anchor Stuart Varney. "Many Americans don't live in the suburbs, who are far away from where police can respond, and so that's why that self-defense is so important."And then she brought the threat of "open borders" immigration into the mix."And all the things the Democrats want to put in place—my goodness, if they want to open our borders, you better be sure the people in Texas, the people in South Dakota, the people in the middle of this country, we are going to be armed and ready," she exclaimed. "Because we have to have a means to defend ourselves from—who knows who's coming in? That's the thing, we don't know, and we have to be able to protect ourselves."The right-wing provocateur's insistence that guns are needed to stave off migrants heading into the U.S. comes barely a month after the El Paso mass shooting that left 22 dead. The suspected shooter admitted that he was targeting "Mexicans" and apparently posted a racist manifesto in which he decried the "Hispanic invasion" of America.This also isn't the first time that Lahren has fear-mongered over supposed "open borders" immigration. Earlier this year, she devoted a monologue to warning Fox viewers that an extremely high border wall was needed because immigrants are "shifty and adaptable."After her remarks faced intense backlash that included Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro personally calling her out, Lahren took to Twitter to "apologize" for how her comments "came out.""Not what I meant & I apologize for the way it came out. I simply mean without a secure border we don't know who is coming into our nation & those who wish to do us harm will exploit it," she wrote Friday afternoon. "I'm NOT advocating for violence against any person, regardless of race or immigration status."Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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| Liberty students protest in wake of reports about Falwell Posted: 13 Sep 2019 03:39 PM PDT  Students at Liberty University in Virginia gathered Friday to protest in the wake of news reports containing allegations that school president Jerry Falwell Jr. improperly benefited from the institution and disparaged students in emails. Students joined together at the private evangelical university known for being an influential hub in conservative politics and held up signs calling for accountability and an investigation. Elizabeth Brooks, a junior majoring in politics and policy, told The Associated Press by phone that a recent Politico Magazine story as well as a Reuters report prompted the protest at the school in Lynchburg.
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| Israel's F-35s Are the Uncontested Kings of the Middle East's Skies Posted: 13 Sep 2019 01:00 PM PDT  Israel's enemies can't even see them coming.
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| Dominican Republic Announces New Safety Measures After Deaths of 11 American Tourists Posted: 12 Sep 2019 09:38 PM PDT  'American tourists should feel safe and secure,' an official said
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| Andrew Yang on healthcare during the Democratic Debate: 'I'm Asian, so I know a lot of doctors' Posted: 12 Sep 2019 06:51 PM PDT  While speaking during the Democratic debate, Andrew Yang invoked a stereotype about Asian people.
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| Anti-Semitism: The Fight That Never Flags Posted: 13 Sep 2019 03:30 AM PDT  In the course of a review of The Plot against America, Philip Roth's dystopian novel that has the United States adopting a form of Nazi rule after the election of America-Firster Charles Lindbergh, the Australian writer Clive James confessed to never quite suspending his disbelief in this lurid alternative history. The United States, wrote James, "will never be free of racial prejudice for the same reason that it will never enshrine racial prejudice in anything like the Nuremberg Laws: it's a free country." He pithily concluded that "the insuperable problem with The Plot against America is that America is against the plot."Bari Weiss, a staff writer and editor for the opinion section of the New York Times, used to hold the same iron conviction that the United States would never succumb to the plague of anti-Semitism. In her slim new book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism, Weiss confesses she is no longer so sanguine about the status of the "Jewish question" in the land of the free, even if the symptoms of a resurgent anti-Semitism aren't as acute as they are in the Old World. A fair reading of the times suggests that her newfound anxiety is prudent.Not so long ago, sounding the alarm about the Jewish place in American life would have been dismissed as hyperbolic or hysterical. By the standards of Jewish history, the asylum discovered in the United States after the Shoah was an almost unimaginable gift. Weiss recounts that growing up on American soil around the turn of the 21st century, members of her community knew they were "the lucky ones." The faint echoes of anti-Semitism were at a safe remove in this secular republic so profoundly shaped by its confrontations with both the Nazi abattoir and the Soviet gulag. "Survival had no longer been our concern," she writes. In America, the sons and daughters of Abraham and Sarah managed to flourish "like no other diaspora in history," even if ample evidence of the vehemence ranged against their tribe could be found in the foreign press: pictures of buses blown apart by suicide bombers in Jerusalem, the YouTube video showing Daniel Pearl's gruesome beheading in Karachi, firebombed synagogues in Stockholm, Jewish cemeteries desecrated in Paris, or attacks on those wearing a kippah in Berlin.Weiss suspects that the failure of anti-Semitism to take hold on this side of the Atlantic can be credited to the American regime's early efforts to inoculate the country against this venomous mania. In 1790, George Washington gave his assurance to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, R.I., that American Jews would "possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship." In the same letter, America's first president promised that the new republic would give "to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance." As a nation founded on the universalist claims of the Declaration of Independence, the United States has seemed, for all its flaws, particularly ill-suited to federally sanctioned prejudice. In addition, the "special nature of America," in Weiss's telling, includes an attachment to the Hebraic tradition as reflected in the dizzying array of biblical place names that dot its landscape. This, in turn, has nourished America's long-standing alliance with the State of Israel. All of this has predisposed America to be "a New Jerusalem for the Jewish people."This is not to deny that American Jews occasionally found themselves (as the author did, growing up in Pittsburgh) on the receiving end of rancid jokes about "picking up pennies," along with creepy "questions about horns." More often than not, however, these insults didn't escalate into injuries, in large part because this ill-concealed prejudice was understood by mainstream society to be anathema to American politics and philosophy. It was tempting, therefore, to write off these churlish anti-Jewish outbursts as nothing more than "vestiges of an uglier, more violent past." Any suggestion that they were harbingers of a resurgent chauvinism threatening Jewish life and limb would have been greeted with mirth.Weiss's visceral confidence that Jews (along with other religious minorities) would continue to enjoy the fruits of an apparently eternal American exceptionalism was shattered when her kehilla, or community, was visited by evil. In October 2018, eleven Jews were murdered in the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh where Weiss became a bat mitzvah. In that event, her hometown temple earned the awful distinction of suffering the deadliest attack on Jews in American history. The perpetrator of this heinous act was decidedly "homegrown," to use the contemporary argot, attacking a synagogue that had opened its doors to persecuted people of all faiths as part of National Refugee Shabbat, a project of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.Those who insisted that this was a singular episode of mass murder would be proved wrong a few months later when another white supremacist struck a synagogue in San Diego. The roots of anti-Jewish violence (if not yet anti-Jewish pogroms) that had long found infertile soil in the United States at last discovered a more hospitable patch of terrain.Anyone familiar with the sordid record of fear and loathing toward Jews knows that severing these roots will be a task fraught with difficulty. (If you are not familiar, procuring a copy of How to Fight Anti-Semitism would be a very good place to start.) The first problem in understanding this complex phenomenon is that Judaism itself is properly understood not merely as a religion or an ethnicity, but as a people and a civilization. It follows, as Weiss succinctly explains, that there is no single reason for anti-Semitism.Considering this hatred, one cannot fail to be struck — as Jean-Paul Sartre was in his essay "Anti-Semite and Jew" — by its lack of any recognizable logic save "the logic of passion." Call me unlucky, but in the past year alone, in places as diverse as Dubai, Beirut, and Istanbul, your obedient servant has encountered this fit of illogic at close range. Over dinner or drinks, elite members of these societies (anti-Semitism frequently infects the pseudo-intellectual) unburdened themselves of the opinion that the official narrative about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks is a cheap ruse, and al-Qaeda's holy warriors were not responsible for this obscenity. (No prizes for guessing which intelligence service of a certain Levantine nation was fingered instead.)This ancient animosity would not have proved so dynamic and durable down the centuries if it weren't essentially protean. Though it's often thought of as a neurosis, Saul Bellow insisted that it was a psychosis. It involves no exaggeration to say that the Weltanschauung of Jew-hatred is so replete with contradiction as to be schizophrenic.After originating in Egypt, Judeophobia has been maintained as a fashion by such discrepant forces as medieval Christianity and modern Islam. In the 20th century, virulent forms of the virus broke out in the Roman Catholic Church and the Russian Orthodox Church (the former being in sympathy with fascism and the latter blessing the execrable Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion that is the source of many conspiracy theories relating to the Jews, which were later reproduced in Hamas's charter). In its various permutations, anti-Semitism has conscripted the Jew as a nefarious partisan and practitioner of capitalism and, alternately, of Bolshevism. (As Marx proved, not even being born a Jew according to the strict matrilineal principles of Jewish law is a guarantee against indulging this primitive stupidity.) Jews have been portrayed as vicious race contaminators as well as an all-powerful tribe standing apart from society. Anti-Semitism is not, in other words, a run-of-the-mill prejudice akin to racism against, say, "black" Africans. Rather, in the words of the historian Peter Hayes, it is "a kind of superstition" that conceives of a universal conspiracy in which the Jews are the sinister vanguard.How to Fight Anti-Semitism focuses more on present than past manifestations of this "disease of the mind," as Weiss dubs it, in echo of the historian Paul Johnson. The primary targets of her sharp pen are not the Gospel of John or even Marxist revolutionaries (it's not for nothing that the German socialist August Bebel described anti-Semitism as the socialism of fools). Anti-Semitism has spread and mutated, appearing in the guise of a modern theocratic fascism while also poisoning diverse political movements in the West.As Weiss is fully aware, her book is most apt to court controversy by providing a political guide to these fresh outbreaks of anti-Semitism. She begins rather dauntingly by noting that Jews in the West, especially in Europe, are confronted by a "three-headed dragon." First, there is an antagonistic environment for Jews, thanks in large measure to the rapid growth of Islamism on the Old Continent. Second, there is ideological vilification by the political Left, which increasingly regards Israel as an illegitimate state serving no other purpose than as a bastion of Western (read: white) colonialism. Third, there is a recrudescence of reactionary populism on the political right that, while often professing sympathy for Israel, evinces a fervent commitment to blood-and-soil politics that seldom ends well for Jews.Not everybody will agree with Weiss's portrait of the hydra-headed enemy, which itself points to part of the problem. The tribal impulse in our political life has grown so pronounced that it has overwhelmed a common civic culture, rendering many classical liberals politically homeless. There is a well-oiled habit among the political class and in the press of excusing obvious, often deplorable, transgressions by one's "own" side. The acid test for fighting anti-Semitism, as with so many other derangements, is to face it down with equal enthusiasm and commitment when it flares up on one's team — or, better yet, to be more discriminating about which team one belongs to in the first place.The Left The true anti-Semite is easy enough to spot on the lunatic fringe, but it's another matter if you're not aware of the existence of plural lunatic fringes. Most children of the Enlightenment have been trained to discern this toxic ideology when religious fanatics inveigh against the Jews' supposed responsibility for the murder of Christ or when voices of the "alt-right" curse the Jews for deriving from the racial gutter. But symptoms of the toxin are no less definitive when one hears of an occult world government whose "lobby" distorts U.S. foreign policy and global financial markets, or is treated to the filthy argument that, in its methods of warfare against Hamas — a terrorist organization as well as a regime based in large measure on the desire to stamp international Jewry out of existence — the Israel Defense Forces have taken a leaf from Hitler's book.As the Democratic party's center of gravity has moved sharply to the left in recent years, the anti-imperialist mindset has gained traction, attributing the ills of the Middle East to British and French (and, latterly, Israeli and American) power. This political evolution has been exemplified by the now-famous freshman congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, who have brought critical (if maladroit) scrutiny to bear against the U.S.-Israel alliance. Another member of "the Squad," Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has openly consorted with Jeremy Corbyn of Britain's Labour party, a fellow traveler with Islamist movements whose tenure as Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition has been marred by one anti-Semitic scandal after another.At its worst, this mindset is prone to detecting arcane Jewish manipulations behind all earthly power. More commonly, the insurgent progressive perspective masquerades as merely anti-Zionist, conceiving of Jews as part of the coalition of the oppressor while Israel, "the Jew among the nations," is treated with frenzied derision. In addition to being indicted as the sole party responsible for the conflict with the Palestinians, and therefore almost entirely to blame for their miserable plight, Israel is portrayed as a uniquely malevolent force in the world. The dramatic rise of the BDS movement (deemed by the German Bundestag, not unjustifiably, as anti-Semitic) across the West today capably demonstrates that these vicious and extreme detractors of the Zionist entity are on the march.This palpable and supercharged hostility has taken by surprise many liberal Zionists — as appears to have been the case for Weiss — who are given to assuming that the Left instinctively takes the side of the underdog, the immigrant, and the outsider. Although the Left has largely come by this reputation honestly, it does little good for Jews, who, despite being the principal target of hate crimes in the United States and most of Europe, scarcely qualify as an oppressed minority in the eyes of today's Left. Weiss is keen to announce and decry progressives' evolving hierarchy of privilege, whereby Zionists (i.e., the vast majority of worldwide Jewry) generally occupy the top rung as defenders of a colonial state embodying the "white man's burden." (This narrative seldom accounts for the Mizrahi Jews, more than half of Israel's population, whose roots lie in the Middle East.)The progressive temper does not merely direct suspicion and ire toward Israel and all its works but shows every sign of failing to recognize an enemy even when it meets one. The mainstream Left is proving increasingly blind to the clear and present danger posed by Islamist ideology and, worse, often lends aid and comfort to its cause. This vile tendency crops up regularly, but two prominent examples include the Southern Poverty Law Center (which designated the liberal Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz an "anti-Muslim extremist" and was later compelled to pay damages) and the Women's March (whose unscrupulous leaders Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour embraced the anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan).Weiss does not make the common mistake of conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. This has always been a self-refuting standard, since, as Weiss reminds us, the earliest anti-Zionists to scorn Theodor Herzl's dream of der judenstaat were themselves Jewish (not only the left-wing critics of Palestinian-Arab dispossession but the Orthodox sects that regarded Jewish political sovereignty prior to the arrival of the messiah as blasphemous). Incidentally, some Zionists have also been quite nasty anti-Semites, including British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour whose famous 1917 declaration "viewed with favor" a Jewish home in the mandate of Palestine in order to empty Britain of its Jewish population.Nor does Weiss argue that stinging dissent from the Israeli government, let alone a harmlessly critical HBO mini-series, constitutes anti-Semitism, or even anti-Zionism. Nonetheless, it has become difficult in practice to disentangle anti-Semitism from anti-Zionism, given that manifestations of both often share the purpose of demonization and delegitimization of the only Jewish state. (By contrast, try to imagine, if you can, a movement of similar breadth and depth aimed against another "faith-based" state, Pakistan, that was similarly cobbled together out of rival ethno-religious nationalisms amid the collapsing British imperial order in 1947.)Weiss shrewdly analogizes modern anti-Zionism to the situation of a young couple weighing whether to have a child. All of the credible and practical concerns fall away once they have the baby, or else the parents are behaving immorally. Such is the case today, when the State of Israel is an established fact. To have questioned or opposed the project of building a Jewish state in the Jews' ancestral homeland before the U.N. Partition Plan of 1947 is one thing. It is quite another to endorse tearing down that living, breathing state today, in full knowledge of the enormity that would ensue. The offense here is compounded when those agitating to make Israel a pariah state demonstrate little knowledge or concern about formulating and executing a strategy to confront bellicose regimes and militant Islamist groups that imperil the Jewish state and the civilized world.The Right In addition to being more diffuse than many imagine, the lunatic fringe is also thicker than is generally understood. Weiss is justly concerned by the spike in violence against Jews and other minorities from the identitarian right and about the grisly ideology behind it. After some years of dormancy, in August 2017 it flared into the open in Charlottesville when a "Unite the Right" rally of white supremacists gathered at the University of Virginia to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Carrying tiki torches, these doughy goons shouted the slogans: "Blood and soil," "White Lives Matter," and, in a nod to the ancient anti-Semitic notion of the Jew as the evil puppeteer, "Jews will not replace us." Lest we forget, President Trump's reflexive response to this wicked nonsense was to put in a good word for such "very fine people."Weiss's handling of the ugly movement known as the "alt-right" is fairly comprehensive, and the reader emerges on guard against this ethno-religious movement in our midst. She is also alert to the threat posed by unsavory authoritarian populists across the West who, though generally willing to dispel any impression of being motivated by racism, aim to turn their societies away from the liberal tradition. In either of these guises, the chauvinist Right tends to regard Muslims as the "other" and casts Israel (in Weiss's wry description) as a "kind of anti-Muslim Sparta" rather than a pluralist democracy preserving its Jewish character even under existential threat.The longer Israel and America remain in the saddle of populist nationalism, the more this crude description of Israel risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. (As Weiss must know, Israel's occupation of the West Bank will eventually become all but irrevocable, at which point the Zionist project will cease to be recognizable as a democratic Jewish state.) Stuck in a defensive crouch, Israel's conservative partisans in both countries tend to dismiss liberal scruples about the Israeli government's innumerable follies and injustices. They cheer Prime Minister Netanyahu's no-holds-barred posture against the Left, and the actions taken in self-defense against a militant Sunni gang in Gaza and a swelling "Shiite crescent" across Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. These conservatives also cite the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, among other items, as reason to embrace Trump for being in the running for "the best friend Israel has ever had in the White House."Among Zionists, Weiss helpfully distinguishes between "the David people and the Goliath people." The former think that Zion is always under siege, that any Israeli weakness will be exploited by its enemies, and that most other considerations are secondary. The latter think that Israel has accumulated such a preponderance of power that its vulnerability has been greatly diminished, and that illiberal aspects of Israel's character (consider last year's Jewish nation-state law that privileges Israel's sectarian features over its secular pluralist claims) are sapping precious legitimacy at home and abroad. Weiss's conclusion that each of these tendencies contains partial truths is fair enough as far as it goes, which is not far enough. In reality, the difference cannot be so evenly split.As long as the political Right believes Israel's society and government require an unqualified defense, the David people cannot be acquitted on the charge of loving the Jewish state "not wisely, but too well." By refusing to hold Israel to its own standards as an exemplar of liberal democracy, such ostensible friends are rendering a grave disservice to the Zionist cause. Weiss can hardly be counted among them. She posits that "supporting Israel . . . means demanding that Israel live up to its ideals," but never gets around to spelling out just what those ideals dictate in relation to the pressing need to reach a decent accommodation with the Palestinians. To be fair, Weiss does mention in passing the settlement enterprise as a valid point of criticism of Israel, and not a species of the phenomenon that is her subject. What's more, she registers a genuine sense of "despair" when observing Palestinians waiting at checkpoints, and says that Palestinian suffering in the course of occupation constitutes a "stain" on her Jewish soul.Nonetheless, the dogma of a "chosen people" has enabled a strident intolerance among many of Weiss's coreligionists that demands a more thoroughgoing critique than it receives in How to Fight Anti-Semitism. This is not because anti-Semitism is a response to the behavior of Jews (it absolutely is not). Rather, Israel's "accidental empire" of systematic land seizure in biblical Judea and Samaria is premised on a "civilization state" model of nationalism profoundly at odds with the liberal ideal that will render the case for Israel increasingly toxic.Many years ago, Yehoshua Leibowitz, the editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica, warned of a "Judeo-Nazi" tendency among the messianic settlers who moved onto the occupied West Bank after 1967. One need not go that far to recognize that Israel's defensive occupation of the post-1967 territories has unloosed a xenophobic current that not only serves to deprive Palestinians of their rights and sovereignty, but also cements sectarian and racist feelings within Israel proper. (To instance one example, courtesy of the Israel Democracy Institute, 70 percent of Jewish Israelis now oppose appointing Arab Israelis to cabinet posts.)Weiss appears more panicked by the related matter of Israel's new nationalist allies (e.g., Victor Orbán's government in Hungary) who are self-proclaimed illiberal democrats and give off more than a whiff of anti-Semitism. Weiss also passionately criticizes the rabbinate's suffocating influence among Israeli Jews, and scorches Netanyahu's unfathomably crude move to pull the racist party Otzma Yehudit into his governing coalition. This is all to the good, but the failure to offer a straightforward denunciation of Israel's occupation of land claimed and inhabited by Palestinians is a baffling omission in a book about fighting anti-Semitism — again, not because Jewish settlement beyond the Green Line is in any way related to anti-Semitism, but because it weakens Israel's moral defenses when it needs them most.If the populist-nationalist view of Israel continues to dominate the right side of the ballot in both Israel and America, and if that view continues to command electoral majorities, it will help vindicate the Left's suspicion that Israel is in essence an ethnocracy, or will soon evolve into one. As progressive politics lurches to the left, the Israeli Right will find new support in subverting democratic institutions and entrenching the occupation. In place of a smaller, plucky Israel punching above its weight against fearsome enemies while upholding a laudable multiethnic democracy, the cycle of dueling left and right populisms risks helping to foster a Greater Israel that loses sight of the liberal Zionism that birthed it. If this comes to pass, it will be a moral and political catastrophe, no matter where America's embassy in Israel is situated.Conclusion As I turned the final page of How to Fight Anti-Semitism, my mind returned to a vignette that Weiss had earlier extracted from Joachim Fest's memoir of growing up in interwar Berlin, Not I. Fest recalls his father, a pious Catholic and adamant anti-Nazi, begging his Jewish friends to leave Hitler's Germany before it was too late. Fest's father heaped praise on those in this dark time who resolutely persisted in classifying themselves "German citizens of Jewish faith": "In their self-discipline, their quiet civility and unsentimental brilliance, they had really been the last Prussians." They had "only one failing," he said, "which became their undoing: being overwhelmingly governed by their heads, they had, in tolerant Prussia, lost their instinct for danger, which had preserved them through the ages."Only a small number of Jews in the Third Reich lived up to the Jewish reputation for pessimism and understood what lay in wait for them. Victor Klemperer was one of them: The German-Jewish diarist whose writings eerily predicted the Holocaust said that the fate of the Jews was to be a "seismic people." It would be rash for Jews anywhere, even in America, to allow this premonitory instinct to atrophy, and Weiss deserves credit for keeping it alive.The most mournful realization generated by How to Fight Anti-Semitism involves the fantastic resilience of this disease and its protean nature, which augurs a fight that is decidedly unlikely to culminate in a decisive victory. To the contrary. Anti-Semitism is a plague whose latent tenacity ensures that Jews will not enjoy a quiet life anytime soon, but are rather condemned to live in a kind of exile — even if they happen to reside in the "safe haven" of the Jewish state.As this malignant disease is confronted and engaged, the ability of Jews and philo-Semites to hold a tension within themselves between vigilance and realism is vital. Weiss's book is unbeatable at showing that "never again" is a necessary but insufficient responsibility of Zionism. "Jews did not sustain their magnificent civilization because they were anti-anti-Semites," Weiss sagely observes. There is a growing peril in allowing an imagination of disaster to disorient Jews and obscure their duties and interests in the world beyond mere survival.It has been said that Jews must have a bag mentally packed, ready to flee. This paranoia is deeply embedded in the Jewish psyche, and for understandable reasons. Although past generations of Jews could be forgiven for harboring that mental luggage and little else, in fact their achievements proved to be more formidable and enduring; for modern Jews, even while they attend to their perennial fears — and their fanatical enemies' designs — of a world without Jews, it is important also to bear in mind that Hitler is dead, and there is work to be done outside the realm of security. Modern Jewish power has furnished the moral space to advance and vindicate modern Jewish values.The peculiar coincidence of great power but also abiding vulnerability demands the acknowledgement, after Jewish fashion, of a rich irony. In his essay "Why We Remain Jews," the philosopher Leo Strauss laid great emphasis on the tenuousness of existence as well as the illusion of salvation. He argued that "the Jewish people and their fate are the living witness for the absence of redemption. This, one could say, is the meaning of the chosen people; the Jews are chosen to prove the absence of redemption." The absence of redemption should recommend to Jews (and their well-wishers) a vigorous pursuit of self-defense and self-respect that recognizes ultimate security as a mirage.As the political center gives way to the ethno-nationalist Right and the anti-colonialist Left, which feed off of and reinforce each other, Weiss and many Jews have begun to ask the breathless question: Could it happen here? Gentiles should by all means join them, though "it" will not be a totalitarian future replete with book burnings and goose-stepping soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division. It is safe to surmise that America remains firmly against that "plot," even as the erosion of trust in the institutions of free government, at home and abroad, is well under way. If this cycle persists or accelerates, it will be a striking historical anomaly if the Jews do not suffer grievously, though this time their suffering may not be appreciably greater than the rest of ours.
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| After Trump fires Bolton, Rand Paul and Liz Cheney go to war over it Posted: 12 Sep 2019 12:34 PM PDT  In the wake of the national security adviser's firing, two Republicans trade barbs over the president's foreign policy.
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| US couple 'abandon 11-year-old daughter' and move to Canada Posted: 13 Sep 2019 11:22 AM PDT  Indiana prosecutors have charged a couple with abandoning their adopted daughter in 2013 and moving to Canada, renting an apartment in Lafayette for the then-11-year-old girl but otherwise leaving her to fend for herself.Prosecutors in Tippecanoe County, where Lafayette is located, have filed neglect charges against 45-year-old Kristine Elizabeth Barnett and 43-year-old Michael Barnett.
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| 'Every right to call that out': Booker defends Castro on Biden attacks at Democratic debate Posted: 13 Sep 2019 07:41 AM PDT  During the testy exchange, Castro claimed Biden said Americans would have to "buy in" for health care coverage under Biden's proposal.
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| AG Barr has received draft report on FISA abuse allegations Posted: 13 Sep 2019 02:04 PM PDT  DOJ Inspector General Horowitz sent draft report to attorney general to review; Catherine Herridge reports.
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| Will Venezuela Become a Russian Missile Base? Posted: 13 Sep 2019 06:23 AM PDT  And how would Trump respond to that?
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| In era of legal pot, can police search cars based on odor? Posted: 13 Sep 2019 08:37 AM PDT  Sniff and search is no longer the default for police in some of the 33 states that have legalized marijuana. Traditionally, an officer could use the merest whiff of weed to justify a warrantless vehicle search, and whatever turned up — pot, other kinds of illegal drugs, something else the motorist wasn't allowed to have — could be used as evidence in court. The result is that, in some states, a police officer who sniffs out pot isn't necessarily allowed to go through someone's automobile — because the odor by itself is no longer considered evidence of a crime.
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| View Photos of the 2020 Cadillac CT4 Posted: 12 Sep 2019 10:00 AM PDT |
| Cubans fear return to 90s austerity amid cuts Posted: 12 Sep 2019 02:23 PM PDT  Havana awoke Thursday to long lines at gas stations and public transportation stops after President Miguel Diaz-Canel warned fellow Cubans to expect fuel shortages and blackouts that he blamed on US sanctions. Terrified!" said Katia Morfa, 36, as she took her seven-year-old daughter to school. It's inevitable that we think of the dark and very sad days of the Special Period," Morfa told AFP.
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| People are already getting arrested at Area 51, and of course they're YouTubers Posted: 13 Sep 2019 12:39 PM PDT  With only a week to go until the widely memed Area 51 raid, two hopefuls were already arrested for trying to storm the Air Force base. Unsurprisingly, they're both vloggers.Eager to "see them aliens" -- as the original Facebook event put it -- Dutch YouTubers Ties Granzier, 20, and Govert Sweep, 21, ignored the "Do Not Enter" signs and entered anyway. According to a video posted by the Nye County Sheriff's Office, the two were caught when the deputies responded to a report of "foreign national trespassers" at Area 51, which is a National Security Site. Granzier and Sweep's car was parked at a gate approximately three miles into the property."Both individuals told deputies that they speak, write, and read English," the statement continued. "They said that they saw the 'No Trespassing' signs at the Mercury highway entrance to the Nevada National Security Site, but they wanted to look at the facility. Granzier advised deputies that he is a YouTuber."Their car was packed with a laptop, cameras, and a drone. After Granzier and Sweep consented to a search, deputies found footage of Area 51. Both YouTubers were arrested and booked into the Nye County jail and were charged with trespassing. If caught trespassing on a military base, violators can receive a $500 fine, a prison sentence up to six months, or both. SEE ALSO: Storm Area 51 creator calls AlienStock 'a possible humanitarian disaster'. But it's still going ahead.In an Instagram post on Tuesday, Granzier wrote: "It has always been a dream to be here, now to crazy recordings of crazy adventures and ... area 51 ..."He appears to have removed any mention of Area 51 from the caption, but his supports are flooding his comments with FreeTie. > View this post on Instagram> > the grand mother of canyon en de hoover dam toch wel altijd al een droom om hier te zijn nu door naar gekke opnames van gekke avontuurtjs> > A post shared by TIES (@ties) on Sep 10, 2019 at 9:12am PDTAlthough more than two million Facebook users responded to the event, the U.S. government warned against actually attempting to storm the military base on Sept. 20. "The U.S. Air Force is aware of the Facebook post," an Air Force spokesperson told Insider. "Any attempt to illegally access military installations or military training areas is dangerous." Ahead of the estimated thousands of eager alien enthusiasts flooding the area, the Nevada Department of Transportation removed the iconic "Extraterrestrial Highway" sign, according to a Fox 5 report on Thursday.Instead of risking the prison sentence or worse, consider going to the corresponding music festival, Alienstock. The Facebook event's original creator backed out and called it a "potential humanitarian disaster," but the festival is still reported to proceed as planned.The moral of this story: Don't storm Area 51, even if you're a YouTuber.
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| Yang unveils plan to give $1,000 a month from campaign to 10 families — which may violate election laws Posted: 12 Sep 2019 05:26 PM PDT  A Federal Election Commission rule prohibits the use of campaign money for "personal use."
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| Who won the Democrats' debate? Our panelists' verdict Posted: 12 Sep 2019 10:25 PM PDT  Another combative Democratic debate saw clashes between Joe Biden and his opponents – but no clear winner emerged Nathan Robinson: 'Biden did better but remains a liabilityThe consensus will probably be that Julián Castro distinguished himself in Thursday's debate, thanks to some forceful talk on immigration, a good story about hard ethical choices, and some deliciously salty exchanges with Joe Biden. Biden himself did better than before, which isn't saying much. There were still painful moments, especially a downright bizarre ramble delivered in response to a question on his racial record – Biden implied that black parents need instructions on how to raise children, told people to "make sure you have the record player on at night", and then started talking about Venezuela for no reason at all. I continue to believe he is a political liability who should under no circumstances be nominated.Bernie had some excellent answers on foreign policy and democratic socialism, sadly made less forceful thanks to a hoarse voice. Unfortunately, he was also denied the chance to say anything about climate change, meaning he couldn't explain the urgent need for a Green New Deal.Warren distinguished herself as an explainer of progressive policies and effectively replied to the line about people wanting to "keep their insurance" by saying "I've never met anybody who likes their health insurance company." Kamala Harris continues to duck tough questions about her atrocious record as a prosecutor, Amy Klobuchar continues to offer uninspiring centrist cliches, Beto O'Rourke continues to emphasize guns and racism, Andrew Yang gets ever closer to becoming Matthew Lesko, and Cory Booker continues to be personally endearing without offering any reason to vote for him. Oh, and please: no more three-hour debates. They are truly unendurable. * Nathan Robinson is the editor of Current Affairs and a columnist for the Guardian US Lloyd Green: 'For Democrats, 2020 can't arrive quickly enough'Joe Biden came out swinging hard but then struggled to stay focused in the third hour. Still, his swipes at Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were effective. Warren refused to own up to the cost of her single-payer healthcare plan; as for Sanders, he was reminded that "socialist" can be a putdown. Biden's line, "I'm with Barack, Elizabeth is with Bernie" is here to stay.Kamala Harris also did well. Her tart Wizard of Oz description of President Trump, "When you pull back the curtain it's a really small dude," got the audience's attention.Presidents Obama and Trump were also winners. This time, the candidates on stage repeatedly sang Obama's praises on his healthcare reform. As for Trump, he had to be smiling when Julián Castro angrily taunted Biden over his age. For the Democrats, 2020 can't arrive quickly enough. * Lloyd Green was opposition research counsel to George HW Bush's 1988 campaign and served in the Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992 Jessa Crispin: 'I miss Marianne Williamson'Biden as the Democratic frontrunner only makes sense if no one is watching any of his media appearances or these debates: he spends half his time stuttering, digressing, and bleeding from sensory organs.Everyone on stage on Thursday agreed on which issues are important and squabbled about how they will all magically solve intractable problems like healthcare, gun control and environmental devastation. The only fun left here is guessing who leaves the race next. Well, that and figuring out why Kamala Harris, who kept giggling at her own awkward jokes, had such a strong wine mom energy tonight.I miss Marianne Williamson. While everyone else argues about whose plan is going to actually raise taxes the most, she spoke to the deep issues of apathy, loss of authority, and weariness with a system that spends a year making big promises and then spends four years explaining why those promises are all impossible to achieve.If Biden is the Democratic future, responding to every mass shooting with an Oh Jeez and every diplomatic crisis with a "got your nose" joke, I want at least one person talking about why this is a joke too many. * Jessa Crispin is the author of Why I Am Not a Feminist Malaika Jabali: 'No clear winners – but better moderators'It's clear that Democratic debate hosts continue their disingenuous framing of socialism and the left, from asking loaded questions about what distinguishes Bernie Sanders from Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro to repeating conservative talking points about Medicare for All. The debates are becoming increasingly redundant, with few revelations materializing among them. However, moderators Linsey Davis and Jorge Ramos asked tough questions that were a welcome shift from the tone of previous debates.Davis unflinchingly confronted Biden on his positions on racial equality and lack of interest in reparations, and she directly called out Kamala Harris's criminal justice record. Likewise, Jorge Ramos keyed in on Biden's support for the Obama administration's deportations of 3 million people.As the debate was three hours long, there should have been plenty of time to follow up on these questions, instead half of the first hour was spent relitigating Medicare for All. While there were no clear winners, and the frontrunners' positions will likely change little after tonight, at least a few pointed questions forced some to contend with their records. * Malaika Jabali is a public policy attorney, writer, and activist Art Cullen: 'Beto had a tremendous night'The best moment in all the debate was when Joe Biden made his closing remarks, speaking of resilience against all his tremendous personal loss: "Faith sees best in the dark. You find purpose in what you do. I stayed engaged." Going up against that, Julián Castro looked small nipping at Biden's heels by suggesting that he was forgetful.Beto O'Rourke had a tremendous night, the best on stage, with accolades all around and the most applause from the crowd for championing gun safety and condemning racism with passion, calling Trump a "white supremacist". "Would you take away their guns? "Hell yes," O'Rourke said. "We're gonna take away your AR-15, your AK-47."Elizabeth Warren maintained her momentum with cogent riffs on trade, Afghanistan, healthcare and corruption. Amy Klobuchar's midwestern appeals for pragmatism will echo for voters looking for relief from chaos. She stayed in the fray. * Art Cullen is editor of the Storm Lake Times in north-west Iowa, where he won the Pulitzer prize for editorial writing. He is author of the book: Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper
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| Charles Payne calls out 'irony' of 2020 Dems' racism claims Posted: 13 Sep 2019 04:39 AM PDT  Fox Business host Charles Payne said Friday there is "irony" in the way 2020 Democratic presidential candidates talk about systemic racism in America, as many of them also call President Trump a racist.
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| Zimbabwe's Mugabe to be buried in 30 days, at new mausoleum Posted: 13 Sep 2019 01:23 PM PDT  The burial of Zimbabwe's founding president, President Robert Mugabe , will be delayed for at least a month until a special mausoleum can be built at a prominent spot at the national Heroes' Acre monument, the latest turn in a dramatic tussle between his family and the country's current leader, a once-trusted deputy who helped oust Mugabe from power. The decision to build a new resting place for the ex-leader, who died at age 95 in Singapore last week, came after consultations with influential traditional chiefs, Mugabe's nephew, Leo Mugabe, told reporters. The announcement followed days of controversy over where he should be laid to rest, with Mugabe's widow, Grace, insisting on a private burial rather than the state funeral and burial in a simple plot alongside other national heroes planned by the government.
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| 'When I listened tonight, I felt like it was like eating leftovers': Marianne Williamson on debates Posted: 12 Sep 2019 08:58 PM PDT  "When I listened tonight, I felt like it was like eating leftovers," she told a group at a Beverly Hills, Calif. party.
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| Ancient Handholding Skeletons Are Men but Italy Won’t Say Gay Posted: 13 Sep 2019 05:45 AM PDT  Archeo ModenaROME—In 2009, the straight world swooned when archaeologists discovered two ancient skeletons from between the fourth and sixth centuries A.D. holding hands in a grave in Modena, Italy. They were dubbed the "Lovers of Modena" and have become synonymous with heterosexual romance, their image now often used in Italy to symbolize undying love.When they were discovered, archeologists said the bones were in such a state of decay that the usual genetic-based methods used in confirming the biological sex of ancient remains was of no use. Still, one of the figures was slightly smaller than the other, so it was assumed they were male and female. The individuals did not die in situ—their hands were placed holding each other's by whoever buried them, most likely to represent a relationship between the two people. Eleven people were buried in the cemetery where they were found, all initially thought to be soldiers and victims of an ancient war, based on wounds consistent with battles. The consensus among anthropologists was that the presumed female hand-holder was the lover of one of the warriors.This week, scientists with the University of Bologna announced the "Lovers of Modena" were actually both biologically male, thanks to a revolutionary process they used to examine tooth enamel. A certain peptide that is present only in males was present in all 16 teeth extracted from both skeletons. The scientists also found that only one of the 11 individuals buried in the cemetery was female, and she wasn't holding anyone's hand. Then, suddenly, the hand-holders weren't lovers at all: Italian archaeologists insisted that surely they were brothers or cousins who died in battle. Archaeologist Federico Lugli, who led the Bologna study, conceded that while it was impossible to know if the two men were lovers, he highly doubted it. "In late-ancient times it is unlikely that homosexual love could be recognized so clearly by the people who prepared the burial," he told The Daily Beast by email. "Given that the two individuals have similar ages, they could be relatives, probably siblings or cousins."Homosexuality was well documented in Roman times. Emperor Nero married women to bear children, but he had sex with men for pleasure. He publicly married two men, Pythagoras and, years later, Sporo, who was castrated and made to wear a woman's gown during the ceremony, according to historical accounts by Pliny the Elder, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio, whose writings account for much of what we know about ancient Rome. The ancient Roman Empire legal tome Lex Scantinia sets out a series of regulations for men having sex with other men, including that freeborn Romans—that is to say those who were not slaves or war prisoners—could not take a passive role when having sex with a man. But by no means did it make same sex relationships illegal and it was quite common for noble Romans to have male lovers in addition to wives who fulfilled the traditional role of childbearing. In the case of the skeletons of the Lovers of Modena, it seems historians are not willing to concede that two individuals who were once thought to be romantically linked when they were presumed to be male and female are likely not now that their biological sex is the same. "The burial of two men hand in hand was certainly not a common practice in the late-ancient era," Lugli says. "We believe that this choice symbolizes a particular relationship between the two individuals, but we do not know the nature of it."There are plenty of examples of ancient figures buried in all manner of embrace—most of which have been positively identified through genetic sampling as male and female, but not all. The embracing skeletons found in Petrykiv village in western Ukraine are thought to be from a woman who committed suicide to be buried with her man, but the analysis was made based on jewelry and size. In 2015, a couple of 6,000-year-old spooning skeletons were found in Greece, though no one has any idea yet why they were in such a position. Their bones were identified as biologically male and female. Usually, when couples are found buried together, the first question is why they died at the same time and if one was sacrificed to be buried with the other. Now, thanks to the new dental enamel science, archaeologists can go back to other ancient lovers to find out more about who they were. "At present there are no other burials of this type," Lugli says of the two male hand-holders. "In the past several graves were found with pairs of individuals laid hand in hand, but in all cases it was a man and a woman. The link between the two individuals of the Modena burial, instead, remains a mystery." Or perhaps the evidence is right in front of them. Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
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| Pakistan's Khan calls Modi 'cowardly', vows to raise Kashmir at UN Posted: 13 Sep 2019 07:50 AM PDT  Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan branded his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi "cowardly" on Friday and promised to raise New Delhi's decision to strip Indian Kashmir of its autonomy at next week's UN General Assembly session. Khan, speaking to a crowd of around three thousand supporters at a rally in Pakistani-administered Kashmir, warned that Modi's move on August 5 would have repercussions beyond the disputed Himalayan territory. "When you give a message to 200 million Indian Muslims that India is only for Hindus, you will push them to violence," he warned.
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| US-trained bomb-sniffing dogs sent to Jordan are living in horrible conditions and dying from improper care Posted: 13 Sep 2019 11:38 AM PDT  More than 10 have died in recent years from potentially preventable health issues. Others were found to be living in "disturbing" conditions.
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| Vietnam Fights China Moves to Hinder Offshore Energy Exploration Posted: 12 Sep 2019 10:45 PM PDT ![Vietnam Fights China Moves to Hinder Offshore Energy Exploration]( "Vietnam Fights China Moves to Hinder Offshore Energy Exploration") (Bloomberg) -- Vietnam is pushing back harder against China's efforts to isolate it diplomatically on a territorial dispute in an energy-rich part of the South China Sea.The foreign ministry in Hanoi on Thursday called on China to immediately order a state-owned survey vessel along with several Coast Guard escorts to leave Vietnamese-claimed waters in its exclusive economic zone, which stretches 200 nautical miles from its coast. It also said a multi-billion dollar oil and gas project being carried out by state-owned Vietnam Oil & Gas Group and Exxon Mobil Corp. in block 118 of the waters would continue unimpeded."Any activities that hamper Vietnam's oil and gas exploration in Vietnamese water are violations of international laws," Le Thi Thu Hang, a spokeswoman for Vietnam's foreign ministry, told reporters during a briefing on Thursday.The Chinese-owned Haiyang Dizhi 8 has intermittently zigzagged across a Vietnam-demarcated block of water to study the seabed in an active drilling block operated by Russia's state-owned Rosneft Oil PJSC since early July. China claims most of the South China Sea with a map of a nine-dash line stretching far from the mainland, and has sought to negotiate one-on-one deals with countries in the region on sharing energy and fish resources.The latest Vietnamese statements came after China scored diplomatic wins with other South China Sea claimants. On Monday, China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi agreed with his Malaysian counterpart Saifuddin Abdullah on the establishment of a bilateral consultation mechanism to "properly handle" disputes in the South China Sea.China also appears to be making progress on a joint exploration deal with the Philippines, with President Rodrigo Duterte saying earlier this week he would ignore an international court ruling affirming his country's territorial claims in order to advance energy cooperation with Beijing. Duterte said the deal would entail a 60-40 revenue-sharing scheme favoring the Philippines."We're seeing a full court press with China to push its nine-dash line, press foreign oil companies and pressure countries into joint development deals," said Carl Thayer, emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia who has written about Southeast Asia security issues for more than two decades..To contact the reporters on this story: Nguyen Dieu Tu Uyen in Hanoi at uyen1@bloomberg.net;Peter Martin in Beijing at pmartin138@bloomberg.net;Philip J. Heijmans in Singapore at pheijmans1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Ruth Pollard at rpollard2@bloomberg.netFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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| Every top Democrat can beat Trump. Their unique strategies will determine who gets that shot Posted: 13 Sep 2019 12:43 PM PDT  Each of the five leading 2020 Democratic candidates can beat the president in a general election, according to the latest national match-up polls. But first, they will need to secure the party's nomination in a hotly contested primary season that started with more than two dozen hopefuls. They're each using very different tactics to do so.Those five candidates — Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg — joined each other on Thursday night for the third Democratic debates, along with five additional candidates currently polling beneath them: Cory Booker, Andrew Yang, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O'Rourke and Julian Castro.
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| Peru ex-president denied bail in U.S., wife dragged from court after outburst Posted: 12 Sep 2019 01:51 PM PDT  A former Peruvian first lady was dragged out of a courtroom in San Francisco on Thursday as she cursed a judge's decision to keep her husband, ex-president Alejandro Toledo, in jail pending extradition proceedings. Toledo, 73, is wanted in Peru to stand trial over accusations that he took a $20 million bribe from Brazilian construction company Odebrecht during his 2001-2006 term. Toledo denies wrongdoing.
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| Man says he saw woman burn bloody clothes after 1992 killing Posted: 13 Sep 2019 09:32 AM PDT ![Man says he saw woman burn bloody clothes after 1992 killing]( "Man says he saw woman burn bloody clothes after 1992 killing") A man testified that he saw a woman burn bloody clothes at her eastern Iowa home a day or two after prosecutors allege that she beat her ex-boyfriend to death with a baseball bat in 1992. Scott Payne told a jury Thursday that Annette Cahill, whom he had met through a friendship with one of her relatives, said the clothes were covered with red paint. Cahill, now 56, was charged in May 2018 with first-degree murder, accused of beating to death Corey Wieneke with a bat that was later found near his home in rural West Liberty.
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| John Bolton gets back into political game after leaving White House Posted: 13 Sep 2019 01:06 PM PDT  The former national security adviser had disagreements with President Donald Trump leading up to his departure. He is throwing $50,000 at five republican incumbents
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| Felicity Huffman reacts to 14-day prison sentence: 'There are no excuses' Posted: 13 Sep 2019 01:37 PM PDT  Felicity Huffman appeared in a Boston court on Friday, where she was sentenced to 14 days behind bars.
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| One of the photographers behind the iconic Tiananmen Square image has died. He once said he wrapped the film up and stashed it in the toilet to hide it from Chinese security. Posted: 12 Sep 2019 11:35 PM PDT  Cole was one of four photographers who captured the iconic 1989 standoff which became a defining image of the bloody Tiananmen Square massacre.
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| NASA says a new comet is likely an 'interstellar visitor' from another star system — the second ever detected Posted: 12 Sep 2019 02:10 PM PDT  If the comet-like object has interstellar origins, "it's the next best thing to sending a probe to a different solar system," one astronomer said.
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| US Navy sails ship close to islands claimed by China Posted: 13 Sep 2019 11:24 AM PDT  The US Navy said that one of its destroyers had sailed close to the Chinese-controlled Paracel Islands in the South China Sea on Friday, asserting international freedom of navigation rights in the contested waters. The USS Wayne E. Meyer guided-missile destroyer passed through the area of the Paracels east of Vietnam and South of China's Hainan Island without requesting permission from Beijing, or from Hanoi or Taipei, which also claim ownership of the archipelago. The move could add to the tensions between the US and China, now bogged down in a grinding trade war, as Beijing pushes to expand its military reach globally.
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| Biden Lies: "We Didn't Lock People Up in Cages." Posted: 13 Sep 2019 04:13 AM PDT  But he did.
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| U.S. fighter jets smashed an island ISIS was using 'like a hotel,' and troops found rockets and bombs stashed in caves Posted: 12 Sep 2019 11:06 AM PDT  On Sept. 10, US Air Force F-15 Strike Eagles and F-35 Lightning II aircraft dropped 80,000 pounds of ordnance on 37 targets on Qanus Island in Iraq's Tigris River. Approximately 25 Islamic State fighters were killed in the operation, according to Sabah Al-Numaan, a spokesperson for the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service.
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| Lebanese-American to be prosecuted for working for Israel Posted: 13 Sep 2019 07:45 AM PDT  A Lebanese-American man was referred Friday to prosecutors after confessing he'd worked for Israel during its occupation of Lebanon for nearly two decades, a Lebanese security agency said. Amer Fakhoury was detained after returning to his native Lebanon from the United States earlier this month.
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| Beto O'Rourke says Texas lawmaker made 'death threat' against him after AR-15 comment at Democratic debate Posted: 13 Sep 2019 10:39 AM PDT  Beto O'Rourke's call for the buyback of military-style assault weapons was met with what O'Rourke called a "death threat" from one Texas lawmaker.
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| These Are the Next Wave of Ultra-Luxury Electric Cars Entering the Market—and They Don't Disappoint Posted: 13 Sep 2019 12:14 PM PDT |
| The Words Missing from a New York Times Essay about Religious Liberty Posted: 12 Sep 2019 11:40 AM PDT  The headline is jolting. "Religious Crusaders at the Supreme Court's Gates." Thus starts Linda Greenhouse's analysis of the actual and potential religion cases before the Court during its October term. Her thesis is that the Court's relative restraint in its religion cases the previous term represented the justices' merely "biding their time." This term the gloves may come off. Now the Court may well "go further and adopt new rules for lowering the barrier between church and state across the board."She focuses on an Institute for Justice case that the Court has accepted for review, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue. It involves a Montana supreme-court-ordered termination of a state tax-credit scholarship program that "helped needy children attend the private school of their families' choice," including religious and nonreligious schools. The precise issue before the Court, in dry legalese, is this: whether the Montana court's decision "violates the religion clauses or the equal protection clause of the United States Constitution to invalidate a generally available and religiously neutral student-aid program simply because the program affords students the choice of attending religious schools."Greenhouse is incredulous. If SCOTUS rules against Montana, then, according to her, "the logical consequence is that a state that once had a program offering financial support to religious and nonreligious schools alike . . . and that subsequently shut down the program entirely can be deemed to have violated a principle of religious neutrality.""Can that possibly be the law?" she asks. But her summary isn't exactly right. She pays short shrift to the key fact of the case. The Montana court's ruling was based on the state's Blaine amendment, an artifact of odious 19th-century anti-Catholic bigotry. In fact, the words "Blaine amendment" appear nowhere in her piece.A brief history lesson is in order. As Mike McShane explained in an instructive Forbes piece last year, in the latter part of the 19th century, America's public schools were often "nominally Protestant." They would frequently start their days with prayer, the students would read from the King James Version of the Bible, and they'd sometimes even sing hymns.So when Senator James Blaine proposed amending the United States Constitution to state that "no money raised by taxation in any State for the support of public schools, or derived from any public fund therefor, nor any public lands devoted thereto, shall ever be under the control of any religious sect; nor shall any money so raised or lands so devoted be divided between religious sects or denominations," he was not attempting to stamp out public-school religiosity. He was attempting to deny aid to Catholic parochial schools.Blaine's federal amendment failed, but his language found its way into 37 state constitutions. As McShane notes, the anti-Catholicism of the amendments is betrayed by the words "sect" or "sectarian." In the language of the time, Protestant instruction was "nonsectarian." Catholic instruction was "sectarian."Let's look at the relevant language of the Montana constitution. The section at issue is entitled "Aid prohibited to sectarian schools" and prohibits the use of public funds "for any sectarian purpose or to aid any church, school, academy, seminary, college, university, or other literary or scientific institution, controlled in whole or in part by any church, sect, or denomination."Mr. Blaine, meet your amendment.So let's go back to the question posed by Linda Greenhouse. "Could that possibly be the law" that states are prohibited from ending "a program offering financial support to religious and nonreligious schools alike"? Yes, it can possibly be the law. Indeed, it should be the law — when the state ends support because it's enforcing a legal provision that in purpose and effect engages in blatant religious discrimination.The twin constitutional pillars of religious liberty in the United States — the free-exercise clause and the establishment clause — don't just protect liberty by disestablishing religion (by preventing the formation of a state church). They protect liberty by preventing punitive anti-religious policies. They prevent the state from targeting religion for disfavored treatment.Targeting religion for disfavored treatment is exactly what Blaine amendments do. They were aimed squarely at Catholics. Yet as so often happens with attacks on liberty that are allegedly narrowly targeted, the government expanded its scope. Now the law aimed at Catholics affects all people of faith. When it comes to participation in public programs — programs they bought and paid for with their own dollars — Montana's religious citizens and religious institutions are entitled to equal treatment under the law.
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| Hong Kongers troubled by unrest look for new homes abroad Posted: 12 Sep 2019 07:03 PM PDT  HONG KONG/MELBOURNE/VANCOUVER (Reuters) - As protests in Hong Kong stretch from summer into autumn with little sign of resolution, a surge in migration applications suggests more locals are making plans to leave the special administrative region. Since an abortive push to allow extradition to mainland China sparked unrest in the former British colony three months ago, emigration seminars have been overflowing, organizers and attendees say. Requests for police-record printouts, which cost HK$225 ($29) and are only issued for visa applications or child adoptions, jumped 54% to 3,649 in August compared with last year.
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| Judge who gave lenient sentence to sex attacker Brock Turner fired from job coaching tennis to schoolgirls Posted: 13 Sep 2019 01:33 AM PDT  A former US judge who sentenced a sex attacker to just six months in prison has been fired from his new job as a school tennis coach following an outcry from pupils and parents.Aaron Persky, who was ousted as a judge last year over his lenient sentencing of Stanford University student Brock Turner, had been hired over the summer to coach girls at Lynbrook High School in San Jose, California.
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| Philippines arrests 270 Chinese citizens in fraud raid Posted: 13 Sep 2019 01:08 AM PDT  Philippine police have arrested more than 270 Chinese nationals in a raid on a gang wanted over a vast investment fraud that cost victims in China millions of dollars, authorities said Friday. Agents swooped on an office building in the capital Manila on Wednesday to take four suspects into custody in connection with the 100 million yuan ($14 million) scam, but stumbled upon many more. "The operation then yielded the incidental arrest of 273 other Chinese nationals who were caught in the act of conducting illegal online operations," immigration authorities said, without elaborating.
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| Tax Cut 2.0 Looks Different to Trump Than to GOP Lawmakers Posted: 13 Sep 2019 12:32 PM PDT  (Bloomberg) -- One of President Donald Trump's favorite political promises is a second tax cut. But lawmakers in Congress -- who would need to develop and pass another reduction -- are more focused on making their first tax cut permanent.Trump on Thursday promised House Republicans another middle-class tax cut that he said would be "very substantial" and "very, very inspirational," without giving details. Republican leaders say they support the idea, but they haven't detailed what a plan would look like. Trump has said his proposal will be released next year, in time to be a campaign issue ahead of the 2020 election."We will gather together the best ideas from the Hill and the administration and the outside groups to provide a significant new round of middle-class tax relief," White House Economic Adviser Larry Kudlow told reporters Friday. "This is not a recession measure at all. The economy is very strong."Congressional tax writers, led by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and the House Ways and Means panel's top Republican, Kevin Brady, are focused on a different Tax Cut 2.0: Preserving the individual rate reductions from their 2017 law that are set to expire in 2025."The first and most important step is we can make the cuts for families and small business permanent," Brady told reporters Friday at a House GOP policy retreat in Baltimore. He was referring to the lower rates for individuals and pass-through companies that were made temporary in the GOP's signature tax law to avoid running afoul of budget rules.Because of the projected $1 trillion-plus deficit impact of the GOP's tax code overhaul, only the corporate rate cuts and some of the structural changes were made permanent. Even before the temporary individual tax cuts run out, some breaks for companies purchasing new equipment will expire in 2022, and those for the beer and wine industry will expire at the end of this year.Congress -- with a Republican-led Senate and a Democratic-led House -- would have to pass another law to extend those cuts.Campaign PromiseBrady led an effort to make all the temporary tax cuts permanent last year when the Republicans still had the House majority. However, his Republican colleagues in the Senate, who only had a slim majority, didn't bring up the matter on fears it wouldn't get the 60 votes required to pass.That inaction suggests that more piecemeal extensions of provisions that expire at different times are more likely, rather than preserving the whole law with one vote. Lawmakers, regardless of which party controls Congress, have often voted to extend tax breaks just before they're scheduled to disappear.Trump made a similar promise to cut middle-class taxes before last year's midterm election as House Republicans struggled to counter Democratic talking points that the 2017 overhaul mostly benefited the wealthy. The president's proposal caught Republicans off guard, and nothing ever advanced as Brady tried to cast it as part of a unified GOP plan to extend the 2017 cuts.For now, an additional tax cut would be nearly impossible as Republicans and Democrats remain diametrically opposed, said Adam Michel, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation. With the 2020 election likely to deliver a still-divided government, further tax cuts are unlikely unless the economy takes a serious turn for the worse, he said."But if we actually entered a recession, the conversation would be very different," Michel said.(Updates with Kudlow comments in the third paragraph.)To contact the reporters on this story: Laura Davison in Washington at ldavison4@bloomberg.net;Erik Wasson in Baltimore at ewasson@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Joe Sobczyk at jsobczyk@bloomberg.net, Anna Edgerton, Steve GeimannFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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