Blue Shoes
Blue Shoes's JournalI know this is a bit to ask.
Some of my friend in real life have put a lot of effort into developing clean water systems for third world countries and they've put a lot of effort into a Kickstarter to help deploy them to Afghanistan. I don't want to ask anyone to donate, but sharing it to help raise awareness would be helpful. If the moderators think this post violates the ToS I'll delete it.
Corporations Prepare to Gorge on Tax Cuts Trump Claims Will Create Jobs
Source: The Intercept
The official line from U.S.-based multinational corporations is that if they get a huge tax break, they’ll bring home the trillions of dollars in profits they’ve stashed overseas and use it to hire tons of Americans. (Nearly 3 million, says the U.S. Chamber of Commerce!)
But now that Donald Trump’s election means it might really happen, corporate executives are telling Wall Street analysts what they’ll actually use that money for: enriching their shareholders and buying other companies.
Read more: https://theintercept.com/2017/01/05/corporations-prepare-to-gorge-on-tax-cuts-trump-claims-will-create-jobs/
Trump to tap Wall Street lawyer, Jay Clayton, to head SEC
Source: WSJ
President-elect Donald Trump announced on Wednesday that he will nominate Wall Street lawyer, Jay Clayton, to head the Securities and Exchange Commission.
As chair of the SEC, which polices Wall Street and the financial markets, Clayton would play a key role in Trump's efforts to usher in a period of deregulation, including undoing parts of 2010’s financial reform legislation, known as the Dodd-Frank Act.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/01/04/trump-to-tap-wall-street-lawyer-jay-clayton-to-head-sec/?utm_term=.49d14349acf1
Uber Driver Saves 16-Year-Old Girl From Sex Trafficking
Source: NBC
Once Avila dropped them off at the hotel, he called the police.
"The worst thing I thought would happen when driving Uber is that I would be getting drunk passengers and I would have to handle them," Avila, 34, who is also a quinceañera photographer, told NBC Latino. "All my life, I thought about people throwing up in the car as the worst scenario."
Avila started streaming to Facebook LIVE once the police arrived. His reaction to breaking up a child sex trafficking ring had been viewed more than 119,000 times as of Thursday afternoon
Read more: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/uber-driver-saves-16-year-old-girl-sex-trafficking-n701241
Paula White, prosperity preacher once investigated by Senate, is a controversial pick for inaugurati
Source: Washington Post
After Donald Trump’s inaugural committee announced its chosen clergy to The Washington Post on Wednesday, the dissent was quieter — and it was not about political issues, but theological ones.
What little criticism emerged on Wednesday mostly focused on one of the six clergy members who will pray at Trump’s inauguration: Paula White, a Florida-based televangelist who has long been close to Trump.
White is known for embracing the prosperity gospel — the theology that God will bless true believers not just with eternal salvation but with material wealth here on Earth. To many believers, the prosperity gospel offers hope and promise. But to other Christians, it’s heretical; and to some, prosperity gospel preachers’ motives are suspect, especially when they seem to be enriching themselves by asking for money from their followers.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/12/29/paula-white-prosperity-preacher-once-investigated-by-senate-is-a-controversial-pick-for-inauguration-prayer/?utm_term=.121ebaa13f14
Philippines' Duterte calls U.S. envoys 'spies' over alleged ouster plot
Source: Reuters
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte derided U.S. ambassadors as "spies" on Thursday, responding to a media report of an alleged American plot to destabilize his government, a job he said some envoys were appointed solely to do.
The volatile former mayor said though had received no intelligence reports of any U.S. plan to undermine his presidency, he believed most ambassadors were in cahoots with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which had a track record of meddling in other countries' affairs.
The Manila Times newspaper on Tuesday reported a former U.S. ambassador to the Philippines had prepared a "blueprint to undermine Duterte", citing a document it had received from a what it described as a "highly placed source". (bit.ly/2hhzEGk)
The U.S. State Department has described the allegations as "false".
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-philippines-duterte-usa-idUSKBN14I14R
After states legalized medical marijuana, traffic deaths fell
Legalization of medical marijuana is not linked with increased traffic fatalities, a new study finds. In some states, in fact, the number of people killed in traffic accidents dropped after medical marijuana laws were enacted.
“Instead of seeing an increase in fatalities, we saw a reduction, which was totally unexpected,” said Julian Santaella-Tenorio, the study’s lead author and a doctoral student at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in New York City.
Since 1996, 28 states have legalized marijuana for medical use.
Deaths dropped 11 percent on average in states that legalized medical marijuana, researchers discovered after analyzing 1.2 million traffic fatalities nationwide from 1985 through 2014.
source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-marijuana-traffic-death-idUSKBN14H1LQ
South Carolina church shooter seeks to keep mental health evidence from jury
Source: Yahoo News
CHARLESTON, S.C. (Reuters) - Dylann Roof, the man convicted in a church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, asked a judge on Wednesday to keep details about his mental health sealed for the sentencing phase of his federal death penalty trial next week.
Roof, a 22-year-old avowed white supremacist, was found guilty on Dec. 15 on 33 charges of federal hate crimes resulting in death, obstruction of religion and firearms violations stemming from the June 2015 massacre of nine people at a historic black church.
The same jury that heard six days of testimony about the bloodshed at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church will reconvene on Tuesday for the trial's penalty phase.
Roof, handcuffed and wearing a prison jumpsuit, smiled and answered "yes" when U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel asked if he still planned to serve as his own lawyer as prosecutors make the case that he should be executed instead of spending the rest of his life in prison without parole.
Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/news/charleston-church-shooter-offer-no-evidence-jury-weighing-164325893.html
Trump accuses Obama of putting up roadblocks to a smooth transition
Source: Washington Post
After having repeatedly praised President Obama’s efforts to ensure a smooth transition, President-elect Donald Trump reversed course on Wednesday, accusing the current occupant of the Oval Office of putting “roadblocks” in his way.
Trump took to Twitter shortly after 9 a.m., saying he was “doing my best to disregard the many inflammatory President O statements and roadblocks.”
“Thought it was going to be a smooth transition — NOT!” the Republican president-elect wrote.
The White House declined to comment on Trump's tweets.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/12/28/trump-accuses-obama-of-putting-up-roadblocks-to-a-smooth-transition/
Trumps Homeland Security Pick Falsely Claimed Narcoterrorism Has Killed 500,000 Americans
Source: The Intercept
While Trump continues to regularly contradict his own supposed views on U.S. foreign policy, his approach to the U.S. southern border is clear. He talked a lot about building a wall while running for president. Since winning, he’s repeatedly emphasized the seriousness of his promise.
...
John Kelly, the retired Marine general who Trump has chosen to lead the Department of Homeland Security, has his own pattern of exaggerating the border threat. Between 2012 and his retirement in early 2016, Kelly served as head of U.S. Southern Command. In this role, he coordinated all U.S. forces in the Western Hemisphere south of Mexico, including the Caribbean and Guantánamo, which is home to the hemisphere’s largest overseas U.S. military base. As Obama trimmed the military’s budget with the sequester, and prioritized Asia and the Middle East over the relatively peaceful Western Hemisphere, Kelly complained that the budget cuts were undermining regional security.
In a 2014 interview, he said that the flow of drugs and instability in Latin America posed an “existential” threat to the United States. During a March 2015 hearing before the Senate Armed Service Committee, Sen. Mike Lee. R-Utah, asked him to explain why the southern border posed such a large threat. Kelly responded with these words:
...
Kelly’s second claim to the Senate committee, that 500,000 Americans “have died from narcoterrorism” since 9/11, is a significant exaggeration. The real number of Americans who have died of post-9/11 terrorism in all its forms is well under 1,000, according to a 2014 study that was supported by the Department of Homeland Security. And at least one-third of the 40,000 killed by drugs annually do not die, as Kelly claimed, from drugs coming into the U.S. across the southern border, but from overdoses of legally prescribed opioids. Almost all of the profits from those addicts flow not to drug cartels but to pharmaceutical companies. Sales of legal opioids have quadrupled since 1999, particularly in those white, rural areas of the country where Trump’s support is strongest.
Read more: https://theintercept.com/2016/12/27/trumps-homeland-security-pick-falsely-claimed-narcoterrorism-has-killed-500000-americans/
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